Nicholas Love's "Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ": Continuity and cultural change

Abstract

This thesis investigates Nicholas Love's negotiation of the social and religious tensions of early fifteenth-century England---caused by increasing lay literacy, the ongoing Wycliffite controversy, and the aftermath of the Lancastrian takeover---in the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, his translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. It demonstrates that although Love's Middle English translation extended the Meditationes to a broad lay readership, manuscripts of the Mirror circulating ever more widely as the fifteenth century progressed, the work was early associated with figures in positions of power, ranging from Archbishop Arundel, the leader of the orthodox suppression of Lollardy, to Thomas Beaufort, an extender of Lancastrian military power abroad, to Sibyl de Felton, the abbess of a prosperous and somewhat worldly convent, who might have used the Mirror to stir up orthodox zeal among her nuns. It is argued that despite these connections, the intentional conservatism with which Love condescends to his lay readers, and even the aggressive orthodoxy of the Treatise on the Sacrament, which is original to Love, this work is more than a piece of Church propaganda, for, retaining the Meditationes's emphasis on Christ's human relationships, it invites its readers to an intimate and emotionally charged encounter with Jesus, the divine human being who is both the instigator and the object of their devotion. Finally, it notes the paradox that in the Treatise on the Sacrament, which closes the work, Love incorporates material that is dramatically powerful but theologically problematic.