Alimentary Theology: Religious Experience and the Language of Food in Late-Medieval English Vernacular Literature

Abstract

Vernacular writing about religious experience and theology in late-fourteenth and early fifteenth century England represents an innovative and creative source of poetry and prose. In the move from Latin to Middle English, authors gave vibrant expression to old and new religious ideas through the emerging literary language, a phenomenon Nicholas Watson has termed “vernacular theology.” This dissertation examines vernacular authors’ use of metaphors of food and consumption to explore theology and religious experience in late-medieval England, a literary technique I am calling “alimentary theology.” Middle English authors’ use of alimentary metaphors join abstract ideas and spiritual concerns with physical bodies and basic biological drives, transgressing modern conceptual divisions between matter and spirit. Whether authors are adapting familiar biblical metaphors like Psalm 33:9(34:8), “taste, and see that the Lord is sweet,” or inventing new ones, alimentary metaphors not only make religious concepts more accessible to a non-educated, lay audience, the language alters and shapes the theological content communicated through it. Vernacular theology in the language of food and drink shows religion in late-medieval England to be embodied, experiential, and social—much like food in daily life. The dissertation close reads alimentary metaphors in well-known poetic and prose works including William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love’s A Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and lesser studied texts like the Pearl-Poet’s Cleanness and the contemplative guide A Ladder of Foure Ronges. The method of analyzing metaphors utilizes the insights of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on the experiential and metaphorical basis of language. The dissertation also employs the interdisciplinary field of food studies to explore the transcultural, sociological, anthropological, and historical significance of the food and foodways behind the metaphors. Chapter one examines a dialogue in Piers Plowman between the character Hunger and the representative of agricultural labor, Piers, about just ways to distribute food in a society that is shifting from land-centered agricultural subsistence to a landless mobile and urban population. Chapter two continues the focus on appetite in Pier Plowman, exploring the threat to society the poem sees being posed by the religious orders’ twin overconsumption of food and of knowledge—and how Piers Plowman presents moderation as the solution to both types of gluttony. Chapter three delves into alimentary descriptions of religious reading practice that portray reading as a subjective, embodied, thick, and transformative experience that raised contemporary anxiety about heterodox interpretation when applied to vernacular texts. The final chapter examines the merging of courtly table manners with religious virtue in Cleanness as the poem uses upper class practices of feasting and hospitality to authorize a worldly, aristocratic moral order.