Scorn, Shame, and the Simple Reader

An investigation into how the emotional language in texts intended for solitary women became the foundation for a medieval Christian reading public

Scorn, Shame, and the Simple Reader reveals how a cluster of rarely studied guides to the religious life helped forge a new identity in late medieval England. Lifting passages wholesale from texts originally intended only for holy virgins walled up in cells, these treatises turned Christlike shame and scorn for the world into an emotional language of collective belonging. Their simple readers—people of all genders and from all walks of life, all addressed as a “dear sister” while they read—exemplified a new mode of public spirituality, formed through acts of reading and imagination.

As Spencer Strub demonstrates, these acts of reshaping a life proved fertile ground for experiments in literary invention. Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town cycle plays share the same vocabulary, make the same metaphors, and abhor the same sins. They share the simple reader’s scorn and shame, in other words, but they put it to different ends. Dwelling in the impossible space between holiness and the world, these literary works found new ways to narrate the particularities of life as it was actually lived. In rewriting our understanding of gender, emotion, and piety in a period of religious upheaval, Strub provides a new perspective on the efflorescence of vernacular English fiction at the turn of the fifteenth century.