This dissertation examines three literary treatments of patience in late medieval English literature. I argue that patience appears in the literature of late medieval England in a new and surprising form. Langland’s Patience in the B-text of Piers Plowman is an impoverished minstrel that disrupts and antagonizes his interlocutors through gnomic riddles and comic vignettes. The homiletic poem Patience, through a narrator hyperactively keen to transform suffering into “play” or “jape,” unpicks the deficiencies of a theology that views patience as “ease” or even pleasure and illuminates the Book of Jonah as a unique scriptural witness to the difficulty and estrangement of living within the patientia Dei. The “morality play” Mankind stages its grappling with the difficulties of Jobean patience through the antics of foul-mouthed diabolical and hamartiological agents who perpetually trouble the patience of both the characters and the audience. By reading these poems and plays very closely amidst their scriptural and patristic intertexts I argue that the works studied in this dissertation constitute an intense literary interest in the theology of patience in late medieval England, both as a spiritual and as a hermeneutic ideal. In Piers Plowman, Patience and Mankind, patience becomes a discomforting concatenation of mirth and despair. In Piers Plowman, Haukyn is brought to the belief that living “[s]o hard it is” by Patience’s comic vignettes. God’s “meschef” in Patience brings Jonah to cry, twice, that his life is “to longe.” Mankind loses his patience and sinks into acedia in Mankind via a theatrical “jape” by the professional minstrel Titivillus, a “jape” that the audience are repeatedly invited to be patient for. I argue that this unusual collocation of frivolity and sorrow can be understood partly in relation to the patristic focus on differentiating Christian patience from stoic fortitude and apatheia. This created a foundational concept of patience as participatory with the patientia Dei. The patience of God, as conceived in patristic treatises on patience, was a non-suffering (impassible) patience. The problem of conceptualizing the impassible patience of God produced, I argue, enduring formulations of God’s patience as a form of pleasure and, accordingly, of human patience as participatory with the pleasure of God. Yet, the pleasures that Piers Plowman, Patience and Mankind associate with their treatments of patience are not rarefied spiritual joys. Rather, in each text studied here, patience is particularly associated with the low-brow entertainments of minstrelsy, “jape” and “game.” This produces a disorienting concatenation of low-comedy and grave suffering through which, I argue, these writers align their explorations of the theology of patience with their own literary practice. In Piers Plowman, through Patience’s strange minstrelsy, Langland is making an important statement of his own learned “meddling with makings.” In Patience, the poem speaks in multiple voices to produce a contradictory and dissonant account of God’s patience and how it might be understood. In Mankind, the play’s central episode of the breaking of Mankind’s patience turns to the social and economic realities of the theatrical production itself to explain a theology of patience that will attend to a Creation of invisible and visible parts. Patience, often a wan-faced and inscrutable virtue, has a vibrant and unique life in the vernacular literature of late medieval England. The three texts studied here are a case study in the under-explored novelty of late medieval conceptions of patience that, I hope, might illuminate unexpected areas of late medieval devotional and literary practice.

More than any other period in the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages were informed by translation. Practices of translation pervaded and underlay every aspect of medieval culture and politics. Yet, our understanding of how medieval writers thought about translation remains profoundly lacking. Most contemporary histories of translation theory choose to neglect the Middle Ages entirely, or to turn them into a footnote to Jerome’s distinction between “sense-for-sense” and “word-for-word” translation. Consuming the Word offers a new approach to medieval translation theory by considering texts, genres, and forms that have been largely neglected by scholars. While most research in this field has concentrated on texts that are regarded as explicitly “theoretical,” such as prefaces, commentaries, and treatises, Consuming the Word extends this investigation to the figurative language of “literary” works: poetical texts written primarily for moral and intellectual edification, aesthetic pleasure, and entertainment. By analyzing an archive of four 14th-century devotional poems composed in Spanish, Italian, and Middle English, this dissertation demonstrates that the writers of the Middle Ages articulated arguments on language, interpretation, and translation whose complexity and originality greatly surpassed the arid and derivative thinking about translation that is generally attributed to this period. Consuming the Word further demonstrates that, by the late 14th century, Christian devotional writers tended to deploy a particular figure to construct arguments on translation, interpretation, and vernacularity: the figure of gluttony. In the first chapter of this dissertation I examine the theories of language and translation conceived by Dante Alighieri in the first decades of the 14th century. I argue that the figures of consumption and gluttony that appear in the last section of Purgatorio are meant to convey a theoretical justification for his use of the vernacular, bringing to fruition several contradictory arguments that are only outlined in his two previous works on the subject: Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the second chapter I concentrate on Cleanness, an anonymous and generally overlooked Middle English poem in which the poet ostensibly eulogizes the virtue of purity. By examining its figurative depictions of cooking and feasting, I contend that, rather than as a casual assortment of disparate scriptural episodes, Cleanness should be interpreted as a coherent argument in favor of vernacular translation. On the contrary, in the third chapter I show how a contemporary Middle English poem, the more famous Piers Plowman, relies on the personification of gluttony to disclose an almost antithetical argument. In Piers Plowman, vernacular translation is described as a losing bargain, morally and intellectually detrimental. In my fourth and final chapter, I turn to the celebrated Libro de Buen Amor, to analyze how its figures of eating and overeating convey an argument on the endlessness of all interpretation and on the importance of choice in the act of translating.

This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience. These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular.