The Prick of Conscience is a Middle English poem dating from the first half of the fourteenth century promoting penitential reflection. It is, in terms of the number of surviving manuscripts, the most popular poem written in English before print, with over 130 known copies.
The text is divided into seven sections: man's sinfulness, the transient nature of the world, death, purgatory, Doomsday and its tokens, Hell, and Heaven.
The Prick of Conscience itself says nothing to identify its date, but it can be roughly dated from works which refer to it, showing that it existed when they were written, and from works on which it draws, showing that those works existed when it was written. On this basis its editors place it "in the second quarter of the fourteenth century", i.e. roughly 1325–1350. [1]
The poem also contains no identifying information about its author. Five manuscripts attribute it to Richard Rolle, three attribute it to Robert Grosseteste, and one attributes it to Alcuin of York. [2] The latter two attributions are chronologically impossible, and the attribution to Rolle was considered highly implausible by Hope Emily Allen, a leading authority on his work. [3] Contemporary scholars therefore consider the poem anonymous. [4]
The Prick of Conscience's popularity can be judged from the fact that it survives in about 130 manuscripts – more than any other Old or Middle English poem. [5] A wide range of churchmen and lay men and women owned or accessed manuscripts of the poem; Agnes Paston, a member of the family who produced the Paston Letters, is known to have borrowed a copy, from a burgess of Great Yarmouth. [6]
John Lydgate mentions the poem in his Fall of Princes , and Chaucer might allude to it at the beginning of the Parson's Tale, the last of his Canterbury Tales . [7]
Unusually, passages from and illustrations of the account of the Fifteen Signs of Doom in the Prick of Conscience appear in stained glass form in the "Prick of Conscience Window" in All Saints' Church, North Street, York. The window is thought to have been constructed around 1410–1420. [8]
In Christianity, an anchorite or anchoret is someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society to be able to lead an intensely prayer-orientated, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life. Anchorites are frequently considered to be a type of hermit, but unlike hermits, they were required to take a vow of stability of place, opting for permanent enclosure in cells often attached to churches. Also unlike hermits, anchorites were subject to a religious rite of consecration that closely resembled the funeral rite, following which they would be considered dead to the world and a type of living saint. Anchorites had a certain autonomy, as they did not answer to any ecclesiastical authority apart from bishops.
Pearl is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex system of stanza-linking.
Middle English Bible translations (1066-1500) covers the age of Middle English, beginning with the Norman conquest and ending about 1500. Aside from Wycliffe's Bible, this was not a fertile time for Bible translation. English literature was limited because Anglo-Norman French was the preferred language of the elite, and Latin was the preferred literary language in Medieval Western Europe.
The Cursor Mundi is an early 14th-century religious poem written in Northumbrian Middle English that presents an extensive retelling of the history of Christianity from the creation to the doomsday. The poem is long, composed of almost 30,000 lines, but shows considerable artistic skill. In spite of the immense mass of material with which it deals, it is well proportioned, and the narrative is lucid and easy.
Speculum Vitae is an anonymous Middle English poem, written in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The poem consists of a commentary on the Lord's Prayer primarily derived from a prose Old French work, the Somme le roi of Laurent d'Orléans, dated 1279.
Richard Rolle was an English hermit, mystic, and religious writer. He is also known as Richard Rolle of Hampole or de Hampole, since at the end of his life he lived near a Cistercian nunnery in Hampole, now in South Yorkshire. In the words of Nicholas Watson, scholarly research has shown that "[d]uring the fifteenth century he was one of the most widely read of English writers, whose works survive in nearly four hundred English ... and at least seventy Continental manuscripts, almost all written between 1390 and 1500."
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change radically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more apparent in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English literature, religious, courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
The Ayenbite of Inwyt —also Aȝenbiteof Inwit; literally, the "again-biting of inner wit," or the Remorse (Prick) of Conscience is the title of a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English.
Walter Hilton, Can. Reg. was an English Augustinian mystic, whose works gained influence in 15th-century England and Wales. He has been canonized by the Church of England and by the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Mum and the Sothsegger is an anonymous fifteenth century alliterative English poem, written during the "Alliterative Revival." It is ostensibly an example of medieval debate poetry between the principles of the oppressive figure of Mum and the unruly, wild Sothsegger.
Richard the Redeless is an anonymous fifteenth-century English alliterative poem that critiques Richard II's kingship and his court, seeking to offer Richard retrospective advice, following his deposition by Henry IV in 1399. The poet claims that "Richard has been poorly advised, his kingdom mismanaged, his loyal subjects ill-served." The author believes that the advice he imparts will be of great aid to any guiding the kingdom in future years. The poem also contains elements of satire, especially towards court manners and clothing fashions.
John Audelay was an English priest and poet from Haughmond Abbey, in Shropshire; one of the few English poets of the period whose name is known to us. Some of the first Christmas carols recorded in English appear among his works.
Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960), was an American medievalist who is best known for her research on the 14th-century English mystic Richard Rolle and for her discovery of a manuscript of the Book of Margery Kempe.
James H. Morey is an American academic. He is a professor of English at Emory University teaching courses in Old and Middle English, including Chaucer.
The Lincoln Thornton Manuscript is a medieval manuscript compiled and copied by the fifteenth-century English scribe and landowner Robert Thornton, MS 91 in the library of Lincoln Cathedral. The manuscript is notable for containing single versions of important poems such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Perceval of Galles, and gives evidence of the variegated literary culture of fifteenth-century England. The manuscript contains three main sections: the first one contains mainly narrative poems ; the second contains mainly religious poems and includes texts by Richard Rolle, giving evidence of works by that author which are now lost; and the third section contains a medical treatise, the Liber de diversis medicinis.
The Harley Lyrics is the usual name for a collection of lyrics in Middle English, Anglo Norman, and Latin found in Harley MS 2253, a manuscript dated ca. 1340 in the British Library's Harleian Collection. The lyrics contain "both religious and secular material, in prose and verse and in a wide variety of genres." The manuscript is written in three recognisable hands: scribe A, scribe B or the Ludlow scribe, and scribe C.
Margaret Kirkby, was an anchorite of Ravensworth in North Yorkshire, England. She was the principal disciple of the hermit Richard Rolle, and the recipient of much of his writings.
Ralph Hanna is Professor Emeritus of Paleography at Keble College, Oxford and Professor Emeritus of English at University of California, Riverside. After undergraduate study at Amherst College, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University. He is the author of Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (1996), London Literature, 1300-1380 (2005), The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (2010), Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, Their Producers and Their Readers (2014), and Editing Medieval Texts: An Introduction (2015). He has also edited a number of important Middle English texts, including volumes such as Richard Rolle: Uncollected Prose and Verse, With Related Northern Texts (2007), the Speculum Vitae, with David Lawton The Siege of Jerusalem (2003), and, with Sarah Wood, Richard Morris's Prick of Conscience: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text (2013), all with the Early English Text Society.
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
"Maiden in the mor lay" or "The Maid of the Moor" is a Middle English lyric of the early 14th century, set to a melody which is now lost. The literary historian Richard L. Greene called it "one of the most haunting lyrics of all the Middle Ages", and Edith Sitwell thought it "a miracle of poetry". It is a notoriously enigmatic poem, perhaps devotional, perhaps secular, which depicts a maiden in the wilderness who lives on flowers and spring-water. Critics are divided in their interpretation of her: she may be the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, a water-sprite, or an ordinary human girl. The 14th-century bishop Richard de Ledrede's dissatisfaction with this song led to an alternative lyric for it being written, a Latin religious poem, Peperit virgo.
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