Confined Meditation or Mediated Contemplation: Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ

Abstract

Nicholas Love, the prior of the Carthusians of Mount Grace, translated the Vitae Christi into Middle English around 1410, entitling it The of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christe, as a means to provide his readers with material for private meditational devotion. The Mirrour was composed as part of an existing rich tradition of manuals written to instruct and aid meditation and contemplation. Nonetheless, because of Love’s explicit claim that he wrote his work primarily for an active, lay audience, the Mirrour was a new initiative. This characteristic of the text attracted critical attention. The idea that the Mirrour was intended for meditation has been pressed with new vehemence and insight by Michelle Karnes. Her main thesis is that Love, in translating the Meditationes, created a new, much more restrictive work that consciously distances his readers from any advancement from meditation towards the practice of high contemplation, unlike its Latin original. My interpretation is a somewhat modified one. Although it seems true that many late-medieval mystical texts, like that of Love, do differentiate between the ‘professional’ contemplatives, who are favoured with access to high contemplation, and the laity, who are mainly offered the lower meditation, I find some fine tuning is necessary. Although Love himself formulated his endeavour to fit the text to the needs of his lay audience several times in his work, one should not always take his pronouncements at absolute face value. His text, in my interpretation, by a close reading yields a more complex picture both of his endeavours and of its outcome. I would assert that although the primary aim of Love was teaching and fostering meditation, and although he did not expect such endeavours from the part of the majority of his readers, he did not exclude his audience from the possibility of reaching and experiencing the phase of contemplation.