Abstract
Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne,1 written between 1303 and 1317, has been praised for the superb view it gives of medieval life;2 I suggest that it is not just a view in the sense of being a window onto the medieval English world and what the people did, but a more fundamental view into minds and hearts. Study of the text will help a modern reader understand the mentality of those who used Handlyng Synne and other contemporary didactic works, the ordinary medieval people who form the majority of the community but have left few records of their lives. Modern scholarship has become increasingly aware of the disparate but enlightened audiences of medieval works through research such as Claire Mcllroy’s study of Richard Rolle,3 and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s edited volume on Middle English literary theory.4 This chapter associates my work with theirs by arguing that the way Mannyng wrote for his readers and listeners suggests that his audience was broad in class and education, yet capable of sophisticated understanding and discernment.
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Notes
All quotations are taken from Robert Marmyng, Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983).
Kenne th Sisam, Fourteenth-Century Verse and Prose (1921; rev. edn Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 3.
Claire Elizabeth Mcllroy, The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004).
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999).
This syllabus was established by Archbishop Pecham’s provincial Council of Lambeth in 1281, text available in R M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods: With Other Documents Relating to the English Church. II, A.D. 1205–1313 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 900–5.
For the relationship of Handlyng Synne to English synodal statutes, summae confessorum, and artes praedicandi, see Fritz Kemmler, ‘Exempla’ in Context: A History and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ (Tübingen: Narr, 1984), pp. 24–91.
Early texts that include such an inscription are the Lives of Saints Margaret, Katherine, and Juliana, written for ‘alle leawede men pe understonden ne muhen latines ledene’ (‘all lay people who cannot understand the Latin tongue’), quoted in J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers, Early Middle English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. xviii
Joyce Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims: Robert Mannyng and the Gilbertine Cult’, Philological Quarterly, 81, no. 3 (2002), 311–26 (pp. 312–18).
All references to the Manuel des Péchiez are taken from Robert Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, AD 1303, with those parts of the Anglo-French treatise in which it was founded, William of Wadington’s “Manuel des Péchiez’, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner, 1901).
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Prologue, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 195
Lany Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 32.
Peter Brown, ‘The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 41–59
Cynthia Ho, ‘Dichotomize and Conquer: “Womman Handlyng” in Handlyng Synne’, Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 383–401
Earnon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 63.
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© 2015 Anne M. Scott
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Scott, A.M. (2015). The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion: The Deadly Sin of ‘lecherye’ in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (1303—1317). In: Broomhall, S. (eds) Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_3
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