Kissing Matter: John Lydgate’s Lyric On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est and the Democratization of Contemplation

Abstract

This article examines the use of contemplation in the religious poetry of John Lydgate, a fifteenth-century Benedictine monk and poet from England. While our understanding of Lydgate as a Benedictine poet has gained scholarly momentum, his paraliturgical writings have received less sustained attention. In this article, I argue that Lydgate democratizes the millennium-old monastic practice of lectio and meditatio by introducing a new contemplative mode for lay- and non-Latinate people in the vernacular, which I refer to as a performative lectio domini. This lectio is on an image instead of scripture and takes place within the context of the liturgy. Lydgate offers directions for participation in a liturgical ritual, enabling his readers to fully inhabit the surplus of materiality, somatic movements, and figurative language emanating from the liturgy in order for them to abandon themselves to contemplation in the crux of the rite. By looking at the poem On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est as a case study, I demonstrate how for Lydgate the liturgical kiss becomes a threshold of encounter with Christ through the incarnation. Rather than producing an emotive response, as is often characterized, the liturgical kiss fosters an intellectual illumination and deeper knowledge of Christ crucified.

1. Introduction

Contemplative practices and contemplative writings underwent a considerable change in the first half of the fifteenth century in England, as the rhetoric and practices of the cloisters and anchorholds were being translated and made accessible to all strata of society, fostering new contemplative modes. Eleanor Johnson, in her book Staging Contemplation, observes this shift as “an increasingly public and increasingly collective contemplative culture” (Johnson 2018, p. 15). The trickling of an eremitic and monastic contemplative culture into the public sphere can be attributed to a few determining factors, one of which is the foundation of three religious houses near Sheen by King Henry V in 1414. While the house of Celestines failed, both houses of Carthusians at Sheen and Birgittines at Syon came to reinvigorate the English devotional landscape by promoting contemplation. Vincent Gillespie underlines that both houses became England’s “greatest institutional centres of interest in contemplative writing and contemplative experience” (Gillespie 2011b, p. 170). Library holdings and textual productions in and around Sheen and Syon included important contemplative writings such as Richard Rolle’s Melos amoris, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, The Mirror to Devout Men and Women, and The Orcherd of Syon. The wealth of contemplative material testifies to the dedication of Carthusians and Birgittines alike to pursue a life of contemplation, which reflected more on their own spiritual edification than a desire to disseminate such material to the laity as Gillespie has pointed out.

Whether encouraged or not by Carthusians and Birgittines alike, the contemplative aspirations of the laity could not be denied, as the creation of chantries as well as household chapels, and the growth in religious fraternities and guilds demonstrate (see Rice 2008; Harvey 2006; Barron 1985). New English devotional practices and liturgies, such as the devotion to the Name of Jesus, emerged so to satiate the laity’s curiosity for contemplative spirituality1. It is in such context of growing democratic spirituality, where contemplation was no longer confined to monasteries and anchorholds, that interpretations and translations of liturgies in the vernacular gained momentum in the public culture of fifteenth-century England. Practices of visualization, embodiment, ritual, and memory coalesced in order to promote “an incarnational and sacramental aesthetic” in the act of contemplation (Despres 2010, p. 102). Hence, paraliturgical writings, as witnesses of public, social, and cultural practices, refine our understanding of the democratization of contemplation—the process of making it accessible to all—in the fast-changing religious landscape which unfolded under Henry Chichele’s archiepiscopacy (1414–1443).

In this rapidly evolving English religious landscape of the first half of the fifteenth century, one particular poet demonstrates constancy and endurance. With a literary career spanning no less than fifty years, the Benedictine monk, John Lydgate (c.1370–1449), pursued steadily his own literary agenda personifying a piety informed by the magisterium of the institutional English church. Constructing his life-long poetic project around community and liturgical literacy (Bryan 2008, p. 59), Lydgate remained untethered by the whims of religious change, such as Lollardy, while over the years he abided by the requests of his secular patrons. Considered as one of the most prolific Middle English poets of fifteenth-century England, John Lydgate is mostly known in scholarship as the Lancastrian court poet par excellence (Nolan 2005; Scanlon and Simpson 2006). Scholarly speaking, Lydgate remains rather nebulous when it comes to a sustained critical analysis of his religious poetry. This article is another step towards displaying John Lydgate as the Benedictine monk whose poetry was mostly written in, inspired by and infused with his monastic context of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which he joined in the mid-1380s before or at the age of fifteen (Lydgate 1911, p. 356, l. 742). While Lydgate’s religious poetry is gaining more momentum in its critical reception, this article is concerned principally with his paraliturgical lyrics and most precisely with one particular poem: On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est (Boffey and Edwards 2005: NIMEV 4245)2.

Lydgate’s lyric On Kissing reveals the Benedictine monk’s poetic project of expounding, glossing, and amplifying liturgical material. This article traces how the monk of Bury St Edmunds takes on the task of translating an acculturating ritual, a ritual that was not found in medieval missals but gained currency in practice and became pervasive in fifteenth-century English liturgical performance3. While some would have adhered to the figurative meaning behind kissing earth, iron, wood or stone, many would merely have had a tacit knowledge of the performance without understanding what it stood for. As such the ritual transformed the person at prayer as the repetition of the performative act at mass instilled devotion. Lydgate’s authorial agenda in his writing of On Kissing suggests that while many people were accustomed with the ritual, very few had an intellectual understanding of it, even among his courtly audience. John Lydgate’s dedication to expounding the “moralyte” of the practice, which is to say its spiritual meaning, through a tropological reading of the liturgy, speaks of his commitment to orthopraxis4. One of the consequences of the fall being multivocality, that is to say the opportunity to affirm and hold contrary beliefs and behaviors, Lydgate endeavors to align his readers’ bodies, hearts and minds to the liturgical practice they take part in. His liturgical poems are thus an attempt at ensuring that outward liturgical performances might conform to inward intention. By translating the tropological meaning of kissing at “Verbum caro factum est”, while inviting his audience to consider a new contemplative mode, a performative lectio domini, I argue that Lydgate fosters the democratization of a millennium old monastic practice. While Lydgate demarcates contemplation through pastoral regulation and mediation, this new contemplative mode which foregrounds visualization, materiality, somatic movements, and figurative language, posits the liturgy as the embodying of a spiritual practice of union with God, a union already achieved through Christ’s incarnation.

2. The Liturgical Kiss and the Second Reading of the Gospel of John

John Lydgate’s lyric On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est is found extant in ten different manuscripts dating from the first half of the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century5. Most of the manuscripts, except for Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 683 (hereafter Laud misc. 683), Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College, MS 174/95 (hereafter MS 174/95), and Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q.G.8 (56) (hereafter MS Q.G.8), are in the “standard literary format” (around 300 mm × 200 mm, see Hanna 2015) which would have made them unlikely to be carried around as devotional and didactic props in liturgical settings, as opposed to smaller manuscripts that could fit in the palm of one’s hand. Laud misc. 683, as suggested by Anthony Bale, was probably a domestic book used for basic instruction, and could have been portable based on its smaller size (200 mm × 140 mm) (Bale 2002, p. 191). Given its smaller format (around 200 mm × 150 mm), MS 174/95 could have been a devotional prop used in the domestic or possibly ecclesial contexts. Its fourth booklet, which contains On Kissing, is made up of an extract from Lydgate’s Virtues of the Mass, some religious verse by William Lichefeld (d. 1448) and others, as well as an excerpt from the penitential romance King Robert of Sicily, underlining both its devotional and educational function. MS Q.G.8 is also found in a smaller size (around 200 mm × 150 mm) and similarly to the other two manuscripts contains religious verse, although primarily by or attributed to John Lydgate.

The other manuscripts, apart from Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354, compile almost exclusively Lydgatian material for literary purposes rather than devotional ones. The anthology London, British Library, MS Harley 2255 contains religious and didactic verse and could have been compiled under Lydgate’s own direction according to Derek Pearsall (Pearsall 1970, p. 77). For a matter of fact, the other five anthologies have either been copied by John Shirley (c. 1366–1456) or the “Hammond scribe”, which attests to their shared metropolitan origin and literary network6. The anthologizing process behind Lydgate’s minor poems organized in poetical collections is intricately connected to the production and circulation of booklets (the compilation of material in groups according to theme or source) in fifteenth-century London. Julia Boffey and John Thompson commented that many booklets, similarly to Lydgate’s collections of minor poems, would have existed on their own, and as such their shelf-life would have been rather short (Boffey and Thompson 1989, p. 290).

While these literary anthologies have ensured that Lydgate’s poetry would be preserved for posterity, one should not undermine that Lydgate’s religious verse could have circulated widely in different forms. For example, Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354, which contains On Kissing, was owned by the London merchant Richard Hill who compiled eclectic writings reflecting his social milieu (see Gillespie 2003). Hill’s commonplace book contains as many as 247 items spanning from a London chronicle to some religious poems such as Lydgate’s Virtues of the Mass, followed by On Kissing. The compiling efforts of Richard Hill reflect Londoners’ assiduity at acquiring texts for domestic and literary purposes, shedding light on the wide range of access to manuscripts and printed texts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century London (Barron 2016, pp. 58–59). Given that the lyric appears in Hill’s commonplace book, it is likely that it would have circulated in “precarious literary” forms such as devotional booklets and tracts, single leaves, or personal pious books passed down from one generation to another until the manuscripts’ complete deterioration (see Boffey 1996, p. 70).

Richard Hill’s manuscript and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.21 both include the lyric of On Kissing in a paraliturgical grouping with An Exortacion to Prestys (NIMEV 4249) and Virtues of the Mass (NIMEV 4246), and so does MS 174/95, although with an incomplete beginning. This suggests that in didactic manuscript contexts, the poem was perceived as a paraliturgical writing, rather than a means to contemplation per se. In fact, none of the manuscripts mentioned above contain a progressive spiritual program of instruction, beginning with catechetic material and ending with contemplative texts, as many fifteenth-century miscellanies with religious content do (Pore Caitif)7. The manuscripts and their contexts in which one finds the lyric On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est reveal that the poem, beyond being intrinsic to Lydgate’s poetic collections, was understood first and foremost as a paraliturgical lyric with didactic and devotional purposes, performed to bolster people’s faith.

The poem, On Kissing, expounds the liturgical practice which unfolded at the second reading of the Gospel of John within the celebration of the mass (see Atchley 1900). While a reading or chanting of the Gospel lesson would have taken place in the first part of the mass, before the Offertory, the first fourteen verses of John’s Gospel were read right after the priest’s dismissal or when the priest was unvesting at the end. Lectionaries traditionally assigned this lesson from the Gospel of John as the Gospel reading for Christmas day. However, the lesson came to have a life of its own throughout the liturgical year. The first mention of a second reading of John’s Gospel is in a canon of a council held in Seligstadt, near Mainz, in 1022 (Simmons 1879, p. 383). In his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, William Durandus (1230–1296) mentions the reading of this Gospel as being sometimes said at the end of mass (Durandus 1995, IV.xxiv.5, p. 342). In England, the province of Canterbury adopted such practice by 1305, as a provincial council stated that no other priests should begin to celebrate their own mass until the second Gospel reading of the main mass had been fully said (Simmons 1879, pp. 383–84). The practice was still deeply anchored in Canon Law by the fifteenth century as William Lyndwood, the great English canonist of the fifteenth century, glossed the practice in his Provinciale (Lyndwood 1679, III.23, p. 238). An indulgence was often attached to this second reading of the Gospel for all those who had attended mass until the end while being “truly penitent”. Lydgate’s On Kissing omits any references to an indulgence, trading its contemporaries’ transactional tone for a focus on the devotional practice itself8. In contrast, the late fourteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 100, the fifteenth-century manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 750 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. e. 17, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 30 dated from 1441, as well as London, British Library, MS Addit. 37049 from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, all contain indulgences connected with the second reading of the Gospel of John. Ashmole 750 thus includes the following indulgence:

Also whoso ever saie or her devoutely the gospel of Saynt John In principio erat verbum, and knele doun or devoutelle encline at these wordes verbum caro factum est hathe a yer and xl days to pardon.

(f. 141v)

Eamon Duffy has suggested that the purpose of such an indulgence was “in order to encourage the laity to remain to the end of mass, even after the climactic moment of the elevation” (Duffy 1992, p. 124; see also Swanson 2006, p. 233).

The liturgical practice can not only be traced in late medieval England in lists of indulgences but also in various anonymous versions of the Virtues of the Mass9. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 32, a mid- to late-fifteenth-century manuscript, explains that the ninth virtue of the mass is intricately connected with the ritual:

The ix vertew is pardon as y hope

Xl dais y grauntid by the pope

Yf thow kisshe what euer it be

At verbum caro apon this knee

(Rawl. poet. 32, f. 36r)

Sharing a similar source text, the numbered list of virtues version of the Virtues of the Mass found in New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 317 (hereafter Beinecke MS 317) defines “what euer it be” by “Yf þou kysse ground stoone or tre” (f. 2r). The closest Virtues of the Mass rendition of the liturgical practice can be found at the end of an exposition of the ceremony of the mass copied in Beinecke MS 317. The thorough description of the liturgical practice in this version of the Virtues of the Mass is worth quoting in full.

And Seynt John his gospell for to her

Þou take goode hede

The which gospell clerkes alle

In principio þe hit calle

A nobyll þynge

And gret pardoun shalt þou se encrest

At verbum caro factum est

That worthy worde

Than shulde alle knele boþe most and lest

To benche or borde

To stok or stone to stole or tre

To erthe or walle what so hit be

Kysse hit lovely

A twelf moneth pardoun have schall þe

And dayes fourty

The pope þat gaf and granted þis

Hyghte Clement þe fyfte I wysse

Hys soule God yelde

The childe þat best ys brynge us to blys

With hym to byelde

(f. 27v)

The insistence on the pardon-earning nature of the practice due to the indulgence given by Pope Clement V is pervasive, as Christ will bring the participant to dwell in eternal bliss. These fifteenth-century Virtues of the Mass examples, all emphasizing the pardon as the devotional focus, suggest that the practice of reading John’s Gospel a second time had percolated as much in monastic milieux such as Lydgate’s as in the parish churches of London10.

3. Lydgate’s Paraliturgical Lyrics

Lydgate scholarship is gradually paying more attention to John Lydgate, Benedictine monk of Bury St Edmunds, instead of merely Lydgate as a courtly poet with a Lancastrian agenda. Such shift in interest fostered by scholars such as Shannon Gayk, Jennifer Bryan, Jennifer Garrison, and Jacob Riyeff has promoted an integrated view of Lydgate and the significance of his Benedictine background and his monastery as the main locale of his writings. Shannon Gayk emphasized Lydgate’s authorization of Middle English as “a mode of theological instruction” while maintaining that the Benedictine author upheld through his religious writings the “clerical mediation of lay spirituality” (Gayk 2006, p. 177). According to Gayk, by translating monastic hermeneutics Lydgate asserts “the authority of historical discourse and ecclesiastical structures” (Gayk 2006, p. 178). Jacob Riyeff displayed how the Benedictine monk’s poetic project went about inviting his readers into some forms of “ruminative and typological meditation on the liturgy” (Riyeff 2016, p. 376). Riyeff demonstrated how much Lydgate’s religious poetry emanated from the hierarchical and communitarian nature of his Benedictine order. The essay collection Lydgate Matters edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown has also contributed to a recovery of Lydgate’s holistic identity as a writer embedded in the particular material culture of the social and religious milieu which permeated his writings. Such emphasis on material goods and the material world that undergird Lydgate’s poetics have promoted an integrated view of his aesthetic practices. John M. Ganim also underlines ways in which Lydgate draws on his “monastic cultural production” which he translates into other contexts emphasizing dynamics of performativity, commemoration, and memory that undergird his own shorter works (Ganim 2008).

As such, Lydgate’s religious writings promoted a democratization of contemplation in that they made available monastic modes of meditation and contemplation outside of the realm of vowed contemplatives using nothing less than the vernacular. This was not in any case new, as authors such as Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Nicholas Love were actively translating monastic and anchoritic modes of contemplation into Middle English for a non-vowed audience (Watson 1999; Rice 2007; Karnes 2007). Whereas Rolle and Love anchored their understanding of contemplation within affective modes of piety, such as calor, canor, and dulcor for Rolle, and erotic rhetoric for Love, Hilton’s contemplative writings can be more easily associated with Lydgate’s, as they both play down affective piety for the sake of promoting theological truths11. Michael Sargent has pointed out that “In traditional terms, Walter Hilton would be considered anything but an affective contemplative writer” as the Scale of Perfection should be understood as “a guide to a life of personal reflection and moral reform leading eventually to a sense of union with God through grace” (Sargent 2019, pp. 138, 147–48). Both Hilton and Lydgate did not seek to stir emotions through their writings, but acknowledged the senses as means to attain cognitive illumination, understanding, in the act of contemplation. Both Hilton and Lydgate have been described as upholding a conservative theology—and so has Nicholas Love—while being very much practical in their treatments of contemplation (Lagorio and Sargent 1993, p. 3074; Gayk 2006). Whereas Hilton foresaw the possibility of contemplation in non-religious setting, as in Book II of the Scale of Perfection, Lydgate maintained that lay contemplation was to take place primarily within the confines of the church, ensuring pastoral oversight.

Lydgate’s religious poetry can be divided into more or less three different categories: one concerned with hagiography (see Somerset 2006; Nissé 2006), the second with Marian material, and the third with the liturgy. However, most often both his hagiographic and Marian lyrics originate in the liturgy in the broad sense of the term meaning all “activities involved in prayer” (Leclercq 1982, p. 236). Not to mention that both genres make implicit and explicit references to the liturgy as a pervading cultural framework within which Lydgate writes verse. For example, in his monumental Life of Our Lady (NIMEV 2574), Lydgate uses liturgical feasts to give rhythm to the narrative of the Virgin’s life. By paraphrasing and explaining liturgical rites, Lydgate invites his audience to a deeper understanding of what takes place at church, as such he seeks to ensure that all can be fully integrated in public worship. Hence, the collection of paraliturgical verse composed by Lydgate traces offertory psalms such as Benedic anima mea domino (NIMEV 2572), psalms used in the Office of the dead such as Deus in nomine tuo saluum me fac (DIMEV 1563), writings about liturgical sequences of specific feasts such as A Procession of Corpus Christi (NIMEV 3606) and Laetabundus (NIMEV 1019). This translation effort, as Lydgate made widely available a Latin liturgical culture to non-Latinate people, has been characterized as the essence of the Benedictine monk’s work of spiritual direction (Heale 1998, p. 62).

John Lydgate’s paraliturgical lyrics can be described as guides in performance for a readership within and beyond his monastic milieu. One of such guides is his Virtues of the Mass which takes the reader through the liturgical sequences of the ceremony, from the vesting of the priest to the singing of Ite missa est. The poem is fueled with practical advice in light of a performative observance, such as when to stand or when to kneel, as well as spiritual advice stirring the reader’s interior life according to the liturgical sequence, whether to confession or to adoration at the elevation of the host for example. Lydgate’s Virtues of the Mass is part of a greater literary corpus consisting of at least forty-four texts mostly of anonymous authorship (Chan 2023, p. 81). Whereas some of these texts expound the benefits of attending mass, others such as Lydgate’s version expound the ritual. Texts tracing the benefits of the mass seem to want to convince or affirm people that going to mass is crucial for one’s well-being. The audience of these texts is therefore probably mixed with regular church goers and not so regular attendees. Virtues of the Mass texts that expound the ritual however expect more of their audience, as church attendance is a premise to explaining the liturgical sequences. Lydgate’s meticulous exegesis of each liturgical sequence is unparalleled in this literary corpus apart from a couple of versions which can be found in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1), in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. A. 268, and Beinecke, MS 317. Such assiduity and details in description suggest that Lydgate was not only addressing regular church goers, but also devout ones, who sought to understand the intricacies and decipher the mysteries of the mass.

John Lydgate’s almost unprecedented effort at providing his audience with an extensive somatic, intellectual, and spiritual knowledge of the ritual unravel his authorial agenda opening up monastic and clerical learning to a wider audience. For instance, in his Virtues of the Mass, Lydgate expounds the gradual, a melismatic chant consisting of two verses of a psalm sung between the epistle and the gospel readings, as a “Token of Ascendyng vp from gre (degree) to gre/In vertew vpward procedyng stound[e] mele” (ll. 242–43). This brief chant, Lydgate adds, reminds the reader that one’s spiritual journey first begins in humility on the ground prior to being “Reysyd by grace, feythe, hope, and charyte” by “parfyte connyng and humble pacience/With compassion and fraternall pyte” in Christ’s passion (ll. 245–47). This spiritual journey begins in humility with the full choir singing the first verse of the psalm, while one’s exaltation is brought forth by the soloist cantor who sings the second verse prior to being joined by the choir (Reid 2016, p. 519). Such succinct chant announcing the gospel reading is an opportunity for Lydgate to redirect the gaze of his audience to Christ’s passion, which is at the heart of the mass and the gospel. But most of all, Lydgate juxtaposes the monastic modes of lectio and meditatio on the biblical excerpts for the day (i.e., the epistle and the gospel) to a series of image associations drawing on Christ’s passion. By referring to Christ’s passion, “In Crystes passion set hoole theyr confydence” (l. 248), Lydgate makes the outcome of monastic ruminatio on Holy Scriptures available to a non-clerical and non-Latinate audience. As a matter of fact, the fruits of both lectio and meditatio on the epistle and gospel proper are the theological virtues and grace received through Christ’s death on the cross. This short liturgical sequence of the gradual functions, in Lydgate’s terms, as the superimposition of an image—the image of Christ’s passion—onto Holy Scriptures read prior to the liturgical sequence of the gradual in the form of the epistle and after it in the form of the gospel reading. By explaining the meaning behind well-known performed liturgical sequences, Lydgate opens the mysteries of the mass to a wider audience, deciphering its theological symbolism and performative nature. Lydgate shows how liturgical participation requires the stimulation of all bodily senses—the visualization of mnemonic images, such as Christ’s passion in this instance, and the experience of aural and somatic mnemonics—in order for the ritual to foster spiritual formation and transformation in the beholder/participant. Thus, Lydgate affirms that both the ritual itself in its communal performative setting, and the devotional text to be read (and thus performed) in public or in private share in the same salvific function arising from the mass. Just as the late fourteenth-century Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord admonishes its audience to learn and meditate on the scenes of the Last Supper and Christ’s passion in the communal setting of the mass so to be then used in private settings, Lydgate’s Virtues of the Mass and On Kissing both invite a public and private means of engagement with the text and the ritual they respectively explain (Perry 2011, pp. 440–41).

In his expounding of rituals, as iterations of not only religious but also cultural practices of social performance (see Flanigan et al. 2005), Lydgate gives us an insight into daily liturgical rites with an emphasis on orthopraxis, which can also be traced in writings of some of his near-contemporaries such as the parish priest John Mirk (d. c. 1414), and the Augustinian canon John Audelay (d. c. 1426). By emphasizing the significance of right liturgical participation, Lydgate affirms the transformative nature of the ritual on the participant, as much as the transformative nature of the poetic discourse on the reader. Both ritual and poetic discourse are agents of change. While Lydgate’s paraliturgical lyrics are performative in nature, as one would have been invited to join a procession on Corpus Christi day, recite the Pater noster, or pray a levation prayer at mass, they are as well performative whenever read outside of their liturgical setting, as they demand from the reader a sense-experience attention to the poem’s context, an internalization of the liturgical rite, as well as an intention to perform the text inwardly. The act of reading Lydgate’s paraliturgical poems not only represents but also replicates the audience’s liturgical experience. Therefore, it is possible to consider that Lydgate’s paraliturgical verse draws on the essence of poetry as “a mode of illuminating bestowed by God on writers so that they may make manifest eternal truths not otherwise available” (Meyer-Lee 2006, p. 43). Hence, divinely illuminated poetry illuminates divinely whoever comes in contact with the text. The ritual and the paraliturgical verse become entrusted with one and the same agency blurring the boundaries between the participant and the reader. By associating performance with poetic discourse and figurative language, Lydgate establishes that both the performed word and the word on the page offer modes of knowing the divine. Both embody loci of contemplation.

4. Lydgate’s Contemplative Modes

John Lydgate’s poetic treatment of the theme of “contemplacioun” demonstrates how the Benedictine monk plays on the polysemic nature of the term. By juxtaposition and association, Lydgate unveils the complexity of a term which ranges from everyday devotion and spiritual posture to the heights of the beatific vision. The very roots of the noun “contemplation” in the early Middle Ages can be traced to “the activity central to monastic life, the performance of the liturgy”, whereas in the late Middle Ages, its most common use is that of “the highest form of devotional prayer or attention that an individual person can address towards God” (Watson 2011, p. 14; Johnson 2018, p. 1). Of the heights of contemplation as beatific vision, Lydgate seldom makes any explicit reference. In a pageant which was once attributed to the monk of Bury St Edmunds, Margaret of Anjou’s entry into London, 1445 (see Kipling 1982), contemplation is defined as

… all felicité

Withouten ende eternally t’endure

Contemplacioun of the Deité,

Which noon erthely langage may discure (reveal),

God beholden of hys creature,

Whiche aperteneth to gostly suffisaunce,

Whan from the worlde is made disseveraunce.

(Lydgate 2010, ll. 134–40)

The joy of being united to God in “all felicité” is at the heart of contemplation, it is contemplation in its purest form, and in this case the term implies vision of God. The pageant ends with this very beatific vision which is represented as “Joie, laude, rest, pees, and parfite unité/Triumphes of eternalle victorie/With fruicioun of the Trynite/By contemplacioun of Hys Glorie” (ll. 168–171). However, as foreshadowed in the former extract from Margaret of Anjou, the beatific vision as a “gostly suffisaunce”, a spiritual contentment, can only take place when “the world is made disseveraunce”, once one has died. Lydgate’s closest reference to the beatific vision in his use of the term contemplation can be found in The Legend of St. Austin at Compton (NIMEV 1875; see Whatley 2001; Hurley 2021). In the poem, Augustine gives the choice to a priest, who was resurrected in order to give penance to an excommunicated knight, to join him to preach the faith of Christ or to go back to the grave. The priest responds without hesitation: “Unto my grave I may restooryd be/…/Tabyde in reste from worldly perturbaunce” (Lydgate 1911, p. 204, ll. 364, 368). He then adds:

I reste in pees and take of nothing keep,

Rejoisshe in quiete and Contemplacioun,

Voyd of al trouble, celestial is my sleep,

And by the meene of Cristes passioun,

Feith, hoope, and Charite, and hool affecioun,

Been pilwes foure to reste upon by grace,

Day of the general resurrectioun,

Whan Gabriel callith tappeere a-forn his face.

(ll. 369–376)

Having joined the Church sleeping in purgatory until called forth on judgment day to join the Church triumphant in heaven, the priest is already experiencing the joys of heavenly contemplation as a foretaste of what is to come. Affirming that the beatific vision can only be attained in the afterlife, Lydgate upholds the conservative views of the Church and distances himself from any heterodox views that creeped into fourteenth-century visionary writings in England influenced by the beatific vision controversies12.

While contemplation as an anticipation of the beatific vision occurs only once in Lydgate’s repertoire and to a dead man for that matter, his use of contemplation in its monastic setting is predominant in his poetry. The fourteenth-century Benedictine manual for novices De modo meditandi vel contemplandi, written at Bury St Edmunds and found in its library during Lydgate’s lifetime, anchors its understanding of contemplation within coenobitic monasticism where recitation of psalms and prayers by rote arising from the liturgy are the heart of the practice (Riyeff 2019, pp. 151–52). In such context, monks were expected to dedicate themselves to lectio divina, prayerful reading (see Robertson 2011). In his Legend of St. Gyle (NIMEV 2606), Lydgate describes the monk’s assiduity to the task: “Knelyng in churche, or in thy lybrarye/Euer in study or Contemplacyoun” (Lydgate 1911, p. 167, ll. 181–82). In his Dance of Death (DIMEV 2591), a series of dialogues between Death and some various protagonists, Death reminds a monk of the transience of life, to which the monk replies in a repentant spirit: “I hadde levere (I would have rather) in the cloistre be/At my book and studie my service/Wiche is a place contemplatif to se/But I have spent my life in many vice/Liche as a fool dissolut and nyce (frivolous)” (ll. 385–92). The act of prayerful reading (which is here liturgically oriented) as the locus of contemplation in both instances is intricately connected to the study of books, the act of devoting oneself to learning. Similarly, in his Testament (NIMEV 2464), Lydgate admits that in his younger years as a monk he spent his time savoring good wine and dedicating himself to “ryot or excesse” as “On contemplacioun [sic] [he] fond but small comforte/Holy histories did to [sic] [him] no chier” (Lydgate 1911, p. 356, ll. 728–32).

Contemplation, is not solely available to those belonging to the cloister and instructed in the arts of grammatica. Lydgate, as a translator of monastic hermeneutics in the vernacular, uses figurative language as a way to extend entry into ruminative meditation to Latinate, non-Latinate, and non-literate people alike. In his prologue to the Virtues of the Mass, John Lydgate enjoins his pious audience eager to hear mass to imitate the priest’s preparation for mass by remembering Bible passages.

Ye folkys all, whyche haue deuocioun

To here masse, furst do your besy cure

With all your inward contemplacion,

As in a myrrour presentyng in fygure

The morall menyng of that gostly armure,

When that a preest, with mynystres more & lasse,

Arayeth hymsylf, by record of scripture,

The same howre when he shall go to masse

(p. 87, ll. 1–8)

“Ye folkys all” denotes a shift in contemplative performance beyond the walls of the cloister or the anchoritic cell. As pointed out by Eleanor Johnson, in the later Middle Ages in England, contemplation is no longer confined to the vowed religious living in solitude but is open to anyone seeking to know God intimately (Johnson 2018, p. 2). As such, “contemplation is increasingly a practice urged on all Christians” (Johnson 2018, p. 12), or as Vincent Gillespie puts it: “Merchants could aspire to contemplation as legitimately as monks” (Gillespie 2011b, p. 177). Not only does Lydgate insist on the broad nature of his audience, but the act of contemplation is also here disconnected from bookish study. Jennifer Bryan has read “inward contemplation” as a means to understand the priest’s garments and actions (Bryan 2008, p. 58). Jennifer Garrison has argued furthermore that Lydgate invites his readers in this first eight-line stanza to self-reflection based on the priest’s own spiritual preparation for the mass (Garrison 2017, p. 165). Based on the unequivocal associations that Lydgate adjoins to the term “contemplation” as seen above, an invitation to meditate on priestly vestments or to focus on the self (apart from self-introspection leading to penitence) would seem inappropriate in such context. “Inward contemplacion” which should be pursued in great pains, diligently (“besy cure”), here belongs to the semantic field of prayerful reading. Lydgate expects his audience to mirror the priest, who through prayerful rumination of holy scripture prepares himself to celebrate mass. However, instead of dedicating themselves to the process of lectio divina throughout the ceremony, they are invited to meditate on an image of Christ’s passion.

Furst, with your eyen verray contemplatyfe,

Calleth to mynde, of hole affeccioun,

Howe the masse here in thys present lyfe

Of gostly gladnesse ys chyef direccioun,

To haue memory of Crystes passioun,

As doctors remembre in theyr doctryne,

Geyne gostly sekenesses oure restauracioun,

Our bawmne, our tryacle, our helthe, our medycyne

(p. 87, ll. 9–16)

While “doctors remembre in theyr doctryne”, lay people and non-Latinate clergy ought to ruminate on an image. With the survival of more than 250 complete and partial copies of the Wycliffite Bible, one cannot deny that Middle English translations of the Bible were in circulation throughout most of Lydgate’s monastic life (Solopova et al. 2020, p. xv). However, Lydgate makes no reference to the laity’s access to Holy Scriptures in the vernacular. Rather, he encourages them to use images as the source of their meditation. Visualization by and of itself becomes a form of prayer technique. References to pictures as the books of the laity appear as early as in the writings of Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), since “a picture provides for uneducated people looking at it… what they should follow” (Gregory the Great 2004, p. 745). According to Thomas Aquinas, images had a threefold purpose: they instructed, they were essential for memorization, and finally they stirred people to devotion (Aquinas 1933, p. 312)13. Hence, Lydgate’s parallelism between the audience who ought to remember the passion visually and the doctors who remember their doctrine within the context of the liturgy points to one and the same thing. Both the crucified Christ—the flesh on the cross—and the biblical account—the words on the page—, which is the grounding for Christian doctrine, when contemplated upon lead to “gostly gladnesse”, the ultimate goal of contemplation (Boersma 2023, pp. 13–17).

As Vincent Gillespie has pointed out in a conference paper “Lectio domini: Learning to Read Christ the Book in Later Medieval England”, “ruminative engagement with the Word of God revealed in the Bible was not an option, even if primers and Books of Hours allowed partial engagement” (Gillespie 2019). Over the last thirty years, Gillespie has shown how the monastic lectio divina gradually came to be articulated in the English vernacular context as a lectio domini, a sustained process of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation on an image of Christ crucified. Hence, lectio domini is “a consciously willed alteration of approach away from rumination on a text towards rumination on an image” (Gillespie 2011a, p. 112) in order to respond to the devotional needs of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century audiences with a mere pragmatic literacy if nothing more. As Shannon Gayk has demonstrated, Lydgate uses contemporary devotional images as prompts for the practice of monastic meditatio and contemplatio (Gayk 2006, p. 177). “Inward contemplation” in Lydgate’s Virtues of the Mass is, thus, a visual mode of contemplation which is emphasized in the poem’s second stanza, as the Benedictine monk calls upon his audience’s own “eyen verray contemplatyfe”. This conflation of inwardness and sight in the process of contemplation embodies the epitome of lectio domini.

The very act of visualizing Christ on the cross in the communal and performative setting of the mass is, according to Lydgate, as valuable an alternative as engaging with the written Scriptures in an exercise of lectio divina. The inward image was then further supplemented with an outward one for all those present at mass. One could not evade the visual predominance of the passion image in church buildings, as if glossing the very liturgical rites. Christ crucified would have been gazed at by the participants all throughout the ceremony. As Eamon Duffy emphasizes with regard to the rood-screens which parted the chancel from the nave, “the screens were first and foremost Christological images, proclaiming the centrality of Christ’s atoning death” (Duffy 1992, p. 158). To look through the arches of the screen at the ritual unfolding in the chancel would have been a sight of the life of Christ layered in meaning and in omni-temporality. Laura Varnam goes as far as saying that crucifixion imagery, which was pervasive in parish church art, most often positioned the laity at the foot of the cross generating a calvary of their own (Varnam 2018, p. 166). Lydgate invites his audience to consider the liturgical sequences of the mass, whether bidding prayers, Confiteor, Offertory or Canon, through the contemplative lens of both an inward and outward image of Christ’s passion imprinting a material memorial on the participant in the rite.

The other layer of sense-experience that Lydgate holds concurrently with his mode of contemplation is performance. Indeed, whether the audience is about to participate in mass or to read Lydgate’s poetic discourse, both the performative nature of the ceremony and the text cannot be forgotten. Embodiment on the one hand and imagination on the other require an intentness of purpose in the act of contemplation. Nonetheless, rather than being a hindrance in encountering the divine, this performative layer ought to be habituated, fully absorbed into one’s being in order to allow heart, mind, and soul to freely meditate on the crucified Christ. As mentioned, for Lydgate, Christ’s passion is the visual exegetical tool through which the ceremony has to be understood. It is the contemplative lens through which one participates in the mass. Towards the end of his Virtues of the Mass, drawing on the Fasciculus morum (Chan 2023, p. 83), Lydgate acknowledges that “A Masse ys egall to Crystes passion”, therefore the process of hearing the ceremony should be “emprynte” in one’s memory (p. 114, ll. 643, 647). To fix the passion on one’s mind by having memorialized the meaning and the intricacies of the mass is to have access at all times to the greatest “directory” to the grace of God. It is what Henning Laugerud calls a “physical-mental impression” (Laugerud 2015, p. 266). This physical-mental impression on the mind is enabled by the multisensorial nature of the ritual. The whole person, body and soul was formed and informed by liturgical practices. The interplay between the aural nature of the liturgy which the choir embodied, the visual nature of the clergy’s vestments, the church’s architecture and ornamentation, as well as the olfactory nature of incense and candle wax and the haptic and kinetic nature of kneeling, kissing, standing, all contributed to a deeply physical, embodied, contemplative experience centered on the passion. However, contrary to his near-contemporary contemplative writers, Lydgate did not aim to spur his audience to an emotional response but to greater understanding of cognitive truths.

5. Kissing as Contemplative Threshold

Lydgate’s liturgical writings offer a complex layering of sense-experience within the act of contemplation. In his lyric On Kissing, Lydgate invites his audience to an exercise of “inward contemplacion”. Similarly to his use of the term in the Virtues of the Mass, the Benedictine monk refers to a state of prayerful attention. Rather than an outward prayer, On Kissing encourages an inward form of devotion to Christ, coupled with habituated performative aspects14. This intension to encounter the divine is to be generated through and alongside paraliturgical gestures, which are highly performative and yet to be habituated so not to distract the act of contemplation. Lydgate offers performative cues in the paraliturgical practice of In principio:

Your hertes ey lyft vp in-to the Est,

All yowre body and knees boweth downe,

When the preest seyth Verbum caro factum est,

With all your inward contemplacion,

Your mowthe furst crossyd of high deuocion,

Kyssyng the tokens rehersyd here toforn,

And euer haue mynde on Crystes passion

Whyche for your sake weryd a crowne of thorne

(Lydgate 1911, p. 117, ll. 25–32)

While bodily gestures of kneeling, making the sign of the cross in front of or on one’s mouth, and kissing earth, iron, wood or stone affirm the embodied grounding of the act of contemplation, the heart is to be elevated towards the seat of transcendence, towards God, and the mind occupied with Christ’s passion. This exercise of performative meditation, a kinetic lectio domini, demands a complete absorption in the act of contemplation. Lydgate insists on the somatic nature of the procedure. It requires “All yowre body” in order to demonstrate a posture of humility and submission to the lordship of God in the act of contemplation: a full bodily orientation towards the divine. Likewise, the life of the mind is also necessitated in its totality, the contemplative practice entails full attention and concentration, “with all your inward contemplacion”. Throughout, the fourteen verses of the first chapter of the Gospel of John have to be listened to. Rather than being a soundtrack in the background of a contemplative exercise, these very words as an aural layer juxtaposed to kinetics, touch, inward sight, and attention were in fact binding as the very catalyst of contemplation.

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum: et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt… Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis: et vidimus gloriam ejus, gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiae et veritatis.

(Vulgate, John 1.1–5, 14)

In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life: and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness: and the darkness did comprehend it… And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

(Douay-Rheims)

Instead of introducing this biblical passage by its incipit “In principio” as he does in his Virtues of the Mass, Lydgate refers to the verses that introduce the Incarnation. “Et Verbum caro factum est”, the Word made flesh, immateriality becoming matter, the divine becoming human, is the great mystery that makes contemplation possible. This insistence on the Incarnation suggests that “Verbum caro factum est” inaugurates a liminal space where encounter between immateriality and matter, the divine and human is made possible. And this liminal place is at the heart of the ritual which Lydgate translates and expounds. Lydgate’s endeavor is hence twofold. Not only does he invite his audience to contemplate Christ’s incarnation, but he also makes the Latin biblical text accessible to his readers with little or no Latin literacy by revealing the spiritual meaning of the introduction to the Gospel of John. “To kysse stone or tre/Erthe or yron” as Lydgate explains is as much to offer a performative response to the Johannine prologue as to enter a locus of encounter, as the kiss itself in the context of the mass is a sign of the Incarnation.

While kissing matter during the second reading of the Gospel of John became common practice in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, kissing materiality was already embedded in the liturgy and in particular days of the liturgical calendar. For instance, long before Lydgate’s writings, the Sarum missal required the choir to genuflect and kiss the earth in the procession of Palm Sunday, while the people were required to kiss their seat or the ground when rising from their prostration after the solemn absolution on Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday (Dickinson 1861, pp. 261, 133, 300). John Mirk, in his late fourteenth-century manual for priests Instructions for Parish Priests, glossed this practice as a remedy against pride and as an instrument for meekness. “Agaynus pruyde, wythowte les/þe forme remedy ys mekenes:/Ofte to knele, and erþe to kys/And knowlache wel þat erþe he ys” (Mirk 1974, p. 155, ll. 1555–58). By kissing the earth, the parishioner was reminded that he was himself made out of dust. Such devotional practices, acquired as tacit performative knowledge, presupposed that kissing the ground generated some forms of transformative possibilities. During Sunday mass, those present were invited to kiss the paxbred, “a disk or tablet on which was carved or painted a sacred emblem” such as Christ on the cross (Duffy 1992, p. 125). After the priest had kissed the plate on which the host rested, as well as the chalice, he would kiss the paxbred, which was then passed along to the congregation outside the screen to kiss, one after the other, observing seniority. It was a symbol of eucharistic union, as laypeople tended to participate in the eucharist only once a year, and by extension it was a symbol of peace, the reconciliation between God and humanity, and between parishioners themselves, which the eucharist signified. The liturgical kiss of peace, as Michael Camille puts it, “brought the congregation together in the mass and was enacted by a chain of kisses linking each participant with the ultimate mouth” (Camille 1991, p. 169)15.

The various rubrics to On Kissing, which vary from “A lytyll compilacioun declaryng when men kysse in churche stoone or erthe tymber or iron, what they shuld remembre therby”, to “þane shoule yee rede nexst a devoute seyinge of verbum caro factum est” and “here begynneth a tretis of the knelyng and kyssyng maad at verbum caro factum est” all place the individual meditation of the lyric within the pastoral oversight of the liturgical kissing at verbum caro factum est16. Whether as a private reading in a domestic chamber or as a public reading in church, the poem relies on the audience’s memory of the liturgical practice. Lydgate begins his poem by enjoining his pious audience who “kepe an obseruaunce” (Lydgate 1911, p. 116, l. 1), in that they already participate in the liturgical practice and are familiar with kissing earth, iron, wood or stone. His audience is not only “devout” (Lydgate 1911, p. 116, l. 1), but they are also regular church goers who participate in mass, as they take part in the performative aspects open to lay participants. The act of kissing matter is framed as a deeply cognitive process by Lydgate who insists that they “haue in remembraunce” (l. 3) the meaning of their performative actions. Memorializing the liturgical practice is at the heart of the contemplative mode Lydgate is about to unfold. His use of the lexical field of memory in his injunctions “thynke on the crosse””(l. 9), “graue all these sygnes depe in thy memory” (l. 14), “put in thy mynde for a memoryall” (l. 18), “beholde” (l. 21), “thynke” (l. 23), and “euer haue mynde” (l. 31) reinforces his endeavor to generate a physical-mental impression of the rite on his audience who are to meditate on a mental image of Christ crucified.

By offering a tropological reading of the matter kissed in the liturgical rite, Lydgate stresses the need to acquire knowledge of the divine mysteries at hand in the act of the liturgical kiss. His visual associations are telling of the crux of the contemplative exercise: the earth is a figure of Christ’s fully human nature (l. 5), the stone signifies Christ’s burial (l. 6), whilst iron represents the spear and nails that produced his five wounds (ll. 7–8). Each constituent of matter recalls a devotional image “remembryd in scripture” (l. 8) upon which the participant can ruminate. Rather than expanding on these images, Lydgate entrusts his readers with their own horizons of expectation of external visual objects which are in ample supply in churches, books of hours and other devotional manuscripts (Woolf 1998, pp. 183–84). Indeed, by the fifteenth century, a plethora of passion images were available to the laity. One of the most common ones was the Image of Pity, which pictured Christ standing in his tomb17. Devotions to the five wounds were also popular alongside a liturgical office of the same name (Pfaff 1970, pp. 84–90), which was one of the most common votive Masses in late medieval England (Duffy 1992, p. 243)18. The London Book of Hours dated circa 1420, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. liturg. d. 1, compiles a five wounds devotion supplementing the text with illuminations beginning with Christ’s crown of thorn and ending with his left foot19. Five wounds devotions were often accompanied by illuminations of the instruments of the passion. The mid-fifteenth-century English roll, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add. E. 4, for example, offers alongside its lyric on the passion depictions of the nails and lance which inflicted the wounds.

Lydgate’s audience was therefore familiar with these images which did not need expanding on. Lydgate was counting on the muscular memory of his readers so that mere allusions to Christ’s fully human nature, his burial and his five wounds might evoke full devotional imageries. Just as in lectio divina verbal echoes might bring forth an abundance of biblical quotations (Leclercq 1982, p. 73), in lectio domini a visual echo will bring to mind figurally linked imageries based on previous meditations on devotional pictures. However, Lydgate does not stop at rumination on an image, these visual echoes being the very “moralyte” of the constituents of matter that are to be kissed. By combining lectio domini, with the hearing of the Johannine prologue, and the kissing of matter, Lydgate unfolds a performative lectio domini which imparts truth, while ultimately providing an experience of Christ.

Visual and textual images are hence used to impart truth through a typological meditation. This comes more directly to the fore with On Kissing’s second stanza:

Thynke on the crosse, made of four dyuerse trees.

As Clerkes seyn, of Cedyr and Cypresse,

To hygh estates and folkes of lowe degrees

Cryst brought in pease, the Olyfe bereth wytnesse;

Namly whan vertu conserveth his grennesse

Looke on thes signes and haue them in memory

How crystys passioun was groundyd on meeknesse

And how the palme ffygured his victorye.

(ll. 9–16)20

The wood’s tropological meaning is fourfold just as the cross is made of four different types of trees. Cedar and cypress signify “hygh estates and folks of lowe degrees” (l. 11), and olive wood is a sign of reconciliation between the latter (l. 12), but ultimately reconciliation between God and humanity which is the intrinsic meaning of the cross. Lydgate’s insistence “Looke on thes signes and haue them in memory” (l. 14) implies that the tropological meanings of the types of wood have to be assimilated, which is to say that Lydgate invites his readers to reconciliation with God and one another, because of Christ’s abasement in the incarnation and passion. Lydgate ends his stanza by distancing himself from devotional passion images of the time and their emphasis on suffering by offering a theological reflection on the cross’s achievement: Christ’s victory as represented by the palm tree.

The reference to Christus victor shifts the poem’s focus from passion—its narrative and its benefits for the Christian community—to an anagogical trajectory. The cross symbolizes victory over death, and thus announces Christ’s resurrection and exaltation “Beholde the baner vyctoryous and royall/Crystes crosse as standard of most pryse” (ll. 21–22). This “standard”, according to the Middle English Dictionary (MED) can not only mean a military banner displayed from a pole in battle, which reinforces Lydgate’s use of the Christus victor imagery, but also a service book21. Such a layering of meanings is rather common in Lydgate’s poetics. Hence, the use of “standard” reinforces Lydgate’s insistence that his readers ought to meditate on an image of Christ’s crucified throughout the mass, undertaking an exercise of lectio domini. To establish the cross as a service book is to reassert the centrality of the passion in all liturgical rituals, whether one is literate or not. The cross not only guides one through the mass, but it has an eschatological mission, it leads people to eternal life: “Thynke howe the thyef for mercy dyd call/Tawght by thys tre the way to paradyse” (ll. 23–24). The juxtaposition of particular features of Christ’s Incarnation—which comprehends his taking on human nature, his passion and exaltation—to the material world surrounding the participant at mass, makes a statement about Christ’s taking on matter in the incarnation which is sustained by the very act of kissing materiality.

Katie L. Walter has shown in her book Middle English Mouths that the kiss by its very nature is bordering on the interior and exterior, and borders between the spiritual and material worlds. By its ultimate liminal nature, the kiss symbolizes the mystical union between God and the human soul, the union of Spirit with flesh (Walter 2018, p. 119). While Lydgate is not innovative in his treatment of the liturgical kiss, his poem offers the possibility to transmit implicit monastic knowledge so to attain greater cognitive truths. The kiss imagery was fully expounded in the exegetical tradition of the Song of Songs commentaries, which some of Lydgate’s audience might have been exposed to through the writings of Richard Rolle. The twelfth-century Cistercian abbot of Clairvaux, St Bernard, who wrote eighty-six sermons on the book of the Song of Songs, understood the kiss at the image of the ultimate mystical union between God and the human soul. Developing on the verse “let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth” (SoS 1:1) in his second sermon, Bernard explains “For his living, active word is to me a kiss, … a revealing of mysteries, a marvellous and indistinguishable mingling of the divine light with the enlightened mind, which, joined in truth to God, is one spirit with him” (Bernard of Clairvaux 2010, p. 9). Bernard, here, seems to draw on Origen (c. 185–c. 254) and St Ambrose (339–397), whose interpretative lenses on the kiss paint an intellectual encounter with the divine rather than an emotive one such as imageries of bold human and carnal love that so often characterize the kiss’s exegesis in the high and late Middle Ages. Origen’s commentary on the Song of Songs expounds this first verse mentioned above as “the soul desiring to penetrate into the mysteries of the Word … Thus she prays for the direct visitation of the Word of God that she may be fully illuminated” (Perella 1969, p. 42). Similarly, Ambrose interprets the kiss as “the knowledge of divine things and the presence of the Word in the soul” (Perella 1969, p. 44). Throughout his expounding of the liturgical practice, Lydgate places himself in this interpretative vein that posits the intellectual illumination bestowed on the beholder in contemplation. In fact, for Lydgate, the act of kissing matter opens up the possibility of a deeper understanding of the mysteries unfolding through sense-perception. The kiss, with its multilayered sense-experience in Lydgate’s On Kissing, is an incarnational threshold between the flesh and the spirit, between matter and divinity. As such, Lydgate’s performative lectio domini within the context of the liturgical kiss does not merely express a contemplative posture, but signifies a joining of body and spirit in the unifying act with the divine.

6. Conclusions

Lydgate’s insistence on the cultivation of a physical-impression of the passion imagery in his readers’ bodies, minds, and souls is characteristic of his translation of monastic hermeneutics into Middle English. On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est is, however, uniquely reflective of John Lydgate’s stance on contemplation. Apart from the Virtues of the Mass poem, in his religious lyrics Lydgate associates explicitly the act of contemplation only with vowed religious and saints of the past. By offering an exposition of the liturgical kiss at Verbum caro factum est, Lydgate points his readers to the potentiality of encounter through an intellectual illumination, which opens up the Word’s mysteries. Hence, this article has aimed to demonstrate that the liturgical kiss was for Lydgate a threshold of encounter with Christ through the incarnation. And yet rather than producing an emotive response, Lydgate insists that it fosters an intellectual illumination, a deeper knowledge of Christ, Christ crucified. While his literary exposition could be perceived as a gloss of the practice, it acts in fact as a preparation for contemplation. One could argue that the lyric itself functions as a mimesis of the ritual opening up a liminal locus of contemplation. However, Lydgate’s emphasis on sense-perception through aurality, somatic movements, touch, outward and inward sight, as well as attention, what Derek Pearsall has qualified as a means to overwhelm “with excess, hardly to be comprehended” (Pearsall 1970, p. 268), invites his audience to persistently proceed to a church building, ensuring pastoral oversight. Whereas On Kissing could be read, meditated upon, and reproduced in non-public chambers based on the memorialized liturgical practice, in order to attain the fullness of sense-perception advocated by the performative lectio domini, one required to be at church or to have an in-house or visiting clergy to perform the second reading of the Johannine prologue, which was essential to complete both the liturgical rite’s and the poem’s meaning. Hence the poem could have been performed in a domestic context, as the presence of in-house or visiting clergy amidst one’s household would have been common among Lydgate’s commissioners and courtly audience who often had private chapels on their estates22.

The act of translation of the lyric of On Kissing functions, thus, as a guide to performance. The liturgical directions invite readers to inhabit and assimilate the rite in order to fully abandon themselves in the act of contemplation when the second reading of the Gospel of John was being read. Throughout this article, I have argued that On Kissing and Virtues of the Mass both introduce a new contemplative mode, one of performative lectio domini. This performative lectio domini seems to belong to Lydgate’s later poetic career, due to its resonance with pervading performativity and embodiment which are characteristic of the flourishing Middle English devotional literature of the mid-to late-fifteenth century. By underlining the performative and embodied nature of centuries old rituals, Lydgate is neither radical nor avant-gardist; rather, he steadily pursues and unravels his broader coenobitic agenda as a Benedictine monk in one of the most powerful institutions of its kind in the first half of the fifteenth century in England. By writing towards the democratization of the mass—making the rite accessible to all—one lyric at a time, Lydgate labors towards fostering a greater liturgical literacy among the laity, while affirming the magisterium of the church and spreading his Benedictine ideals of lectio and liturgical practice.