Practicing church: Vernacular ecclesiologies in late medieval England

This dissertation examines three Middle English guides for spiritual practice, Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne, The Book of Margery Kempe, and John Myrk's Instructions for Parish Priests. Central to my project are two challenges to scholarship on medieval spiritualities in the developing discipline of Christian spirituality that also speak to persistent scholarly orientations in established disciplines of religious and cultural-historical studies. First, I address the normative object of Christian spirituality, "spiritual experience," using the "practice theory" of Pierre Bourdieu to argue for a non-binary understanding of "spiritual practice" as the proper object of study in the field. Secondly, I shift the normative elite, professional religious subject of much historical spirituality scholarship by highlighting spiritual practices of non-elite believers. Here, I apply Anthony Giddens's "structuration theory" to better understand ordinary medieval believers' role in shaping the English church.;Using practice theory balances the traditional consideration of the Latinate grounding of medieval texts with attention to depictions of the socio-spiritual agency and authority of ordinary believers as they draw upon vernacular spiritual resources made available after the Fourth Lateran Council and new social configurations after the Black Death. Reading these texts as instances of socially-embedded spiritual practice undertaken at the cultural intersection of late medieval Latinate habitus and an emerging vernacular habitus shows considerable socio-spiritual ambiguity and competition within texts. In Handlyng Synne, vernacular tales often undermine the Latinate teaching Mannyng assumes will prevail, while The Book of Margery Kempe shows the canny vernacularist appropriation of Latinate learning to authorize Kempe's worldly lay vocation. Myrk's Instructions exhibits an anxiety to constrain this growing vernacularity, especially among parish clergy, whose status he sees as diminished by faltering Latinity and the socio-spiritual authority and para-sacerdotal status of midwives regularly performing emergency baptisms. Seen through the lens of practice theory, these texts reveal ordinary medievals actively transforming church, even in their orthodox conformity, on the basis of remarkably inclusive, distributive, vernacular ecclesiologies. Neither passive consumers of narrowly orthodox spiritual practices nor heterodox dissenters, these ordinary "knowing agents" draw upon the Christian tradition to enhance spiritual meaning within their daily lives, changing church itself in the process.