| This dissertation reads fourteenth-century English contemplative literature as mediating between the proliferating narratives of time in the later Middle Ages and a Christian readership whose devotional practices hinged on specific ideas about how time works. Medieval contemplative writing is often held to exhibit its author's "rest in the eternal" or exemption from the concerns of everyday, lived time. Scholarly arguments that historicize contemplatives' literate practices and consider their texts' implications for late medieval devotional behaviors remain unreconciled with assumptions about contemplative time-sense. I examine the three major fourteenth-century English contemplative writers' rhetorical and narrative structures, as well as the social structures that conditioned their potential readerships, to show that far from reflecting a lack of concern with or a removal from time, their works engage a broad audience by speaking to widespread concerns and curiosities about how an eternal God interacts with people who are subject to time. To do so, they draw on and contribute to a variety of contemporary discourses about time and spirituality. I argue that the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing (fl. c. 1390), the visionary anchoress Julian of Norwich (c. 1343--c. 1416), and the hermit Richard Rolle (c. 1300/1310--1349) articulate their "subjective" experiences of time in terms of "objective" measurements of cosmological time. Using this language, they present their privileged encounters with God so that a wide spectrum of readers can re-imagine their own relationships to historical and phenomenological time, and structure their devotional routines through that lens. Certain practices of time, these contemplative writers argue, cultivate a sense of how God views time and his temporal creation; such knowledge of the divine is a means to increase believers' confidence in the state of their souls. As these authors attenuate boundaries between historical periods and between divine and human temporal perspectives, they challenge restrictions on who can perform certain kinds of devotion. |
