Cushions, Kitchens and Christ

* This book is the first to identify the significant patterns of domestic imagery in late medieval religious writing; to date, the images that I discuss have only ever been noted as individual examples of writers making recourse to figurative language. This will enable readers to examine domestic imagery in a new light, as one of the major preoccupations of late medieval religious writers (and vernacular translators). * This book not only examines the patterns of domestic imagery in late medieval religious writing, it also explores its broader cultural significance, both in relation to the growing cultural importance of the household sphere and the spiritual climate of fifteenth-century England. This broadens the scope of the book, and it will therefore be of interest to scholars in other fields, particularly History. * This book offers citations from the original Latin versions of the Middle English texts that I examine for every quotation used. This will enable scholars of medieval translation practices to identify key differences and similarities between the original texts and their vernacular versions. It is relatively rare for scholars of Middle English literature to consistently refer to the Latin sources of the texts that they discuss, and I hope that my approach will encourage others to pay closer attention to the original Latin texts.

This book is the first full-length study of the significant patterns of domestic imagery in late medieval religious writing in English and their broader cultural significance.This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.