Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Later Middle Ages

Summary

In the anonymous fourteenth-century poem,The Pricke of Conscience, its author focuses in considerable detail on the miseries of this life, the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and the joys awaiting the saved in Paradise. In Part Four of this text, we are presented with a detailed and theologically informed treatment of the doctrine of Purgatory as it was developing during the later Middle Ages, including details of the ‘payns seven’ (2897) which a soul could expect in Purgatory after death. According to this author, too, the boundaries between this world and the afterlife were permeable, with those left on earth being able to affect the course of a soul's expiation of sin before its triumphant entry into Heaven. Moreover, that soul could, under some circumstances, return to warn the living of what lay in store for them and thus bring about a mutual deliverance:

… thurgh helpe and spede

Of prayer of frendes and alumusdede,

Til wham þai ofte in gast apere,

Thurgh speciel grace, in sere stedes here,

For to hast þair deliverance. (2882-6)

Whilst Jacques Le Goff considered the purgatorial doctrine to have emerged at the end of the twelfth century, more recently, Takami Matsuda has argued that concerns about Purgatory only began to reveal themselves within an English literary context at the end of the thirteenth century, in which case the poem can be regarded as belonging to a new and innovative genre which sought to articulate a type of third space between Heaven and Hell in which a soul could atone for a range of earthly sins.