2 - Breath Courting Silence in The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd

Summary

Catherine Innes-Parker's 2015 edition of The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers fills an important gap in the Wooing Group scholarship, as mentioned by other contributors to this present volume. If the collection of essays, The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group (edited by Susannah Mary Chewning), to which Catherine contributed a chapter, offers an assessment of the previous scholarship, as well as offering innovative perspectives on these meditations, her edition invites us to think even further and more creatively about this wonderful collection of meditative pieces. My chapter argues that the layout chosen by Catherine for her edition of the meditations invites new ways of exploring The Wooing of Our Lord and its companion pieces. Indeed, by choosing a layout that leaves plenty of blank space on the page, she invites the readership of this lyrical prose text to pause and give silence a significant place as part of the meditative process.

One consideration I wish to explore, as a tribute to Catherine's scholarship and person, is the reading of The Wooing as a performance piece that involves the whole person, physiologically, sensually, affectively and intellectually, where breathing becomes one of the means by which the meditative material from each of these texts properly nourishes and transforms their performers. If what is left to us are primarily words neatly arranged on vellum and carefully thought out, probably by a male spiritual guide whose composition was at least initially directed towards an audience of anchoresses, these words were uttered in a specific space, in a specific way, and with a specific aim in mind. The words are therefore the only remnants of a performance that required physical and physiological activity within a performance space: breathing the words in and out also involves giving space to the quality of silence. The choice by Innes-Parker to spread out the text generously on the page suggests to me that she was acutely aware of the importance of silence as part of this meditative process. The aim of this essay is therefore to follow Catherine's cue by investigating the way in which breathing, whispering words within the space of the anchoritic cell or a private chamber, listening to the ensuing silence, led to profound transformative experiences.