4 - Sourcing a Critical Edition of A Talkyng of the Loue of God

Summary

The fourteenth-century meditation A Talkyng of the Loue of God bears out the general point that the manuscript context of sources shapes the form and the content of Middle English devotional texts, and that this is especially so where the text, or the source, or both, are compilations. We can see this, for instance, in Talkyng, itself a compilation, with the invocation of the name of Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), which appears to have wandered from the margins of a source compilation into the text itself: the Latin name inserts itself into the middle of a howl of grief over the solitude and isolation, the distance from fellow humans and all creatures, from having turned to the delusions of the world and the self-deception of hypocrisy. Then the meditation turns abruptly to penitential regret in a quotation from Anselm's Prayer to St John the Evangelist I: ‘Anselmus.A; serwe and siking.criȝing.& gronyng.wher be ȝe ryue; ȝif ȝe here faylen.// Wher be ȝe feruent; ȝif ȝe heere slaken.’

This quotation is one of several borrowings from a wide corpus of Latin prayers and meditations in what Ralph Hanna calls the ‘transitional block of material probably derived from Anselm’ between the two prayers from the Wooing Group, On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti and Þe wohunge of ure lauerd that make up the bulk of the text. It is the only borrowing in Talkyng for which the name of Anselm, or any Latin author, is given. The invocation of a source author is, like the voice of the passage, lonesome but talkative: it speaks with several voices at once. We hear Anselm, the original author of the passage; we hear a compiler, for having chosen the passage and chosen to name the original author; we hear at least one scribe including the name within the main prose of the text itself. In her work on the Manuel des Pechiez, Hope Emily Allen suggested that an investigation into A Talkyng of the Loue of God could tell us the history of English mysticism – and, indeed, it takes several generations of intention and accident, in both the composition and our analysis of it, to produce an interruption in the text like this sudden, singular invocation of a source.