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Diversity and similitude in Middle English Ten Commandments texts

TCD MS 70, folio 144r

Religious miscellanies feature prominently among the Library’s holdings of Middle English manuscripts. Intended as manuals for religious instruction, they frequently contain texts of and commentaries on the Ten Commandments. A survey and analysis of the content and contexts of selected examples suggest that the creation of a flowing effect, whereby the various instructions almost ‘bleed’ into one another, was part of their aesthetic. Thus, the texts are arranged in order to suggest a way of reading whereby the reader becomes deeply familiar with essential religious knowledge. Contrasts in these texts shed light on a vibrant and heterogeneous creative culture of religious instruction, wherein a range of audiences and communities of readers engaged with catechetical material during the late medieval and early modern period.

The Library’s Middle English religious miscellanies contain several examples of Ten Commandment texts which are the products of innovative practices of assimilation. During the Late Middle Ages, the official Church and the reformist Wycliffite and Lollard movements shared a common belief in the necessary good of basic catechetical instruction. The Ten Commandments formed a central part of the syllabus. As works of religious instruction, often designed for the clergy but later adapted for the laity and adopted into lay religious practice, Ten Commandments texts and their expositions are by and large utilitarian in their production and presentation. There are reasons of economy and efficiency that can explain why scribes chose to pack texts together so tightly, but beyond these practical concerns such arrangements ultimately have the effect of suggesting a way of reading, one which I would argue recommends that the reader develops a stream of religio-spiritual consciousness. Thus, the texts are arranged in order to immerse the reader in a pool of essential religious knowledge.

TCD MS 245, folio 14v
Fig. 1 – TCD MS 245, folio 14v

In TCD MS 245, the Ten Commandments receive comment by a reader sympathetic to Wycliffite ideas on the importance of having proper knowledge of the Trinity, and critical of the official Church’s shortcomings. This manuscript bears witness to the detailed theological knowledge that Wycliffite readers sought to acquire and disseminate. In the margin of folio 14v, in a different hand to that of the main text and using alternative spellings for ‘hooli’, ‘witt’, ‘þe’, and ‘sone’ a scribe has written alongside the section explaining the third commandment that ‘the holy gooste is the mynde of the father & wytt of the sonne’ (figure 1). This rather complex concept is a part of theological knowledge which ultimately helps the reader to understand mankind’s relationship to the Trinity, not simply its parts.

Fig. 2 - TCD MS 159, folio 154r
Fig. 2 – TCD MS 159, folio 154r

Another example is found in TCD MS 159, where a rendition of the Ten Commandments is interwoven into a text known as the Speculum Christiani (incomplete). Here a later reader of folio 154 felt inspired to copy something of the instruction given in the fifth commandment (figure 2). The pithy arrangement of the English verse on the page appears to have been an aid to the manuscript reader, breaking up the explanatory material in Latin which frames the verse, but which contains highlighting and underlining in red to alert the reader to keywords and junctures in the text. This suggests that the text served a utilitarian and instructive purpose, originally for a bilingual audience, or an audience accustomed to receiving bilingual instruction.

Fig. 3 - TCD MS 178r
Fig. 3 – TCD MS 178r

A very different presentation and engagement with the Ten Commandments is evident in TCD MS 70. In contrast to TCD MS 159, this version of the text has a very different tone; part of its unique character is the continuous use of English. The emphasis is on clear, comprehensive and unequivocally frank instruction. In the presentation of the fifth commandment, on folio 178r, the writer explains in English that hatefulness is tantamount to murder: ‘ech man þat hatiþ his broþ[er] is a mansleer, & he þat seiþ he loueþ god & hatiþ his broþ[er], is a lier’– there is no sugar-coating (figure 3).

Contrasts in the arrangement and presentation of Middle English Ten Commandments texts and commentaries can be seen in a survey of selected examples. These point towards the vibrant and heterogeneous creative culture of religious instruction, and also to the contrasts in the range of audiences and communities of readers who engaged with this type of catechetical material during the late medieval and early modern period. However, in terms of the fundamental ideas and creed, it is worth bearing in mind, indeed it is essential for understanding the conflicts and disputes of the times, that these communities of readers were in essence united in one faith and that there was far more that united their religious practice and catechetical knowledge than divided them.

Dr Sarah McKeon, University of Hull

Further Reading
John Wyclif, ‘Chapter 15: The First Commandment’, in Wycliffite Spirituality, ed. and trans. by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Stephen E. Lahey and Fiona Somerset (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2013), pp. 87-145.
Sarah McKeon, The Ten Commandments in English Popular Culture c. 1350-1550 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).