"Sowe ye yt together as ye may": Textile Images as Meditational Stimuli in Fifteenth-Century English Bridgettine Writings

Abstract

abstract:This article aligns St. Bridget of Sweden's Liber celestis revelacionum with the genre of gospel meditations popularized in late-medieval England by Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. It considers how descriptions of specific fabrics, with textures that would be known intimately by a fifteenth-century reader, engage and stimulate the devout imagination. The article focuses on the role of textiles and textile imagery within the Bridgettine Syon Abbey, arguing for a particular sensitivity to texture within the Bridgettines' daily experience, which facilitates their embodied relationship with the Virgin Mary. It concludes with a close reading of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.41, exploring the interrelation between its fifteenth-century Bridgettine treatises, which emphasize the symbolic and spiritual value of textile imagery within late-medieval Marian devotion.