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Treatise of Love

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Treatise of Love
Original title Tretyse of Loue
Language English
Genre Prose treatise
Publisher Wynkyn de Worde
Publication date 1491-1494
The Treatise of Love (Tretyse of Loue) is an English prose text first
printed around 1493. Its printing was the work of Wynkyn de Worde, who
took over William Caxton's printing business in 1491, and printed the
Treatise before he began publishing under his own name in 1494.[1]
Drawing greatly on the Ancrene Wisse,[2] the text contains religious
advice addressed to an audience of aristocratic women.

Contents
The text contains three main parts that deal with divine love, which are
largely based on the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, and,
following an "intermediate conclusion," seven brief sections dealing with
other aspects of (religious) love. Besides the Ancrene Wisse, other
source texts are the Planctus Mariae (usually ascribed to Bernard of
Clairvaux) and the Hours of the Cross from the Meditations on the Life of
Christ.[3] Like the Ancrene Wisse, its religious advice is written for
the purpose of aristocratic women (one specific but unknown woman is
addressed).[4]

Compared to the Ancrene Wisse, however, the Treatise moves some of its
contents and reorganizes them. In particular, it reorganizes the
discourse to more closely follow the Passion. Central to both texts is a
discussion of "four loves"—that between good friends, men and women,
mother and child, and body and soul (in the order of the Ancrene Wisse).
The Treatise, however, relegates the love between men and women to the
final position, and spends very little time on it; indeed, direct
references to carnal love found in the Ancrene Wisse are left out of the
Treatise.[5]

"Courtly tropes of wooing and marriage", commonly found in contemporary

devotional tracts for women, are found in the Treatise as well. It
proposes that the female audience is the recipient of love letters
written by Christ; one critic referred to this rhetoric as "romance
gospel", a kind of gospel in which "women readers [are represented] as
beautiful and reticent ladies, the passive love objects of a courtly
Christ."[6] The Virgin Mary is likewise presented as a passionate woman,
grieving over her dead son in the Passion:

Then she rose up on her feet and with very great pain faced the Cross,
where she might best embrace the blessed body of Jesus Christ, whom she
had formerly suckled with her own sweet breasts....And she was all
splattered with the precious blood of her sweet son, the blood that fell
on the earth in great quantities, which she kissed fervently with her
holy mouth.[7]

Table of contents
And see the inclination of his head to kiss you; see the spreading of his
arms to embrace you; behold the opening of his fair side and the
crucifying of his fair body, and with great affection of your holy love,
turn it and turn it again from side to side, from the head to the feet,
and you shall find that there never was sorrow or pain like that to that
pain our lord Jesus Christ endured for your love.

Tretyse of Loue, part 1.[8]

The Tretyse of Loue
Hours of the Cross
Remedies Against the Seven Deadly Sins
The Three Signs of True Love and Friendship
The Branches of the Appletree
The Seven Signs of Jesus' Love
An Exhortation by Faith
Master Albert of Cologne's Nine Articles
Diverse Sayings of Saint Paul and Others
The Six Masters of Tribulation
Textual origin
The Treatise's relationship to the Ancrene Wisse is notable, and makes
the Treatise its youngest derivative in English.[9] However, the text
does not derive from any English version: it announces in its opening
lines that it is translated from the French, and its language also makes
it likely that the sections from the Ancrene Wisse were translated into
English from a French translation of the originally English text.[10]

Extant copies
Ten copies are known to have remained; of three or four others the
location is unknown. One of those copies belonged to John Moore,[11] the
Bishop of Ely whose library was bequeathed to Cambridge University. It is
noteworthy that eight of those ten copies are bound together with the
Chastising of God's Children, another book published by de Worde between
1491 and 1494.[12] The copy used for the edition published by the Early
English Text Society is from the Pierpont Morgan Library—it was
previously owned by the Earl of Aylesford and Lord Amherst of
Hackney.[13]
References
Notes
Fisher ix.
Wada 109.
Fisher xxi-xxiv.
Meale 38.
Fisher xxi.
Bartlett 67.
Fisher 70-71; trans. Bartlett 125.
Fisher 15-16; trans. Rubin 176.
Allen.
Fisher xvi-xviii.
Fisher xi.
Fisher ix-x.
de Ricci 113.
Bibliography
Allen, Emily Hope (1940). "Wynkyn de Worde and a Second French
Compilation from the Ancrene Riwle with a Description of the First
(Trinity Coll. Camb. MS.883)". Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton
Brown. New York. pp. 182–220.
Bartlett, Anne Clark (1995). Male authors, female readers: representation
and subjectivity in Middle English devotional literature. Cornell UP. p.
66. ISBN 978-0-8014-3038-1.
Fisher, John H., ed. (1951). The Tretyse of Loue. Early English Text
Society. Vol. 223. Oxford University Press.
Meale, Carol M. (1997). "'oft sithis with grete deuotion I thought what I
might do pleysyng to God': The Early Ownership and Readership of Love's
Mirror, with Special Reference to its Female Audience". In Shoichi Oguro;
Richard Beadle; Michael G. Sargent (eds.). Nicholas Love at Waseda:
proceedings of the international conference, 20-22 July, 1995. D.S.
Brewer. pp. 19–46. ISBN 978-0-85991-500-7.
de Ricci, Seymour (1909). A Census of Caxtons. Oxford UP.
Rubin, Miri (2009). Medieval Christianity in practice. Princeton UP. ISBN
978-0-691-09059-7.
Wada, Yoko (2010). A Companion to Ancrene Wisse. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN
978-1-84384-243-9.
Categories: Middle English literatureTreatises
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