Medieval Studies The Prick of Conscience
by
James H. Morey
  • LAST REVIEWED: 19 April 2024
  • LAST MODIFIED: 19 April 2024
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0167

Introduction

The Prick of Conscience (PC) is a mid-14th-century poem of over 9,600 lines in octosyllabic couplets that survives in more manuscripts than any other Middle English poem. Its readership was incontestably wide, and it served as a compendium of religious knowledge, natural history, and penitential practice in late medieval England. The author is anonymous, though early in its critical history it was attributed to the famous 14th-century mystic and psalm translator Richard Rolle. Notably, John Lydgate and John Bale attributed the poem to Rolle, five manuscripts name him as the author, and the poem sometimes appears with Rolle’s genuine works. The original dialect was northern, probably that spoken in Yorkshire, and a southern (sometimes called “East Midland”) recension exists. The PC inspires humility and dread, but more optimistically it provides readers with the information necessary to understand the relationship between the human and the divine and thereby to achieve salvation. The regular four-stress rhythm generates a strong sense of movement, and the poet transitions from book to book with summaries of the previous book’s contents and anticipations of the next. Overall, the poem progresses from man debased to man glorified, from earth to heaven, and from death to the afterlife. The prologue (the “entre” ≈ 350 lines) repeats the headings to its seven books. Book 1, Of Man and his Wretchedness (≈ 550 lines) and book 2, Of the World’s Unstableness (≈ 700 lines), rely on Pope Innocent III’s influential De Miseria Condicionis Humane (Lewis 1978, cited under Sources and Analogues). Book 3, Of Death and of the Pain that with Him Goes (≈ 950 lines) and book 4, Of Purgatory where Souls are Cleansed of their Folly (≈ 1,100 lines), move from the contemptus mundi tradition to the difficult work of healing the soul and derive principally from the Anglo-Norman Les Peines de Purgatorie (Relihan 1978, cited under Sources and Analogues). The last three books progress from Earth (book 5, Of the Day of Doom and of the Tokens That Before Shall Come [≈ 2,300 lines]) to Hell (book 6, The Pains of Hell [≈ 1,050 lines]) and finally to Heaven (book 7, The Joys of Heaven [≈ 1,950 lines]). The length of book 5 has been taken to reflect an inartful and gloomy obsession with judgment, but it should be noted that book 7, on a more positive subject, is comparably long, and that the trajectory of the work rises.

General Overview

Most scholarship on the PC has been devoted to manuscript and source study. The early critical reception of PC was decidedly negative, with numerous laments over its tedium. Work in the last twenty years, however, demonstrates that PC is a major component of the large genre of Middle English catechetical literature. It was surely read, or otherwise consulted, in pieces for devotional purposes and for preaching. That a medieval cleric or layperson would read such works straight through, as moderns read novels, is unlikely. Thompson 1998 and Heist 1952 provide general introductions to this learned world and its preoccupation with historical contingency and Doomsday. More focused treatments can be found under Literary Relations and Stained Glass, especially Sawyer 2020 which provides the most comprehensive overall study. Latin quotations from various sources—usually translated and sometimes identified, although at times incorrectly—provide a framework of learned authorities on which the poet builds the doctrinal exposition (see Sources and Analogues). The author expresses the need to make these materials available in English to “lewed men” (see lines 336–339 and 9545–9564) as a kind of antidote to the proliferation of popular trifles and vanities (lines 183–184). PC is one instance of the vast production of pastoralia—works intended for religious edification and salvation of souls—that derive from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (Boyle 1985). One of the council’s decrees (beginning “Omnis utriusque sexus fidelis . . .”) stipulates yearly confession of all communicants, thus requiring a clergy able to deliver doctrinal instruction intelligibly and a laity capable of receiving it, presumably in the vernacular. A work in the same tradition is the Ayenbite of Inwit, which also categorizes sin (drawing upon the Somme le Roi, as does PC; see Hanna 2008, cited under Sources and Analogues) and explains the means of salvation to a lay audience (see Morris 1866 and Gradon 1979, cited under Sources and Analogues). The Ayenbite is sometimes confused with PC and it dates from the same time (1340), but it exists in a single manuscript (London, British Library Arundel 57; see Dan Michel of Northgate’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, cited under Facsimiles) and has a named author.

  • Boyle, Leonard E. “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology.” In The Popular Literature of Medieval England. Edited by Thomas J. Heffernan, 30–43. Tennessee Studies in Literature 28. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

    A useful guide to a huge subject, with a schematic diagram of the genre of pastoralia on p. 38.

  • Heist, William W. The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952.

    Overview of the medieval tradition and a discussion of the version used in PC (pp. 131–133).

  • Thompson, John J. The Cursor Mundi: Poem, Texts and Contexts. Medium Ævum Monographs, n.s. 19. Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1998.

    See especially pp. 88–95. Discusses the combination of material from PC in a Cursor Mundi manuscript (London, British Library, Additional 36983) and notes the omissions of Latin quotations. Also discusses Doomsday and the coming of Antichrist from book 5.

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