Spatial Imagination and the Holy Land in Fifteenth-Century North Yorkshire: Robert Thornton’s Practice of Reading Devotional Writings and Romances

This thesis examines key devotional writings and romances in Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042, both of which were copied by the fifteenth- century Yorkshire gentleman Robert Thornton. Through a close reading of the texts and the manuscripts themselves, I explore how Thornton used space to envision Jerusalem and the Holy Land through a performative mode of reading. I argue that Thornton, likely through his collaborative relationship with his spiritual advisor(s), developed the knowledge and skill affectively and spatially to read a text and immerse himself in Christian versions of Jerusalem. The thesis begins with Thornton’s lived environments, which were fundamental to his imagining of Jerusalem as well as his spatial experience. Chapter 2, commencing the exploration of imaginative spaces, focuses on Thornton’s annotations to the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and points out how he was trained to use imaginative space for spiritual reading. Chapter 3 investigates the ways in which the stylistic features of the Privity of the Passion, an extract from the Cursor mundi, and the Siege of Jerusalem engender spatiality and invite Thornton to Christocentric Jerusalems. Chapter 4 examines Richard Cœur de Lyon and the Childhood of Christ, the two texts which were paired by Thornton as a set of ‘romances’ and demonstrates that these texts’ Palestines contributed to the formation of a religiously aggressive cultural fantasy and became a source of pleasure and laughter for Thornton. This thesis concludes that devotional literacy, the ability to read texts in a textually and devotionally required manner, was likely understood to demand of readers/audiences both affective engagement and spatial imagination. A pious, late-medieval northern English reader like Thornton was able skillfully to envision and enjoy imaginative Jerusalems through a regular practice of reading and by willingly embracing Christocentric piety and militant Christianity.