Defiant Devotion in MS Laud Misc. 108: the Narrator of Havelok the Dane and Affective Piety (Jocelyn Wogan-Browne‪)‬

The rhetorical overlap between the textual lives of the ostensibly religious and the ostensibly chivalrous--as exemplified in the Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108--has drawn critics to acknowledge what Jocelyn Wogan-Browne deems the 'limited meaningfulness' of generic distinctions that do not take into account the narrative structures, 'social functions', and readers shared by romance and hagiography. (2) An awareness of blurred boundaries proves helpful for a reading of the narrator/audience dynamic found in the Laud romance, Havelok the Dane. This essay will address how the romance shares a notion of readership with its neighboring saints' lives; specifically, within the manuscript context formed by the collection of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL), the act of reading inscribed by the narratorial voice of Havelok proceeds as an act of affective, meditative response. Through techniques of contemplative reading, the poem's narrator ultimately draws an audience not toward personal contrition but rather toward a collective expectation of righteousness in the discharge of secular power. In general, medieval literature elicits a meditative form of reading, that is, a referential and reflexive mode of reading; both religious and secular texts typically establish an advisory relation between narrator and audience. (3) The modern reader of the Laud manuscript's SEL notices this obligatory dynamic between narrator and audience without difficulty: after the narration of a saint's life and death, the addressee is enjoined to deploy the reading/hearing of the saint as a prayer for his or her soul. (4) The routine nature of the closing prayers creates a mode of practice in the SEL reader: hearing/reading each life becomes a form of meditative prayer. (5) The devotional implications of the Laud SEL support O. S. Pickering's hypothesis of a small group of 'enclosed religious', perhaps novices or nuns, as the audience of this early Middle English collection. (6)