My long standing interest in contemplative writing fits very precisely into this category of exploration. Religious texts always seek to make an impact within a recoverable target range of acceptable responses, and the techniques they use offer fascinating fields for analysis, not least because those impacts are rarely sufficient in themselves and so always gesture to their own effacement as part of an ongoing and continuous process of cognitive and emotional understanding. These texts are songs from the threshold of lived experience, struggling to articulate and communicate ineffable showings or transcendent encounters. Hence my continuing fascination with Julian of Norwich, and her highly sophisticated and playfully manipulative relationship with the broad spectrum of religious writing in her period. This interest has linked back towards my original researches into catechetic and pastoral literature to give me an unusually broad view of, and sharp perspective on the field of ‘vernacular theology’ as it is now constituted. It also fuels my growing desire to explore the (as yet largely unarticulated) linguistic and semantic theory and (very substantial) praxis lying behind the extensive vernacular translation of orthodox religious texts in the fifteenth.
Fundamental to this work, however, is another pillar of my scholarly priorities: that such texts have to be seen against the deep background of their contemporary textual, social and intellectual environment. My interest in deep context also drives my work on History of the Book. No matter how abstract the ideas, the manuscripts and early printed books always have things to tell us, often in unexpected aspects of layout, ordinatio and metatext, as well as the more expected (and often exquisitely historically layered) signs of readerly response.
