Domestic Devotion: Representing Household Space in Late Medieval ReligiousWriting

Abstract

This chapter explores built space as metaphorical means of ‘placing’ the self. Focusing on the late-medieval English religious texts Abbey of the Holy Ghost, The Doctrine of the Hert and The Book of Margery Kempe, Chaudhuri analyses the use of home and household as metaphors for the pious heart, or as the imaginary backdrop of the soul’s encounter with God. These household metaphors have conventionally been seen as a means of configuring the domestic environment as a legitimate devotional space, anticipating Bachelard’s association of the home with the inmost recesses of the psyche. Chaudhuri, however, argues instead that a principal objective of domestic metaphors in these texts is to reimagine the religious environment as a domestic one, thus extending and revising Bachelard’s concept of the ‘housed’ imagination.