Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost

"Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost." Through the translation, adaptation, and augmentation of a short spiritual guide, a series of late fourteenth-century English authors responded with optimism and caution to bourgeois desires to emulate the vowed religious life. The Abbey of the Holy Ghost was translated from a French source in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and soon after a sequel was composed: The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost. Together these texts render the process of meditation and contemplation more accessible to lay readers while working to impose specific limits on lay spiritual power and autonomy. Fifteenth-century manuscripts featuring the Abbey and Charter reveal that during a period of acute concern over heterodoxy, the composite work was deployed in multiple orthodox ways, channeling bourgeois lay readers toward self-regulation while encouraging elite laywomen and nuns to seek contemplative perfection.