The Pore Caitif as a reformist text

ThePore Caitif is a late-fourteenth-century Middle English devotional compilation extant in more than forty complete or partial copies. This voluminous work, aptly described as ‘a comprehensive … manual of doctrine and devotion’, includes fourteen tracts, commencing with syllabus material and tracts on patience and temptation, moving into Rolle-inspired meditations on desire for Jesus and love of Jesus, and finally treating topics such as the active and contemplative lives and chastity. This all sounds very orthodox, yet the work's history is complicated. Thirteen copies of the Pore Caitif have been called ‘Lollard manuscripts’ because they contain ‘certain interpolations and omissions that may be interpreted as ‘Lollard’ in sympathy: for instance, the omission of the passage that declares that ‘ymagis schulen be as kalendars to lewide folk’ or the passage that allows oaths as lawful under certain circumstances’. In this paper I analyse one such volume, British Library, MS Harley 2322, which contains a Pore Caitif text with these sorts of textual variants as well as two separate Wycliffite interpolations. Looking in detail at two tracts of the Pore Caitif as they appear in this book, I work to envision the role of this volume in early-fifteenth-century Wycliffite devotional life, and I simultaneously use this manuscript as a window into the late-fourteenth-century reformist origins of the Pore Caitif.