“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay’s Practice of Care

Abstract

In the Middle Ages, the term “blind” was capacious, denoting both complete lack of sight and lesser forms of visual impairment. Though absolute blindness was generally considered beyond medical remedy, treatments for innumerable other ocular complaints were ubiquitous in medieval leechbooks and remedy collections. In Beatrix Busse and Annette KernStähler’s words, these Middle English medical texts describe visual impairment not as a total, static state, but as liminal: a “gradual process of decay or of moving towards blindness,” what they call “blindness as a process of becoming.”1 This article explores how conceptualizing blindness as a dynamic movement, rather than a static state, might illuminate the relationship between late medieval medical and literary cultures. I focus on the devotional poetry of fifteenth-century priest John Audelay, which is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302; a brief overview of this manuscript and its treatment of Audelay’s impairment is provided below. The article’s first section proposes that approaching the material and medical realities of Audelay’s blindness as evidence rather than metaphor allows us to understand his writing as the product of a nuanced system of medieval healthcare that, particularly where ocular health was concerned, was shaped as much by continual care as it was by discrete moments of trauma and treatment. The second section discusses the form of the spiritual “remede” presented in Audelay’s “Carol 2,” arguing that his didactic prescription constitutes a regimen of care that asserts the efficacy of durative, long-term treatment. Ultimately, I suggest that John Audelay’s poetry offers one example of how we might productively think through late medieval health as a durative and dynamic process, rather than a discrete destination. Aside from the devotional verse contained in Douce 302, we have only one other document with which to reconstruct Audelay’s life: a 1417 court record that identifies him as the personal chaplain of the Lestrange family, arrested for his involvement in their assault of a knight at a London