The Medieval Person: Concepts of Self and Personhood in Late Medieval English Literature
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Date
2019-09-18
Authors
LaRiviere, Katie Jo
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In a debate significant for both its stakes and longevity, medievalists and early modernists have engaged the question of selfhood and argued about its ostensible “beginning.” Scholars on both sides have imagined the medieval concept of selfhood as fundamentally shaped by political systems of national violence or various programs of social control. Within this imagination, the critical concept of selfhood has assumed its modern definition, which equates selfhood to “agency” and associates the self with choice, mobility, and power. Such assumptions perpetuate the notion that medieval selfhood was underdeveloped for those with limited social power and implicitly value subjects with social privilege as “selves.” In this way, our criticism has reinforced modern biases via scholarship, and we have imposed these values upon the past. Additionally, these critical assumptions have led to problematic views about medieval conceptions of the “person” in conjunction with race, gender, and key medieval social institutions, especially the church.
This dissertation confronts these assumptions and shows how three late medieval literary texts instead define selfhood and identity in accordance with the Christian concept of a relational and Trinitarian God: for them, relationship with God and neighbor is the basic frame of the self. In the morality play of Wisdom, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I show how medieval writers are concerned with the evolution of the self toward perfection through their conceptions of charity, “transcendent autonomy,” and conversion.