Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12879986
AutoresMasha Raskolnikov (0000-0003-0319-3082, Cornell University, autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Volume2
Fascículo1
Data de publicação2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLiterature Compass (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00128.x
OpenAlexW2128769225
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas21

This essay reviews some of the recent critical writings on medieval confession and discusses their importance to the ongoing debates about the history and formation of the self as subject. Building on the evidence that the rise of annual, required confession led to the emergence of “confessional literature” (works using the tropes and methods of the confessional to structure narrative), the essay suggests that the ways of understanding the self made available through such works form a kind of “vernacular psychology”– that is, a practical, quotidian alternative to Aristotelian/philosophical or Galenic/medical modes of thinking about the self. “Vernacular psychology” describes this widespread set of medieval understandings of the self that were made public in a range of writings in English and Anglo‐Norman (only the former is considered here). Such understandings stressed the self's vulnerability to sin, conceived as something that both attacks the self from without and is generated from within, implying a range of relations between the “self” and the “world” that the large array of Middle English “confessional” writings offer in distinction to the Latin clerical tradition

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Confession (law · Confessional · Epistemology · Experimentalism · Literature · Middle English · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Self · Sociology · Subject (documents · Vernacular · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity