| This dissertation examines the symbolic relations that link lying and selfhood in late medieval culture. The project suggests that while lying produces a structure of belief and a power dynamic mirroring such Christian rituals of self-constitution as prayer or confession, it is also the form of communication of a postlapsarian self par excellence. Unlike prayer and confession that discover the image of God within subjects through their verbal renunciation of bodily desires, lying gives voice to desiring selves, discursively compounding their pleasure. Relying upon modern theories of speech as action and/or conduct, including those of Emile Benveniste, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, and the medieval discourse on "the sins of the tongue," the study argues that medieval writers consider lying as tantamount to violent or sexual acts, allowing the liar to produce a self in the process of corrupting others.;The first chapter considers a fourteenth-century penitential poem, Speculum Vitae, whose author contrasts selves produced by lying with those formed by the Lord's prayer. Unlike the Lord's prayer which brings into being transparent selves whose interiorities are shaped around a desire for God, lying produces selves whose inner world is created around illicit sexual desires and a hidden self-love. Each of the following chapters focuses on a different illicit verbal practice in Middle English romances. As narratives that themselves form a category within some penitential taxonomies of verbal sins, romances offer a productive imaginary space for the study of lying. Moreover, lying figures importantly in romances dealing with the knight's quest for self-knowledge. The second chapter discusses the function of lying in one such romance, focusing on acts of false supplication as a technology of chivalric self-formation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The remaining two chapters deal with romances in which the narrative lens shifts away from a knightly hero toward sexually or socially subservient figures. Focusing on women and servants in Athelston, Sir Launfal, Syr Tryamowre, and The Squyr of Lowe Degre, the chapters explore models of selfhood that authors attribute to these non-chivalric subjects and the symbolic challenges that these figures pose for the knightly self. |
