Remembering and forgetting in late medieval and early Reformation English literature: A study of remnants

This dissertation argues that the idea of remnants plays a central role in the shaping of English literature during the late medieval and early Reformation periods. It contends that, during this time, various forms of fragmentation (textual, aesthetic, linguistic, cultural) link present parts to past wholes synecdochically and thus represent the past by re-membering it. As such, it claims that every act of remembering effects a form of forgetting. The remnants of late medieval and early Reformation England can never quite fully recapture their past, and those attempts to do so can at best only create an illusion of wholeness. The crafting of texts and of literary history in this period of transition, then, is composed in and of fragments. Most of the texts I discuss readily recognize the pervasiveness of remnants in the acts of literary making. They recognize, sometimes anxiously and sometimes joyously, that there are holes in all wholes and that holes can be whole in their own way. I begin with a chapter on Chaucerian works that argues that for Chaucer, literary works reveal an interdependence of parts and wholes. This chapter finds that Chaucer's work establishes a literary history that is ultimately built upon fragments even as it recognizes itself as composed of the same. My second chapter explores the idea of forgetting in late medieval literature, arguing that the prospect of archival loss signals both an anxiety and an opportunity for reconstructing and rewriting. I then turn to early Reformation debates in England to examine the religious and hermeneutical contexts of remembrance as a key contested term, when the partness or wholeness of scripture, of relics, and of interpretation more generally became matters that would eventually begin to differentiate a Catholic past from a Reformist present. In my last chapter, I claim that sixteenth-century attempts by Reformation bibliophiles, editors, and writers to reconceive of the past in terms of fragments align the present emerging nation with a fictive sense of wholeness and completeness, altogether different from its past.