| This dissertation focuses on the relationship between the institutional ideology of the medieval Church and the development of vernacular literature in England in the later Middle Ages (1300-1450). In particular, I have sought to understand the role that the promulgation of the doctrine of transubstantiation might have played in the construction of interiority and identity. My interest has been to arrive at a secular theory of vernacular, "Eucharistic" poetics based upon, yet distinct from, dogmatic codifications of the medieval Church. In a cultural survey that begins with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and ends with the spiritual memoir of Margery Kempe (1436), I focus on the reciprocal transformations of subjectivity and literary form that were produced in the tenuous relationship between institution and individual in the generations following Fourth Lateran. Fourth Lateran's sponsorship of clerical literary genres such as penitentials and commonplace books laid the groundwork for the fascination with extremes of publicity and privacy characteristic of the later Middle Ages, while establishing contexts in which medieval Christians began to perceive their own lives as narrative material. I draw examples from Franciscan lyric poetry, Corpus Christi drama and the Booke of Margery Kempe to illustrate how Fourth Lateran's doctrine of transubstantiation and mandate for annual confession enabled a reconceptualization of human sentience and materiality ultimately elevating the status of private experience. I argue that the genius of Fourth Lateran was its willingness to gamble on the productivity of individual devotional practice for the advancement of its educational and institutional ambitions, but that the abatement of the Church's authority in this period was imbedded in the very ideology by which it sought to secure textual supremacy. The vernacular literature of this period reflects an engagement with narrative and history as plastic and negotiable, and the remarkable example of The Booke of Margery Kempe evinces the degree to which even "lewd" lay subjects could begin to appropriate and territorialize the transformative possibilities of narrative as they composed their own self-authorizing scripts, reimagining and rewriting the limits of institutional, social, and spiritual constraints. |
