Forms of living: Asceticism, culture, and articulating the medeled liyf in late medieval English literature

My project engages vernacular theology from the perspective of Middle English secular literature, examining how authors shape the late medieval discourse of the mixed life affecting self and community, as well as textual production---the cultural effects of ascetics. I argue that the Clerk's Tale, the Confessio Amantis, and the Play Called Wisdom imagine separate applications of Walter Hilton's Medled Liyf (or mixed life) and evaluate living as a secular ascetic. I contend that contrary to theological and ecclesiastical texts, these writings acknowledge lay piety's ascetic impulse as a secular act, tentatively in the fourteenth century and then more boldly in the fifteenth century.;Each chapter examines how a secular text applies mixed life strategies which I have named domestic asceticism (the application of ascesis in the feminine household and its interference with authorship), civic asceticism (a rhetoric promoting a method of reading and knowing and a politicized version of behavior), and dramatic asceticism (the use of ascetic rhetoric and its aesthetic performance that attempts the self-regulation of its textual matter and its audience). Investigating such strategies reveals these late medieval authors' interest, concern, and ultimately pessimism regarding the mixed life as an independent form of discipline that could be reconciled with the secular life.