Reforming the self: Lyric 'I' and penitential self in the Middle English religious lyrics and 'Pearl'

The question of medieval selfhood--how medieval men and women conceived of their identity--has been a thorny one since Augustine tried to plumb his personal history in the Confessions. I explore, through a close reading of the Middle English religious lyrics and Pearl, the way that the Sacrament of Penance shaped medieval ideas about selfhood, and how the lyrical poetics of this time mirrors these concerns.;In the third chapter I explore Middle English religious lyrics which do confront the "I"--poems which seem to have a tie to the newly required Sacrament of Penance. Penance, as a method of self-regeneration and reform, requires the penitent to construct an autobiography, an "I", of his past life. To teach this, penitential handbooks present a sample confession which they encourage the reader to plagiarize. The lyrics take up this idea; rather than relating personal, individual experience as in a post-medieval lyric, they offer general images, a conventional role that the reader can take up, reforming his own"I" along the pattern the poem provides. In the fourth chapter I explore poems which branch out from mere penitential subjects, using this penitential poetics in more sophisticated subjects and forms.;In the final chapter, I explore this penitential poetics in Pearl. Here the narrator begins in sinful self-absorption, and the maiden must bring him to understand his sinfulness and help him to reform. To do so, she acts as the priest or the lyric poet does, providing the dreamer with new roles into which he can speak his own "I". The reader, too, however, is induced to follow the dreamer's progress, reforming his own "I" as he reads. Yet Pearl is not a lyric, but a story; it takes the lyrical "I" and displaces it into narrative time. By returning to waking hours, the Pearl-poet encapsulates the lyric "I" and releases the readers from this role back into their own worlds, where they must begin again the difficult process of finding their true identity and relation to God.;In the first chapter I explore the early questions of identity in the Middle Ages, and then, in the second chapter, preaching verses and hymns, two forms which do not foreground a complex lyric "I". Homiletic verses avoid the "I" altogether, speaking from the abstract voice of the sage; the hymns conversely lose the "I" in a generalized "we", and in the Other, the object of the hymn.