'Space to Speke': Confessional practice and the construction of character in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Guillaume de Machaut, and Juan Ruiz.

Abstract

The dissertation examines the construction of the subject in medieval literature at the archeological level, that is, as Foucault would have it, at the level of what made it possible. The obligatory confessional practice that develops after the Fourth Lateran Council creates, authorizes, and codifies a space for self-presentation. Using both traditional institutional history and the type of archival reconstruction of discursive formations associated with Foucault, I argue that this new space transforms the possibilities for the construction of the literary subject. Part One explores the development of the discursive formation of confession. I illustrate that Augustine's Confessions corresponds to the practice of early public penance, but Augustine's self-presentation does not provide a model for medieval confessional practice or for the confessional self-presentations of fourteenth-century literature. In Abelard's Ethics, I find evidence of the shift toward the formalization of the confessional subject. Yet, the Historia calamitatum, illustrates the continued predominance of self-justification based on an outward show of penitential satisfaction. In the vernacular manuals that appear after 1215, I discover a concentrated and uniform effort to codify the confessional subject. I show how this codification makes available and maps out a space to speke of the self and of inner dispositions. Part Two examines the way this new space to speke makes possible a discourse of the self in major literary texts of the fourteenth century. I find a major preoccupation with confession in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Particularly in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, the confessional authorization to speak justifies a self-presentation based on private experience. In Guillaume de Machaut's Livre du Voir Dit confession proves to be the only language adequate to the production of an inner truth of the self. In Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor, the discourse of confession permits the author-persona to maintain a didactic attitude while narrating his own scandalous experience in love. These literary self-presentations illustrate the extent to which confession has become the privileged language for the representation of the self and for the construction of literary character in the fourteenth century.