Sentenced to Hard Labor: Vernacular Transformations in the Late Fourteenth Century.

Abstract

This project re-characterizes the development of vernacular readership in late fourteenth century England. It offers a fresh heuristic for recognizing vernacular works that ostensibly limit their potential audiences through the use of recondite, Latinate, and otherwise hermetic discourses while, at the same time, making the labored interpretation performed by those readers the center of its textual purpose. It focuses on two poems, William Langland’s Piers Plowman and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, as examples of texts that are neither open nor easy—on the contrary, they are deliberately difficult. Through them it examines the relationship between vernacular difficulty, laborious reading, and readerly transformation in the context of late medieval devotional culture. Each chapter pairs one aspect of the text with an external, Latinate discourse in order to explore the ways in which the author adapts and re-calibrates it for the purposes of establishing a new form of vernacular reading. The first non-introductory chapter argues that the use of visual allegory in Langland only makes sense if we understand the poem as a transparent and dismissive gesture towards uses of textual images as tools for meditation and thought. The second chapter shows how Langland turns toward an exegetic mode of reading based in Augustinian hermeneutics, a form that relies on a never-ending and continually productive struggle over interpretation and understanding. Turning to Gower, the third chapter discusses the presentation of alchemy in the poem as an idealized form of interpretive labor that is simultaneously offered as a model for reading and rejected as a physical and textual practice. The final chapter examines the problem of producing accurate and effective language through vernacular confessional discourse in the Confessio. Each transmuted discourse contributes to the “hermeneutic narrative,” or the interpretive path readers generate as they work their way through the texts. The dissertation shows that the historical importance of these poems lies in their open commitment to the construction of this hermeneutic narrative, while their critical usefulness lies in their ability to highlight similar questions in other contemporary texts.