(no subject)
I need to submit this tomorrow for a job app. I think there will be medievalists and early modernists on this search committee - it's a department apparently trying to develop something bigger with medieval lit, and they already have someone teaching OE and ME, so I do need to presume that my readers are at least familiar with these works. So I don't want to gloss over anything that might bring protest. But I don't want to presume anything in terms of vocabulary, either, and in fact I want this to be really clear to non-medievalists, so *anybody's* feedback is welcome here, even if it's "I don't know what x means in this context." I haven't allowed enough time for advisor feedback, of course :/ and I don't know what to put in my cover letter since I won't have a paragraph about my diss, I suppose, since they want an abstract. But anyway, one-page diss abstract follows:
My doctoral dissertation, entitled Daughter of God, Sister of Angels: Soul and Body Relations in Medieval English Literature, reexamines the popular medieval genre of soul-and-body addresses, works which dramatize confrontations between the soul and its body, usually at death or on Judgment Day. Criticism has long characterized these works as didactic and their authors as willing to ignore orthodoxy in favor of vivid scare tactics, but my first chapter serves as a prelude situating soul-and-body addresses within the same penitential tradition of compunction in which Augustine wrote the Confessions. A coda looks ahead to Paradise Lost, examining Milton's revisions of patristic and medieval philosophies of soul, body, and the nature of matter; I argue that Milton's philosophy of being ultimately places angels rather than humans at the center of the cosmos as the paradigm for rational embodied existence.
While the project touches on nearly a thousand years of literature in order to contextualize medieval soul-and-body works, it focuses primarily on these anonymous, obscure, and often-neglected soul-and-body addresses, which I argue are important early English contributions to penitential theology and the history of subjectivity and the body. Thus, my research challenges narratives of literary history that presume soul and body to be static, transhistorical concepts, the sole domain of the educated elite and largely unchanged between Augustine and Aquinas.By building on recent semantic studies illuminating the various shades of meaning in Old English terms for mind, spirit, soul, body, and cognitive faculties, I demonstrate that 'soul' and 'body' were dynamic concepts attracting ongoing interest and debate in the early vernacular. Soul-and-body addresses describe soul and body through metaphors of kinship; sometimes they are brothers, sometimes they are spouses, but only rarely are they shown in an inherently hierarchical relationship that presupposes the natural dominance or mastery of the soul. These patterns of metaphor challenge the critical tendency to characterize medieval people as mired in a dualist worldview in which the material body is the inferior or even denigrated counterpart of the immaterial soul. The body is central to early medieval penitential theology -- salvation is impossible without it -- and it is given much more agency and value in soul-and-body addresses than standard histories of medieval philosophy of being generally acknowledge.
Pursuing the metaphor of kinship through Old English poetry and homilies that continued to be copied and adapted well into the Middle English period, I find that angels are seen as having a special kinship with the human soul, and they are often the mediators between God and humanity - more so than was Christ in an Anglo-Saxon milieu. These poets and homilists are all part of a continuing scriptural and exegetical tradition in which angelic being elucidates human being; long before Milton's radical vision of an angelic paradigm, angels were essential to understanding the nature of rational embodied being in English culture, and the ontological questions they highlight have never been the sole domain of church fathers or scholastic philosophers. With the gradual development in Middle English of the concept of 'inwit' - or conscience in its modern, morally weighted sense - the strong, often familial link between humans and their guiding angels begins to fade and the concept of a moral compass within the human soul or self becomes more prominent. References to a tri- or multipart soul become more widespread and, as Middle English works such as The Pricke of Conscience and Sawles Warde demonstrate, vernacular literature increasingly concerns itself with hierarchizing the parts of the self. By tracking these shifting conceptions across the 1066 divide, the project recontextualizes more familiar Middle English vernacular religious works by illuminating their neglected Old English precursors and tracing the ways in which their dominant images and metaphors shift over time in response to cultural, sacramental, and philosophical change.
My doctoral dissertation, entitled Daughter of God, Sister of Angels: Soul and Body Relations in Medieval English Literature, reexamines the popular medieval genre of soul-and-body addresses, works which dramatize confrontations between the soul and its body, usually at death or on Judgment Day. Criticism has long characterized these works as didactic and their authors as willing to ignore orthodoxy in favor of vivid scare tactics, but my first chapter serves as a prelude situating soul-and-body addresses within the same penitential tradition of compunction in which Augustine wrote the Confessions. A coda looks ahead to Paradise Lost, examining Milton's revisions of patristic and medieval philosophies of soul, body, and the nature of matter; I argue that Milton's philosophy of being ultimately places angels rather than humans at the center of the cosmos as the paradigm for rational embodied existence.
While the project touches on nearly a thousand years of literature in order to contextualize medieval soul-and-body works, it focuses primarily on these anonymous, obscure, and often-neglected soul-and-body addresses, which I argue are important early English contributions to penitential theology and the history of subjectivity and the body. Thus, my research challenges narratives of literary history that presume soul and body to be static, transhistorical concepts, the sole domain of the educated elite and largely unchanged between Augustine and Aquinas.By building on recent semantic studies illuminating the various shades of meaning in Old English terms for mind, spirit, soul, body, and cognitive faculties, I demonstrate that 'soul' and 'body' were dynamic concepts attracting ongoing interest and debate in the early vernacular. Soul-and-body addresses describe soul and body through metaphors of kinship; sometimes they are brothers, sometimes they are spouses, but only rarely are they shown in an inherently hierarchical relationship that presupposes the natural dominance or mastery of the soul. These patterns of metaphor challenge the critical tendency to characterize medieval people as mired in a dualist worldview in which the material body is the inferior or even denigrated counterpart of the immaterial soul. The body is central to early medieval penitential theology -- salvation is impossible without it -- and it is given much more agency and value in soul-and-body addresses than standard histories of medieval philosophy of being generally acknowledge.
Pursuing the metaphor of kinship through Old English poetry and homilies that continued to be copied and adapted well into the Middle English period, I find that angels are seen as having a special kinship with the human soul, and they are often the mediators between God and humanity - more so than was Christ in an Anglo-Saxon milieu. These poets and homilists are all part of a continuing scriptural and exegetical tradition in which angelic being elucidates human being; long before Milton's radical vision of an angelic paradigm, angels were essential to understanding the nature of rational embodied being in English culture, and the ontological questions they highlight have never been the sole domain of church fathers or scholastic philosophers. With the gradual development in Middle English of the concept of 'inwit' - or conscience in its modern, morally weighted sense - the strong, often familial link between humans and their guiding angels begins to fade and the concept of a moral compass within the human soul or self becomes more prominent. References to a tri- or multipart soul become more widespread and, as Middle English works such as The Pricke of Conscience and Sawles Warde demonstrate, vernacular literature increasingly concerns itself with hierarchizing the parts of the self. By tracking these shifting conceptions across the 1066 divide, the project recontextualizes more familiar Middle English vernacular religious works by illuminating their neglected Old English precursors and tracing the ways in which their dominant images and metaphors shift over time in response to cultural, sacramental, and philosophical change.