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This thesis examines the language of pain/suffering in Ancrene Wisse, the Wooing Group, and the Katherine Group, arguing that the anchoress nourishes an acute but discriminating sensitivity to pain. It seeks to demonstrate that the anchoress uses these early Middle English texts to cultivate sophisticated affective stirrings. Chapter 1 foregrounds the multidimensional penitence in Ancrene Wisse, situated in the context of Latin and vernacular penitential and homiletic material. The anchoress’ penitential processes demand not only physical pain, but also affective pain and intensive cognitive processes of self-examination. Chapter 2 argues that the Wooing Group meditations are tools of pain-cultivation, which the anchoress uses to nurture her affective pain as she develops her intimacy with the Spousal Lamb and his Mother. Chapter 3 assesses imagery of physical and affective woundedness. This chapter examines the anchoress’ use of imagery of Christ’s wounds, sin-wounds, and penitential wounding in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, and then studies her use of the saints’ wounding in the Katherine Group. Chapter 4 contends that spectatorship and performance of suffering are not separable acts for the anchoress. The chapter assesses: the anchoress’ spectatorship in the Katherine Group hagiographies, a spectatorship based on defamiliarization; the anchoress’ participation with the pain of Christ in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, including an examination of her potential use of church wall paintings; and the female reader of Hali Meiðhad, who immerses herself in the suffering of a married and child-bearing woman. Chapter 5 examines the crucial affective phenomenon of compassion, arguing that compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group is not a distanced ‘pity’, but a complex ‘co-feeling’ (using Milan Kundera’s (1984) term). The thesis concludes by underscoring the fact that the anchoress’ painful existence is not pathological; it is an existence characterized by agency and emancipation.

This thesis examines the way the absence of moral consideration of the animal in Christian doctrine is evident in Middle English literature. A fundamental difference between the theology and literature of the medieval period is literature's capacity to present and theorise positions that cannot, for various reasons, be theorised in the official discourses provided by commentators and theologians. Patterns of excluding the animal from moral consideration by Christianity are instigated with the rejection of the ethics of late Neoplatonism. Highlighted by Neoplatonists, and evident in the stylistic differences in reading scripture and philosophy, is an early Christian ideological predisposition toward purely humanocentric concerns. The disparity between a definite Hellenic ethic of the animal and its absence in Christian thought is most evident in the contrast between an outward looking Neoplatonic understanding of creation, and the closed matrix of scholastic interpretative thought. Influential textual representations of the universe require that creation is interpreted through a fideistically enclosed system of signs. The individual must have faith before approaching knowledge. The animal is placed into a system dominated by the primacy of faith in God, which paradoxically produces the predetermined answers supplied by Christian doctrine and selective scriptural and doctrinal suppositions. In literary texts, the animal provides an obvious method of Christian debate. Contemporary theological values, such as the doctrinal commonplace of comparing man with animal in the corporeal context highlights the uncomfortable similarity to, yet prescribes that man aspire to distance himself from, the animal. The primacy of man and the importance of his salvation, is a doctrine which countermands the theocentric basis of Christian theology, in which God is understood as a presence in all his creation. Such conflicting perspectives result in animals in medieval literature being used to test theological and philosophical parameters, illustrating the inadequacy of sharp theological boundaries, and demonstrating the ability of literary expression to escape that which has already been enclosed.

This dissertation examines the ideological role and adaptation of the mythical British past (derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae) in chronicles of England written in Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in terms of the shaping of English history during this time. I argue that the past is an important lens through which we can read the imagined geographies (Albion, Britain and England) and ‘imagined communities’ (the British and English), to use Benedict Anderson’s term, constructed by historical texts. I consider how British history was carefully re-shaped and combined with chronologically conflicting accounts of early English history (derived from Bede) to create a continuous view of the English past, one in which the British kings are made English or ‘of England’. Specifically, I examine the connections between geography and genealogy, which I argue become inextricably linked in relation to mythical British history from the thirteenth century onwards. From that point on, British kings are increasingly shown to be the founders and builders of England, rather than Britain, and are integrated into genealogies of England’s contemporary kings. I argue that short chronicles written in Latin and Anglo-Norman during the thirteenth century evidence a confidence that the ancient Britons were perceived as English, and equally a strong sense of Englishness. These texts, I contend, anticipate the combination of British and English histories that scholars find in the lengthier and better-known Brut histories written in the early fourteenth century. For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, my study takes account of the Albina myth, the story of the mothers of Albion’s giants (their arrival in Albion before Brutus’s legendary conquest of the land). There has been a surge of scholarship about the Albina myth in recent years. My analysis of hitherto unknown accounts of the tale, which appear in some fifteenth-century genealogical rolls, leads me to challenge current interpretations of the story as a myth of foundation and as apparently problematic for British and English history. My discussion culminates with an analysis of some copies of the prose Brut chronicle (c. 1300) – the most popular secular, vernacular text in later medieval England, but it is seldom studied – and of some fifteenth-century genealogies of England’s kings. In both cases, I am concerned with presentations of the passage of dominion from British to English rulership in the texts and manuscripts in question. My preliminary investigation of the genealogies aims to draw attention to this very under-explored genre. In all, my study shows that the mythical British past was a site of adaptation and change in historical and genealogical texts written in England throughout the high and later Middle Ages. It also reveals short chronicles, prose Brut texts and manuscripts, and royal genealogies to have great potential future research.