The Southern Recension of the Pricke of Conscience, also known as the East Midland Recension, has not hitherto been edited except for a few passages and its manuscripts have been very little examined. Earlier attempts at a classification of the texts of all versions have resulted in the erroneous assignment of four manuscripts listed in Brown and Robbins Index of Middle English Verse to the wrong categories. The present textual study is based on the eighteen known manuscripts of the recension. It provides a history of Pricke of Conscience scholarship together with a bibliography of books, theses, articles and papers treating the poem, its versions and manuscripts. There is a description of each of the eighteen manuscripts for Book V, a textual study of all of the manuscripts using the variants in Book V and an edition of Book V based on Huntington Museum Manuscript HH 125. There follows a critical edition of a selected passage, lines 4737i-4802, of' the Signs Before Doomsday, with a listing of' the substantive manuscript variants; in the appendices are given the variants of' the manuscripts for Book V and a listing of the Latin works used as the sources of the Pricke of' Conscience.

The problem of this study was to determine the relationship between guilt and anxiety as well as the relationship of these factors to certain psychological and sociological variables. The variables were sex, ordinal position, marital status, education, religious beliefs, church attendance, happiness of childhood, discipline from parents, happiness now, parental happiness, parental education, and parental occupation.

Whatever are the other merits of Macbeth, it must be classed as one of the most penetrating studies of conscience in literature. Shakespeare does not attempt to describe in the drama how the ordinary criminal would react to evil, but how Shakespeare himself would have felt if he had fallen into crime. 1 The ramifications of this conflict between the conscience of a man of genius and the supernatural forces of wickedness, therefore, assume immense dimensions. "Macbeth leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime . . . But what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play, was the incalculability of evil--that in meddling with it human beings do they know not what."2 This drama displays an evil not to be accounted for simply in terms of the protagonist's will or his causal relationships to evil. It is an agency which is beyond the power of Macbeth's will; and his conscience, as powerful and imaginative as it is, can only warn him that he is involving himself in a force which will cause him unexpected and hideous mental pain. If there is a moral in Macbeth, it is obviously that men should not tamper with evil, for not even a deep-rooted conscience and an ascendant will can contend with its influence.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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Texte remanié de: Tesi di dottorato--Torino--Università, 1994.

Diss.--Bochum, 1994. / Bibliogr. p. 180-194.

Habilitationsschrift--Fach Alte Geschichte--Universität zu Köln, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. [427]-461.

Thèse de doctorat : Sociologie et Anthropologie : Lyon 2 : 2001. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr.

Thèse d'université--Lettres--Paris, 1950. / Bibliogr. f. I-VI. - Ex. dactylographié.