<p>This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> and moving through texts in the "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.</p><p>After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of <italic>conscientia</italic>--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called <italic>Mum and the Sothsegger</italic> (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation explores the complex vocabularies of service and servitude in the Age of Chaucer. Working with three major Middle English texts--William Langland's <i>Piers Plowman</i> (chaps. 1 and 3), Julian of Norwich's <i>Revelation of Love</i> (chap. 2), and Geoffrey Chaucer's <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> (chap. 4)--my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice. For late medieval English culture, the word "service" was an all-encompassing marker used to describe relations between individuals and their loved ones, their neighbors, their church, their God, and their institutions of government. In the field of Middle English studies, these categories have too often been held apart from one another and the language of service has too often been understood as drawing its meanings solely from legal and economic discourses, the purview of social historians. <i>Love, Labor, Liturgy</i> sets out to correct this underanalysis by pointing to a diverse tradition of theological and philosophical thought concerning the possibilities and paradoxes of Christian service, a tradition ranging from Saint Augustine to Martin Luther and beyond.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duquesne University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-222).

Langland's use of moral distichs from the medieval text known as the Disticha Catonis has been noted but never critically examined as a whole. The figure of 'Cato' and the distichs attributed to him stand out in Piers Plowman. I will begin by placing both Piers and the Disticha in their medieval literary context. Questions of audience and literacy have always been central to Piers, and I will look at the way in which Langland's use of Latin quotations from the Disticha relates to these issues. I will also examine the role of ' Cato' and the distichs in Piers in order to dispell the prevailing critical view that 'Cato' represented a pagan authority. The medieval Christian commentaries which accompanied the Disticha illuminate Piers as well. Critics have often wondered why Langland choose to write in a mixture of languages. 'Cato' and the Disticha are part of the answer. / Graduate

Inaug.-Diss.--Zürich. "Literaturverzeichnis," p. (143)--145. / Lebenslauf.

Inaug.-Diss.--Strassburg. / Lebenslauf. "Bibliographie": p. [194].

Inaug.-Diss.--Zürich. "Literaturverzeichnis," p. [143]-145. / Lebenslauf.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic university of America, 1932. / At head of title: The Catholic university of America. Bibliography: p. 102-104.

William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.

<p>This dissertation draws on the virtue ethics tradition in moral theology and moral philosophy for inquiries regarding the acquired and infused virtues, virtue's increase and remission, and virtue's relation to sacramental practice. I rely on two medieval texts to ask and answer these questions: the <italic>Summa Theologiae</italic> by Thomas Aquinas and <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> by William Langland. My arguments are primarily inter- and intra-textual with some attention to the texts' history of interpretation and the socio-historical Catholic culture in which they were written. I conclude that the texts share pedagogical features that teach their readers in what the perfection of virtue consists and show readers how to increase in that perfection.</p><p>This thesis follows from the work of David Aers, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Eberhard Schockenhoff.</p> / Dissertation