Revision of Ph. D. thesis Trinity College Dublin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

This dissertation offers the first full-length study of medieval England’s literary tradition of manuals for penitents—texts describing the sins, and other essentials of the faith, that address penitents preparing for confession. This tradition includes works that were among the most popular in medieval England. Some of these—including the Parson’s Tale and Ancrene Wisse, which is an important precursor to this body of writing—have been studied in depth, but the tradition in which they participate is still not well understood. This dissertation shows that this tradition emerged in a significant way in the second half of the thirteenth century, although it took root in an existing body of self-examination writing. Insofar as it reflects a new emphasis on reading as a means of interrogating oneself rather than as a means of preparing oneself to interrogate others, the development of these manuals represents a widening range of reading practices and a shift toward private confessional education. The first two chapters describe the characteristics of manuals for penitents, including their material and formal qualities. Among other contributions, the first chapter explores a feature of commentaries on the essentials of the faith that often goes unnoticed: that when they appear in manuals for penitents, they are not, as is often thought, digressive, impersonal, or strictly didactic, but instead encourage and promote self-reflection. The second chapter examines the implied and actual audiences of manuals for penitents. On the basis of this more precise characterization of these manuals, the final three chapters offer insight into three interlinked texts chosen from different stages of the development of these manuals: Ancrene Wisse, the Compileison, and the Parson’s Tale. In addition to shedding light on these three texts, these concluding chapters highlight some of the tensions that emerged surrounding the shift to asynchronous penitential learning that was enabled by these manuals.

This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience. These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular.

In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.