Gregory the Great described the government of souls as ‘the art of arts,’ a sentiment that the Fourth Lateran Council would echo in 1215. This thesis takes as its fundamental proposition that this ‘art’ can be understood as a ‘craft’, one that is responsible for producing and maintaining a Christian subjectivity marked by introspection, inwardness, and a strong distrust of externalities. Using a theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault I suggest a tradition of administering and producing these subjects through ‘pastoral power.’ Charting the trajectory of these ideas from the ascetics of the early church through to fifteenth-century Middle English texts, I explore the dynamics produced by texts invested in producing this specific form of subjectivity as they expand their reach from a specialised audience of monks to an increasingly laicised vernacular sphere. This investigation is broken into two halves. The thesis begins with a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s theories of power and subjection. Here I suggest that there are important conceptual connections between Foucault’s concept of ‘discipline’ and medieval approaches to the care of the soul. The first half of the thesis stresses the longue durée development of pastoral power, focussing on two particular historical moments. The first of these chapters engages with the pastoral and monastic thinkers of the early church, who developed two overlapping regimes – that of body and spirit. The second turns to the Ancrene Wisse, arguing that the it responds to the developments of twelfth-century spirituality by suggesting a form of spiritual engagement that is increasingly imbricated in the mundane world. The second half of the thesis focuses on a number of texts produced in Middle English during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Two chapters focus on a collection of pastoral texts produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first focuses on the hermeneutic dynamics of these texts whilst second chapter assesses the use of documentary imagery and theories of legal accountability in the same texts. The final chapter suggests that certain proto-autobiographical texts, represented by the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are conditioned by the concerns and dynamics of pastoral power, which also affects the practices modern readers bring to bear on them.

A traição é um tema que temos estudado já faz algum tempo, utilizando como fontes as Canções de Gesta, um gênero literário poético corrente nas regiões que compunham o reino da França, entre o século XI e o século XV. O período áureo dessa poesia coincidiu com o governo da dinastia conhecida como dos Capetos diretos, cujo reinado e sucessão de pai para filho persistiu sem interrupção de 987 até 1328. Criadas e difundidas nos diversos senhorios territoriais da França, em especial no norte do reino, as Canções de Gesta tratavam em seus enredos de vários problemas de ordem moral e política vigentes na época. Em uma sociedade cuja coesão, ao menos na sua camada governante, era baseada na fidelidade e na criação de laços vassálicos, a traição constituía uma grave ameaça à estabilidade e à paz. Tanto a moral cristã quanto a moral cavaleiresca condenavam quem a praticasse, mas isso não evitou a sua constante ocorrência. Estudamos cinco poemas épicos: a Chanson de Roland (c. 1100), o Girart de Vienne (1180-1185), o Renaut de Montauban (início do século XIII), o Gaydon (1230- 1240) e o Jehan de Lançon (metade do século XIII). O Roland, sendo o mais antigo desses poemas, apresenta um monarca respeitado e difere dos poemas posteriores, cujos enredos valorizam os personagens conhecidos desde o século XIX como Vassalos Rebeldes. Da análise da traição nessa poesia e da relação entre vassalos e o rei pudemos extrair alguns pontos importantes. De início o ligado à questão vocabular, pois traïson / traïtre / traïr designam um dos mais graves crimes ali descritos, graças a sua ligação com a tradição neotestamentária da entrega de Jesus por Judas Iscariotis, suplantando outros termos de origem latina ou não (proditio, felonie). Nas Canções, a traição é dirigida primeiramente contra os barões e cavaleiros sendo os seus executores da mesma condição social de suas vítimas. Só tardiamente ela denomina um atentado contra o monarca. Outro ponto é a defesa, nos poemas, do direito à guerra ao senhor caso este não cumprisse suas obrigações de justiça para com seu vassalo. Assim, os heróis em luta contra Carlos Magno não eram mostrados pelo poeta como traidores e sim como vítimas de uma perseguição. Esses cavaleiros conservavam o respeito pelo seu senhor e aspiravam ser perdoados e reintegrados à corte régia. A responsabilidade pelas traições era direcionada para uma linhagem específica, a de Ganelon, responsável pelo desastre de Roncesvales na Chanson de Roland. Mas se aqui a traição fora um crime individual, desde fim do século XII há um trabalho de readaptação no qual o fato de se pertencer a essa família já tornava o personagem passível de ser um traidor. As suas traições podiam ir da falsa acusação até ao envenenamento de outros personagens. A prova da traição se dava frequentemente através do duelo judicial e os culpados, além de condenados à morte, podiam ter os corpos destruídos para evitar a ressurreição no final dos tempos. / Treason is a theme that we have been studying for some time, using as sources the Songs of Geste, a poetic genre current in the regions that made up the Frances kingdom, between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. That poetrys golden period coincided as the dynasty of government known as the \"direct Capetian\" which reign and father to son succession persisted without interruption from 987 to 1328. Created and disseminated in the various Frances territorial manorials, especially in the northern kingdom, the Songs of Geste treated in their plots of various problems of moral and political force at that time. In a society whose cohesion, at least in its ruling layer, was based on loyalty and creating vassalian ties, treason constituted a serious threat to stability and peace. Both Christian morality as the moral chivalry condemned those who practiced it, but that did not stop their constant occurrence. We studied five epic poems: the Chanson de Roland (C1100), the Girart de Vienne (1180-1185), the Renaut de Montauban (early thirteenth century), the Gaydon (1230-1240) and Jehan de Lançon (half of the century XIII). Roland, is the oldest of those poems, has a respected monarch, and differs from the later poems whose plots value the characters known since the nineteenth century as \"Vassals Rebels\". From the analysis of treason in this poetry and the relationship between vassals and the king, we could draw some important points. Initially the connected to the vocabulary question because traïson / traître / traïr designate one of the most serious crimes described there, thanks to its connection with the neo testamentary tradition of Jesus delivery by Judas Iscariot, supplanting other terms Latin or not (proditio, felonie). In Chansons, the treason is primarily directed against the barons and knights and the executors are of the same social condition of their victims. Only belatedly it calls an attack against the monarch. Another point is the defense, in the poems, from the right to the war to the lord if he does not achieve his justices obligations to his vassal. Thus, the heroes in the fight against Charlemagne were not shown by the poet as traitors but as victims of persecution. Those knights keep respect for their master and aspire to be forgiven and reintegrated to the royal court. Responsibility for treason is directed to a specific lineage, that of Ganelon, responsible for Roncesvales disaster in the Chanson de Roland. But if here the treason was an individual crime, since the end of the twelfth century there is a readjustment work in which the fact of belonging to that family already makes the character capable of being a traitor. Their treasons can go from false accusation to the poisoning of other characters. The proof of treason is often done through the judicial duel and the guilty, beyond sentenced to death, they might have their bodies destroyed to prevent the resurrection at the end of time.

This dissertation investigates how the Greeks of the Trojan War and Alexander the Great are presented in Old French and Middle English literature. These ancient Greeks are depicted ambiguously: they share some of the characteristics of Jews and Saracens as they are portrayed in medieval literature. The thesis begins with an overview of the frameworks used to define ancient Greek identity. These include the philosophical heritage Greece left to the medieval West; the framework of Jewish identity, encompassing “variable characterization” and the hermeneutics of supersession; and the historical template, seen through the Orosian paradigm of translatio imperii and the Trojan foundation myth. The first chapter examines the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure. The Greeks of the Trojan War are noble and valorous, but through their gift of the Trojan horse and sack of Troy, they display the treachery associated with post-Incarnation Jews and the cruelty and violence associated with Saracens. Due to the myth that the Trojans founded the Roman people, through their siege of Troy, the Greeks seem like the movers of imperium, the authority to rule, from Troy to Rome, which will eventually become a Christian empire. In the second chapter, I turn to the depiction of Alexander in Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie and the Middle English Wars of Alexander. In the Roman de toute chevalerie, Alexander is ambiguous: he is chivalrous, learned, and even a proto-Christian, though he himself assumes some typical Saracen characteristics. Alexander participates in translatio imperii, holding the right to rule in its Orosian succession and providing a model of empire to Rome. The Wars of Alexander witnesses the changes wrought to Alexander’s depiction in the fourteenth century due to revised views of chivalry, eschatology and crusade. The third chapter investigates the depiction of the Greek Diomede in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a depiction informed by classical ideas and Chaucer’s depictions of Jews and Saracens in his other works. Diomede is both treacherous and cruel, seen in his seduction of Criseyde, rather than in battle. The ending of the tale posits a proto-Christian identity for Troilus and the Trojans, and suggests that Diomede participates in the supersession of the Greeks by the Trojans. Greeks function as movers of imperium, and are necessary for the beginnings of Christian empire.

This dissertation investigates how the Greeks of the Trojan War and Alexander the Great are presented in Old French and Middle English literature. These ancient Greeks are depicted ambiguously: they share some of the characteristics of Jews and Saracens as they are portrayed in medieval literature. The thesis begins with an overview of the frameworks used to define ancient Greek identity. These include the philosophical heritage Greece left to the medieval West; the framework of Jewish identity, encompassing “variable characterization” and the hermeneutics of supersession; and the historical template, seen through the Orosian paradigm of translatio imperii and the Trojan foundation myth. The first chapter examines the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure. The Greeks of the Trojan War are noble and valorous, but through their gift of the Trojan horse and sack of Troy, they display the treachery associated with post-Incarnation Jews and the cruelty and violence associated with Saracens. Due to the myth that the Trojans founded the Roman people, through their siege of Troy, the Greeks seem like the movers of imperium, the authority to rule, from Troy to Rome, which will eventually become a Christian empire. In the second chapter, I turn to the depiction of Alexander in Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie and the Middle English Wars of Alexander. In the Roman de toute chevalerie, Alexander is ambiguous: he is chivalrous, learned, and even a proto-Christian, though he himself assumes some typical Saracen characteristics. Alexander participates in translatio imperii, holding the right to rule in its Orosian succession and providing a model of empire to Rome. The Wars of Alexander witnesses the changes wrought to Alexander’s depiction in the fourteenth century due to revised views of chivalry, eschatology and crusade. The third chapter investigates the depiction of the Greek Diomede in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a depiction informed by classical ideas and Chaucer’s depictions of Jews and Saracens in his other works. Diomede is both treacherous and cruel, seen in his seduction of Criseyde, rather than in battle. The ending of the tale posits a proto-Christian identity for Troilus and the Trojans, and suggests that Diomede participates in the supersession of the Greeks by the Trojans. Greeks function as movers of imperium, and are necessary for the beginnings of Christian empire.

In the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer gives us an excellent illustration of a point French theorist Michel Foucault would make centuries later: That power is something that moves and shifts between people and within institutions, that it is not fixed nor permanent, that it is used as needed toward specific ends, and that it is enacted through the medium of discourse. In Melibee, Melibees wife Prudence achieves a place of authority and influence in her marriage via her use of discourse, and specifically by using a more male way of speaking. Chaucer is often considered feminist-friendly due to characters such as the Wife of Bath, but critics have also given us many reasons why the Wife fails as a truly empowered woman. Within Chaucers oeuvre, Prudence is often overlooked as an example of Chaucers proto-feminism because she is a wife who, despite her barrage of knowledge, at times is somewhat meek and subservient to her husband.

This dissertation explores the complex interactions among written text, language choice, and political context in Wales in the late-eleventh and early-twelfth centuries. I argue that writers in medieval Wales created in both their literary compositions and their manuscripts intricate layers of protest and subversion in direct opposition to the authority of the Anglo-Norman political hegemony and the aggrandizing spread of the Canterbury-led church. These medieval literati exploited language and script as tools of definition. They privileged Welsh or Latin when their audience shifted, and they employed the change from early Insular script to the Caroline script of the Normans as not just a natural evolution in script development, but as a selective representation of mimicked authority. The family of Bishop Sulien at Llanbadarn Fawr has been the focal point of this study, as they were active during a time of Anglo-Norman intervention in their community that is reflected in the shifting script of their manuscripts and the apprehensive though proud tone of their compositions, which include the vitae of saints David and Padarn and the poetry of Ieuan and Rhygyfarch ap Sulien. My work provides a much-needed cohesive portrait of the multilingual medieval Welsh literary culture at the turn of the twelfth century. Questions of audience and authority come into play, particularly when considering the growing hybridity of learned communities during the Anglo-Norman infiltration of Wales. Manuscripts themselves are viewed as vehicles of identity, for the evolution of script and design offers clues as to the methods of compromise practiced by Welsh intellectuals. This compromise in the written word can be viewed as an embodiment of the Welsh desire and need to mediate fraught political boundaries, as they did using both the ‘nation’-defining Welsh language and the vehicular prestige language of Latin, resulting in an intertextual exploration of identity through the act of writing itself. Writing is a critical demonstration of Welsh authorship and agency in medieval Britain, and one that can be used to reflect upon notions of Welsh identity. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

Henry Suso (c. 1295-1366) and Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349) were two of the most popular authors in late-medieval England and Germany: their Latin works survive in hundreds of manuscripts owned by both lay and religious readers across Europe. Authority and exemplarity are central to their works, both writers present themselves as eponymous characters in their works, creating "pseudo-autobiographies" which offer their author-characters to the reader as ideal exemplars for imitation. Also central to their authorial strategy is their attention to feminine aspects of both divinity and audience; both imagine themselves as brides of Christ even as they pledge their devotion to Wisdom, a (female) combination of the Old Testament Goddess and Christ incarnate. The imagery of courtly love is employed both as an enticement for readers and as a natural extension of their internalization of the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs; their claims to bear the name of Jesus on their heart lead to iconographic crossover in representations of Rolle in English manuscripts. Music and aurality are repeatedly employed as a fundamental aspect of their descriptions of mystical experience. Suso was read widely in late-medieval England, both in Latin and in English translation; as his popularity grew, so too did his influence on English literature and theology. The chapters of the Horologium Sapientiae on the Eucharist and the art of dying well proved especially popular. Two Carthusians, Nicholas Love and the author of the Speculum Devotorum, for instance, both drew on Suso's treatment of the Eucharist in reinforcing orthodox beliefs surrounding the sacrament of the altar – yet a recently-discovered independent translation of the same text is found in a manuscript otherwise containing Lollard tracts. Suso's liturgy in honor of Eternal Wisdom proved his most popular and enduring contribution to English literature: it entered Sarum Use Books of Hours by the end of the fifteenth century and was printed in English translation towards the end of the sixteenth.

In the tumultuous political environment of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Britain, animal literature saw rapid development and innovation. Beast fable and epic, which already had a long tradition in Latin and French, gained new vigor and popularity in English and Scots renditions. Simultaneously, a new strain of political theory appeared in the vernacular. This dissertation makes a tripartite argument about the relationship between these two discourses. First, writers of literature and political theory alike struggled to reconcile an optimistic view of human society, inherent in the prevailing philosophical tradition of natural law, with the widespread corruption they witnessed in ecclesiastical and royal courts. The fruits of this struggle were darkly humorous works of beast epic and fable in the former case, and pragmatic political theory in the latter. Second, because of its literary character, beast literature actually proved more adventurous than political theory in demonstrating how one might use dissimulation to dominate the predatory world of politics, and in showing the moral and linguistic exhaustion that could result from such manipulation of others. Third, as political writers adapted their theories to reflect politics as it was actually practiced, they explicitly turned to beast literature for images and exempla, so that the animal characters of Aesopian fable and Reynardian epic stealthily crept into works of serious political inquiry.

Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript written out around the year 1000, but there are many reasons to believe that the poem was composed several centuries before this particular act of manual reproduction. Most significantly, the meter of Beowulf reveals that the poet regularly observed distinctions of etymological length that became phonologically indistinct before 725 in Mercia. This dissertation gauges the explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed about three centuries before the production of the extant manuscript. The following studies test the hypothesis of archaic composition by determining whether it is able to accommodate independent forms of evidence drawn from the fields of linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal