Penitentials to poetry: the literary critique of avarice in fourteenth-century England
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Jessica D. Ward (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Denise Baker
Abstract: My dissertation elucidates how three extraordinary late-fourteenth-century writers—William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer—address the challenge posed to Christian ethics due to the proliferation of urban markets and increased personal wealth in medieval England. In the Middle Ages, avarice comprised a wide range of sins and disorders, including usury and miserliness, but also unexpected practices such as sacrilege and rape. Though many historians have focused on avarice in the late medieval period, their attention tends to be on its strictly economic and legal dimensions. This emphasis on the financial valance of the concept, however, occludes both the ethical philosophy that animates literary discourse on avarice and the literary forms that sustain and enable that philosophy. My dissertation demonstrates that these vernacular authors appropriate the various genres of penitential literature, one of the most popular forms of writing in the period, to foster their readers as moral subjects. Tracing a connection between penitential and poetic strategies, each chapter considers how these poets deploy the rhetorical techniques of a specific penitential discourse to argue that avarice—not pride—is the most pernicious vice because it diminishes communal wellbeing and harms individuals and their relations to God. My project shows how paying attention to these authors’ lengthy and imaginative analyses of avarice can enrich ongoing conversations about critical topics such as the emergence of subjectivity in the pre-modern period and the rise of proto-capitalism in England.
Penitentials to poetry: the literary critique of avarice in fourteenth-century England
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Created on 5/1/2019
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2019
- Keywords
- Avarice, Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Medieval Literature, Penitentials
- Subjects
- Literature, Medieval
- Poetry, Medieval
- Penitentials
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, $d -1400
- Gower, John, $d 1325?-1408
- Langland, William, $d 1330?-1400?