For Y am sorwe, and sorwe ys Y” : melancholy, despair, and pathology in Middle English literature

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2008This dissertation argues that modern concepts of melancholia and depression first take shape in the extraordinary efflorescence of highly personalized vernacular writing that occurs in the late Middle Ages, much of which features characters in the throes of paralyzing sadness, longing, and loss. This cultural heritage begins in the confessional booth. The central claim of my thesis is that confessional practices mandated for all Christians in the Middle Ages directly affected the literary representation of despairing and depressed subjects. Because of the universal injunction, following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), to examine and re-examine one’s conscience in confession, continental Europe saw a plethora of penitential handbooks encouraging practices that induced the reflexive turning that initiates subjective consciousness. This turning, I argue, resulted in the discovery of the psyche as fundamentally flawed. Jacque Lacan’s mirror in this sense corresponds to the medieval speculum hominis, in that late medieval subjects define themselves through recognition of and investment in a broken and divided self. My dissertation examines the developing relationship between this concept of the conscience and the definition and performance of sadness as a cultural idea. I closely examine four texts spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the anonymous Pearl, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe. My project explores those questions of subject formation, class and gender identity, and power relationships that inform the development of a despairing identity. In addition to describing and explaining how medieval despairing subjects write themselves, get written, and get read in fourteenth and fifteenth century England, I convey the powerful appeal of these subjects for their original medieval audiences and for twenty-first century readers, a large part of which lies in the remarkably rich ways that these writings respond to diagnostic methods of literary interrogation such as psychoanalysis and clinical psychology