Browsing by Subject "Humility"

“Matter of Meekness: Reading Humility in Late Medieval England” argues for the surprising importance of an oft-ignored virtue in English literature of the late fourteenth century: humility or meekness (the two are synonymic in Middle English). Readers in modernity have fundamentally misunderstood the importance and role of humility in late medieval literature, and in doing so, have missed an essential mode of understanding medieval conceptions of personhood and community in such late medieval texts as The Showings of Julian of Norwich, Pearl, and Piers Plowman. For medieval writers and thinkers, to be human was to be created and limited. The practiced acknowledgment of one’s creatureliness, limitations, and sinfulness constituted the virtue of humility. This dissertation explores the role and importance of this epistemological humility in late medieval English texts.

“Matter of Meekness” places these literary works in conversation with Augustinian and Thomist theological traditions as well as contemporary, popular penitential and devotional materials aimed towards lay and clerical audiences. References to humility abound in the late medieval period: it appears in lists, gradations, particular vocabularies, and in many instructional examples. Like the writers of these manuals, the writers of my study understood their works as vehicles for the transformation of their readers. By retrieving and re-examining robust medieval conceptions of humility, we can understand the way that works such as the anonymous Pearl, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the Showings of Julian of Norwich draw from and innovatively transform these traditional didactic discourses of moral and spiritual learning in late medieval England in order to not just urge submission to God, but to reform the contemporary church, theologically intervene in penitential traditions of sin and self-knowledge, or penetratingly and theologically explore the ways that memory and habits can be reformed into practices of virtue.

The introduction explores the differences between medieval conceptions of humility and modern definitions of humility, arguing that the way we read medieval texts and their depictions of humility and human limitation has been obscured by post-Enlightenment understandings of the virtue. The first chapter takes up the work of Julian of Norwich, showing how she draws on conventional medieval images of humility—Christ, Mary, motherhood, childhood, and servanthood—to probe the limits of institutionalized traditions of humility. I argue that Julian’s critically overlooked and innovative portrayal of the child reconsiders self-knowledge and human moral dependence. Chapter two argues that the anonymous, fourteenth-century alliterative poem, Pearl, is a meditation on the profound difficulty of learning within the contexts of grief and suffering. The poem’s form inculcates humble habits of reading wherein the reader participates in the main figure’s learning. In chapter three, I examine a series of allegorical figures who advocate for creating humility through punitive conditions of deprivation in Piers Plowman. Langland’s dialectical portrayal of learning in these scenes ultimately questions the ability of the fourteenth-century church to create the conditions for communal formation in the virtues. All three works interrogate, conceptualize, and affirm the paradoxical power of acknowledging weakness in learning.

What we now call “liberal individualism”—that is, the belief in the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual—first emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Europe, and continues to be a defining feature of Western democracies. The liberal valorization of freedom as the sovereign moral concept was a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, scientific progress, and secularization, which led to the view that human life is self-contained and without an externally defined purpose, and that human relations can be understood by considering society simply as an aggregate of individuals who are each driven by desire and self-interest. Values previously safeguarded by divine authority devolved into matters of choice by the individual will, and many observers have suggested that this change resulted in a moral lassitude that, paradoxically, made it more difficult to realize the Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty, rights, and justice. Arguments grounded in premises of natural freedom and rights often end up rationalizing absolute authoritarian power, as we see, for example, in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

This dissertation examines how British writers of the Romantic period such as Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley responded to this moral dilemma of liberal individualism by developing a new understanding of humility in their works. The meaning of humility in the West has been fundamentally shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions that view humility as a spiritual quality that disposes an individual toward reverence for and submission to God. As a quality that goes against the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and agency, humility underwent a steady devaluation in the eighteenth century and onward, perceived, for example, as a “monkish kind of virtue” by David Hume and a “slave morality” by Friedrich Nietzsche. This study argues that instead of returning to the religiously infused concept of humility, British Romantic authors developed a new form of humility for the secular age, one that not only preserves human agency but also emphasizes the need for human action for collective good. This humility does not focus on self-abasement but on a selfless mood, predicated on an immanent framework derived from Stoicism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which were influential in the eighteenth century. In three chapters, this study shows how Equiano, Godwin, and Shelley’s instantiations of Romantic humility respectively illuminate Romantic humility as it informs human relations, historical progress, and human-nonhuman relations. In so doing, this study shows that Romanticism cannot be viewed simply as an extension of Enlightenment individualism but also as an era of collectivist humility.