Browsing by Subject "Julian of Norwich"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access Love, Labor, Liturgy: Languages of Service in Late Medieval England(2009) Knowles, James RobertThis dissertation explores the complex vocabularies of service and servitude in the Age of Chaucer. Working with three major Middle English texts--William Langland's Piers Plowman (chaps. 1 and 3), Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love (chap. 2), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (chap. 4)--my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice. For late medieval English culture, the word "service" was an all-encompassing marker used to describe relations between individuals and their loved ones, their neighbors, their church, their God, and their institutions of government. In the field of Middle English studies, these categories have too often been held apart from one another and the language of service has too often been understood as drawing its meanings solely from legal and economic discourses, the purview of social historians. Love, Labor, Liturgy sets out to correct this underanalysis by pointing to a diverse tradition of theological and philosophical thought concerning the possibilities and paradoxes of Christian service, a tradition ranging from Saint Augustine to Martin Luther and beyond.
Item Open Access Matter of Meekness: Reading Humility in Late Medieval England(2019) Hamman, Grace E“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.
Item Embargo Never God-bereft: allegory and agency in late medieval literature(2023) Li, Shirley YuelingFor Augustine, Scripture resounds like a Bach cantata. At every moment, its allegories reverberate with many voices. In the Psalmist David’s voice we hear Christ’s, in whose voice we hear the Church’s, in whose voice we hear the saved or sinful soul. Voices—persons—agencies are in allegory distinct yet simultaneously entwined. I argue that such allegorical multivocality, in which voices, persons, and agencies are intermingled, affords a means to understand our shared agency and life with God. My dissertation explores this claim through two late medieval texts. In the anonymously authored fourteenth-century poem Pearl, the polysemy of memory reveals the polysemy of allegory and agency. Through recursive recollection the dreamer finds that his grief and despair are threaded through with God. Likewise Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love declares that even in deepest sin God is present. We have no autonomous, sin-stained selfhood, no self- and sin-defined meaning to our lives apart from an allegorical and Christological hermeneutic. Altogether our texts attest to our deep-grounded life in God. However dark our grief and despair, and however deep our sin, we are never God-bereft.
Item Open Access The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher(2014) McCray, Donyelle CharlotteThis dissertation consists of a homiletical reading of Julian of Norwich's life and work. While Julian is often classified as a mystic or theologian, she may be better categorized as a preacher in light of contemporary homiletical theory. Julian becomes decipherable as a preacher on a performative level when one attends to the apostolic dimensions of her anchoritic vocation and the particular ways John the Baptist serves as a model for medieval English anchoriticism. Her writings clearly fit within the ambit of the English medieval sermon genre, but censorship likely reduced her audience and contributed to her illegibility as a preacher. Julian displays proclamatory intent through direct statements and by aligning herself with celebrated preachers like Saint Cecelia, Mary Magdalene, and the Apostle Paul. Like Paul, Julian sees Jesus' body has her primary text, places human weakness at the center of her theology, and uses her confined body as a rhetorical tool. Yet, more than anything else love for the church drives her preaching, and this love enables her to connect with her fellow Christians and counter those forces that would silence her. For the contemporary church, Julian bequeaths a liberative example of preaching outside the pulpit. This dissertation concludes with a contemporary example of a figure engaged in such a vocation, the African-American church mother.