Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text

Abstract

In his most recent book, A. C. Spearing picks up some of the threads of his earlier work, especially those he lays out in Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford University Press, 2005), adding to the compelling case he has made that much of our reading of medieval narrative leads us astray.The problem, Spearing has argued, is that we understand subjectivity anachronistically, in terms borrowed from the novel and the dramatic monologue, not those familiar to medieval writers.Seeking to move scholars of medieval literature away from what he sees as a crippling tendency to reduce all acts of narration to a paradigm that stresses the "unreliable narrator, " Spearing has argued previously that the kind of hermeneutic gap that we imagine existing between the author and the narrator would have been difficult if not impossible for a medieval writer to comprehend.To read medieval literature, then, we must look elsewhere for our critical footholds.Medieval Autographies begins with the same premise but extends and refines it by focusing on texts that are related in the first person; more specifically, on the French dit, which comes to prominence in the mid-thirteenth century, and one of its primary reflexes, the prologue, which becomes a dominant English form about a century later.Spearing believes we should call such texts "autographies, " a term that recognizes their difference from autobiographies, which depend on conveying individual subjectivity through textual expression.As Spearing points out, even medieval life stories, such as Margery Kempe's, fail to delineate personalities so much as the exemplarity of experience or what "souls have in common" (36).In other texts, too, including Machaut's dits and Chaucer's General Prologue, the "I" of the medieval poet is not systematically or consistently related to the representation of a single individual's consciousness.Adopting the term autography, moreover, opens up for us the common characteristics of first-person narratives, which Spearing demonstrates are often concerned with the act and problematics of writing itself.Through nicely shaped readings of Machaut's Dit de la fonteine amoureuse and other dits, Spearing shows that neither dits nor dream visions offer

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