Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Holchak, Paul.
- Title
- Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower.
- Published
- Holchak, Paul. Intelligent Bodies and Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance in Middle English Writing from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, and John Gower. Ph.D. Dissertation. City University of New York, 2017. x, 239 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A78.07(E). Freely accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global and at https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1915/.
- Review
- In his dissertation Holchak uses current ideas from cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (e.g., Andy Clark, Alva Nöe, Antonio Damasio, Martha Nussbaum, and Daniel Kahneman) to argue for "a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England" (iv). It emphasizes the interrelation of embodiment, cognition, environment, and action in religious practice as evident in "The Myroure of Oure Ladye" and "The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ" from Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love's "Meditationes Vitae Christi" and "Treatise on the Sacrament," and fictive representation of pilgrimage in "Piers Plowman" and of confession in "Confessio Amantis," treating the latter two as similar in several ways: "the interest, energy, and narrative focus shift in both poems to zones of interactive participation in which the activity of bodies matters. In navigating those zones, an ability to use implicit, partially unstated information proves crucial to the protagonists’ projects. As a consequence, Will and Amans learn that when they no longer expect their actions to be controlled discursively, the process of participating in devotion changes, and how one participates appears more significant than how far along one is in completing the performance" (220). For CA, Holchak focuses all but exclusively on the end of Book 8. After Amans resists confession throughout earlier portions of the poem, Holchak tells us, and tracing various shifts near the end of the poem--discourse to recognition, stasis to motion, Genius to Venus, Amans to Gower--Holchak argues that Gower "accepts and affirms that he does not really know what love is" (214), relaxing his "reliance on discursivity" and enabling him "to leave a narrative in which Amans had been trapped, (218), heading ambiguously but significantly “Homward” (8.2967). [MA]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations