Poet and Sinner: Literary Characterization and the Mentality of the Late Middle Ages.
- Author/Editor
- Braswell, Mary Flowers.
- Title
- Poet and Sinner: Literary Characterization and the Mentality of the Late Middle Ages.
- Published
- Braswell, Mary Flowers. "Poet and Sinner: Literary Characterization and the Mentality of the Late Middle Ages." Fifteenth-Century Studies 10 (1984): 39-56.
- Review
- This article relates the medieval sacrament of confession, and the manuals created to support it, to the emergence of true literary characters in late medieval fiction. Braswell's main focus is Ricardian (late fourteenth-century English) poetry, including the "Confessio Amantis. As mandatory auricular confession took root in European culture following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), "the sinner" became "a complex individual who could both understand and articulate his feelings and actions . . . [he could also] convincingly change . . . " (40). Essential to character development in fiction was an interlocutor, not necessarily a priest, who questions the sinner to discover her personal situation and guide her inner progress. First, Braswell outlines the profusion of instructional manuals for priest and penitent on how to make a good confession. These include examples of dialogue in the first person, with the priest asking questions and sometimes answering with instruction on points unclear to the penitent. The confessor invariably started off with questions on the deadly sin of pride, as it was first important to break down the sinner's "self"--only as a penitent-in-progress does the sinner have a character, not after a full confession. By giving detail on the many branches of sin, the manuals encourage the priest to engage the penitent in "a moral psychodrama" allowing for "a variety of plots" (43) as every sin had a unique array of characteristics. Over time, this concern for interiority and motive gave rise to character development in literature (46-47). Turning to the four great Ricardian poets, Braswell explains how the priest-figure who elicits character development needn't be a priest, nor is the confessant necessarily contrite. In "Piers Plowman," the personified Seven Deadly Sins confess defiantly, as does Lady Meed to a corrupt friar. Among the Ricardians, Gower in CA follows most closely the sacramental question-and-answer process as set forth in the manuals. Like a true penitent, Amans changes character in the course of his confession: "Earlier, he had asked his confessor to shrive him so that 'ther schal nothing be left behinde.' Having lost his sinful nature, he has lost his personality as well. He begins as an egotistical sinner and ends as a humble old man" (50). While auricular confession was abolished by the reformation in England, the "sinner as a literary character" lived on into the English Renaissance, especially in tragic theater (52). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 1984
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis