Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century

Abstract

Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century analyses key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without both the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and a shift in perspective towards a visual and spatial orientation. This results in a self which is not an agent that will act on the outside world like the Renaissance self, but, rather, one which inhabits a potential, middle ground, or 'space of agency', explained here partly in terms of object-relations theory.