David Aers - Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430

Routledge Revivals

David Aers explores the treatment of community, gender, and individual identity in English writing between 1360 and 1430, focusing on Margery Kempe, Langland, Chaucer, and the poet of Sir Gawain. He shows how these texts deal with questions about gender, the making of individual identity, and competing versions of community in ways which still speak powerfully in contemporary analysis of gender formation, sexuality, and love. Making wide use of recent research on the English economy and communities, and informed by current debates in the theory of culture and gender, the book will be of interest to those concerned with Medieval studies, Renaissance studies, and Womens studies.

English Writing 1360-1430

David Aers

First published in 1988
by Routledge

This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge
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1988 David Aers

The right of David Aers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, withour permission in writing from the publishers.

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 88009704

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-30567-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-14199-2 (ebk)

COMMUNITY, GENDER, AND INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY

English writing 1360-1430

DAVID AERS

First published in 1988 by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001

1988 David Aers

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Aers, David
Community, gender, and individual identity: English writing 1360-1430.
1. Poetry in English, 1066-1558
Critical studies
I. Title
821'.1'09

ISBN 0-415-01378-X
ISBN 0-415-01379-8 Pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Aers, David.
Community, gender, and individual identity: English writing, 1360-1430/David Aers.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-01378-X. ISBN 0-415-01379-8 (pbk.)
1. English literatureMiddle English, 1100-1500History and criticism. 2. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 3. Individuality in literature. 4. Community in literature. 5. Sex role in literature. I. Title.
PR275.I34A35 1988
820'.9'001dcl9 88-9704
CIP

Thus the original doubt as to which was more real, the common sense world or the transfigured one, could now be answered: the transfigured world was the real one, potentially, because the mystery was there in the developing living facts evolving under one's own nose, not in some far away fairy-land.

(Marion Milner, On Not Being Able To Paint, 1957)

There are many people I would like to thank in connection with making this book. Those whose admirable labours in the field of medieval studies I am most conscious of leaning on, and to whom I am immensely grateful, I have sought to acknowledge in the notes. Rodney Hilton kindly read and commented on an early version of the first chapter with his habitual depth of knowledge and clarity of perception. Barrie Dobson also commented on that version and an outline of the book. For helpful discussion of some of the concerns informing I would like to thank Linda Macfarlane, Sarah Beckwith, and Paul Gilbert. I am very grateful to Derek Pearsall for an exceptionally scrupulous, helpful, and generous reading of the typescript. Many of those who have influenced my writing most profoundly may well not appear in the book or the notes at all either because the assimilation has been so thorough that the influence is pervasive or because the influence is on a way of looking at things rather than any specific point that could appear in a note. But I would at least like to thank Sita Narasimhan, Tony Spearing, Derek Pearsall, the late Elizabeth Salter (in whose memorial volume Leeds Studies in English an early version of the first chapter appeared), Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress. Perhaps I should also note that some very diverse and deeply contradictory writings within some of the various psychoanalytic traditions, feminist traditions, and Marxist traditions have constantly engaged my attention and stimulated my reflections.

I have enjoyed working out much of the material in the book in seminars with students in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, That institution has constantly enabled the kind of courses from which this book emerged. I hope it may long survive the current government's attack on the humanities in Britain.

My thanks are due to the British Academy and the School of English and American Studies for grants towards the preparation of my manuscript, and to Ann Cook for typing it. Acknowledgements are also due to Oxford University Press for permission to quote from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn (1957); Athlone Press for Piers Plowman. The B Version , ed. E. T. Donaldson and G. Kane (1975); Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron for permission to quote from the edition of The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Arnold, 1978).

University of East Anglia, Norwich
December 1987