Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century

This book analyses key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts which articulate an autobiographical stance.

Spence analyses key twelfth-century texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. She discusses issues such as the relation of subject to object, self to body, body to text, and text to language, and shows how the gap between Latin and the vernacular was crucial in creating the medieval 'self'.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.