Monastic literary culture and communities in England, 1066-1250

Literary histories of the Middle Ages have emphasized the rising interest in subjectivity during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when psychology and individuality receive a new emphasis in the writing of secular courts and the new religious orders. At the same time, traditional Benedictine monks in England explored the question of subjectivity differently; they crafted communal identities through relationships to local geography and material objects, such as property and relics, rather than individual identities based on interior states. Monastic writing is thus an important exception to the main current of western literary history. My dissertation explores English monastic literary culture from 1066, when the Conquest stimulated a revival in monastic writing, until 1250, when monastic writing merges with secular discourses.;Since most monastic writing is local, I analyze the subjects (both narrators and characters within narratives) created by writers at Worcester Cathedral Priory, Durham Cathedral Priory, and St Albans Abbey. In Chapter One an explication of the First Worcester Fragment serves as an introduction to the communal and deliberately material subjectivity of monks. In Chapter Two I trace the subjectivities represented in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and the Old English Durham, arguing that the clerical community subsisting at Durham before 1083 established a tradition of city-writing where material objects were invested with a vitality denied to human actors. In Chapter Three I explain how the post-1083 Benedictine priory transformed this tradition through readings of Symeon of Durham's Libellus de Exordio and Lawrence of Durham's Dialogi. These writers emphasize group action and shared emotions as a way to establish a common, transhistorical identity. In Chapter Four William of St Albans's representation of the ancient past of St Albans Abbey in the Passio Sancti Albani similarly makes liturgy and the common life the basis of a connection between the church's present and the past identities. And in Chapter Five I show how the St Albans monk Matthew Paris combines an emphasis on property and vocation to create a stable identity for St Albans Abbey and its patrons in his personal copy of Saint Alban material, Dublin Trinity College MS 177.