| Individual movement in the medieval period could be a charged activity, since it enabled the walker to navigate independently through urban space and among disparate social contexts, potentially disrupting or undermining communal cohesion, a cohesion which was itself routinely formed through the orchestration of civic, ritual movement. This dissertation argues that British authors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries responded to the increased social limitations placed on movement by repeatedly returning to images of mobility—primarily walking, but also riding, perambulating, and other modes of transit—in order to explore the tensions that erupted between individual movers and communal expectations for that movement. In a variety of genres (including romances, descriptions of cities, devotional lyrics, and other forms of popular poetry), authors represent mobility as an embodied practice that permits the individual to evade, subvert, manipulate, or even reinforce societal standards of movement. These authors analogously represent mobility as a textual practice, which allowed authors to evaluate how movement could drive the organizational rationale of texts. In other words, authors analyzed how the ritualized forms of walking they undertook influenced habits of everyday movement and patterns of thought. This study is influenced by Michel de Certeau's seminal work on walking and spatial stories, in which he argues that the footsteps of walkers compose a text that they themselves cannot read; in inventing the figure of the voyeur who observes walkers' movements, he argues walkers subvert urban space, but he rejects their ability to actively shape it. My research on medieval mobility historically contextualizes de Certeau's theories in three significant ways: first, medieval walkers often adopted both a pedestrian and a voyeuristic perspective, permitting them both to experience and to describe the spaces through which they passed; second, medieval riders appropriated the same serial principles that mark walking and attending to this broader range of medieval mobility permits me to interrogate how medieval movers actively shaped their surroundings while also being shaped by them; and, finally, when medieval travelers leave the urban sphere, they still comply with the rules of city space even as they move in extramural spaces. |
