Medieval Autographies

<p>In <i>Medieval Autographies</i> A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing focusing on the roles and functions of the I as a shifting textual phenomenon not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry calling it autography. He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person embracing prologues authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives and descendants of the <i>dit</i> a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies he claims are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced a montage-like unpredictability of structure and a concern with writing and textuality. </p><p>Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English <i>Winner and Waster</i> the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars analyzes Chaucer's <i>Wife of Bath's Prologue</i> as a textual performance and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve's <i>Regement of Princes</i> prologue his <i>Complaint and Dialogue</i> and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham's legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> and Capgrave's <i>Life of Saint Katherine</i>.</p>