Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England Steven A

Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England Steven A. Hackbarth Marquette University Recommended Citation Hackbarth, Steven A., "Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England" (2014). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 411. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/411 APOCALYPTIC MENTALITIES IN LATE-MEDIEVAL ENGLAND by Steven A. Hackbarth A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin December 2014 ABSTRACT APOCALYPTIC MENTALITIES IN LATE-MEDIEVAL ENGLAND Steven A. Hackbarth Marquette University, 2014 Apocalypticism, defined by expectation of an imminent End, assumes many forms and proves influential in the second half of the Fourteenth Century in England. Throughout my study, I demonstrate that a rich apocalyptic environment emerges in works of the period, including those of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl-poet. In this period, apocalypticism has provided explanations for plague, narratives that make evil more vivid, and arguments for urgent action. It gives contemporary phenomena special meaning. My study is organized around conspicuous centers of meaning that work reciprocally with the apocalyptic, simultaneously defining the End and defined by it. First, I center on death, which as a theological “last thing” in itself necessarily shares a sense of anxiety with the apocalypse. In connection with both death and apocalypse, fear and hope are often invoked. And as forms of death are tied to the apocalyptic, this means that data from the late-medieval world are used to tell a vivid story with implications for the future of daily life. My second chapter deals with how the meaning of the apocalyptic is interrelated with ecclesiastical authority. In an apocalyptic context, authority delineates not only power but also the important matters of good and evil. In this period in which notions of power and evil are intensely debated, apocalypticism proves adaptable to different circumstances and different perspectives while still remaining grounded in predictive ancient prophecy. Third, I maintain that the period’s still-developing practices of confession (which claim to regulate all human activity) are given a special urgency by the sense of impending doom. Then I close my study with an examination of how writing embodies a curious tension with the apocalyptic in mind: writing is confined to time, but it also must serve as a witness to eternal matters. The apocalypse, while it argues for ephemerality of earthly things, requires a qualified permanence of texts that spread its explanations and stories. Overall, I maintain that the richness and variety of apocalyptic meaning in this period is best understood through the apocalyptic’s interaction with key cultural terms, including mortality, authority, confession, and textual permanence. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Steven A. Hackbarth I am deeply appreciative of the support offered by Marquette University’s Department of English and the Graduate School throughout my doctoral work. In particular, I am grateful for the advice and guidance of my dissertation director, M.C. Bodden, and of my committee members, John Curran and Angela Sorby. I also wish to thank Tim William Machan for his years of service on the dissertation committee. And I must express my gratitude to the organizers, advisers, and participants of Marquette’s Dissertation Boot Camp, as that initiative by the Graduate School helped me immensely throughout the writing stage of this dissertation. I am also indebted to the many professors who have encouraged me in the years prior to my doctoral work, including Lorna Wiedmann, Peter Fraser, Martin Moldenhauer, Cathy Tonnacliff, Mary Jo Brown, John D. Niles, Michelle Bolduc, Kristin Pitt, and Gabriel Rei-Doval. I am also grateful to Rebecca Parker Fedewa, David Weaver, and Christian Williams, friends who have been deeply supportive since our undergraduate years. I also thank my colleagues at Wisconsin Lutheran College for their support and collegiality as I have taught there. Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Erin, for her support throughout the majority of my graduate career and to my parents, Allen and Lyn, for encouraging me to pursue all of my educational and professional goals. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………..i INTRODUCTION…………………………………...........................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: THE PRIMACY OF DEATH………………........................................7 CHAPTER TWO: PENULTIMATE THINGS”: ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY AT THE WORLD’S NEAR-END………………………………………47 CHAPTER THREE: CONFESSION AND THE END.........……………………………97 CHAPTER FOUR: THE END THROUGH TEXTUAL PERMANENCE AND EPHEMERALITY………………………………...…………..154 BIBLIOGRAPHY..………………………………………………………..……………220 1 INTRODUCTION The notion of an apocalypse can put the fear of God and the fear of death in us. And everyone fears death. In this project I set out to complicate the way by which we understand apocalypticism in the later Middle Ages. Throughout this study I continue to ask what the apocalypse—an unstable term—looks like. I focus on England in the later fourteenth century, and my approach incorporates cultural and textual phenomena evident in texts that we hold up as literary but whose apocalyptic meaning is still being debated. These works include those of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl-poet. I use these texts to draw out apocalyptic meaning that has been consistently overlooked in previous scholarship, while I also connect their work with other discourses from which they draw and which had deep effects on religious discourse in the period. I structure my study around four rich centers of meaning—mortality, authority, confession, and textual permanence. As I do this, I show how the apocalyptic affects and is affected by these qualities. My study begins with death because, I maintain, death is a necessary first cognitive step in understanding the apocalypse. And the logical move from death to the apocalypse shows the apocalypse to approximate the semantic puzzle “the death of death,” a term on which my chapter hinges. Thus, as my project is concerned with how individuals in this period process the apocalypse, the primal experience of death is an important reference point. In the next chapter, the very social yet deeply religious implications of religious authority show another rich center of apocalyptic meaning. Religious authority is widely contested in this period that encounters the Papal Schism, interclerical conflict, and Wycliffism. One important component of this developing apocalyptic thread in the later Middle Ages is how the 2 necessary social exposure required by church work enables others to construe a person’s claims to authority and patterns of behavior as apocalyptically evil. More broadly, this chapter presents a story of how in the apocalyptic moment clergy, laity, and those with claims in between use apocalyptic urgency to exercise their own kind of decisive judgment on matters of truth, power, good, and evil. As language harnesses tremendous power in those first two major centers of meaning, so does it prove powerful in the final two that I examine, which are defined in terms of communication. I will show that confession, an increasingly important and contested religious practice in the late Middle Ages, is especially powerful as it shares concerns with the apocalyptic. These concerns include exposure (which I considered in the previous chapter) and also secrecy, vulnerability, and revelation. My final chapter considers the implications for posterity communicated by these texts. Writing, within an apocalyptic scheme, is limited to time, to the human activity worked out before the End. But it allows individual writers to transcend death as well as social and geographic separation from their audiences. Furthermore, texts may, given an apocalyptic imperative to revise and supersede what has been written before, seek (and occasionally achieve) a new sense of stability. The ambitious and deeply culturally engaged narrative projects of Chaucer and Gower illustrate this most clearly. As Chaucer and Gower assume their readers to be engaged with apocalyptic discourse, they invite readers textually to make more sense of the End. All of these centers of meaning prove especially rich and complicated in this period. In order to tell this story of shifting and intensifying meaning, this study necessarily draws on a wide range of works and approaches that have traced significant 3 portions of the rich network of apocalyptic meaning available in the late Middle Ages. This study will seek to avoid key missteps that have been cited in studies of apocalypticism in recent decades. Among these missteps, those brought about by overapplication of sociological models have proven most controversial and have been countered. As Curtis Bostick rightly observes, various sociological approaches to late- medieval apocalypticism have not appreciated fully the deep religious meaning communicated from various factions within late-medieval Christianity.1 Bostick’s emphasis on differences of apocalyptic aims helps us begin to understand the diverse forms that apocalypticism can take in the late Middle Ages. He offers the terms “accommodative,” “reformist,” and “subversive” as categories for three general orientations

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