University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 The Art Of The Question In Late Medieval England Erika Dawn Harman University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Harman, Erika Dawn, "The Art Of The Question In Late Medieval England" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2915. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2915 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2915 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Art Of The Question In Late Medieval England Abstract This project uncovers the unwritten rules of the interrogative which acted as arbiters of power in religious discourse between 1300 and 1450. The central claim of the project is that scenes of question-asking dramatize the convergence of conflicting cultural and intellectual investments, as lay people leverage questions to negotiate social position, spiritual authority, and access to knowledge. Viewed as intersections between lay education and clerical learnedness, questions show how late medieval authors incorporated contemporary social concerns about the development of an educated laity. Despite the role of the interrogative in both communicating the laity’s aspirations for religious knowledge and reifying social barriers that denied them such access, there has been no extended study published on questions in Middle English literature. Individual chapters approach questioning through the clerical resources harnessed to address the laity’s demand for religious knowledge, including rhetoric, grammatical thought, and techniques of scholastic disputation. Each chapter examines a genre which represents an intersection between lay education and clerical learnedness: devotional guides such as those by Richard Rolle, Lollard tracts, lyrics, sermons, and elementary textbooks.