Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities
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Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities by Anna Patricia Wilson A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD in Medieval Studies Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Anna Wilson 2015 ii Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities Anna Patricia Wilson PhD Medieval Studies Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This thesis explores the ideological significance of immaturity to several late medieval texts that focus on the conjunction between reading and feeling. Using examples from modern fanfiction to help theorize affective reception (that is, reading and response that privileges feeling), this thesis argues that approaching medieval texts with a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ highlights how ideas of age and temporality structure relationships between reader and text across late medieval reading communities. In particular it examines how Margery Kempe, Petrarch, and Chaucer performed, resisted and played with the idea of immature reading in their texts. For each author, an immature relationship with texts becomes a space of inappropriate desires and emotional excess, ambivalence, anxiety, and subversive power. Although these authors moved in different intellectual communities, all interacted with a shared cultural ideology of immaturity and reading that emerged primarily from monastic theories of reading and worship from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This study argues for the centrality of a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ to this reading tradition in Chapters One and Two, and in Chapters Three and Four further argues Petrarch’s debt to this same tradition of affective piety. Chapter Five treats Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, arguing that Petrarch’s portrayal of vernacular poetry as childish is central to Chaucer’s poetics of reception. Finally, in addition to analyses of individual late medieval texts, this study also examines how metaphors of immaturity have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception of medieval texts, particularly in the relationship between ‘amateur’ (a category I juxtapose with ‘fan’) and ‘professional’ medievalism. How does the cultural narrative of the movement from childish love to mature objectivity structure our understanding of history? And how might returning to ‘childishness’ as a theoretical category shape studies of medieval literature? iii Acknowledgments I owe thanks firstly to David Townsend, Suzanne Akbari, and Will Robins, whose intellectual mentorship and personal friendship nurtured this project from start to finish, and to Karma Lochrie and Alex Gillespie for their generous criticism and feedback. I am grateful for the financial and administrative support of the University of Toronto, the Jackman Foundation, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the McCuaig-Throop Fellowship, and the University of Toronto Women’s Association. Thanks also to the American Comparative Literature Association and the New Chaucer Society, both of which provided financial support to travel to conferences where I was able to present material from this thesis. Particular thanks go to Grace Desa, Rosemary Beattie, and Franca Conciatore, of the Centre for Medieval Studies, whose administrative competence makes the world go round. Numerous friends and colleagues gave freely from their time, resources, wisdom, and energy to help me write this thesis. Thanks to Kaitlin Heller, Susannah Brower, Megan Graham, Morris Tichenor, Chris Piuma, Amanda Wetmore, Lochin Brouillard, Nicholas Wheeler, Daniel Price, Emily Blakelock, Michael Barbezat, Ika Willis, Jessica Taylor, and in particular to the members of my email accountability group, Alice Hutton Sharp and Jessica Lockhart; to Rachael Baylis, for being my IM work-buddy for so many years; and to to the members of my writing group: Jonathan Silin, Jessica Fields, Didi Khayatt, Scott Rayter, and Amy Gottlieb. I am also grateful for fandom, where I learned how to read. Thanks to the community at large for your labour, humour, energy, anger, friendship, inspiration, and love. You create wonderful things. A book seems an inadequate gift to thank my family - Mum, Alex, Jack, Tom, Dad, Hilary - and my wife, Jessica Taylor - for their years of love, support, wisdom, understanding, encouragement, advice, and shelter. Nonetheless, here it is. Thank you for making it possible for me to do what I love. This thesis is dedicated to you. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi List of Appendices ........................................................................................................................ vii 1 Introduction: Childish Medievalism .......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Fans and Amateurs .............................................................................................................. 4 1.2 The Future of the Middle Ages ........................................................................................... 8 1.3 Queer History? .................................................................................................................. 13 1.4 Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................................... 17 1.5 An Introduction to Fandom ............................................................................................... 20 2 Towards A Fannish Hermeneutics ........................................................................................... 48 2.1 The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Late Medieval Affective Piety .................................... 48 2.2 Affect and Intimacy in Fanfiction ..................................................................................... 59 2.3 Modern Fandom, Medieval Devotion ............................................................................... 63 2.4 Conclusion: Towards a Fannish Hermeneutics ................................................................. 71 3 Visions and Supervisions ......................................................................................................... 72 3.1 Introduction to the English context ................................................................................... 73 3.2 Margery Kempe’s Immature Spirituality .......................................................................... 84 3.3 Immaturity and Supervision ............................................................................................ 100 3.4 “Noli me tangere” ........................................................................................................... 119 3.5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 129 4 Petrarch, affective devotion and immaturity .......................................................................... 131 4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 131 4.2 Petrarch’s Medieval Devotion ........................................................................................ 134 v 4.3 The Textual Self: Petrarch, RPF and the Mary Sue ........................................................ 154 4.4 Schoolboy reading .......................................................................................................... 179 4.5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 193 5 Writing to Petrarch ................................................................................................................. 194 5.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 194 5.2 Petrarch and periodization .............................................................................................. 198 5.3 Fantasies of Encounter .................................................................................................... 209 5.4 Writing to Petrarch .......................................................................................................... 217 5.5 Petrarch and the Queer/Fan ............................................................................................. 235 5.6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 248 6 Bad Readers ........................................................................................................................... 251 6.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 251 6.2 Bad Readers, Bad Subjects ............................................................................................. 255 6.3 Fanfiction as ‘Bad Reading’ ..........................................................................................