Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages: Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet

by Peter Godman

Overview

The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521519113
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/04/2009
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature , #75
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter Godman is Distinguished Professor of the Intellectual History and Latin Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Rome (La Sapienza).

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Moral moments; 2. The neurotic and the penitent; 3. True, false, and feigned penance; 4. Fame without conscience; 5. Cain and conscience; 6. Feminine paradoxes; 7. Sincere hypocrisy; 8. The poetical conscience; Envoi: spiritual sophistry.