Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England

"You must see yourself." The exhortation was increasingly familiar to English men and women in the two centuries before the Reformation. They encountered it repeatedly in their devotional books, the popular guides to spiritual self—improvement that were reaching an ever—growing readership at the end of the Middle Ages. But what did it mean to see oneself? What was the nature of the self to be envisioned, and what eyes and mirrors were needed to see and know it properly?

Looking Inward traces...