Author: Daniel Stokes

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13:

"This dissertation identifies what I call a post-cultural imagination running throughout a body of late medieval vernacular religious literature that has hitherto been assessed as either paradigmatically ethnocentric or anomalously culturally tolerant. I argue that, rather than debating cultural tolerance, these texts in fact deconstruct the category of culture altogether. I contend that, as they considered issues of multi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism, these Catholic English writers assumed a post-cultural standpoint, wherein they filed qualities such as dress, skin color, and language, id est those that are 'accidental' in nature, into a conceptual space that tolerated such cultural variance. But these qualities took a subordinate position to 'substantive' universal concerns of the human condition which exist - or should exist - beyond culture in every truly human community and nationality. Consequently, cultural diversity could be countenanced, but only so long as the conceptual space of substantive truth and falsehood, good and evil, beyond culture was securely regarded as fixed and universal. With the dawn of the Reformation, however, this local-universal separation proved increasingly difficult to sustain, as proto-Protestant Lollard attacks on Christian Orthopraxy depended on a fundamentalist reading of human virtue. Accordingly, the accidental space for cultural variety was eradicated and all aspects of human behavior and belief had to be substantiated in biblically grounded universal and divinely mandated terms. In the first chapter of Post-Cultural Imagination, I argue that the author of Mandeville's Travels makes Catholic Christianity catholic, that is by definition free from sectarian prejudice, by portraying Christianity as a universal cosmopolitan principle that transcends nation, race and culture, rather than a local or provincial religion. I demonstrate that the much written-about contradiction between 'modern' relativism and dogmatic exclusivity, in Mandeville, can be more fully appreciated through a lens of post-cultural understanding. In chapter two, I state that in order to solve the problem of the Law's shortcomings in Piers Plowman, Langland presents a model of do-well reminiscent of St. Paul's concept of being 'in the spirit.' In such a model, an individual will necessarily fail to completely realize justice, but will succeed to do-well through the endeavor itself. In chapter three, I look at a religious uncertainty principle present in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem St. Erkenwald and contend that the poem reveals to both St. Erkenwald and the reader that they only perceive the nature of universal truth and justice 'as through a glass darkly.' In doing so, the poem invites empathy for the unfortunate pagan Other. My final chapter looks into the ways in which the post-cultural sensibility began to decline with the arrival of Lollard polemics. I argue that Lollardy destabilized the post-cultural sensibilities of medieval English Christianity. Ultimately these pressures lead to a collapse of a postcultural consciousness, which contained crucial features differentiating between Catholic and Proto-Protestant Christianities at the birth of the Reformation"--Pages v-vi.