2025 Theses Doctoral

“Steryngs” of the Will: Issues of Volition in Late Fourteenth Century English Literature

Romano, Joseph

Often considered less sophisticated than their Latinate counterparts, contemplatives and poets writing in the English vernacular during the late fourteenth century are, this dissertation argues, philosophers and theologians in their own right. Filling a lacuna in medieval intellectual history, “Steryngs” of the Will develops the first literary history of the will in the vernacular writing of late medieval England. Pushing beyond the boundaries of “vernacular theology,” this dissertation demonstrates that Middle English works of devotion and contemplation are significant voices in cross-disciplinary and contemporary debates in theology and philosophy, regarding especially the will, grace, the soul and body, and contemplation. More broadly, “Steryngs” of the Will explores how Middle English poetry and prose about contemplative experience do the intellectual work of philosophy and theology, and, at the same time, do more than just intellectual work. Geared toward a wider, non-Latinate public in search of spiritual nourishment, the vernacular writing of late medieval England takes up enduring questions about the will, grace, and the love of God found in the monastics and scholastics, reshapes them, and makes them new.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the anonymously authored Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Divine Love did not merely rehearse in Middle English the conceptions of the will found in the Latin treatises of the university of the church. Instead, these texts demonstrated that the vernacular and its literary forms could serve as profound vehicles for theological and philosophical reflection on various kinds, capacities, and habits of volition. The literary forms that emerged within, and were particular to, vernacular writing—the macaronic long poem (Piers Plowman); epistolary modes of spiritual direction addressed to novices and women (the Cloud of Unknowing and Scale of Perfection); and autobiographical narrative and reflection on visionary experience (A Revelation of Divine Love)—drew upon their Latin forebears, and in some cases surpassed them, using theology and philosophy to move beyond philosophy and theology altogether. In some instances, the vernacular became the medium for virtuosic expression of contemplative practice and experience: how the will orients the soul toward, and ultimately rests in, the unitive love of God. In studying how Middle English writers engaged the will, grace, and contemplation, this dissertation offers new directions for medievalists working in the expanding field of vernacular theology and literature, suggesting that there is promise in medievalists becoming literary theologians and theologians of the literary.