Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England

Description

People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy. Contents Preface Introduction: Literature and Death I. Soul 1. Out of Death, Art of Dying 2. The Old English Grammar of the Soul 3. The Tremulous Soul: The Worcester Fragments II. Crypt 4. Unearthly Earth: Mortuary Lyric 5. “Alway deynge and be not ded”: The Book of the Duchess and “The Pardoner’s Tale” 6. Dying and the Tragedy of Occupation: “The Knight’s Tale” 7. The “Deth-dyinge” of Will: Piers Plowman 8. The Physics of Elegy: Pearl 9. Death, Terminable and Interminable: St. Erkenwald III. Archive 10. Lydgate’s Exquisite Corpus 11. “Dyynge and talking”: Hoccleve’s Loquacious Archive 12. The Care of the Archive: John Audelay’s Three Dead Kings Acknowledgments Notes Index