Individuality and Community in Late Medieval Literature

The second half of the 14^th century saw massive changes in English society that culminated in the first large-scale English uprising of the Peasant Revolt in 1381. The death of between 40-60 % of the English population during the plague pandemic of the middle of the century not only meant that mobility was necessary in geographical terms; but, combined with a burgeoning market economy and the rise of new religious orders and in particular the proto-Protestant Lollard movement, it also led to a new social mobility that threatened to dissolve traditional hierarchies while at the same time creating a new consciousness of the place and role of individuality and community. Reading Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Hoccleve’s “Complaint” and the English female mystic Margery Kempe the class aims to, first, develop a historically contextualised understanding of what community and individuality, two central notions of Western modernity, might have meant in the late middle ages and how they inform each other. How are they related to class and gender in particular? Secondly, it also wants to discuss how community and individuality are configured not only in literary texts, but also through the different literary genres that we are going to look at.