The contingencies of person: Studies in the poetic and legal conceits of Early Modern England.

摘要

This dissertation argues that person is a cultural category that depends on models of agency, value, and dominion. Arguments about person are found both in the uses of character in the writings of Langland, Skelton, and Spenser, and in the uses of legal person in the records of early English law. The poems address controversies about the representation of person in marriage doctrine, economic thought, antifeminism, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence.;In John Skelton's early sixteenth-century "Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge," economic exchange and women's sexuality work in tandem to degrade human agency. In transactions that liquidate commodities into instantly depreciating value, the alewife's product becomes the economic general equivalent. Chapter Two examines the poem in the context of early economic treatises: is the origin of value in labor, in the commodity, or in the person? Skelton deploys clerical antifeminism in a critique of the model of person promulgated by early economic thought.;Edmund Spenser calls The Faerie Queene a treatise on moral philosophy, delivered "by ensample" rather than "by rule." Chapter Three considers the themes of conquest, consent, equity, and dominion throughout books four and five, and demonstrates that the two facets of moral philosophy--ethical and political--become increasingly irreconcilable as Spenser considers the problems of dominion and English rule in Ireland. The scheme of the virtues is finally abandoned in The Mutabilitie Cantos, where an allegorical trial treats dominion directly: the relative claims of conquest (derived from civil law) and inheritance (derived from common law), are tried by natural law.;Chapter One explores the economic analysis offered by Passus II-IV of the late fourteenth-century allegory Piers Plowman. By drawing an analogy between the law's control of feminine agency in the context of marriage ("unity of person") and the workings of money in the service economy of the professions ("mede"), Langland urges the king and his council to institute economic controls. The poem offers gender as a way to understand economic agency at a time when the economy did not have a stable, moralized concept of the proper places of person and intention attached to it.