Ohio State nav bar

Fiona Somerset (University of Connecticut), “’In cuntrey hit is a comune speche’: Vernacular Legal Theory in Mum and the Sothsegger [Silence and the Truthteller]”

CMRS Knot
February 6, 2015
All Day
090 18th Ave. Library

Professor Fiona Somerset will deliver the sixth lecture in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.

 

It is not a new insight that what is probably the early fifteenth century’s most sustained and thoughtful response to Piers Plowman, the alliterative, allegorical dream vision Mum and the Sothsegger, is also a sophisticated critique of political corruption in contemporary England. What has not yet been addressed among studies of the poem’s political allegory and use of personification, though, is the extent to which its critique hinges upon a specific medieval legal idea whose implications continue to haunt us even up to the present day: that one person may be held responsible for (and even punished for) another’s sin because he or she has consented to it by remaining silent. Crucially, the poem insists (as in my title) that this theory is common knowledge, the property of all. My current book project focuses on the history of this idea, and its deployment in allegorical poetry and rhetorical prose between the late twelfth and mid fifteenth centuries. In my paper at OSU I’ll show what this broader perspective can contribute to our reading of Mum and the Sothsegger.

 

Bio:  Fiona Somerset is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut, and co-Director of its Medieval Studies Program.  She is the author of Feeling Like Saints (Cornell, 2014), a study of the lollard movement, as well as Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1998), editor of Four Wycliffite Dialogues EETS 333 (Oxford, 2009), and co-author and translator of Wycliffite Spirituality (Paulist, 2013). On leave at UCONN’s Humanities Institute in 2014-15, she has pronounced that she is finished with Wyclif and the lollard movement (at least for now) and is developing new research on medieval legal and political theory and its literary expression between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.