Narratives of Conversion and Conversion of Narrative in Pre-Modern England

This dissertation documents a narrative feature common to a number of medieval English poetic texts. The texts studied here exhibit what I call conversion of narrative. This is a process by which a poetic narrative establishes and follows certain “generic” contours that are secular, not concerned with the supernatural, spiritual dimension of humanity. The secular narrative then fails according to its own internal logic, and radically shifts to have a sacred, often explicitly prayerful, conclusion. This abruptness is not due to narrative inconsistency but is a narrative form in itself. In conversion of narrative, secular narrative forms must be explored and proved insufficient before a sacred, contemplative narrative frame can be effectively established, paradoxically showing the need for the secular even in this sacred-facing narrative form. This project will demonstrate one mode by which opposites in tension are dynamically reconciled: how timelessness irrupts into time, how one meaning emerges from and directs another, and how the sacred infuses and transforms a secular text and context. Using theoretical interlocutors like Augustine, Boethius, and Ricoeur, the dissertation explores texts that exhibit conversion of narrative in medieval England, across a long chronology. Beginning with Old English texts like The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon, passing through early English romances like Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré, the dissertation ends in the mid-fifteenth century, with the poetic compilation of Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91. This dissertation demonstrates through its broad analysis the chronological range of conversion of narrative, and its ubiquity as an available formal choice for poets in medieval England, though conversion of narrative is in fact neither ubiquitous, nor even common. This form of narrative structure has hitherto not been identified as such and could rightly be considered alongside other literary-rhetorical and symbolic forms, like allegory, figura, riddle, and fable, to name a few examples. This dissertation contributes to growing scholarly subjects like poetics of contraries, paradox, and the relationship between literary rhetoric and theology in the medieval literary world. It aims to show both an additional nuance in the phenomenon of medieval religion, as well as how contemporary scholarship might approach the deeply spiritualized nature even of “secular” artifacts in medieval culture.