The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual by Suzanne Verderber (review)

In The Medieval Fold, Suzanne Verderber convincingly complicates scholarship on the emergence of the individual in the twelfth century, situating herself from previous work by exploring the causes as well as evidence of this emergence, pointing primarily to the Gregorian Reform and utilizing a careful patchwork of analytic lenses to do so. Throughout, Verderber strives to reject binary explanatory models of the repressive state versus the individual for “a model of the subject that is more supple, one that allows for permeability between inside and outside, between subject and world” (5). Throughout her book, she both explains her new model for understanding the emergence of the individual, tied for her to the individual internalization of increasing pastoral power in the wake of the Gregorian Reform, and persuasively provides proof of the effect of this internalization in later troubadour lyrics and fin’amor literature.

Verderber begins her investigation by situating herself opposite Colin Morris, whom she claims espouses a “Sleeping Beauty” model which maintains that the seeds of the individual were present before the twelfth century but had not been allowed to “bloom” (9). Instead, Verderber calls for a less binary understanding of the forces which produced individualism. She accordingly relies on several theorists, including Nietzche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze. Critical to her argument is the concept of “radical reflexivity,” or “consideration of the movement of [one’s] own impulses, desires, and thought processes as an object of knowledge” (11); this stems, she argues, from the Gregorian Reform’s mandate that laity must confess annually. She first turns to Nietzche, who traces a historical contest between “affirmative forces” and “reactive forces.” Verderber argues that pressure by such reactive forces on affirmative forces leads to subjection, or “interiorization” (14): “the crucial moment of subjection occurs—literally the creation of a ‘subject’—when the aristocrat allows himself to be persuaded by the fiction that he is accountable for his deeds, that his deeds are evil, and, finally, that he needs to repent not only for his deeds, but also for the very instincts that propel them” (13). Verderber utilizes Nietzsche in order to convey a theory that recognizes not an always already existing contest between individuals and society but rather the clash of a variety of forces, from which the individualized subject emerged. Verderber next employs the term “folding” to represent how nascent subjects internalized and negotiated the very pastoral power that produced them. The “first fold,” she explains, is the “application of reactive force to affirmative force, eliciting the fiction of interiority through the transformation of affect into speech” during confession, an “individualizing form of power” (14–15). This power, she theorizes, is then misperceived as “Law,” or the notion of “an earthly, sovereign authority backed by God” (60).

Verderber spends the first chapter, “The Gregorian Reform, Pastoral Power, and Subjection,” explaining these events in detail. Throughout, she is careful to clarify that it would be too simplistic to say that the Reform serves as a magic moment in which pastoral power was suddenly invented; rather, she cautions that it marks a high point in a gradual process of consolidating already existent pastoral power. However, some aspects of the Reform, Verderber notes, were crucial for subjection. She begins by comparing Reform policies with previous policies. What truly made the Reform unique, she argues, was the individualization of penance and confession, which took on a psychological quality in which the pastor delved into the mind of the sinner. Verderber argues that a growing belief in Purgatory at this time likewise shows similar concern regarding individual penance, but also demonstrates a rise in the idea that penance during life is necessary to avoid Purgatory—even though it might not be enough. The combination of these psychological confessionary developments with the lack of surety of salvation, Verderber claims, resulted from the Reform’s mandate of annual confession, and led to “radically reflexive subjects” who “through their participation in confession … dutifully responded...