Abstract

This article compares aspects of the work of Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve and argues that they both seek to inhabit the cultural identity of the ascetic. Preoccupied especially with a specific instantiation of that identity—the figure of Job as mediated through the Office of the Dead—Julian’s A Revelation of Love and Hoccleve’s Series think and move within the terms of a single religious discourse, one neither penitential nor affective. Complicating gender identity in quite explicit and direct ways, this common ascetic discourse self-consciously situates author and work alike at the intersection of the sheer materiality of bodily experience and the production of literary form.

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