Contesting Individuality: Pryvetee and Self-Profession in The Canterbury Tales

Medieval English culture was strongly communal, lacking any concept analogous to modern privacy. The importance of “pryvetee” in The Canterbury Tales suggests, however, that individuals did value forms of secrecy, interiority, and individuality that we usually associate with privacy. This article argues that pryvetee marks the space of articulation between individual and society where medieval subjects struggle to maintain secrets, freedom from visibility, and control over their own bodies. This struggle sets up barriers between the individual and society and takes form most fundamentally in contests for personal space and the right to tell one’s tale. In the Tales, maintaining pryvetee requires self-defense from others’ prying eyes, but it also provokes characters to control the narratives that define them. These practices of individuation and the concept that unites them offer the means of understanding medieval individuality beyond the anachronistic limitations of modern public-private dichotomies.