Ego Trouble: Authors and their Identities in the Early Middle Ages

by Richard Corradini (Editor), Matthew Gillis (Editor), Rosamund McKitterick (Editor)

Identity can be seen as a complex interface between the individual and society, the scope for individual identification having required renegotiation and been limited by different parameters in every period of history. Conflicts and fractures, failure and a longing for change are unavoidable elements of this. This volume deals exclusively with authors from the Middle Ages, writing between the 5th and the 11th centuries, whose works contain elements of these negotiations on identity versus difference which, within their social, ethnic, political or religious context, can be read and shown to be textual strategies. The collected articles examined in this volume all demonstrate, on the one hand, that the awareness of an individual self conflicting with social identities was by no means so unfamiliar or as little thought about as it appears to many; on the other hand, they show that during those seven centuries no single, continuous, dogmatic body of knowledge about the individual was established, believed or adhered to.

322 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2010