The 'Confessio' Tradition From Augustine to Chaucer

Description: The religious "confessio"-tradition includes three modes: "Confessio peccati," "confessio fidei," and "confessio laudis." "Confessio fidei," which implies a self-testimony, provides the dominant mode for the secular literary "confessio" tradition, which parallels but does not derive directly from the devotional "confessio"-tradition.; All literary confessions include self-witnessing speakers who also witness a philosophy of life shared by a general community, and who derive fictional credibility from the philosophical notion of entelechy, whereby they seem to share the desire to reproduce themselves with words. The literary "confessio"-tradition can thus include such disparate confessors as Augustine and the Wife of Bath because they share a form of utterance that shows their mode of characterization to be identical.

Chaucer Subjects: Background and General Criticism.; Wife of Bath and Her Tale.