The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual [Hardcover]

Striking cultural developments took place in the twelfth century which led to what historians have termed 'the emergence of the individual.' The Medieval Fold demonstrates how cultural developments typically associated with this twelfth-century renaissance autobiography, lyric, courtly love, romance can be traced to the Church's cultivation of individualism. However, subjects did not submit to pastoral power passively, they constructed fantasies and behaviors, redeploying or 'folding' it to create new forms of life and culture. Incorporating the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, Suzanne Verderber presents a model of the subject in which the opposition between interior self and external world is dislodged.Introduction 1. The Gregorian Reform, Pastoral Power, and Subjection 2. The Courtly Fold: The Subjectivation of Pastoral Power and the Invention of Modern Eroticism 3. Chr?tien de Troyes' Diagram of Power: Perceval Conclusion

The Medieval Fold may be the first and only study of its kind discerning the emergence of subjectivity through fold-theory. Through limpid readings in theology, history, and literature Verderber utterly changes received ideas about the twelfth-century Renaissance. Showing how various documents attest to a process where individuals, turning subjection back upon itself, acquire subjectivity, she makes clear how a radical reflexivity marks a culture at once remote and at the core of our being. Elegantly written, the book invites us to read the medieval canon as we never have before.' Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor, Departments of Romance Languages and Visual/Environmental Studies, Harvard University, USA

The Medieval Fold, as an interesting and profound interdisciplinary study, sheds considerable light on the controversial twelfth century and the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. - Mediaevistik

The Medieval Fold is a significant contribution to the histolCM