Fiction’s Truths – False Confessions in Vernacular Literature, 1190–1400

The theological movements that culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 seem to have had repercussions not only on religious life but also on writers’ conceptions of the potentialities and truth-value of language. By rendering annual confession obligatory and by reinforcing the importance of preaching, the Council placed unprecedented importance on what J.L. Austin would later describe as the constative and performative functions of language, promoting oratorial and penitential speech acts that had to be not only truthful but sacramentally effective.Authors of literary texts were quick to pick up on these changes, and already the last decade of the twelfth century saw false confessions and sermons being staged in literary texts as a way of investigating the boundaries between truthfulness and falsehood, literature and reality, the profane and the sacred. These developments coincided with an evolution in literary subjectivity, as authors revisited the models offered by Augustine’s Confessions and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy through the new lens of sacramental penance.This book enquires into the origins of vernacular fiction by examining how questions of truthfulness and subjectivity became central to literary works between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Investigating the phenomenon of false confessions in texts ranging from the Roman de Renart to Dante’s Comedy and the Canterbury Tales, the monograph shows how authors variously attempted to create a new space in which literature could function beyond the categories of truth and falsehood.