CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Yuldasheva, Faeza Azamatovna |
|---|---|
| Title | "Earnest Penny of Heaven": Idioms of Work, Wealth and Exchange in Middle English Devotional Literature |
| Summary | The present study explores economic thinking in three works of Middle English devotional literature—Our daily work, The Book of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love. It is built on the premise of embeddedness of medieval economic thinking into the ethical and religious matters and traces the interpenetration between the ideas of economy and the theological messages in the selected religious texts. The categories of work, wealth and exchange were chosen as points of departure for this enquiry; they are explored in each chapter in the context of a particular source. The findings of this study show the uneasy engagement of the Middle English religious writers with the on-going discussions on the social organization, the value of work and the virtue of poverty. Their responses included reappraisal of labor through sits spiritualization and the “laborization” of spirit in Our daily work and Revelation, and the peculiar absence of work from The Book of Margery Kempe. Poverty, in turn explored from a distance by Julian and Margery, is notably absent from the exhortations of labor in purportedly Rollean account; and all the three texts outline in some form an economy of salvation—gift-based in the case of Julian and exchange-based for Kempe and Our daily work’s author. |
| Supervisor | Gabor, Klaniczay |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/yuldasheva_faeza.pdf |
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