“He made his confession and told all his misdeeds”: The Rise of the Internal Consciousness between 1100 and 1500	
	
	The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 marked a shift in the manner in which the Roman Catholic Church saw the role of the everyday faithful in relation to the socio-political aims of Mother Church--a shift away from public shame and justification by trial toward private guilt and justification by penance.  The genesis of this change in Church policy can be attributed to several different areas, such as the economic need to raise funds for the Crusades, the political necessity of maintaining a short chain of command between the Deity and the peasant, and the social benefit derived by the fabrication of a self-policing individual conscience.  It is in this last result--the internalization of the sense of wrongdoing--that I am most interested.  The development of the concept of the individual conscience is easily traced in the history of the period, as Austin Poole has done.  I argue that this shift in the medieval weltanschauung is equally evident through close readings of literary texts representative of the period between the early eleventh century and the late fifteenth.   
	The Song of Roland, composed before the edicts of the Fourth Lateran Council, may be seen as a control text, exhibiting all of the attributes of the public-shame/justification-by-trial trope.  In texts from each of the three centuries following the eleventh, when The Song of Roland was presumably written--namely, Perceval, Tristan and Isolt, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--the public sphere is successively augmented more and more fully by a private, inner psychology.  This is not to say that there is no evidence for the existence of private thoughts and motivations before 1215, but that there was little value in publicly acknowledging such motivation; I believe that the internalization of penance led to the increasing valuation of the individual conscience, and that this is manifest in the texts I shall study.  In the interest of time, I will discuss only the culmination of this process, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
	Before a discussion of the manner in which these texts help to inculcate the “new” idea of the individual conscience, it may be helpful to define the terms involved in the change: “shame,” “guilt,” and--perhaps most importantly--“individual.”  The idea of shame is the grounding ethical indicator for the society in which the author of Roland writes.  Shame is essentially a public process; it necessitates the codification of any behavior into acceptable and not acceptable.  Because there are few private actions which shame does not preclude or encourage, the system by which the actions of an individual is judged is based on the approbation of a larger authority--God or a group of peers.  Erik Erikson, writing in Childhood and Society,  posits the dichotomy as “autonomy vs. shame and doubt” (251).  Although Erikson’s study is not specific to the medieval period (indeed, it is the result of a long psychoanalytic practice), his ideas seem relevant to such a discussion.  Erikson defines the balance required by a shame-centered culture: “Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at” (252), while this is balanced by the sublimation of ethical subjectivism to “the principle of law and order” that “apportions to each his privileges and his limitations, his obligations and his rights” (254).  This entirely public medieval ethos can be seen in the practices of the tournament and justification by trial in cases of dispute.  I posit that this view of the nature of the relation of the individual to the group is the basis from which gradually evolves the “new” concept of the individual, private conscience.
	The individual conscience is driven, by the time Gawain is written, not by shame, but by guilt.  Guilt is the internalization of codes of behavior, thus creating a self-policing function within the individual: a conscience.  Social stigma are still in place, but only in vestigial forms: the court of law deals with a much narrower scope of issues than did the tournament.  The idea of trial is internal; ideally, the individual is swayed toward right action not by the collective disapprobation of his or her peers, but through the compunction of “universal truths” (Vinogradoff 35).  Justification is no longer based on individual cases, but on precedent and internal codification of behavior.  Erikson says that the individual “can gradually develop a sense of moral responsibility, where he can gain some insight into the institutions, functions, and roles which will permit his responsible participation” (256) in any situation.
	Such a shift from public justification to internal moral responsibility is posited by Erikson in terms of psychological states reached during adolescence (shame) and adulthood (guilt).  However, when this argument is applied to the same sort of shift between the time of Roland and that of Gawain, an interesting distinction must be made in defining the term “individual.”  Robert Hanning, in The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, posits that the defining factor in the literary individual is “depiction of the inner life,” (15) which motivates each character to respond subjectively “and in sharply differentiated ways to a given narrative situation” (14).  While I agree with Hanning in principle, his notion of individuality is static, and needs to be augmented if it is to be useful in my analysis of the changes occurring in the texts under study.  Another definition of the developing individual consciousness occurs in John Benton’s “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality.”  Benton argues that the marks of the “internal voice” to be found in twelfth-century prosody are conventionalized, agreed-upon, public constructions.  It may be of assistance to quote Benton at some length:
Though there is a perfectly good Latin word for “self,”. . . there is no medieval word which has anything like the meaning of “personality,” and persona was still defined in the twelfth century primarily in its etymological sense as a mask held before an actor. . . . [A] medieval person could never verbalize the idea of having a “personality.”  (Renaissance and Renewal 284)
A synthesis of Hanning’s and Benton’s arguments produces an interesting working definition of “individual”: a psychological concept that develops more fully as the “inner life” begins to replace public notions of proper conduct.  In other words, the individual qua character becomes differentiated, as time progresses, from “the individual”--a conceptual means of defining the self and its role in social encounters.
	The Gawain poet, writing circa 1380, takes the internalized notion of the psykologos a step further than von Strassburg, in that Gawain posits a new, wholly conventional individual character.  The story of Tristan and Isolt is made tragic because of an unknowing error, a caprice of fate.  The Gawain poet shows that the guilt-based consciousness has been assimilated and accepted fully by medieval culture because he artfully uses irony to point to the possible faults in the new system.  While Tristan’s deceptions may be possibly explained away as necessary for his honor (he is responsible for the safety of his men, for instance), the only time Gawain is false, it is to save his own life, and it burdens him with guilt.  The Gawain poet also points very early on in the narrative to the vainglory and folly that the new system of consciousness produces:  Gawain must be provoked to accept the Green Knight’s challenge; the vestiges of the old shame-based system are shown to interfere with the proper functioning of guilt.  In this manner, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is comparable in kind to The Song of Roland, where an accepted social system is shown to have its weaknesses.
	Gawain himself is a re-mythologizing of the individual.  Just as Charlemagne merits his own mythos in the Song of Roland, Gawain is presented as an embodiment of the Celtic sun god, Wª (Berington 307), and thus is imbued with his own fantastic elements:  the story is set in winter, when the sun wanes in intensity;  it is interesting to note that Gawain’s challenge begins after Christmas--close to the winter solstice, after which the sun’s power increases.  Gawain, as an individual, guided by his own internal sense of honor and guilt, is so versed in the ways of courtesy that he is seen as an example:  “Each man whispers to his neighbor, ‘Now we can watch the finished arts of courtesy. . . since we have given welcome to a knight who is the paragon of good breeding’” (350).  Gawain instructs those in his host’s castle, but not didactically:  the servants take it upon themselves to watch Gawain.  The process of the sublimation of the “rules” of courtly behavior is not seen as necessary to be taught to Gawain, unlike the cases of Perceval and Tristan, whose educations in the finer points of chivalry are delineated in their stories.
	When Gawain is tempted by his host’s wife, he displays the proper command of etiquette required to at once rebuff her advances, yet not offer offense.  hen she surprises him in his bedchamber, he defuses the situation with tact, giving wit for wit in the combat of dalliance:
“Good morning, sweet lady,” said Gawain cheerfully.  “Everything shall be done to me as you like, as I am well content, for I yield myself as your prisoner, and pray you for favor. . . . will you then grant me a boon and release your prisoner for long enough to let him get up and out of his bed and get himself dressed? (357)
Gawain trusts in his own rhetorical skills to stay within the bounds of gentility while he refuses the lady’s advances.  This is the height of self-control; the internalization of the passions has taken place to such an extent that the lord can trust Gawain in bed with the lord’s wife.  Indeed, even the wife soon sees that Gawain’s trust cannot be broken through sexual advances, and says “Even if I were the loveliest maiden on earth, he left his love-making behind him when he set out on this journey” (359).
	Gawain makes a bargain with the lord; they promise to exchange whatever they get during Gawain’s stay at the lord’s castle.  When the lord gives Gawain the game from his hunts, Gawain repays the lord with kisses on the cheek (363-373); neither breaks his promise.  However, when the lady gives Gawain her charmed sash, purported to render the wearer impervious to weapons, Gawain does not give it to the lord when the time comes for the exchange (374); Gawain breaks his word.  This sets up his encounter with the Green Knight, who is really the lord at whose castle Gawain had been staying.  The Green Knight wounds Gawain by nicking his neck--a token punishment for having broken his word.  The promise that Arthur spoke of to Kay in Perceval is shown to be the root and underpinning of all courtly behavior; the bond of the oath regulates wit, deceit, and dalliance, and thus is shown to be the primum dictum of the internalized consciousness.
	The social system depicted in the Song of Roland is one in which a single concept underlies the manner in which individuals relate to one another:  the oath.  Throughout the upheavals in the social construction of identity that follow in the next few centuries, it is the notion of keeping one’s word that regulates the interaction among men and women.  Alongside this constant develops the internalization of the meaning of “a promise.”  For Roland, a promise is a public pact, to be sworn in the company of others, and to be enforced by the public shame of breaking one’s oath.  Gawain, on the other, views an oath as deeply personal, sworn by one person to one person; the enforcement of a promise is due to the guilt suffered by the oath-breaker.
	In other words, the characters in each of the works I have studied mirror the historical development from a public-sphere idea of the individual, based on shame and the approval or disapproval of one’s actions by one’s peers, to an individual consciousness, based on an internalized sense of guilt and the approval or disapproval of the conscience.

Works Consulted
Benton, John F.  “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality.”  Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century.  Eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable.  Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982.  263-298.
Berington, Joseph.  The Literary History of the Middle Ages, Comprehending and Account of the State of Learning from the Close of the Reign of Augustus to its Revival in the Fifteenth Century.  London: Routledge, 1883.
The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215.  The Internet Medieval Source Book.  Ed. Paul Halsall.  Online posting: [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html].
Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism.  Eds. Kevin Kerrane and Alex Preminger.  New York: Clarendon, 1974.
Coulton, G[regory] G.  Ten Medieval Studies.  Boston: Cambridge UP, 1906.  Rpt. Boston: Beacon P, 1959.
Dronke, Peter.  “Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages.”  New Departures in Poetry: 1060-1150.  London: Oxford UP, 1970.
Erikson, Erik H.  Childhood and Society.  2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1963.
Hanning, Robert W.  The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
Ker, W. P.  Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature.  London, 1896.  Rpt. New York: Dover, 1957.
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-1375.  Eds. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott.  Revised ed.  Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.
Poole, Austin Lane.  Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries.  London: Oxford UP, 1947.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Trans. M. R. Ridley.  Medieval Romances.  Eds. Roger Loomis and Laura Loomis.  New York: Modern Library, 1957.  324-389.
The Song of Roland.  Trans. and introd. Dorothy Sayers.  New York: Penguin, 1957.
Strassburg, Gottfried von.  Tristan and Isolt.  Trans. Jessie Weston.  Medieval Romances.  Eds. Roger Loomis and Laura Loomis.  New York: Modern Library, 1957.  88-232.
Troyes, Chrétien de.  Perceval, or the Story of the Grail.  Arthurian Romances, Including Perceval.  Trans. and introd. D[avid] D. Owen.  Everyman Classic ed.  London: J. M. Dent, 1991.  374-496. 
Tupper, Frederick.  Types of Society in Medieval Literature.  New York: Holt, 1926.
Vinogradoff, Paul.  “English Society in the Eleventh Century.”  Essays in English Medieval History.  Ed. Paul Vinogradoff.  London: Oxford UP, 1908.