Autobiography, biography and personal identity : an interdisciplinary disquisition

Spender, Barbara Anne (1998) Autobiography, biography and personal identity : an interdisciplinary disquisition. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis consists of a series of reflections on the nature and interpretation of personal identify in the twelfth century. It is the product of an interdisciplinary study in which I sought to establish, amid the many dissimilarities between that age and our own, some continuities of attitude and experience.

The work is divided into four parts, the first being an introduction in which I describe the general principles and auto/biographical framework on which it has been constructed. In Part Two I begin to move away from a wholly subjective, twentieth-century perspective to a discussion of attitudes and culture in the twelfth century, ending with a specific example of how the perception of lives then and now can be distorted by prevailing fears and prejudices. In Part Three I examine three twelfth-century biographies, selected both for their value as representatives of three distinct orders of late medieval society and for their significance as evidence of a chronological shift in attitudes to identity. Part Four is a conclusion in which I consider briefly how concepts of identity changed in the twelfth century, the nature of the finished thesis and the consequences of engagement in the research process.

The whole is undertaken against the background of my own autobiography which is intertwined in the text to illustrate the reciprocity of study.

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