| Abstrakt: |
With his translation and expansion of Manuel des peches, Robert Mannyng wanted to guide both a lay and a clerical audience in their understanding of sin and engagement with confession. To do so he had to navigate various contrasting demands, such as exposing clerical shortcomings without driving parishioners away from their religious leaders, or teaching on sins of the tongue without inciting his audience to commit them. This paper shows that Handlyng Synne, Mannyng's carefully constructed penitential text, achieves its aims, to a great extent, by employing different modes of speech representation, which allow him to foreground or background information as required. The discussion explores how the varied representation of speech facilitates the audience's strong emotional connection with the text, as well as the delivery of Mannyng's pedagogical message and the avoidance of potential pitfalls. Reaching a novel understanding of the functions of speech representation in the text is made possible by the application of a specially adapted framework for the study of the many different ways in which speech could be reproduced in medieval texts. With this comprehensive approach, this paper moves beyond the narrower focus- common in previous scholarly work on the text-on direct speech as a narrative technique simply aimed at making the text more appealing to a lay audience used to being entertained by oral narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
