earticle

영어

This article examines two aspects of autobiography, taking for example Guibert de Nogent's De vita sua sive monodies. First, his autobiography, as a person's record, shows how a person became a medieval intellectual: his birth, his education, becoming a monk, election of abbot etc. The fact that he wrote his life after he became abbot. It is assumed that this retrospection is based on the development of self-consciousness, which is not necessarily individualism. The medieval self-consciousness was favored by the sacrament of confession and the idea of private property. Second, autobiography is the mirror of the society. He gives vivid history about the revolts of Laon and the communal movement in twelfth century. The story is often taken as an example of the process of urban uprising: evil conduct of the upper class as cause, and gathering of the masses and their violence, and final harsh suppression. The marriage of his parents shows the transition from knightly marriage to clerical marriage. The former is conjugal relation for the property and descendants, and the latter is characterized as the self control of desire. The story that his father died early before Guibert grew up, implies that Guibert was predestined as a monk and that the prayer is superior to the man of war. So we can read a tripartite society divided by function in shaping in the eleventh and twelfth century. But it is noticeable that his life is very analoguous to Augustine's. So in the next studies, we must examine the similarity between Guibert's De vita sua and Augustine's Confession, and the difference between Guibert's book and Abelard's Historia Calamitatum in the context of medieval intellectual traditon.