Neurodiversity in late medieval English literature: Hoccleve, Kempe, and Malory

Carolyn Sue Gonzalez

doi:10.25820/etd.008231

This dissertation examines late medieval English literature through the lens of neurodiversity studies, arguing that cognitive and affective difference is not marginal but constitutive of the period’s literary culture. Focusing on the works of Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory, I trace what I term a “neurodivergent arc” across late medieval writing: a trajectory in which instability, rumination, excess, and breakdown are central to authorship, sanctity, and chivalry. Reading these texts through neurodiversity theory reveals that cognitive difference, affective intensity, and mental variation not only appear as themes but also organize medieval literary form itself. The project positions late medieval literature as a crucial site for understanding the long history of neurodivergence and its entanglement with identity, spirituality, and authorship. This study intervenes at the intersection of medieval literary studies and critical disability theory, responding to the growing imperative to extend neurodiversity studies beyond modern contexts. Whereas disability studies has profoundly reshaped how scholars interpret embodiment, difference, and identity, neurodiversity studies invites renewed attention to the workings of mind, perception, and affect within historical texts. The term “neurodiversity,” coined by Judy Singer in the late 1990s, describes the natural variation in human cognition and challenges the medicalization of atypical minds. Building on the work of scholars such as Nick Walker, Julia Miele Rodas, and Steven Kapp, this dissertation treats neurodiversity as a critical heuristic rather than a diagnostic tool, using it to interpret how medieval authors render cognitive and affective variation meaningful within their cultural and theological frameworks. My methodology combines the theoretical insights of Walker’s neuroqueer theory and the Damian Milton’s “double empathy problem” with close reading and historical contextualization, showing how literary form mediates divergent experiences of thought, emotion, and embodiment. Methodologically, this project avoids retrospective diagnosis and instead employs neurodiversity as an interpretive heuristic. By pairing contemporary theory with medieval cultural context, I show how literary depictions of breakdown and excess participate in long histories of cognitive difference. This approach foregrounds the ways medieval texts imagine difference through repetition, sensory overwhelm, and emotional excess—features often pathologized in modern contexts but richly aestheticized in premodern literature. Neurodiversity here functions as a mode of critical attention: a way of reading for the interplay between instability and meaning, fragmentation and coherence, that animates late medieval poetics. By pairing contemporary theory with medieval cultural context, the project demonstrates that literary depictions of breakdown, rumination, and ecstasy participate in long histories of cognitive diversity, revealing continuities between medieval and modern ways of representing mental difference. Chapter One analyzes Hoccleve’s Complaint, Dialogue with a Friend, and Learn to Die as a sequence that dramatizes the fragility of identity and the difficulty of reestablishing social trust after breakdown. Traditionally read as evidence of Hoccleve’s attempt to repair a damaged reputation, these texts are here reinterpreted as sustained meditations on cognitive instability and social perception. Their recursive structures, oscillating tones, and affective volatility become formal enactments of non-normative cognition. Drawing on neurodiversity studies, I argue that Hoccleve transforms instability into a poetic principle: his self-reflexive, recursive narration gives voice to what we might now understand as neurodivergent modes of thought and feeling. Rather than striving toward a stable authorial coherence, Hoccleve’s writing demonstrates how neurodivergent voice emerges through textual dissonance, revealing the porous boundary between poetic innovation and cognitive difference. Chapter Two turns to The Book of Margery Kempe, situating it within both the history of mysticism and the embodied realities of postpartum crisis. I foreground obsessive rumination, religious scrupulosity, and sensory ecstasy as key dimensions of Kempe’s spirituality, arguing that her sanctity is inseparable from traits often pathologized by modern critics. Through recursive narration and affective excess, Kempe constructs a spiritual identity rooted in forms of cognition that resist containment by clerical or medical authority. Her unrelenting weeping, compulsive speech, and cycles of obsession—rather than undermining her credibility—constitute the very texture of her mysticism. Reading these behaviors through feminist disability studies and neurodiversity theory reveals how The Book transforms cognitive difference into a site of theological meaning. The work’s fragmented narrative structure and collaborative authorship further exemplify how neurodivergent modes of storytelling challenge the ideals of unity and coherence that have long governed literary interpretation. Chapter Three examines Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur through the lens of affective overload, rigidity, and cognitive shutdown. Situating Malory’s writing within his biography as a “knight-prisoner,” I argue that the romance repeatedly stages knights on the edge of collapse—Lancelot in mutism, Tristram in frenzy—thereby dramatizing the limits of chivalric reason and emotional control. These moments of breakdown reveal the affective instability underlying the chivalric code, exposing how absolutist cognition and emotional excess shape both character and narrative rhythm. Malory’s portrayal of knightly crisis thus participates in a neurodivergent poetics of excess, in which affective extremity becomes central to literary meaning. By placing Malory alongside Hoccleve and Kempe, I show that the aesthetic of instability—whether spiritual, psychological, or moral—forms a connective tissue across late medieval genres. Together, these chapters construct a comparative model of what I call the “neurodivergent arc” of late medieval literature: a pattern in which cognitive and affective intensities generate both literary innovation and new forms of subjectivity. This arc reveals how instability and excess, far from signaling failure or deviance, serve as engines of creativity. In Hoccleve’s reflexive lyricism, Kempe’s devotional autobiography, and Malory’s fractured chivalric narrative, neurodivergence becomes the condition of possibility for artistic and spiritual insight. Each author translates personal or cultural experiences of breakdown into aesthetic strategies that reconfigure meaning through recursion, repetition, and emotional intensity. The dissertation makes two major contributions. To disability and neurodiversity studies, it extends the field into the medieval archive, demonstrating that cognitive difference has long informed literary expression and cultural production. To medieval literary studies, it reframes Hoccleve, Kempe, and Malory not as exceptional figures but as writers whose works are structurally shaped by cognitive and affective variance. In doing so, it challenges normative models of coherence, rationality, and stability as benchmarks for literary meaning. More broadly, it intervenes in ongoing critical conversations about the history of the mind and the relationship between embodiment, emotion, and thought. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that medieval literature does more than reflect theological or medical discourses of health and impairment: it creates imaginative spaces where instability, intensity, and excess are rendered meaningful. By tracing a “neurodivergent arc” across Hoccleve, Kempe, and Malory, I show that difference is not a deviation from medieval literary culture but one of its driving forces. Neurodiversity, rather than being a modern invention, offers a vocabulary for recognizing the deep historical entanglement of cognition and creativity. Through this lens, late medieval literature emerges not as a record of disorder but as a testament to the generative potential of divergent minds: it creates imaginative spaces where instability, intensity, and excess are rendered extraordinary literature about extraordinary people.

Neurodiversity in late medieval English literature: Hoccleve, Kempe, and Malory

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Details

Metrics