Individuality and Identity in the Middle Ages

Within the field of medieval studies, a number of interrelated terms and concepts centered around the idea of the individual and individual identity have drawn a great deal of critical attention over the years. If we begin by citing Louis Dumont's definition of such an individual from his Essays on Individualism – ‘the independent, autonomous, and thus essentially nonsocial moral being” (Dumont 1986:25) – then broadly speaking, we can say that during much of the history of medieval studies, scholars largely rejected the possibility of such individuals in the Middle Ages. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of scholars began to point to at least the avatars of modern individualism in the Middle Ages. Among the most prominent examples which one could cite are Marie-Dominique Chénu's L'Eveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (1969) and colin Morris's The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (1972). This trend produced a contrary response, epitomized in its early form by evelyn vitz's argument that medieval individual identity was always a matter of merely quantitative difference (being more beautiful, more heroic, etc.) and never a question of qualitative distinctions which we might call (from a modern perspective) “individualistic” (vitz 1975).