Stealing obedience : narratives of agency in later Anglo-Saxon England

What follows attends to the discourse of monastic obedience driving three different narratives: the first of an abbot and a professed monk, the second of an oblate, and the third of a man contemplating conversion to monastic life. What I should like to argue is that attention to these narratives of obedience in both the polish of their surfaces and the fractures those surfaces conceal will show an intimate interconnection between monastic identity and a construction of agency markedly different from our own.