The confessional practice that develops after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 makes possible a new cultural and literary discourse of the self. This book explores the impact of confessional discourse on fourteenth-century European literature. The approach is interdisciplinary. The author studies examples of the -confessional- texts of Augustine and Abelard as well as the vernacular didactic literature on confession after 1215. This literature creates a new and more popular language of the self. The literary texts of Chaucer, Machaut, and Juan Ruiz clearly demonstrate the influence of a confessional -self- and use the language of confession to explore and construct the self as literary subject."