The principal argument of Bynum in "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?" is that some modern historians of the medieval period have claimed too much for evidence that the clerics of the period who expressed a strong sense of the self were articulating their individuality within the Renaissance and modern meaning of making man the measure of all things. She develops the view that 12th-century religious discourses about the individual are really evidence of a search for clear identification of personal and social roles, in the context of a more general preoccupation with spiritual experience as life experience. "The development of the self was toward God," she explains (87), and not toward fulfillment of an idiosyncratic search for satisfactory expression of personality, psychology, creativity, etc. That, in Bynum's formulation, was a dynamic of human experience that did not flower until several centuries later.
Bynum argues against scholars who locate the concept of the "discovery of the individual" in the 12th century, in favor of what she sees as the more precise "discovery of self." Even the latter term, she explains, must be understood with a great deal of qualification. Citing scholars who argue that 12th-century contemplative discourse shows "a new concern with self-discovery and psychological self-examination" and individual capacity and drive for achievement, she nevertheless holds that a close reading of contemporaneous documents does not support such a dramatic conclusion. Religious texts of the period, in her view, looked for self-expression by means of a search for an appropriate way and an appropriate group (religious or social) in which to live (85). That would explain the proliferation of religious orders and their competition for, as it were, the hearts and minds of adherents.
At the extremes, some groups might be ostracized as heretical, but by and large the emergence of various religious orders shoul...