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The thirteenth-century Manuel des pechiez, by William of Wadington, contains an early use of personification for pastoral instruction in its dramatized, multi-voiced depiction of the sin of sloth, which stands out among the treatment of the other seven deadly sins. The slippery, in-between qualities of this sin lent themselves well to an experiment with the fictive humanness of personification. Making sloth simultaneously a recognizable, ordinary human figure in a realistic landscape and an embodiment of utter spiritual failure allowed William both to encourage his audience’s self-examination and to explore the potential, and the boundaries, of personification itself.
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