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Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Ph...
Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry
Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.
The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages
This study of the definition of literature in the late medieval period is based on manuals of writing and on literary commentary and glosses. It defines a method of reading which may now profitably explain medieval texts, and identifies new primary medieval evidence which may ground and guide new reading. Allen chooses texts whose commentary tradition provides the greatest opportunity for completeness. The most important of these is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medieval readings of Ovid bring into focus a number of major literary questions—the problems of fable and fiction, of unity imposed by miscellany poetry, of allegorical commentary, and of Christian use of pagan culture—all in connectio...
Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing
The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.
Literature and Ethics
This volume examines the crucial relationship between literature and ethics, as it has developed and changed from the late medieval period to the present day. The focus of the volume is predicated upon three interrelated themes: instruction, judgement, and justice. Previous studies of literature and ethics have often been restricted to a limited chronology and generic focus; the present volume covers a range of periods, texts and genres in order to provide a wider illustration of the relationship between the literary and the ethical.
Ethics and Medievalism
Essays on the modern reception of the Middle Ages, built round the central theme of the ethics of medievalism.
Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature
Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.
William of Malmesbury and the Ethics of History
"William of Malmesbury, arguably the greatest English historian of the twelfth century, repeatedly emphasises that the primary purpose of all literary and intellectual activities is to provide moral instruction for the reader, the most famous of his statements to this effect being found in his monumental work Gesta Regum Anglorum, where he categorises history as a sub-discipline of ethics. However, modern studies have chosen to focus on other aspects of William's oeuvre and tended to dismiss such claims as perfunctory nods to a pious commonplace. This book differs from recent orthodoxy by being based on the proposition that medieval professions of the moral aims of historiography are in fact...
Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition
'Nature' is a highly important term in the ethical discourse of the Middle Ages and, as such, a leading concept in medieval literature. This book examines the moral status of the natural in writings by Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others, showinghow-particularly in the erotic sphere-the influences of nature are not always conceived as wholly benign. Though medieval thinkers often affirm an association of nature with reason, and therefore with the good, there is also an acknowledgement that the animal, the pre-rational, the instinctivewithin human beings may be validly considered natural. In fact, human beings may be thought to be urged almost ineluctably by the force of nature within them towards behaviour hostile to reason and the right.
