Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (The New Middle Ages)

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T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

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Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers

Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney

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The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

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On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

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Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley

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Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature by J. Allan Mitchell

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ETHICS AND EVENTFULNESS IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

J. Allan Mitchell

ETHICS AND EVENTFULNESS IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

Copyright © J. Allan Mitchell, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7442–6 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7442–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitchell, J. Allan (John Allan), 1971– Ethics and eventfulness in Middle English literature / J. Allan Mitchell. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7442–X (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Ethics in literature. 3. Fortune in literature. I. Title. PR275.E77M58 2009 420.9'384—dc22

2008042106

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Myles


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction: Conceptual Personae

xiii 1

1

On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event

11

2

Love and Ethics to Come in Troilus and Criseyde

27

3 Consolations of Pandarus: The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse

47

4 Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics

69

5

Telling Fortunes in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes

87

6

Moral Luck and Malory’s Morte Darthur

111

Notes

131

Bibliography

167

Index

183


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n a previous book I explored the intentional and instrumental purposes of medieval narrative, and the appreciable moral autonomy of its writers and readers. One of my aims was to go some way toward promoting the “ethical turn” in medieval studies, a field that had for some time (quite rightly) resisted the anachronistic and inf lexible moral criticism popular in the middle part of the past century. Of course, I’ve not been alone in urging new, nuanced discussions of the moral aspects of medieval literary experience, a scholarly topic that has developed a sizable bibliography (attesting to what Bruce Holsinger has dubbed, somewhat sardonically, the “ethical chic”), and I owe much to those who have advanced our understanding in this area. I rely on more critics than I can cite who have shared common cause or constructive criticism. Partly in ref lecting on the limitations of my previous work, and on the degree to which the bias against moral criticism has been overcome, I have shifted my focus: whereas before my analysis was premised on the relative freedom of readers to construe texts ethically, now I am more impressed by what happens to moral agency under the pressure of internal and external contingencies. My guiding question throughout has been this: How much is ethics like an adventure anyway? To the numerous interlocutors who took my question seriously, I am grateful. They include generous and sagacious audiences at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol and at the Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies at the University of Kent. I owe particular thanks to Ann Astell, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Peter Brown, Graham Caie, Evelyn Cobley, Patrick Grant, Iain Higgins, Peggy Knapp, Gary Kuchar, Erik Kwakkel, Simon Meecham-Jones, Robert Miles, Russell Peck, Helen Phillips, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Stephen Ross for their encouragement and advice. I am especially indebted to Kenneth Clarke for his many excellent suggestions in the final stages, and to Bonnie Wheeler and the Palgrave editorial staff for shepherding the book through the press. Pieter de Leemans and Pieter Beullens patiently responded to my queries

xiv

AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

about pseudo-Aristotle. Serina Patterson and Kate Soles proved able assistants. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors and infelicities. Both the British Academy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported my research at various phases. Thanks to a Faculty of Humanities Fellowship at the University of Victoria, I was afforded time to complete the book. The second chapter develops ideas originally explored in “Romancing Ethics in Boethius, Chaucer, and Levinas: Fortune, Moral Luck, and Erotic Adventure,” Comparative Literature 57.2 (2005), pp. 101–16, and in “Criseyde’s Chances: Or, Courtly Love and Ethics About to Come,” Levinas and Medieval Literature, ed. Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2009). The fourth chapter is a revised and expanded version of an essay in the volume John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). The brief discussion of Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird in chapter five is a compressed version of my analysis of the poem in “John Gower and John Lydgate: Forms and Norms of Rhetorical Culture,” A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350– c.1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 569–84.

INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTUAL PERSONAE

Fortune makes our Vertues and Vices visible, just as Light does the objects of Sight. La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections1 What we are as humans is always more our accidents than our accomplishments. Odo Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental2

W

hatever else may be said about fortune and cognate notions (hap, sort, cas, chaunce, aventure), rarely do medieval texts ignore such contingencies and their consequences. For all the major writers there is something compelling, if inevitably frustrating to human cognition and conscience, about the existence of so much adventitious circumstance. Variously signifying that which is happy, risky, catastrophic, surprising, or simply unknown, fortune in one way or another is expressive of the circumstantial disorder encountered within the temporal realm. Writers often address the issue figuratively, and somewhat paradoxically given the hypostasizing fiction involved, employing prosopopoeia. Dante writes in Inferno 7.72–96 that Fortune functions as a divine deputy but nevertheless remains unpredictable and hidden from our view, “like a snake in grass.”3 Petrarch says in his De remediis utriusque Fortunae that humans, unlike other creatures, are engaged in an “ever present war with Fortune.”4 Boccaccio devotes a large quantity of the Decameron to retailing the struggle. As Pampinea opines, there is no end to such talk of Fortune, which is not surprising “when you pause to consider that she controls all the affairs we unthinkingly call our own, and that consequently it is she who arranges and rearranges them after her own inscrutable fashion, constantly moving them now in one direction, now in another, then back again, without following any discernable plan.”5 It is as if merely discoursing on the topic, and crafting rhetorical figures and elaborate personification allegories, granted some measure of control over the aleatory and implacable force that is called Fortune. But inasmuch as Fortune is just a name conferred on a refractory reality, formalizing the hazards of experience,

2

ETHICS A N D EV ENTFU LN ESS

writers do not elude its irrationality and incorrigibility: they only disperse it in language. Like the Italians and often under their inf luence, Middle English writers are equally expansive about human vulnerability to happenstance, and to cite just a few examples—anticipating the focus of this book—we see John Gower’s Confessio Amantis imparting the remorseless pronouncement: “His oghne chance no man knoweth, / Bot as Fortune it on him throweth.”6 John Lydgate translated the Fall of Princes “to shewe Fortunys variaunce” throughout history, and Malory’s Morte Darthur has King Arthur dream he is pitched from Fortune’s Wheel.7 If these sometimes sound like banal commonplaces, the main purpose of this book is to reinvest the language with its full range of ethical implication, recovering the contingencies of a conventional idiom. My supposition is that when medieval writers deploy specific terms and tropes relating to fortune, they are articulating a conspicuous openness to various accidental phenomena, the history of which has yet to be told in a way that adequately captures their radical eventfulness. “But what is an event, in fact?” François Dastur offers a useful preliminary formulation that can guide us toward a fresh understanding of the novelties of medieval fortune: “The event in the strong sense of the word is . . . always a surprise, something which takes possession of us in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us towards an unanticipated future.” 8 There are several related philosophical definitions to choose from, as we will see, but what most current thinkers denote by l’événement is something exigent and ecstatic, a phenomenon under the sway of which intentional and instrumental accounts of being in the world are called into question. Here we recall Pampinea’s statement that Fortune “controls all the affairs we unthinkingly call our own,” except that it might be better to say that in fact Fortune—a sort of regulative fiction derived from thinking—does not own all affairs either. Texts examined in this book repeatedly concede that humans are so subject to contingencies (even if the soul is safe from them), indicating that the event of being is not solely a modern predicament. Further, both medieval and modern writers can agree that events are not invariably oppressive: as though coming from nowhere, the fortuitous event can arrive as a surprising gift. Its gratuitous nature recalls the etymology of fortuna, a term deriving from the Latin verb ferre “to bring” and so signifying “that which is brought.” In medieval writings many things fall into this category (happily falling into place), and are equally prone to resist categorization (tragically falling out of place), but in any case that which is brought into the orbit of human experience by the event is risky and often ethically demanding. I focus on how several Middle English writers engage contingencies into which humans find themselves thrown (as Gower

C ON C E P T UA L P E R S ON A E

3

says), including the mixed fortunes of sexual attraction, traumatic accidents, political disasters, social contests, and the textual condition itself— locating in the event the very potentiality of the ethical life. But why do I give conceptual priority to the singularity of event? Because Lady Fortune, whether representing a divine agency, adversary, or mystery, is not always obviously fortuitous in the sense to be elaborated in this book, my critical assumption throughout is that it is necessary to submit the personified figure and related representations to an analysis of event. Fortune can appear to be locked into a mechanical cycle, merely measuring finite intervals between events rather than becoming immanently eventful: such is the Wheel of Fortune as a sort of fait accompli, betraying its name as a predictable, predicable normative principle. Fortune is then a sign less of human vulnerability than of self-assurance, an attempt to arrest and transcend the f lux of experience, as if one could cash out the troublesome phenomena in language. Much scholarship has been devoted to the currency of the medieval figure, exhibiting a long-standing interest in literary and pictorial images of Lady Fortune.9 Yet conventional iconographical analyses have failed to theorize fortune as an ethical and eventful potentiality. One of the purposes of my book, then, is to swing the conversation around so that we see fortune less as a transparent medium (a static picture or principle) than as a difficult and occasionally opaque set of errant phenomena, reversals of expectation, startling events—singular and prior to social or aesthetic categorization. Granted, the task of criticism is itself risky when it moves beyond instrumental figures and forms to talk about their eventfulness. The critical moment is to encounter the past (no less), undertaking to remain faithful to textual events and their aftereffects, rather than transforming into objects of knowledge what were only ever ongoing projects. The argument I am making shares Jeffrey J. Cohen’s interest in urging a critical practice that thinks beyond history to consider eventualities, possible pasts and futures, multiple lines of f light, “becoming over the immobilities of being” (italics original).10 What is at stake in following these temporalities will become clearer as we proceed with the analysis of particular cases of lovers loving, thinkers thinking, writers writing. Indeed, questions that have not often been asked about the reification of Fortune: When does the device become a sign of the singular event it conceals? How far is the concept of fortune measuring something of the immanence of events even as it seems to attempt to transcend them? How do poets and prose writers employ fortune in specific, contingent textual situations? Even the most routine fortunes can disclose residues of the event they must possess if only to encrypt, or, to adopt a witticism of Deleuze and Guattari, “Even illusions of transcendence are useful to us and provide vital anecdotes.”11

4


Fortune may indeed count as one among other “conceptual personae” that Deleuze and Guattari describe as populating the history of philosophy: a persona deriving its authority by cultivating contingency (“as if it seizes a handful of dice from chance-chaos so as to throw them on the table”) only to impose rules by which contingency is parcelled out (“establish[ing] a correspondence between each throw of the dice and the intensive features of a concept that will occupy this or that region of the table, as if the table were split according to the combinations”).12 Here it is useful too to recall Derrida’s description of the way aleatory chance paradoxically depends on its opposite (“machinic regularity, predictability”); that is to say, hazards are inherent and inevitable in any system.13 The challenge, then, is to approach fortune as evidence of something genuinely singular (rather than systematic), futural and fortunal (rather than fated), effectual (irreducible to the order of ordinary causation), traced within the mechanism of a literary device or discourse. True, the phenomena sometimes easily slip out of view, but that is the nature of events: as François Lyotard suggests, events are like lightning f lashes that make things appear so radiant as to blind themselves.14 Language may enable us to look askew at them, or at least to inspect the lambent residue. On this understanding language comports us obliquely toward something novel, signifying and possibly activating untimely and fortuitous events without being held captive to literary conventions or creeds. Irreducible to a fixed idea or ideology, Fortune must again be seen as a generous sign discharging an ecstatic energy. But there are many such signs that limn something of l’événementiel within the domain of Fortune, and by a characteristic medieval anamorphosis they can include their contraries. I have already suggested that a formal figure can give expression to something unformed and quite unprecedented. Likewise, divine intervention proves to be one form that contingency can take: as if suspending their conventional antagonism, Fortune and Providence indeed seem capable of articulating an immanent continuity among temporal phenomena. A late medieval Latin poet, contemplating a motto worn by Lady Fortune in one of her guises, captures the equivocal nature of this shared phenomenality: “Hoc ea iuris habet quamvis sine iure feratur: / ‘Cuncta petas, nil do. Nic pete, cuncta dabo’ ” (This device is hers by right, though she wears it wrongfully: “Seek all and I give nothing; seek nothing, I’ll give all”).15 Gower, in his Vox Clamantis lamenting Fortune’s “euentus inconstanciam,” writes: “Est o quam verum, quod habenti multa dabuntur, / Qui tenet et pauca perdere debet ea!” (Oh how true it is that much is given to him who has much, and he who possesses little must lose that little!).16 From an orthodox theological standpoint, Fortune appears in these accounts to


5

be appropriating the singular gift of Christ, making an illegitimate, even blasphemous claim.17 But if this is all we have to say about the situation and shared idiom, part of the analytical work required here is to recover the sense in which the operations of fortune can be plotted along a continuum with the activities of a benevolent and ineffable providence. As might be expected, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy will be a necessary touchstone throughout this study of fortune and associated phenomena, and I will be examining his carefully considered view of the hidden substratum of sacred or divinely ordained events. What needs to be recovered is the way medieval poets were able to revile and revere Fortune, or at least hold in the mind two antithetical possibilities at once, as Dante does in describing her as perniciously snakelike (l’angue) and yet blessed (beata).18 The legacy of this complex attitude is still there in Joyce’s “fiery goodmother Miss Fortune,” a naughty-and-nice figure who is simultaneously dangerous and alluring, temperamental and tender, a potential misfortune and a mistress of good fortune.19 But the purpose of this study is not limited to abstract speculation on theodicy or the conceptual niceties of events and their effects. In the spirit of Odo Marquard’s remark that “What we are as humans is always more our accidents than our accomplishments,” I am especially interested in pursuing the fortuitous dimensions of ethics, and in particular the way contingencies—Gower’s euentus inconstanciam—leave their mark on practical reasoning and the realization of duties and desires in the event. The idea may at first seem counterintuitive if one assumes that moral agents are not ordinarily held responsible for things that happen to or around them; a compelling human aspiration to autonomous, rational self-ref lection can make such a conception of the subject seem improper. Can one be possessed by an ethical event for which one has not prepared? Is not self-possession a necessary condition of any ethical act? Is there such a thing as moral luck? To glimpse answers we only have to think how often medieval love poets set in motion a narrative train of events that limits choice while making meaningful commitments and identifications possible, producing amatory dilemmas that individuals take to be central to their conception of themselves as moral agents. To take a conspicuous example that falls within the purview of this study, Chaucer’s Criseyde is right to observe that she cannot be forced to love against her will, but she discovers it is also not possible to love by force of will. Indeed love, never the instrument of any single agency, is arguably about as intimate as we ever become with the event.20 Because no account of its visible signs or symptoms fully describes the event, love is the discipline of remaining faithful to something one cannot comprehend; more than the sum of its parts, love is ever emergent and under construction, demanding future

6


decisions all the time. This is a medieval understanding of affect: indeed a commonplace in most discussions of the fortunes of love is that it has a legitimate and happy affective force, compelling the individual will to stand outside the subject, yielding important ethical insights—and competing demands—that Chaucer and his followers found interesting to contemplate. Two identifiable prejudices have so far made it difficult to consider medieval events from the vantage of ethical agency and radical contingency such as I have begun to describe here. According to one venerable opinion, first of all, fortune is but a feeble illusion that masks the true causes of weal and woe. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is supposed to have given definitive expression to the idea long ago, though as we will shortly see this gravely overstates his case. Interestingly, modern critics and cultural historians still tend to reproduce variations on the “Boethian” argument, if now in political rather than theological terms. Fortune is routinely treated as though it were not contingent but rather the causal result of some ulterior design (e.g., ideology, discourse, power, ego, etc.), aiming at the prescribed telos of some intentional and instrumental purpose. The mistaken assumption, in my view, is that the positing of fortuitous events in medieval texts is at best an enchanting artifice and at worst an ideological contrivance that ought to be stripped of its power to deceive. Part of what must be resisted is the temptation to domesticate events, especially tragic events for which one may seek solace in analysis of social formations and causation. Nietzsche believed tragedy had died in the modern age just because of the relentless optimism of theoretical man whose strong rationalism still seems to be mobilized against the tragic. Derrida names this optimism the “hermeneutic compulsion” that the scientist has in common with the superstitious. It is also the paranoiac tendency of the overzealous analyst who turns every random slip or lapse of the analysand into a truth revealed, finding symptoms in every mistake.21 Now some questions need to be asked again in view of the medieval evidence: What is lost to history when we redescribe fortune as something other than fortuitous? How much of what is meant by Fortune in medieval writings is just an inability to find adequate causes to explain some of the most significant lapses or catastrophes of history? Perhaps more damaging to genuine historical understanding is the modern assumption that any genuine sense of contingency was precluded by “medieval determinism” or some other inhibiting consciousness that prevented an appreciation of random or accidental events. On this view, the human adventure had to await a modern zeitgeist. Fortune has indeed often been enlisted by scholars of earlier periods in the service of a “renaissance” awakening from a benighted “medieval mentality,”


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becoming the emblem around which the periods that define current institutional boundaries are built and sustained within the academy. For example, with the advent of the new learning and a full-scale revaluation of fortune in Montaigne and Machiavelli, a newly recovered sense of virtus (courageous, manly activity) supposedly replaced the medieval idea of passive detachment in the face of fortuna (thereby figured as an effeminate if not emasculating medieval identity). This is the familiar story according to which, in the so-called Machiavellian Moment documented in the celebrated account of J.G.A. Pocock, fortune became a new and affirmative force with which to reckon. Endorsing the main idea, Hanna F. Pitkin sanguinely observes that in time fortune became “less grim and more promising, less inexorable and more amenable to human intervention.”22 Gerda Reith’s The Age of Chance assumes that it took the eclipse of the age of faith for a similar change to occur; in the absence of particle physics and probability theory our medieval ancestors had little consciousness of the random or meaningfully contingent apart from God.23 Such histories have led to a shrunken view of personal agency in the past whereby medieval people were inevitably passive, otherworldly, and fatalistic. These ideas are insupportable; nor do they give an adequate account of human agency in general. Those who have attended to the problem of fortune in the context of literary history have tended to focus almost exclusively on early modern writing, and unsurprisingly the disproportionate amount of interest in this area implicitly reinforces the biases against medieval fortunes.24 Except for the rare example of John Bowlin’s Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics, philosophy too gravitates to other periods besides the medieval.25 The two complaints levelled against premodern fortune—either it is too medieval, or it is not medieval enough—have militated against fair descriptions of its dynamics in the literature. A new history of the old literary and philosophical idiom is therefore necessary if we are to challenge f lawed period stereotypes and false teleologies. Attitudes are changing. In his latest book on medieval political rhetoric and poetry, Paul Strohm identifies “a revised, more hopeful view of the individual’s relation to Fortune” that runs through several fifteenth-century texts—in what he dares call a “pre-Machiavellian moment”—making possible new theories of statecraft and the active life.26 Can we not extend our emerging sense of the ethical (not just political or grandly historical) complexity of fortune to earlier centuries? I think we can, and others are beginning to show the way. A fascinating recent study of fortune in early French poetry is Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency. Emphasizing as he does the subjunctive tense of the Roman de la Rose, Heller-Roazen offers a fine model of sustained

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ref lection on the accidental nature of language, literary activity, and the life of moral agents as envisaged by important medieval poets.27 My purpose is to introduce a similar set of concerns into the study of English texts from around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where the ubiquity of Lady Fortune should be enough to suggest how overwhelming the problem of contingency, temporality, and eventuality was for such writers. In my first chapter, “On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event,” the philosophical stakes of this endeavor are set out in relation key medieval thinkers whose legacies live on in and through modern theory. Boethius is notable here not just for his tremendously inf luential experimental work of philosophical consolation, but also for being a locus classicus for ontological accounts of singularity. His statements on singularity indeed helped shaped much later debates in the history of ideas (represented in the modern predicament of Hegelian Sittlichkeit). In this context I look to later medieval neo-Aristotelianism for signs of the event to come, and conclude by examining a postmedieval and surprisingly ultramodern, Heideggerian inheritance that is the German and French phenomenology of the event. Subsequent chapters explore literary examples of various contingencies. The second chapter on “Love and Ethics to Come in Troilus and Criseyde” argues that for Chaucer good fortune is constitutive of—even as it remains conditional upon—the ethical relation. I turn to Emmanuel Levinas to elucidate the way in which the ethical adventure can be figured in medieval “courtly love.” Chaucer and Levinas indeed seem similarly to extrapolate from the particular case of love-longing: for them a series of events is necessary to activate the lover’s desire for the other, and the ethical and political ramifications for personal agency and affectivity are immense. But there are problems with this account when it comes to Criseyde, and the chapter is concerned with the challenge of Levinasian ethics in the face of her destitution. My third chapter on “Consolations of Pandarus: The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse” examines two texts in which it is possible to track the reception and revision of earlier writings, most notably Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, indicating how texts become subject to their own singular fortunes. Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love takes a page from Chaucer’s romance in order to develop an extended ethical inquiry into freedom and fortune, affection and will. His is a relatively systematic exercise, carried out in the vernacular, anticipating a point about secular ethics that I will explore later in the book. In the final part of this chapter I turn to The Chaunce of the Dyse, a Middle English parlor game that capitalizes on the coincidental resemblances that can be identified between


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individual players and Chaucerian characters. Here is a case that indicates how in fictions and their afterlife, l’amour de fortune is not an inconsequential cliché but an affecting means of exposing intersubjective affairs. The fourth chapter is dedicated to “Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics,” and claims that along with Thomas Usk if not Chaucer himself, Gower is engaging in a “vernacular ethics” that adapts the resources of Latin academic philosophy to deal with pragmatic issues thrown up by contingent fortune. Gower’s long poem exhibits a practical, provisional, this-worldly ethical sensibility, and my particular interest relates to the way in which moral agents can be mistaken in the event about what is ethical. Gower offers a version of ethical motivation and action that is largely contingent on the resources of practical reason and rhetoric (i.e., instead of revelation), and this proves a considerable liability. But this liability is also the only possibility of “getting it right,” in the sense of finding adequate grounds for ethical action. Gower indeed puts in focus the dangers of relying on scholastic notions of moral certitude and rectitude, and in the process vernacularizes what originally belonged to Latin learning. The fifth chapter on “Telling Fortunes in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes” shows how a leading fifteenth-century poet comprehended the difficulty of dealing with contingent history. Lydgate writes under the commission of a prince who sought to rise above events, but everywhere—and especially in the sixth book of the Fall—he shows that poets and princes alike are beholden to Fortune. Lydgate’s long work of de casibus tragedy at once deploys and disavows the rhetoric of Fortune, betraying anxieties about his uses of the past in the present. Fictionalizing history, the poem manages to explain something of the significance of fortune without explaining it away. Finally, the sixth chapter on “Moral Luck and Malory’s Morte Darthur” is about the paradoxes of what Thomas Aquinas calls unintentional agency, and here I propose that to make sense of special cases of misfortune the cherished notion of mens rea will not suffice. I turn to Bernard Williams’ theory of moral luck in an attempt to clarify why Malory’s good knights cannot always claim sanctuary from accidental misdeeds. The interrelation of chance and manly virtue is especially momentous in Malory’s Morte, constituting and destroying identities and communities, ameliorating and degrading the personal worth of knights. Here I revisit the question of how chivalric masculinity is constituted by the chances and changes of events.


CHAPTER 1 ON FORTUNE, PHILOSOPHY, AND FIDELITY TO THE EVENT

. . . all fortune is good. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy1 For you may be as practical as is predicable but you must have the proper sort of accident to meet that kind of a being with a difference. Joyce, Finnegans Wake 2

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edieval philosophers may all have agreed that the gifts of fortune ultimately come as the just dispensation of a benevolent God. Such divine benefaction is provident and orderly, as Augustine put it, “because He is God, not fortune.”3 As I will elaborate in this chapter, however, when philosophers subsumed fortune within the higher order of providential causation and care, they made important discriminations about fortuitous phenomena and acknowledged the residual importance of eventfulness even when at pains to deny the immanent connection. Here we should already see why it is necessary to have recourse to something like the modern theory of event, insofar as the old term “fortune” threatens to foreclose debate over issues that were so obviously fraught for medieval thinkers. Anachronism, as this chapter will argue, indeed has its advantages. Given Augustine’s quarrel with the pagans whom he witnessed worshipping a goddess called Fortune, we can hardly expect him to have conceded much authority to fortune. Yet in disavowing fortune, he did not reject its given phenomena and ethical consequences. He comes to terms with the issue belatedly. In his Retractationes Augustine confesses his error in previous works that employed the word “fortune” too readily, inadvertently conferring credibility on pagan notions: But I regret that, in these three books of mine [viz., De Academicis libri tres], I mention fortune so often, although I did not intend that any goddess

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be understood by this term, but a fortuitous outcome of events in good and evil circumstances, either in our bodies or extraneous to them. It is from this that we have those words which no religious scruple forbids us to use: perchance, perhaps, peradventure, possibly, haply; but all of these should be applied to divine Providence . . . . I regret that I spoke about fortune in this way since I realize that men have a very bad habit of saying, “Fortune willed this” when they should say, “God willed this.”4 (Italics original)

Augustine wished to acknowledge fortune de dictu but had trouble finding the language. Later medieval philosophers were far less apprehensive and offered subtle reconceptualizations of the phenomenology of fortune de re, as we will see. For his part, defining the providence that some mistakenly call fortune, Augustine says of God: “he gives in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but thoroughly known to Himself.”5 The theological point is true and yet, in an important epistemic and ethical sense, only trivially so; fortune remains an ineliminable and singular aspect of human experience and epistemology because of the very hiddenness of God, the Deus absconditus of Isaiah 45:15. So Augustine recognizes the persistence of what he called “fortuitous outcomes of events in good and evil circumstances,” leaving it to later writers in more fortuitous circumstances to articulate the meaning of this alienation from providence, the temporal and moral condition of being-in-the-world. The all-too-human condition calls for a particular sort of thinking. A most important successor figure here is Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius whose tremendously inf luential Consolation of Philosophy will occasion much ref lection below about modes of experiencing and discerning contingencies. As a piece of natural philosophy attempting to reckon with fortune, Boethius’s book knows its limitations. Epistemological constraints are acknowledged in the oft-quoted statement: “Everything which is known is not known according to its own power but rather according to the capacity of the knower” (V.pr.4). Fortune is one phenomenon that utterly depends for its existence on the capacity of the knower. But the limitations do not all fall on the side of human cognition. Consider the fact that a divine intelligence cannot ever be frustrated or surprised by events: “For divine Providence anticipates every future action and converts it to its own present knowledge . . . . God has this present comprehension and immediate vision of all things not from the outcome of future events, but from the simplicity of his own nature” (V.pr.6). God sees all events simultaneously, while humans see them successively. God therefore renders necessary what for humans is contingent and temporal. Another and more revealing way to put this is to say that no divine being can see or sense contingent phenomena quite as

F O R T U N E , P H I L O S O P H Y, A N D F I D E L I T Y

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humans do, an inference that had profound ramifications in the history of ideas. Cicero had already taught that fortune is in this way recalcitrant to divine reason: “For nothing is as opposed to reason and constancy as fortune, so much so that it seems to me that even a god cannot have knowledge of things that are to happen by chance and fortune. For if he knows them, then they take place with certainty; and if they take place with certainty, then there is no fortune. But there is fortune.”6 Christian philosophers who followed would attempt to accommodate fortuitous phenomena within a theistic framework, as Aquinas did by distinguishing between particular and universal causation.7 An interesting corollary to all this is that events take effect in the relatively independent domain of the saeculum. In relation to human sensation and cognition, chance and mischance remain potent forces and secular concerns, and it will be the purpose of this chapter to track various articulations of this exigent fortune. Already the methodological consequences are immense. Aquinas’s teacher, Albertus Magnus, argued that because every inquiry occupies a delimited discipline, philosophers must take an appropriate stance toward contingency so as not to deprive it of consequence. While there are occasions to inquire about necessity or divine providence, Albert asserts: “it is senseless to ask about these things in this field [of contingent particulars], for these questions can only be resolved on the basis of the principles of science that we study . . . . These questions must be resolved on the basis of their own principles.”8 To understand fortune qua fortune, philosophy advances only so far with theological speculation; fortune must be allowed to give its own sense hic et nunc. Owing to the peculiar temporal and moral demands of fortune, there are grounds to think that a mundane, strictly atheistic perspective is required. Where can we get this sort of perspective? How does one remain faithful to events of fortune? Here we can begin to frame a rationale for taking postmedieval approaches to the evidence, as I do throughout this book in having recourse to recent theories of event. For indeed, some of the most demanding thinking of event is to be found in the phenomenological tradition extending from Martin Heidegger down to Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, among others. An aspect of the event about which they agree is its belatedness, which is to say events are only ever pronounced retrospectively. If these thinkers can help us frame contingencies anew by producing the necessary phenomenological reduction, perhaps then we have a justification for critical anachronism (the theory may be anachronistic, but at least in this case we are dealing with a theory of anachronism). Badiou’s Being and Event, the single most important recent contribution to the field, puzzles out a useful prescription for “post-evental fidelity” that

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constitutes ethics and politics after the fact. On his analysis an “interpretive intervention” is required before one declares that there has been an event, after which one undertakes the discipline of keeping faith with the event, if possible.9 This chapter attempts one such intervention into the history of ideas. But the methodological dilemma standing before us should also be approached the other way around. Heidegger and his heirs can only be understood once we return to the medieval theories on which they depend, given that a rich vein of thinking about contingency, singularity, and temporality runs a jagged but unbroken path from Aristotle through Boethius and Duns Scotus to Heidegger and Badiou. In some respects, then, this chapter will be about medieval events that take place in having passed before us now. To begin, I return to Boethius who advanced inf luential philosophical accounts of fortune and accidental individuation that informed all subsequent debates. Then I consider how late medieval Aristotelians, in the wake of Boethius, refined understandings of mental and extramental contingencies. Scotus’s notion of radical singularity is an essential touchstone, and his particular energies suggest that the fourteenth century was a period of profoundly creative ref lection on the issue. By the end of the chapter, key Heideggerian conceits should come into view as the inheritance of medieval ontologies and epistemologies. Fortune, Philosophy, and the Individual One of the basic paradoxes of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, expressed with such candor that it is easily passed over, is that the instability of fortune is the chance to cultivate moral maturity and philosophical complexity. Recognizing that “misfortune often turns [weak men] around and forcibly leads them back to the true good” (II.pr.8), Lady Philosophy will reveal that fortune is not irrelevant but constitutive of the larger philosophical endeavor. But before exploring this fairly advanced notion about contingency and moral causality, Philosophy draws attention to the stabilizing effects of fortune. Philosophy’s immediate therapeutic goal is to show that the prisoner’s complaints are overstated. So Fortune—brought forward in book two by Philosophy as an impersonated figure—is invoked to defend herself against the unfair charges. She refers here to her original role in human survival: “When nature produced you from your mother’s womb,” Fortune explains to the prisoner, “I found you naked and lacking in everything. I nourished you with my abundant gifts, and, being inclined to favour you (an attitude which you now seem to hold against me), I endowed you with all the aff luence and distinction in my power” (II.pr.2). The point is at once obvious (none would grow up to cultivate


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a philosophical attitude if it were not for good health and nurturance) and deeply consequential, reminding the prisoner of his original dependence on fortune. The very grounds on which he is complaining are themselves fortuitously given. One of these gifts is the identity Boethius recognizes himself as possessing as his very own, and this includes his mental facility and ethical commitments. This notion of contingent individuality has interesting correspondences elsewhere in the corpus of the philosopher that are worth pondering before moving further into the Consolation. The issue Boethius engages is the perennial ontological problem of individuation, and according to Jorge Gracia, Boethius’s “texts became the source of all subsequent discussions of individuality until the thirteenth century and even after.”10 Indeed the standard view was to regard accidents as producing individuals, following Boethius’s Commentary on the “Isagoge”: For individuals are predicated of singulars, as Socrates and Plato. And those [things] are individual to the highest degree which fall under the pointing and indication of a finger, as this bench [and] this [one] approaching, and those which are designated by some noted accidental peculiarity, as if someone wishes to pick out Socrates he does not say “Socrates” lest there be another who perhaps is called by this name, but he says “the son of Sophroniscus,” provided Sophroniscus had only one [son].11

Boethius elaborates that accidental properties belong to none other than Socrates (e.g., “if he had been bald, snub-nosed, had a protruding belly, and other bodily features, or customs, or a [peculiar] way of speaking”), and the set of accidents constitutes his own identity. Such are the properties that “happened to him accidentally and formed his shape and figure.”12 In Boethius’s De Trinitate 1.24–31 we can find a related account of numerical diversity: . . . three men differ neither by genus nor species but by their accidents, for even if we mentally remove from them all other accidents, still the places for each are diverse, which we cannot by any means make into one place, since two bodies will not occupy one place, and place is an accident. Wherefore it is because men are made plural by their accidents that they are plural in number.13

Here the principle of differentiation is paired-down to mere spatiotemporal location, that is, the contingent “place” (locus) of individuals. The singularity of being an entity is discovered in being just the contingent set of coordinates that locate one here and now. The view came to be contested, once Abelard questioned the propriety of putting accident before

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substance in this manner, and Scotus will have something to say about just this passage on the plurality of individuals. But the Boethian solution remains a benchmark throughout the medieval period, and it also helps explain the claim of Lady Fortune in the Consolation of Philosophy. Leaving aside the ontological question of individuation for a moment, for Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy there are already serious ethical and epistemological problems that arise from the accidents of individual existence. Fortune has begun by teaching the prisoner to cherish her personal gifts, and these are formidable; but another interest of the text lies in what she gives Philosophy. For one thing, and especially in view of the fact that Philosophy brief ly takes on her character, Fortune is apparently useful as a propaedeutic to Philosophy. Granted, Fortune is no less of a scandalous, two-faced figure in this dialogue. But as if to get a handle on the inchoate reality emblematized by Fortune, Philosophy makes Fortune instrumental to her own purposes. Fortune describes the game she plays in a famous illustration of her main device that will resonate down through the centuries: “I spin my wheel and find pleasure in raising the low to a high place and lowering those who were on top. Go up, if you like, but only on condition that you will not feel abused when my sport requires your fall” (II.pr.2). The arbitrariness of her spinning wheel could represent some solace for the prisoner, if he chooses to take it as such, as Fortune says: “What if my very mutability gives you reason to hope that your fortunes will improve?” (II.pr.2). But Philosophy will not let him hope for such an unlikely event, at least not yet. Early in the dialogue she instead advocates a kind of stoic detachment—recommending the example of the man who “hopes for nothing and fears nothing” (I.m.4)—and opposes any such optimism: “If you want to see the truth in clear light, and follow the right road, you must cast off all joy and fear. Fly from hope and sorrow. When these things rule, the mind is clouded, and bound to the earth” (I.m.7). It is this austere dogma that modern critics have too readily identified as constituting the entirety of Boethian doctrine, a philosophy of self-mastery and self-denial indifferent to the world, directed stalwartly against the vanity of human wishes. But this is a mistake. At this early stage, Philosophy is only acting strategically, saving her “strong medicine” (I.pr.5) for later. Even as she attributes instability to the figure of Fortune, Philosophy is in fact covertly adapting her reasoning to time and place, rhetorically constructing an argument that is mindful of circumstances here and now, looking for the timely moment to administer her remedies.14 Philosophy, in other words, retains an interest in the vicissitudes of time and change. Fortune—ostensibly the villain of the piece—is more than a figure to be discarded on the way toward philosophical enlightenment.


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What she represents emerges as a fundamental datum and mode of operation without which enlightenment will not come in the Consolation. The point is easily missed due to the fact that the fourth book redefines fortune as something providential. But the new label does not annihilate contingency so much as displace its origins and return us to the original eventfulness figured by Fortune. In an extended passage, Philosophy, explaining how providence works ethically through contingent events, lists several possible reasons for good fortune: Take, for example, the man so fortunate as to seem approved by both God and men; he may be so weak in character that if he were to suffer adversity he would forsake virtue on the grounds that it seemed not to bring him good fortune. Therefore God in his wise dispensation spares the man whom adversity might ruin, so that he may not suffer who cannot stand suffering. Another man who is perfect in all virtues, holy, and dear to God, may be spared even bodily sickness because Providence judges it wrong for him to be touched by any adversity at all. (IV.pr.6)

Philosophy goes on to enumerate the possible causes of bad fortune: To others, Providence gives a mixture of prosperity and adversity according to the disposition of their souls: she gives trouble to some whom too much luxury might spoil; others she tests with hardships in order to strengthen their virtues by the exercise of patience. Some people fear to undertake burdens they could easily bear, while others treat too lightly those they are unable to handle; both types are led by Providence to find themselves by trials. Some have earned worldly fame at the price of glorious death; others, by not breaking under torture, have proved to the world that virtue cannot be conquered by evil. No one can doubt that such trials are good and just and beneficial to those who suffer them. (IV.pr.6)

In her list of alternatives Philosophy invites her interlocutor to imagine the moral utility of fortuitous events, however providential their source. A detailed look at one of her examples clarifies the point. She goes on to discuss hard cases where the wicked become prosperous. What possible rationale could one find in the divine dispensation? If the wicked man “is so reckless and violent that poverty might drive him to crime, Providence may cure his morbid tendency by making him wealthy. When such a man recognizes his viciousness and contrasts his guilt with his fortune, he may perhaps become alarmed at the painful consequences of losing what he enjoys so much. He will then change his ways and behave himself as long as he fears the loss of his wealth” (IV.pr.6). There are several consequences to this reasoning. First, Philosophy has not beaten a path from

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the contingent world into the pure, immovable condition of the soul. She instead posits—as Aristotle did against Plato—hypothetical situations in which she imagines the effects good and bad fortune have on human character and conduct.15 Nor does Philosophy regularize events within a simple system of rewards and punishments corresponding to human vice and virtue. She produces a complex synthesis that preserves a sense of the fortuitousness of events, their utter exigency and dynamism, without which they would not function effectively. Calibrated to the needs of the moment, events are no less fortuitous for being divinely ordained. To take again the example of the reckless and violent man shielded from poverty, it is precisely due to the contingency of his situation in which he recognizes wealth may be lost that good fortune proves effective. There would be no urgent ethical decision or change in behavior otherwise. The result is an image of the moral life of an individual f lourishing and failing in accordance with the environment as much as due to individual choices. Philosophy does not dichotomize fortune and human felicity, but instead holds that a good condition is sometimes a singularly eventful one; employing the figure of Fortune in particular she indicates that individual identity and ethical values are ever contingent. Because events minimize and maximize opportunities for human excellence, Philosophy teaches that ultimately “all fortune is good” (IV.pr.7). Philosophy ends her lesson with a consolation along these lines—unlike the stoic remedies with which she seemed to begin—and enjoins the prisoner to have “worthy hopes” and “offer humble prayers to heaven” (V.pr.6). If this is a swerve away from her initial philosophical position (assuming the prisoner hopes for deliverance from, rather than through, death), it is because she exhibits an attachment to eventualities at the very climax of a dialogue meant to transcend fortune in communion with God. Certainly, Philosophy is not about to throw the prisoner back onto the Wheel of Fortune. She is telling him to put faith in the unpredictable alterations of a benign Providence. And at this point it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to tell faith and fortune apart. That is to say, Philosophy has accounted for human f lourishing and failing in a way that evokes the very same phenomenality she had previously associated with Fortune by assimilating Fortune to God. One may regard events differently; still, one regards events. Good Fortune and Singularity Boethius’s book concludes with having posited a mostly implicit phenomenology of fortune, and later medieval poets will hold on to the image


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of the moral life he describes. With the advent of the “new Aristotle,” later medieval philosophers were positioned to articulate the relationship between ethics and event in other ways that proved inf luential on contemporary and postmedieval understandings of the accidental condition of being. For these thinkers events would come into focus as psychological effects and ethical problems for human intentionality and intellection in a way they had not done in the Consolation of Philosophy, enabling writers to articulate anew the singularity and contingency of being. Two surviving works of Aristotle proved especially pivotal in late medieval discussions of fortune. The first, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, was translated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who made a complete Latin version available in the 1240s, before which time only parts of the work were disseminated in a version known as ethica vetus.16 Some medieval writers would subsequently attempt a kind of synthesis with Boethius, and indeed it is well established that the Consolation of Philosophy attracted the scholarly attentions of such late medieval “Aristotelianizing” commentators as Nicholas Trevet and William of Aragon.17 Others sought to remain as faithful as possible to Aristotle. Aquinas, for one, produced a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics,18 and Aristotle’s text also leaves a deep impression on the moral part of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.19 In the Summa, for instance, Aquinas follows Aristotle quite closely in acknowledging that “the blessings of fortune serve as useful instruments for acts of virtue, for by the help of riches, power, and friends the opportunity of achievement is presented to us.” Fortune especially facilitates the exercise of magnanimity: “Virtue is called self-sufficient because it can exist even without these external goods, though it needs them to perform its work with greater dispatch.”20 Aquinas claims that fortune may aggravate sin as much as it may assist virtue. Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics is the second work that must be reckoned in the context of his reception among medieval schoolmen, though its implications are not so widely recognized. Aquinas and many others can be found incorporating various ideas about fortune from it via the little known tract Liber de bona fortuna that passed on rare excerpts of the Eudemian Ethics (8.2, 1246b37–1248b11) and the Magna Moralia (2.8, 1206b30–1207b19).21 Something of the importance of this Latin tract derives from the fact that, as John Rist has observed, “De bona fortuna is not an excerpt from existing Latin translations of Magna Moralia and Eudemian Ethics,” since no Latin translation of the whole Eudemian Ethics was available at the time.22 Attributed by medieval copyists to Aristotle, Liber de bona fortuna represented a great discovery in the thirteenth century for the questions it raises about agency and contingency. One scholar has gone so far as to propose that the work would elucidate a middle way

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between l’homme primitif, with his vulgar superstitions about the powers of chance, and l’homme de culture, who arrogantly relies on instrumental reason. The new Aristotelians would instead become sensitive to the plight of l’homme singulier caught up in “l’aventure de son existence, sollicité par ses désirs, préoccupé de son future, angoissé devant les malheurs, aff ligé par la maladie, déçu en général part la malchance.”23 However that may be, the authority the pseudo-Aristotelian text commanded is witnessed in the debates it occasioned in Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus among others regarding the theological gifts, the eternity of the world, the inf luence of heavenly bodies, the natural dispositions and limitations of human reason. 24 The text gave rise to a late medieval moral psychology, furnishing a new understanding of contingent states of the mind and emotion, a topic that will preoccupy us in the third chapter. For now I focus on Duns Scotus whose early fourteenth-century philosophical thinking negotiates a path through Boethius and Aristotle, and moreover serves to bridge medieval scholasticism and modern phenomenology of the event. That events are not just facts in the objective order but rather significant moral pressures, cognitive possibilities, and emotional affects, could be said to represent the general picture medieval thinkers inherited from Aristotle and Boethius. From the former, Scotus would know that the rational mind is subject to irrational promptings based on affective stimuli that belong to de bona fortuna. Scotus was also familiar with Boethian accidental individuation, that is, that individuals are defined by ostensive properties and contingent locus. Yet Scotus was not content with this picture. On the authority of Aristotle, and under the pressure of Scotus’s own brand of intense particularism, the scholastic philosopher offered a new account of radical singularity, developing a notion that becomes a consistent point of reference in twentieth-century German and French phenomenology of the event. It is worth carefully unpacking his account of elusive singularity to see whether or how what follows is faithful to his thought. In Scotus’s Ordinatio (Opus Oxoniense) various competing principles of individuation are firmly rejected in favor of his own novel theory.25 Question 4 begins by quoting the aforementioned passage from Boethius’s De Trinitate (i.e., “Three men differ neither by genus nor species but by their accidents . . .”) but then goes on to deny that accidents can individuate entities. Acknowledging that they do make a difference to substances, Scotus argues that accidents cannot be the difference that makes a substance. Accidents are only predicated of substances in Aristotelian terms. Appealing to Aristotle’s definition of priority in Metaphysics V, Scotus explains that accidents cannot be “prior” to individual substances, but are


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rather “posterior” in the sense that they presuppose a substance of which they are incidental features. Scotus gives another, quite novel reason to reject Boethius when he speaks about the unity an individual substance must have in order to be the thing it is: “For in general, no quantitative part [i.e., accident] is the whole of which it is the part.”26 Scotus argues instead that an individual is a whole or unity; it cannot be broken down into other parts, for otherwise there would be no end to differentiation.27 To avoid infinite regression, Scotus argues for some positive criterion that defines individuals as primarily diverse. Differences, in other words, must come to an end somewhere. Such is the “ultimate reality”28 of the individual, the bedrock fact of being just “this” thing prior to all other attributes and accidents. Scotus consequently holds that the individual is a bare particular, an entity irreducibly and singularly “this” and not “that,” for which the philosopher invents the neologism haecceitas (thisness). Now in abandoning Boethian accidental individuation for an intensive and immanent haecceitas, Scotus seems to reject the contingency of individual identity that was entailed in the older theory. But in fact the distinction between Boethius and Scotus should not be overdrawn, as in one place they agree on the sui generis nature of individual entities. In Boethius’s Greater Commentary on Aristotle’s “De interpretatione” 2.07 137.3–16 we find: If it were permitted to contrive a name, I would call that certain singular quality, unshareable by any other subsistence, by its own contrived name so that the form of my proposal might be clarified. For let the unshareable distinctive property belonging to Plato be called Platonity—for we could name that quality Platonity by a contrived name, in the way in which we call the quality man “humanity.” Hence this Platonity belongs to only one man, and not to any given man but to Plato alone. Humanity, on the other hand, belongs to Plato and to anyone else who falls under the term. Accordingly, since Platonity is suitable to the one Plato, it happens that the mind of someone hearing the term “Plato” turns to one person and one particular substance.29

Boethius may have entertained more than one theory, or perhaps he saw no real contradiction among his views. He presumes that individuals come about accidentally (e.g., Socrates or Plato) while also bearing within themselves some unique individuator (Socrateity or Platonitas). Scotus regarded all this as conceptually problematic, leading him to advance the principle of here-and-now haecceitas. What then happens to accidental properties? Scotus does not see a way forward in the terms of Aristotelian categories (i.e., substance versus accidents), and so he proposes his own one-of-a-kind category haecceitas, and yet for all that Scotus construes

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individuation as its own vivid contingency—in which case we can say that instead of abandoning accidents, Scotus radicalizes the accidentality of being. The Scotistic alternative, in other words, amounts to a more sophisticated and thoroughgoing theory of the contingency of being (and has thus remained attractive to several postmedieval theorists), characterizing being in terms of what we today would call event. We may say that Scotus fulfils the promise of Boethius on two fronts, arguably remaining faithful to a founding event in his interpretative intervention: first, by finding a novel way of naming singularity, and second, by producing accident-like individuals (not accidental individuation). We can consider all this a result of Scotus’s stark particularism. So solicitous is he of the bare particular that, in explaining why an individual must be “this” and not “that,” Scotus leaves the mystery of haecceitas fairly unexplained. And so haecceitas, or what C. S. Peirce calls a “peculiar element, a blind insistency by which the nature crowds itself into a place in the world,” seems to supervene upon the causal order, unforeseen and incalculable.30 How indeed can one discern “thisness”? Scotus admits that individuals are so radically prior to all other qualities that “nothing per se can be abstracted from them.”31 Entities “agree in nothing the same,”32 and in their concrete singularity threaten to remain imperceptible. Fallen consciousness, Scotus claims, knows such individuals derivatively—not in their proper primary diversity. Thus, for instance, the individual entity as “singular does not have its own definition, but only has the definition of the species. So there is no proper demonstration of the singular, but only a demonstration that is about the species.”33 The human intellect considers things the same when they are actually finely differentiated, and consequently haecceitas eludes cognitive mastery. So, far from being epistemologically secure, haecceitas introduces something accident-like or eventful into the very ground of being; fidelity to the event, as it were, remains always limited and compromised by generic understanding. An “extravagant ontology”34 perhaps, Scotus’s theory thus puts the primary constituent of being well outside instrumental reason. For all that, haecceitas is not outside being. Haecceitas befalls being, and we struggle to remain faithful by inventing names and generating abstractions. Heidegger and Events of Being The early Heidegger was especially attracted to the thought of the Subtle Doctor and assumed he had found in Scotistic ontology a forerunner of Husserlian phenomenology. It may well be that he alighted upon an important successor to Boethian philosophy in Husserl. In any case, several scholars suggest that elements of Heidegger’s thinking intersect with,


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or are drawn directly from, related medieval understandings of beingin-the-world, which is less surprising than it might seem given that Heidegger was a former seminarian and, when still a young man, wrote his Habilitationsschrift on the thought of Scotus (and Thomas of Erfurt’s Grammatica speculativa then thought to have been the work of Scotus). However vigorously he may later have hailed the end of metaphysics, Heidegger was deeply indebted to Franciscan scholasticism and would inevitably draw on the resources of what McGrath calls “The Medieval Theological Paradigm.”35 Several others assume that his major ideas are therefore not restricted to the modernity Heidegger describes, and I concur that Scotus and Heidegger share a common backdrop against which their distinct construals become visible. Heidegger did not look at Scotus as a mere historical curiosity; as he says in his original book notice appended to the published Habilitationsschrift, Heidegger turns to the history of philosophy to shed light on the general problem of thought. 36 Two of the most important problems and points of convergence have to do with individuation and intuition, Scotistic notions that Heidegger exhibits to establish the claim that there are, in his audacious assertion, “phenomenological observations hidden in the scholastic way of thinking.”37 In one passage reminiscent of the style of scholastic argumentation itself, Heidegger makes of Scotus an example of what he takes to be haecceitas: “He has a greater and more exact proximity (haecceitas) to real life, to its multiplicity and possible tensions, than did the scholastics before him.”38 But how does one apprehend, as it were, this Scoteity? For a solution, Heidegger turns to Scotus’s idea of simplex apprehensio to describe how singular objects come into view in the intellect by way of passive intuition instead of rational abstraction. There is no ordinary cognition of haecceitas. Singularities are given to the intellect in a kind of imperfect, precategorical thinking. Heidegger thus remarks, “the individual as individual is not to be perfectly comprehended. There is left an ineffable remnant, which can at most be more and more closely approached, without ever being exhausted.”39 One can already see the germ of Heidegger’s notion of being thrown in the world, Dasein’s predicament as puzzled out in Being and Time. But that would come much later. Heidegger’s early thought in the Habilitationsschrift on Scotus, for its part, attempts to clear the ground for Scotus to come into being as an original phenomenon. This clearing for Scoteity is at once more and less dramatic than it sounds. Specifically, rejecting a naive correspondence theory of truth according to which the mind simply recognizes being (adequatio), Heidegger finds in Scotus a congenial mind groping toward the view that being presents itself (aletheia).40 “For judgement this means to be bound to the object.

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According to Duns Scotus, conformity with the object is not to be thought as simply a copy, a repetition of that which ‘lies in things,’ as if making a judgement also existed ontologically. The meaning content of the material object that comes to be given along with the form of reality proper to it is incorporated in judgement” (italics original).41 Scotus’s realist ontology, according to which things have an extramental reality they can disclose to the mind (i.e., they are no mere mental constructs that one can manufacture or manipulate willy-nilly), seems to have most impressed Heidegger. Both share a general background picture of the way thought emerges as a fact of experience; thought is no mere theory of experience. The givenness of things to cognition (i.e., what judgment obtains) will ever inform Heidegger’s view of being—what we may call the objectivity of objects, or their haecceitas. Heidegger eventually develops the view that such singularities are best understood as events, unrepeatable and concrete in their immanent facticity, as he elucidates by means of the notion das Ereignis. This may be the real fruit of Heidegger’s work on Scoteity. In the context of his evolving thought, Heidegger’s conception of event may be said to have summoned from haecceitas a concealed temporality and fidelity. For Heidegger the event (das Ereignis) is existence conceived of as the vivid, pretheoretical involvement in the world as opposed to a detached theoreticism that stands over and against being and devivifies life; one can say the event is historicity itself.42 Only by dwelling faithfully within Ereignisse does my own temporal experience come to light, an intimate sense of involvement that stands in contrast to process (Vorgang) where existence passes me by. Consequently, the event is marked by an upsetting emergency, “thrusts of time” that disrupt the forms of life that settle into ordinary, inauthentic existence (italics original).43 While Heidegger is known to have expressed considerable unease about what he called ethik, the moving event of which he speaks here is actually outstandingly ethical—bringing out another aspect of “thisness” that was only previously implicit.44 A Hegelian distinction between morality and ethics can help here. Given the difference between the immanent particularity of ethical practices or patterns of behavior (Hegelian Sittlichkeit) and normative rules of morality regulating behavior (Moralität), Heidegger clearly appears to stand on the side of the former. One way to put the point is to say ethics is situated in the factical event prior to congealing into abstract morality. There is no ethics of the event, but instead only ever an emergency here and now that demands ethics. Events are marked by an irreversible and irrational temporality, requiring new decisions all the time about what counts as ethical in the first place—just as Scoteity is a decision one makes about Scotus.


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Medievalism and Anachronism in Theory Yet to speak of the event is already to say too much, too late. In the presence of Ereignis Heidegger would say one cannot speak except with a kind of abiding and telling silence. Not total silence—the event speaks.45 The point recalls Boethius straining to denote Platonitas, Scotus’s signature haecceitas, and now Heidegger working out the meaning of Scoteity. Language evidently proliferates following the event because no one attempt to remain faithful entirely succeeds. Agamben for his part renders haecceitas as “what happens to something,” and Deleuze and Guattari employ the term to describe spatiotemporal becoming.46 Given the enduring legacy of Scotus today in these and other inf luential recent formulations, one critic has gone so far as to describe Scotus as “protopostmodernist.”47 But we might as well call postmodern theorists postScotistic, belated as they are in this respect. On the authority of medieval philosophical understandings, indeed we have to come to terms with the anachronistic nature of fortuna, individua, haecceitas, das Ereignis, and l’événement. Anachronism of course remains a danger for those who seek to describe the past, and Augustine’s original problem—seeking as he did to eschew idolatry—haunts us still. How to be faithful to the textual events of the past without reifying them (which is to say, without idolizing and idealizing) is a question of great consequence for the literary medievalist. Insofar as events bear a structural relation of future anteriority to singularity (so that the event always will have happened), fidelity to the future is not just unavoidable but also indispensable to medieval literary history. Come what may, events are going to be retrospectively assigned. We make up the past all the time. This could be reduced to a fatuous statement about the inescapable biases that corrupt historiography, but what theorizing the event allows us to see is that our most important and faithful affiliations with past texts (as with persons) are themselves constitutively temporal.48 The idea is limned in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” suggesting that the realm of the artifactual and aesthetic can be eminently ethical and eventful: “there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work.”49 Similarly, Heidegger’s pupil HansGeorg Gadamer argues that imaginative writing mediates, or perhaps one should say discharges, historical events: the experience of art is an “encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event.”50 Obviously echoing Heidegger in this formulation, Gadamer makes the work of art an “event of Being”51 involving the audience in a hermeneutic circle or feedback loop. In fact Gadamer distinguishes historical scholarship from criticism on these grounds, since the academic historian

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does not inhabit the event that is the text; texts for the historian typically have no “normative validity.”52 But other thinkers have come to the view that historiography possesses its own responsibilities to events. Michel Foucault, for example, seeks a history that retains a sense of its intrinsic particularity, calling historians to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality,” to recover the past prior to its ossification into determined causes.53 There are, then, several justifications for employing modern theoretical terminologies and understandings of the event. One is to imbue old terms with urgency again, generating a new perspective on a hoary figure—reanimating Lady Fortune and her Wheel. Other reasons are potentially more interesting, and they are intrinsic to the object of study. Literary texts bear a particular formal relationship to eventuality, and a faithful history of them must show how they operate in time. Events amount to the coming to pass of what has been; literary form is future-tending in just this way. If the event always arrives from the future, remaining unforeseeable and incalculable in its novel effects, shall we deny that some medieval events are only now happening in moments of retrospective disclosure? Passing before us, in other words, the past demands an interpretive intervention to make sense of singular phenomena. It may be objected that the event, so defined, does not allow for verifications of the sort one normally seeks in historical inquiry. But it is in the nature of some past events themselves to show up in the world as diffuse and recalcitrant to historical understanding. My purpose in this book is to clear the ground for a new account of worldly fortunes that is theoretically sophisticated enough to become historically accurate.

CHAPTER 2 LOVE AND ETHICS TO COME IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

Chance says, come here, chance says, can you bear to part? H. D., “Chance”1

F

ortune has long been treated as a cliché, ideological concealment, or negative theology when it appears in medieval literature. Rarely is it taken seriously on its own terms to signify something fortuitous or aleatory, as characters do within Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. There Pandarus, with his infectious optimism and fraternal affection, consoles the lovelorn Troilus by assuring him of the mutability of Fortune, “That, as hire joies moten overgon, / So mote hire sorwes passen everechon” (1.846–47).2 Chaucer added the passage in his rendering of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, amplifying and enriching the original Italian love story and raising the stakes on the moral and metaphysical issues involved in the ensuing events. The sentiment, expressed in all kinds of late medieval court poetry, attests to love’s radical dependency on Fortune. Troilus’s sorrow happily does turn to joy when he eventually consummates the affair, though certainly his weal proves quite transitory as his initial woe, a tragic conclusion some take as pessimistic proof that fortune has no merits, at least not in this case. But why should the lover not have hoped for a more fortuitous and durable end to his affair? Or rather, what else can a lover do but hope for the good fortune of reciprocal affection and lasting fidelity? Love is not unlike death in this fundamental respect: “Love and death will strike, come their time; only you have no inkling

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when that time is. Whenever it comes, it will take you unawares.”3 But unlike death the danger of love is that it will not come soon enough, or at all. Neither might it endure. Love remains a form of risk and future expectation. Erotic love is by nature a kind of volatile fortune and future contingency beyond human control. The Roman de la Rose accordingly teaches that this love derives from Fortune, “c’est l’amor qui vient de Fortune.”4 Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has Esperance console a lover to “take hope for improvement through Fortune’s mutability.”5 Alluding to the identity of Fortune and Love, Genius in Gower’s Confessio Amantis teaches that the latter spins “as the whiel aboute” and casts gifts as “he that pleieth ate dees.”6 Who would have love any other way? Courtship may end tragically as indeed it does in Troilus and Criseyde, but this may be through no fault of love per se, but rather, as medieval philosophers would say, per accidens. Criseyde will defend love against detractors on these very grounds—asking whether love is any “wers, though wrecches on it crien” (2.865). There are other grounds for thinking the erotic adventure is not just inevitably fortuitous but worth undertaking or enduring, indeed nothing short of an ethically responsible venture that conveys subjects into an unknown and possibly better future, and this chapter will be concerned with the several implications of that thought. If up to now there has tended to be resistance to such ideas, it is partly because as L. O. Fradenburg has observed, Fortune is a conf licted and compromised figure: “Fortune’s aporetic condensation of chance and necessity, significance and insignificance, figures a long-standing difficulty in the history of responsibility and therefore of tragedy.” Troilus and Criseyde is one site of the debate and a fine example of a love tragedy divided along such lines. Still, as Fradenburg observes and I will elaborate further, “many critics of medieval tragedy” resemble Boethius’s Lady Philosophy in desiring “to disperse this condensation, or turn it into something altogether different.”7 Some version of “Boethianism” has regularly been adduced to discredit the commonsense identity of the good life and good fortune.8 Fortune has been viewed uncritically as an evasion of responsibility or a feeble alibi; fortune is not the thing it appears to be. But what if the alternatives—contingency and necessity, fate and freedom, responsibility and irresponsibility—are not independent of one another in the way usually assumed? What if there is a responsibility for fortune? What if ethical responsibility arises as a radical passivity, a subjection to external fortunes and possible futures, a freedom entrammelled in contingency and temporality? On the narrative level, Troilus and Crirseyde certainly depends for its effect on reversals of fortune. Fortune propels the work forward—the narrative seeming to move in a way that is analogous to a revolution of the

L OV E A N D E T H IC S I N T RO I L U S

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Wheel of Fortune—and thereby gives shape to its moral issues.9 If readers experience the work as a tragedy (i.e., misfortune) this is because they are mourning for lost chances (good fortune). Eventfulness is thus central to the ethical sense and satisfaction (or equally, the disappointment) of the tragic: indulging in the pathos of what-might-have-been, generating longing for a better outcome, and implying there was something worthy of hope. But for the lovers, too, fortune has moral momentum. Troilus’s fidelity to love is exemplary and arguably qualifies him for his eventual apotheosis as a kind of virtuous pagan at the end of Troilus and Criseyde.10 So the adventures of erotic love, and beyond that the tragic personal and political events within which love is situated, seem in many ways to affirm fortune. Troilus willingly subjects himself to amatory Fortune: “Have I the nought honoured al my lyve, / As thow wel woost, above the goddes alle?” (4.267–68). In some past critical accounts he thereby demonstrates an excessive and irresponsible passivity, irrationality, carnality, even idolatry, but I will argue that on the contrary his acquiescence instantiates an ethical relation. What is particularly exemplary is the integrity (rather than autonomy) of the lover. To bear out this claim I turn to the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly some of his major statements that characterize ethics as a faintly (and at times explicitly) medieval affair. It seems to me profitable to bring Levinas and Chaucer to bear on one another both to illuminate the ethics of medieval romance and to test the medievalism of the modern theorist against a particular example. That Chaucer treats the ethics of the lover’s case seriously, yet without the solemnity of the ethical theorist, is one important difference between them. There will be other differences to explore. But the real test for this ethical reading will be Criseyde—and so a Chaucerian or “Criseydan” reading of Levinas is in order.11 To whose advantage is it to elevate her lack of agency to a virtue? Does she have the same chances as Troilus? A woman’s passivity and privation by fortune (easily rendered as her putative changeability and weak will) is liable to be considered no virtue at all. Political fortunes enter here and enable us to interrogate the ethical-critical undertaking, inquiring into the very bases of historical understanding. The novelty of a Levinasian approach is that it enlarges the significance of the woman’s subjection while allowing us to pursue larger and persistent theoretical questions that have so burdened modern discussions of a medieval phenomenon: that is, the politics of “courtly love.”12 Criseyde’s subjection yields a nonappropriative ethical relation, I will argue, putting her beyond the reach of narcissistic male fantasy attributed to courtly love by Lacan while simultaneously making more of courtly love than the amoral expenditure of desire described by Deleuze and Guattari.

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An Allegory of Love Troilus’s consent to love’s “right good aventure” (1.368) has to be preliminary to our understanding of Criseyde’s own fortunes. It is by means of a fatal gaze at the temple that, unexpectedly and with some comic appropriateness, the hitherto disdainful Troilus “Wax sodeynly moost subgit unto love” (1.231). Any pretensions to self-sufficiency he had possessed suddenly vanish. No longer the proud bachelor, Troilus soon slinks embarrassingly away to bed rather than face the recriminations of those other lovelorn soldiers he had mocked. Troilus proceeds to commit himself to love, of course, and embrace the risks attendant upon courtship: “with good hope he gan fully assente / Criseyde for to love, and nought repente” (1.391–92). But what could his assente possibly mean if he has already become love’s subject? Such love cannot be taken to imply autonomous and voluntary choice, and indeed love would naturally seem to preclude freedom of choice. Chaucer observes, soundly and eloquently, that love “soone kan” The fredom of youre hertes to hym thralle; For evere it was, and evere it shal byfalle, That Love is he that alle thing may bynde, For may no man fordon the lawe of kynde. (1.235–38)

Troilus is not free to choose to love. He is already and irresistibly subject to love, and by assenting can only reconcile himself to its necessity (which he expressly struggles to do in the Canticus Troili at 1.400–420, on which more in a moment). But assente is not just an attitude toward the past; it also embraces an unknown future “with good hope.” Troilus will take his chances, abide his aventure. Who knows whether it will end well? “It was to hym a right good aventure / To love swich a oon, and if he dede his cure / To serven hir, yet myghte he falle in grace” (1.368–70). Amatory fortune is therefore an eventuality to which he responds, but in an allusive sense of the term—obediently, passively, modestly—as one will who hopes to obtain a requital and “falle in grace.” The risk is that he may fall into disgrace. Risk of this kind, however, has its own virtuous rewards. Chaucer goes on to comment on the goodness that is made possible by love meanwhile, for “ofte it hath the cruel herte apesed” and “causeth moost to dreden vice and shame” (1.250, 252). Troilus becomes an example of love’s improving effect (1.1079–85 and 3.1804–6). The consequences of this representation of love and its aftermath are farreaching and deserve close scrutiny, for apparently the cherished notion of moral autonomy is put in doubt where important ethical values are concerned.13


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The example of the lover’s subjection opens the possibility of a responsibility that is not voluntary or contractual. But perhaps the real quandary is whether Troilus had a choice in the first place, and if not then how does his assente count as a form of moral responsibility at all? How could Troilus, in his utter dependency and passivity, be said to be a moral agent given that his freedom is precluded at the very moment it is summoned? It is the central question of Chaucer’s text, and one with which other poets had wrestled. On learning about the innate human desire to love, Dante queries Virgil in Purgatorio 18.43–75: “if love comes from a source outside of us, / the soul having no choice, how can you praise / or blame it for its love of good and bad?” Virgil answers that while it is true that humans have an inborn inclination to love, ethics consists not in the inclining but in freely assenting to its force.14 Ethics still requires the will: it is just that the ethical relation is one that takes for granted a moral sympathy one already possesses. Chaucer is characteristically less programmatic in his approach to such questions, working them out in relation to circumstantial determinants that limit freedom but do not on that account diminish the lover’s responsibility for fortune, and in the next chapter we will see Troilus specifically recasting Dante’s relatively more theocentric view of love expressed in Purgatorio 17.103–5. But for both Chaucer and the Italians at least ethics is seen as arising from some combination of freedom and necessity, spontaneity and conscious choice. Troilus engages part of this inheritance, for example, in his rendering of Petrarch’s Sonnet 132: “And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis” (Canticus Troili 1.414–15). A similar notion of responsibility may be sought in the writings of Levinas, where ethical responsibility is grounded in the “exteriority” of the other. For Levinas, responsibility is exterior to me; it is not chosen at all. “No one is good voluntarily.”15 He does not mean goodness requires our selfwilled austerity or disinclination, as in the ethical equivalent of “no pain no gain.” Rather, responsibility is not a matter of willing: it is “anterior to all logical deliberation summoned by reasoned decision.”16 Levinas’s work is dedicated to summoning the ethical relation along these radical lines, as subsisting in proximity and passivity and, especially, privation before the other. To his way of thinking, the other’s priority to my being generates ethical obligation at the same time that it restricts freedom. Obligation befalls the subject from outside. Indeed, ethics discloses itself as something chancy and contingent, and here we should not be surprised to find that Levinas is developing Heidegger’s logic according to which the truth of being is happening, an event, das Ereignis.17 Ethics, for Levinas more primordial than truth or being, is revealed as a comparable form of happenstance. John Caputo shares this view in arguing that

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ethical obligation is something that “happens.” “To say that obligations ‘happen’ is to say that obligation is not anything I have brought about, not anything I have negotiated, but rather something that happens to me. Obligations do not ask for my consent.”18 Derrida has claimed that ethics is subject to a similar logic. “No response, no responsibility, will ever abolish the perhaps”19 (italics in original) Caputo and Derrida are heavily indebted to Levinas’s notion that ethics is not voluntary, rational, or contractual but arises out of our being in the world. Levinas’s conception of the ethical relation originating in contingencies makes a deeper kind of sense of the paradox of the passionate lover who cannot help but consent, bereft of the sovereign will and subject to amatory fortune. But Levinas is drawing on a recognizable and affecting literary inheritance, appealing not just to any lover’s assignation but to a particular kind embodied in traditions of courtly and spiritual love, chevalerie and fin’ amor, as though ethics were a sort of knightly undertaking. This is evident early on in Time and the Other (originally published in 1947) where Levinas expressly alludes “to the great themes of Goethe or Dante, to Beatrice and the ewig Weibliches, to the cult of the Woman in chivalry.” He is making direct comparisons to late medieval literature (or a certain idea of the literature), forming a theory of ethics around stock motifs and metaphors that have both secular and religious provenance. Levinas goes so far there as to speak of the “virginity” and “mystery and modesty of Woman” to explicate the holiness of the ethical relation.20 Holiness points to the conventional quasi-religious valence of the exalted feminine inamorata, and here Levinas’s thought probably owes much to Jewish and Christian traditions of spirituality that represent the divine as courting and arousing the beloved soul.21 His direct reference to Beatrice points to his familiarity with the “eternal feminine” as ethical and spiritual exemplar, the sublime unattainable lady who serves to elevate and imparadise the mind of pilgrim Dante.22 Levinas may just as well have derived his notions of love from the spiritualization of sexual love set forth in secular literature such as the troubadour lyric and, of course, courtly romance. If the female beloved is central to Levinasian thought, so is the special means whereby the male lover (typically the errant knight) takes the adventure for her. In his later work, Totality and Infinity (originally published in 1961), Levinas refers to the “movement by which a being seeks that to which it was bound before even having taken initiative of the search and despite the exteriority in which it finds it.” Levinas is describing love as a “supreme adventure” that “is also a predestination, a choice that had not been chosen.” He acknowledges that such love can have a narcissistic aspect, satisfying “the most egoist and cruelest of needs,” compromising the desire for the total, transcendent other. Still,


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chivalric love “bears witness to an exceptional audacity” and remains an image and impulse of the ethical relation that is never really satisfied.23 Levinas’s presentation of love as contingent but necessary, free but fated, undertaken but given is a trope that is familiar enough from romance; this is the knight’s so-called destinal adventure.24 Whatever its origins, Levinas’s apparent medievalization of ethics is curious as much for what it may say about his theory as about medieval cultural formations. To Levinas’s way of thinking the lover’s disposition in the adventure makes his allegiance to fortune intelligible as, not irresponsible, but perhaps the most profound form responsibility takes. In what we may call this new allegory of love, Troilus can be understood as responsible in a radically passive and modest way because he responds with a willing spirit, that is to say, with a specter of a will. He does not choose to love from a position of autonomy or self-sufficiency; at best he loves in order to be able to choose. In fact Troilus so lacks anything like strength of will one may reasonably object that it is putting too fine a point on his behavior here to say it is ethical. Doesn’t Troilus’s conduct argue against any high-toned theorizing about heteronomy or passivity, when it is recalled that this lover is not even able to get himself into bed without swooning? “O thef, is this a mannes herte?” (3.1098). The point is admittedly difficult to accommodate to an ethical theory that privileges radical passivity, for Troilus and Criseyde may simply seem to displace the active will onto a third person (i.e., Pandarus as go-between). One man’s activity makes the other’s passivity possible, a point to which I will return. The objection about the lover’s emotional unmanning can be seen afresh in the context of Levinas’s theory. The comic business in Chaucer’s romance, particularly the lover’s emasculating inertia (which one may compare with the swooning tendencies of a Lancelot or a Guy of Warwick), is instructive in pointing to the lover’s subjection: love happens to him par aventure and does not arise from within the closed circuit of the self. Importantly, Chaucer’s courtly lover undertakes an erotic adventure not in an active, heroic sense at all. In his infatuation and self-abasement he becomes that slightly ridiculous male figure, whose total abandonment to love’s folie seems more important to him than masculinity itself, a common enough phenomenon in medieval romance. 25 What Levinas says of the lover in this regard serves as a useful way of understanding his unmanning: the self ’s trouble is not assumed by his mastery as a subject, but is his being moved, his effemination, which the heroic and virile I will remember as one of those things that stand apart from “serious things.” There is in the erotic relationship a characteristic reversal of the subjectivity issued from position, a reversion of the virile and heroic I. 26

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Troilus’s falling in love and his subsequent amorous incapacity, his right good aventure, is an erotic undertaking in this eminently medieval, effeminizing respect. It is the folly of love that removes itself from “serious things,” in virtue of which the lover becomes a serio-comic example of Levinasian ethics, which in turn figures what is at stake for any moral agent. The lover’s particular fortune is an adventure in an original, temporal sense of the term: à-venir, yet-to-come, futural, dislocated in time, to invoke a critical term central to the ethical theory of Levinas. Levinas— and Chaucer, I am arguing—has seized on just this image of the lover in his serio-comic intemperance as an affecting way of figuring ethics. Erotic love is for these writers not a passing ethical moment in the biography of courtly lovers, but rather nothing short of a “prototype” of the ethical relation. Criseyde’s Chances On the face of it the tragic fate of Criseyde may seem to support the narrator’s belated revelation that his story is “moost for wommen that bitraised be / Thorugh false folk” (5.1780–81), a cautionary tale against the idealizations of courtly culture and ethical theory. How could her misfortunes be taken as anything but a denial of ethics? Criseyde’s objectification, idealization, and betrayal develops into the poem’s central crisis, and it is refracted through several specific betrayals: that of her father Calchas, of her uncle Pandarus, of the Trojan “folk,” possibly of Hector, certainly of Diomede, and most notably of the literary tradition on which hangs her enduring reputation.27 “The tresoun that to wommen hath ben do!” (2.793). The episode describing the “chaungynge of Criseyde” (4.231)—an apposite phrase, cast in the passive voice, looking forward to larger questions about whether she is changeable, changed, or simply exchanged—demands close scrutiny here if we are to begin to appreciate the way ethics is even a possibility for Criseyde. Hers may well be the double bind of being held accountable for what was never fully hers to control. The real and relentless power relations impinging on her seem to put the erotic adventure in question just where it touches ethics most nearly. The point to consider is that even if Troilus exemplifies radical passivity in the amatory sphere, Criseyde’s experience in the political sphere may render Levinasian ethics inadequate, even repugnant: she may have no chance but to be “passive,” but not in an ethical sense anyone is now willing to accept. Consider for a moment her political fortunes. The Trojan decision to exchange Criseyde for Antenor demonstrates the problem well, revealing


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just how closely the subject of ethics is related to the fortuitous in Troilus and Criseyde. Here Chaucer unmasks antecedent political causes of later events that are called fortuitous, as if they were inexplicable, beyond critique. The narrator begins the book lamenting that Fortune, “traitour comune” (4.5), has betrayed Troilus, yet the presentation of events that follows shows that the real traitor responsible for the tragic reversal is Calchas. Calchas, an individual figure of authority who acts with explicable motives, sets in motion a chain of events that has the Trojan parliamentarians quickly agreeing to the exchange because they need more fighting men. Criseyde they can afford to do without, and so they trade her to the Greeks for Antenor, “oon the grettest of this town” (4.192). Thus a clearly discernable chain of political causation and consequence can be delineated in the way a ruling class of men, Greek and Trojan, arrange the situation in a way that only seems to the narrator fortuitous.28 Pressing further, we may arrive at a powerful sociocultural explanation of the formal cause of the exchange: the changing of Criseyde exemplifies patriarchal culture’s usual policy of “trafficking in women,” a dire situation to which Hector embarrassingly alludes when he objects, “We usen here no wommen for to selle” (4.182), or so he had hoped.29 Such analyses are now familiar and expose the political and institutional forces of tragedy (or misfortune) and of woman’s alienation in particular, suggesting that fortune is really an ideological concealment. A woman’s material fortunes—including her literary fortunes—are subject to very specific and identifiable threats: she represents a mere currency of exchange in the masculine political economy, rather than a moral agent. Criseyde is indeed estranged, seduced, exchanged, isolated, and betrayed by men, ever the “hostage, prize, stereotype.”30 Fortune, because it seems to obscure the real issues, can be discarded. If fortune scarcely seems relevant, neither does our ethical theory. What place is there for ethics as adventure when the causes of events are so overwhelmingly politically determined? For good reason critics have become particularly suspicious of anything that appears to veil the real nexus of power relations responsible for producing good and bad fortune. Why refer to Fortune as the mysterious cause of the woman’s alienation when specific individuals and institutions are clearly responsible for the status quo? Talk of fortune would only seem to obscure the real issues, as David Aers remarks when he observes that such references are “evasory, pseudo-explanations.” Speaking specifically of the implications of the exchange of Criseyde, Aers claims that the fourth book . . . carefully describes the prime importance of social organization and cultural values in determining what happens to Criseyde and the consequences

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of this in her relationship with Troilus. It too makes addresses to Fortune (and even more metaphysical speculations about destiny) seem an unnecessarily vague and mystifying discourse in which to grasp the events of the last two books, a discourse which can only conceal human practices revealed in the poetic processes Chaucer created.31

Aers cannot avoid using the phrase “what happens” to describe events, and yet he is at pains to disavow the significance of happenstance. He is not alone in his suspicions. Larry Scanlon likewise describes Fortune’s “problematic political value,” claiming that “although the image of Fortune and her wheel speaks to the contingency of material power, it understands such contingency as absolutely random, and denies it any coherent historical specificity.”32 Fortune yields no useful information; it dehistoricizes events by appeal to an iron law of predictable unpredictability, as exemplified in Cassandra’s “olde stories” that tell “how that Fortune overthrowe / Hath lordes olde” (5.1460–61) or in the Monk’s Tale’s tedious catalogue of Fortune’s fallen. Fortune is a leveler of history. Moreover, Fortune is a reason for keeping things the same and is regularly recruited as a means of social control: “As it reduces the logicality of change, it also reduces its desirability.”33 The figure is therefore largely dismissed as a form of quietism that renders the social order inexplicable and the status quo inevitable if not desirable. The substitution of the causal for the casual is a new historicist tenet.34 The critics are clearly concerned that the figure of Fortune is not properly historical in this context, and so they search for alternative ways to speak about, or discipline, events. Aers refers to “the prime importance of social organization and cultural values in determining what happens.” Scanlon concludes that Fortune is “about power.” But why this is a better explanation is not clear, except that the notion of power may appear to be more comprehensible nowadays than fortune (or the event). In fact, what any comparison of the two ideas brings out is their differences on this score, for fortune is a way of speaking about the very fact of human incomprehension and powerlessness. Arguably that which is saved through this kind of historicization and Ideologiekritik is matched by what is lost to history in the account, and so the new historicism has lately come under critical scrutiny on these very grounds. A chief point of contention is that some recent forms of critique have not been historical enough when attempting to give a causal account of the event.35 Sometimes one of the casualties of history is secure knowledge; mindful of such ellipses, historicity may just emerge anew, but only after reckoning with l’événementiel. Not just the incoherence of the event but also the agony of the suffering brought about by catastrophes remains a surplus in the economy of


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historical accounting. Another way to explain this problem is to say that the meaninglessness of acute suffering is part of the history of suffering to be told. What really “happens to Criseyde”? How else but by reference to the vagaries of fortune can one explain her coming-to-be-responsible as a subject? If to be subject to “gerful violence” (4.286) of Fortune is to be a fully historical being inhabiting the world, then we should hardly deprive Criseyde of the experience. Neither does Criseyde identify herself as an instrumentalized “hostage, prize, stereotype.” As Monica McAlpine has recently pointed out, Criseyde acts courageously under duress: “Criseyde’s submission to the exchange, her unresisting departure to the camp of the feared Greek enemy, against so many interests of her own, and in the service of Troilus’s trouthe and her own honor,” exhibits an extraordinary patience and passivity that is a peculiar virtue of the unfortunate. Hers is the virtue of “making the involuntary voluntary.”36 Her capacity to make a virtue of necessity despite such worldly depredations should help us understand how fortune may also make virtue possible in the amatory sphere, becoming one among other examples of events to which one is subject but which also activate subjectivization. Levinas will help clarify why it is necessary to keep in play both causal and contingent aspects of personal agency, without which any account of ethics is impoverished. Romancing Ethics But there is still the problem of sexual politics that bedevils the Levinasian ethical analysis, and here we must revisit “courtly love.” Psychoanalytic diagnoses have long suggested that devotion to the female beloved is a way of staging and sustaining the lover’s desire (in conformity with the pleasure-principle) against the ravages of reality (or the reality-principle). For Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, such desire palliates against the inevitable disappointment of erotic love through displacement and substitution of the love-object by an “inhibited aim.”37 The restriction becomes a substitutive satisfaction for unfulfilled sexual desire. Lacan, in his well-known remarks on courtly love in both The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and On Feminine Sexuality, elaborates further on the dialectic of desire as evinced in the simultaneous sublimation and dispossession, overestimation and depersonalization, idealization and debasement of the lady.38 In what he calls the medieval “scholastics of unhappy love”39 the courtly lady is something “close to allegory,” a functional “symbol,” and an “inhuman partner.” She is so thoroughly depersonalized that Lacan quips, “all the poets seem to be addressing the same person.”40 Whence all these dissimulations and deferrals?

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Like Freud, Lacan sees courtly love as setting up a safe, inhibited aim. But he goes further: in the game of love erotic desire does not just avoid inevitable defeat by aiming low, but sets up the game’s very conditions of impossibility. Courtly love creates poetry out of man’s failure. Lacan explicitly defines courtly love as a compensation for “the absence of the sexual relationship, by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle thereto.”41 Behind the remark lies the axiom that sexual union is not just impossible but ultimately undesirable: “man does not come (n’arrive pas), I would say, to enjoy woman’s body.”42 The next best thing, therefore, is the perpetual renewal of desire in the absence of woman: the knight comes to enjoy himself. Courtly love thus elaborates “techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus,”43 whereby the knight finds enjoyment in loving an unattainable love-object and relinquishing his desire for its easy attainment. In this libidinal economy woman exists as a thrilling, life-enhancing “lack.” She signifies an object of desire that has to be forgone in order that one might better possess desire as desire everlasting. The payoff is thus not only immunization against the impenetrability of the real (woman), but also an enhancement of one’s experience of reality (in the form of the lady). Courtly love is therefore what Lacan calls “an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation.”44 So for the lady the prospects of l’amour de fortune are very distinct. Feminist scholarship has thus become suspicious of the discourse of fin’ amor, and there seems widespread consensus that the masculine discourse of medieval romance and love lyric idealizes the domna at the expense of real femnas. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay have argued that the image of woman is manipulated in this way as a means of competitive self- advancement among men securing “entry into the feudal hierarchy.”45 Here we come to understand the way in which courtly love is a mediated and appropriative affair, an exchange transacted between men and for their benefit. Such familiar criticisms of mimetic desire have, it turns out, been reiterated in critiques of Levinas’s ethical theory. Levinas is not the only ultramodern moral philosopher who regularly uses f lamboyant and deliberately provocative images to describe ethical responsibility, as we will see. But there are major liabilities. The sexual politics of Levinasian theory has come under close scrutiny ever since Simone de Beauvoir criticized Levinas, in a footnote to The Second Sex, for “deliberately tak[ing] the man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object.”46 While some have attempted eloquent defenses on behalf of Levinas, Luce Irigaray’s main objection remains compelling: the female beloved seems consistently to exist merely to map the coordinates of the male lover’s transcendence.47


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Ultimately, even in the case of Troilus and Criseyde, the male lover’s fidelity only exists in comparison to her infidelity. Arguably Troilus’s transcendent rewards for having loved and lost Criseyde stem directly from her unfaithfulness in the end. Troilus and Criseyde can and has be taken to indicate that empirical women, femnas, have less to gain from courtly relationships than their role as lady, domna, at first suggests. Is the poet not suggesting that the dated chivalric code is a poor model for a medieval, never mind postmodern, ethical theory? Due to the perversions and power- dynamics inherent in courtly love, how can we say the phenomenon resembles anything like an ethical relation? The answer lies in how these difficult circumstances create a hospitable (Levinas would gladly say hostile) context in which the other is encountered from a position of weakness, suffering, and self-sacrifice. Profane and Holy Love What are now commonplace concerns about courtly love should not blind us to the ethical adventure it makes possible for the subject, and here I think Levinas’s peculiar orientation toward the psychoanalysis of desire is a powerful corrective. Where does Levinas stand in relation to the libidinal economy of courtly love? To elucidate his theory and distinguish it from others, Levinas advances the following gnomic formulation: “Profanation is not a negation of mystery, but one of the possible relationships with it.”48 The easiest way to get a handle on his meaning is by thinking of the ethical relation embodied in the erotic as a form of shared sociality upon which everyday human interaction, good and bad, depends for its intelligibility and normativity.49 On this reading, ethics is so primordial that it belies every violent exercise of power. No one would know or care about another’s exploitation by an oppressive power if not for some prior sociality; in fact, there would be no care or power without the presupposition of sociality upon which it is exercised. Levinas describes the phenomenon by using a terminology borrowed from Judeo-Christian theology (in which we can recognize some of the sacralizing terms of courtly love), claiming that that which is “holy” in human affairs makes any “profanation” of them perceptible and objectionable, for without the one the other is illegible. Holiness is, as he explains, a precondition of profanation: “The inf luences, complexes and dissimulations that cover over the human do not alter this holiness, but sanction the struggle for exploited man.”50 These different but related ways of putting the issue are restatements of Levinas’s theory of the ethical as expressed in the erotic—even in the guise of courtly love, despite

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or rather because of its hazardous sexual politics and the unreasonable suffering and abjection it may entail. On this account of the paradox, erotic desire is one of the forms that the ethical dimension of human experience takes, and may be a motive force in struggles for emancipation in the political sphere. If for Levinas courtly love is not as unethical as some theorists have made out, neither is it just an amoral assemblage of corporeal (subjectless) energies. The image of the body as a love machine is an alternative to the rather dour Lacanian psychoanalysis of desire, and Deleuze and Guattari have given exuberant expression to this body in A Thousand Plateaus. In their “antipsychiatric” account of the phenomenon, courtly love amounts to one among other circuits of carnal energy and pieces of equipment: it is not a means (or barrier) to some other end but a self-perpetuating mechanism through which desire f lows promiscuously without ulterior motive, exterior justification, or interdiction. Courtly love is an “immanent” f low of affects not subject to any “transcendent” rationale or regulation, such as is regularly imposed by philosophers or priests. “The most recent figure of the priest,” they write, “is the psychoanalyst” with his prim notions of “Pleasure, Death, and Reality.” Deleuze and Guattari reject the killjoy attitude of the analyst and of the historicist for that matter (anyone who would attempt to immobilize the body), embracing instead the idea that courtly love is nothing other than itself: a free expenditure of desire, an efficient surge of impersonal forces over the body, a proliferation of connections, intensity without interpretation.51 Levinas’s ethical approach to the erotic contrasts sharply with the discourses of both psychoanalysis and antipsychiatry, enabling another understanding of amatory experience. The traumas of Lacanian theory and the decadence of Deleuzeguattarian theory do not do justice to amatory fortune. For Levinas the erotic is not confined within the structure of the psyche, nor is it not just one of many possible “plateaus” of amoral bodily intensities. Unlike Lacan and his disciples, indeed Levinas does not view courtly love as a neurotic detour (“lack” or amor interruptus) by way of which some other transcendent destination is aimed at and missed. Desire such as is expressed in courtly love constitutes the ethical relation with the other because it is never satisfied: privation and errancy of desire is the source of transcendence over our cruel and egocentric need.52 Levinas is also far from simply revelling in the free-play of corporeal energies and intensities; unlike Deleuze and Guattari, he does not treat eroticism as a self-sufficient end, expenditure, or equipmental assemblage (“field of immanence”). Indeed, erotic desire itself points to the fallacy of self-sufficiency or efficiency in any attempts at human assembly, due to the radical contiguity of self and the other.


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Perhaps the most important consequence of this discussion so far is that it permits us to see how cultural phenomena, no matter how artificial or apparently inauthentic, can express ethical relations without having to be held up as normative ethical ideals. Levinas shows that it is not necessary to approve of what goes by the name “courtly love” to see how it paradoxically exposes the ethical relation in Troilus and Criseyde. For our analysis of Criseyde this means she may remain squarely within the sphere of the ethical (in which she positions herself ) without ceasing to motivate strong criticisms of courtly culture to which she is subject; in fact the singular amatory fortunes of the woman give expression to the radical alterities inherent in the love relationship (i.e., holiness), if only to enable readers to put in question its particular compromised social forms (profanation). Seduction and Surrender Against a tradition of criticism that faults Criseyde for her passivity or subjection (e.g., making her out to be culpable, complicit, or merely a casualty), at least two critics have urged that she is no less a moral agent for being susceptible to Fortune. Jill Mann and Monica McAlpine take us up to but not over the threshold of the ethical relation as theorized by Levinas, and I want to press further by showing that Criseyde’s susceptibility to fortune (indeed in her very situation as “hostage, prize, stereotype”) is the possibility of her being a moral subject. She experiences along with Troilus a profound felicity that shows she enjoys the rewards of subjection. I am not simply restating the idea that moral agency is affected by time and change, but proposing that it is so constituted. Ethics is an event of which medieval eroticism—in its suffering and subjection—is a given instance. A justly celebrated part of the poem is the expanded proces by which Criseyde consents to love Troilus, in light of which Chaucer’s particular invention seems to have been to engage and elaborate not just the erotic adventure of men, but also its very conditions of possibility for men and women. Criseyde’s finely nuanced cognitive processes are set in motion and carried forward by chance changes in circumstance. 53 Several such external contingencies—interpersonal, political, discursive—are introduced or amplified by Chaucer to create the setting in which Criseyde can encounter the other. After her surprised intoxication in the first window scene (“Who yaf me drynke?” [2.651]) Criseyde begins to give serious thought to Troilus, as though she can exercise any real agency. Yet already her love may seem compromised insofar as it conforms to the romantic cliché of love-drunkenness, apparently restricting even

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as it restructures her relationships to the other. Would it not be more “ethical” to have made a rational choice? Criseyde indeed attempts to line up the pros and cons of consenting to the fortunes of love (2.687–812), as she is seen doing in Boccaccio’s Filostrato. But perhaps these political considerations hedge in her freedom of choice from another direction, for she soon works out that in prudential terms it would be better not to love at all. Then, just as Criseyde resolves to accept that the negative considerations (i.e., the hazards of being betrayed, slandered, and bound to a man) outweigh the positive ones (i.e., honor and security), Chaucer invents a set of fortuitous encounters that effectively change her mind. Happening to overhear Antigone’s song in the garden allays some of her fears, and the intervention of a nightingale and a weird dream subsequently move her to love (2.813–931). By the time Troilus rides past again in the second window scene, Criseyde discovers she adores Troilus (2.1247–1301). But is this yet any kind of agency? Here falling in love consists of so many inconspicuous modulations of contingency and necessity, chance and destiny, freedom and fortune, that the precise moment of consent is notoriously difficult to determine. The ambiguity of the situation raises profound questions about the woman’s choice and whether and how her consent is given. Does her love develop because of these chance encounters? Or does chance effect a change in her feelings only because she is already disposed to love? The exact ratio of freedom and fortune making up Criseyde’s mind is unquantifiable. But if consent is a matter of conforming to external pressures at all, then is not the ethics of the case still put in question? Her love does not arise ex nihilo but seems to entail subjection to a dominant discourse of late medieval culture.54 Granted, Criseyde’s amatory intentions are in a paradoxical but powerful way already determined, but this is finally not an argument against ethics. That is rather the gift of ethics.55 Criseyde’s chances illustrate how ethical choices can be as much a matter of passive discovery and acceptance as of positive self-determination. If any decision making is involved in giving consent to love, to borrow an apt phrase from Simon Critchley, “the decision is not taken by the subject, but rather the subject . . . is taken by the decision” (italics original).56 The best decisions of friends and lovers are made this way and reaffirm the priority of ethics: they are “passive” or “unconscious,” passionate and never dutiful, as if such an ethics-beyond-freedom were possible.57 Criseyde therefore finds herself responding to love without the presumption (which would indeed be presumptuous) of being able to choose purely and arbitrarily. Chaucer is presenting not an ethics of mutuality but of disparity and displacement. Near the climax of the lovers’ consummation Troilus and Criseyde come as close to fusing together as they can, and their conversation together


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in bed turns on a significant ambiguity over who-consented-when-towhom. Troilus cannot believe his good fortune: “O swete, as evere mot I gon, Now be ye kaught; now is there but we tweyne! Now yeldeth yow, for other bote is non!” To that Criseyde answerde thus anon, “Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere, Ben yolde, ywis, I were now nought heere!” (3.1206–11)

Mann persuasively argues against the reading that there is a willful powerstruggle taking place here: Criseyde’s words are not a “coy revelation that her mind had been consciously made up at some earlier date: it is rather a realization that her present situation and feelings imply—and therefore reveal—an earlier unconscious surrender, now to be made explicit.”58 Nevertheless, I think there is an unavoidable manner of assertiveness in her speech that seems to go beyond mere revelation or the making explicit of the unconscious. Like Troilus earlier, Criseyde is claiming responsibility at the very moment she confirms her happy surrender and lack of self-control—as if saying, archly but decorously, “I would not be yours now if I had not surrendered already!” She is not begrudging Troilus his erotic fantasy, and if anything she is confirming his desire: he wants her to yield, she already has. Except that she does not say she has yielded exactly, for the past participle construction, “Ne hadde I er now . . . / Ben yolde,” indicates something more along the lines of having been made to submit.59 We misjudge Criseyde if we read her speech as a protofeminist assertion of female independence, or a face-saving fiction she is forced to accept against the evidence, or some form of self-deception.60 Still, although there may be no willful power-struggle taking place, Troilus and Criseyde do not indicate complete agreement in their exchange. Mann’s view that we are presented in the consummation with a “vision of sexual mutuality” overstates the case of their intimacy.61 The emphatic temporal qualification and dislocation of Troilus’s speech—“Now be ye kaught; now is there but we tweyne! / Now yeldeth,” set off against the claim to chronological priority in Criseyde’s speech about having (been) yielded to her sweetheart already—mark the distance between them as lovers even at this most synchronous and harmonious moment in the affair. Just so, in her excited assertion Criseyde is expressing not a desire for autonomy from Troilus, but rather indicating the inescapability of autonomy even when it is undesirable. As Levinas puts it, adumbrating the passivity and future contingency of the ethical relation in the erotic adventure, consummation of love never overcomes the “insurmountable

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duality of beings.”62 Love is ever à-venire and resists the synchronicity of being altogether. Against Lacan who would conceive of courtly love as a neurotic defense against the other who n’arrive pas, Levinas sees it as subjecting the self to the arrivant. If the lovers’ consummation is not quite the achievement of “sexual mutuality” or wholeness, nevertheless it is an expression of holiness in profane times. The sacral language Chaucer employs to describe Troilus and Criseyde’s blissful lovemaking and ensuing divine “bond of Love” (3.1766) is conspicuous. In yielding to one another (“ech of hem gan otheres lust obeye” [3.1690]), love becomes a sacrament—so Chaucer seems to allow—expressing a supreme felicity that cannot be described (3.1691–94). This quasi-religious experience is something Troilus and Criseyde owe to their insufficiency and inadequacy. Her love matches Troilus’s love by being unequal to it and, consequently, the ethical relation serves to radicalize sexual difference beyond the profanity of narcissistic desire. How far all this is from attributing agency or autonomy to women, in the familiar mode of the feminist emancipation of female characters, should now be evident. The adventure of love lies elsewhere for the poet, for whom the erotic relationship enacts a shared asymmetry of love, an unaccountable surrender of one to the other in the scandal of the event. To put it simply, and without too much distortion, the courtly romance does not liberate the woman by insisting on her independence from men and other women, and if it can be said to do so at all it is only by conferring upon a woman the privilege of subjection to an other. Only then does she have the chance of a real history, one that is both significant enough to recount and worth living in the event. If ethics is a precondition of political history, only respect for the alterity of the beloved—her secrecy, singularity, and mystery—can inform any ethicopolitical intervention on behalf of women’s history. Loving against Ethics “The pathos of love,” according to Levinas again, “consists in an insurmountable duality of beings. It is a relationship with what always slips away.”63 If the asymmetry of love carries the risk of slipping away (as in fact occurs in the final throes of Chaucer’s tragedy), then such is the risk moral agents accept. But one of the advantages of Chaucer’s text is that it permits him to explore the real risks of a phenomenon that remains largely conceptual in Levinas’s philosophy, for the Chaucerian narrative achieves what is only ever approached in Levinas’s lyric mode. Love’s slipping away receives a more artful articulation in Troilus and Criseyde than in Time and the Other, and this inevitably raises doubts about the


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specific theorization of ethics. For one thing, we could reasonably conclude that while Levinas hits upon a useful analogy of the ethical relation, he has not described sufficient conditions for its survival in the lives of individual moral agents. To be sure, Levinas would in fact agree that the love analogy is only an imperfect manifestation of the ethical relation; for he knows that erotic love is too dependent on need and enjoyment, too “complacent” to be unequivocally ethical.64 A Chaucerian reading of Levinas presses hard on the problem, inviting us to consider afresh rather long-standing criticisms of any ethics that depend on affectivity (e.g., Max Scheler takes issue with any “ethics of sympathy” that “invariably presupposes what it is attempting to deduce”).65 If the ethical relation is really anything like erotic attraction, then what happens when the experience unaccountably fades away? Surely ethics is supposed to cope with precisely the fact that human sympathy is not dependable. One response is to seek refuge in transcendence: thus Chaucer’s narrator reacts strongly and histrionically against “payens corsed old rites” and “wrecched worldes appetites” (5.1849–51) and ultimately reaches for an eternal, all-encompassing divine love in the final stanzas. So what is missing from Levinas’s otherwise perspicacious account of profane love is a “thick description” of the contexts in which love f lourishes and fails. One way to state the case is to say that the “eventful” character of Chaucer’s romance narrative threatens to undo any and all conceptual relations, even the ethical relation conceived as a turn of events, and all this reveals how the futurity of ethics is more radically contingent than even Levinas allows. There may always be additional doubts about whether the erotic model Levinas adopts to figure the ethical relation does not more often reinforce negative sexual or heteronormative assumptions than “sanction” their critique. At least Chaucer situates himself at some ironical distance from the passions he describes. Levinas does offer some relief from the gender fatigue we may feel by clarifying his thinking: “all these allusions to the ontological differences between masculine and feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being.”66 The f lexibility in his terms of reference would account for the way Levinas occasionally switches the gender of pronouns unexpectedly in speaking of the feminine other or beloved: for instance, “Love aims at the Other; it aims at him in his frailty.”67 Finally, there is also the more specific problem of what makes radical passivity possible in Troilus and Criseyde: as Jill Mann observes, Troilus’s mildness is achieved “by transferring the coercive elements in the wooing to Pandarus, who manipulates, coaxes, threatens and deceives with unf lagging energy.” Mann’s solution is to show

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that the “emotional reality” of love is not reducible to the go-between’s attempts to orchestrate it, and therefore Pandarus’s unethical meddling in the relationship does not vitiate its integrity.68 However that may be, the singular ethical relation is seriously compromised by his unscrupulous interventions. Yet here, too, Levinas offers a useful corrective. He sees that there are difficulties in accommodating any “third party” into the ethical relation: the special asymmetry of the one and the other is constantly beset by the multiplicity of persons involved in any ethical relation. As he makes clear in a key passage that marks out the borders of his ethical ideal, “the simplicity of this primary obedience [to the other] is upset by the third person emerging next to the other . . . . Here, starting from the third person, is the proximity of a human plurality.” And so the question from this point of view is always, “Who, in this plurality, comes first?”69 It is a question of justice in light of which Levinas must make accommodations to everyday reality, as he must if ethics is to survive in the world. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, I want to conclude, is not an argument against Levinasian ethics so much as a stronger version of it. There is indeed much to recommend the ethical theory so long as a pragmatic, Chaucerian (particularly “Criseydan”) sense of the risks and rewards of l’amour de fortune serves to quality it. Chaucer’s portrayal of Troilus and Criseyde presents love for either sex as a preoriginary subjection that is beyond—or as Levinas would say, better than—the dichotomies of freedom and fate, contingency and necessity, and so forth. Troilus and Criseyde thus does not give us an applied ethics but instead testifies, in so many ways, that one is not free from the otherness of the world. But alterity threatens to undo the ethical relation conceived along even these primordial lines. Ethics is subject to the chances and changes of temporal events of which even blessed love is no guarantor, and that is the aptness of the analogy: ethics f lourishes and fails no less than love. If courtly love finally fails to deliver on the ethical relation, it still has its attractions— and perhaps that is its attraction. The very notion of love generates an ethical desire by remaining “otherwise than being,” as unattainable and unappeasable as any ethical ideal must remain.

CHAPTER 3 CONSOLATIONS OF PANDARUS: THE TESTAMENT OF LOVE AND THE CHAUNCE OF THE DYSE

Who can give lovers a law? Love is a greater law unto itself. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy1 If you were wise, you would take hope for improvement through Fortune’s mutability. Guillaume de Machaut, Remede de Fortune 2

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round the time Chaucer began composing Troilus and Criseyde he had finished his English rendering of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which more than any other philosophical work gave Chaucer conceptual instruments for shaping the matter of the poem. Chaucer’s frequent recurrence to the language and detail of the Consolation has long been seen as elevating the love affair to speculative heights far above anything conceived in Boccaccio’s Filostrato. A late fifteenth-century reader, attuned to the philosophical implications, seems to have been so genuinely impressed by the resemblances between the two works that at one point he jots the remark “consolatio pandari.” The casual if rather audacious gloss is found in the left-hand margin of fol. 13v in Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.24, in an informal script different from that of the main scribe. The note alludes to the opening sequence when Pandarus counsels Troilus to be optimistic about the possibility of securing a requital from Criseyde (1.897), a passage we had occasion to remark in the previous chapter. Judging by the great concentration of notes found around passages relating to his activity as praeceptor amoris, Pandarus holds a particular fascination for this reader-cum-annotator. The remarks are never negative

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or censorious. At 1.953 (fol. 14v) Pandarus is further commended “de pandari bono consilio” for advising Troilus to remain steadfast and secret; and then at 2.505 (fol. 23r), where Pandarus relates and possibly fabricates the account of Troilus’s decorous palace-garden confession, we find the annotation “gude panda speking to cres<eid>.”3 If we believe this quite witty reader of the poem, even acknowledging the potential ironies of such sanguine commentary, Chaucer must have transposed the Consolation of Philosophy into an appealing Consolation of Fortune. Boccaccio set no precedent for such a loquacious and sententious procurer who role-plays Lady Philosophy, and so our fifteenth- century reader seems to have been cognizant of the stimulus Boethius’s Consolation provided Chaucer. Modern scholars have gone on to establish the extent of that inf luence.4 What has not surfaced before in discussions of Chaucer’s treatment is the fact that he may also have taken inspiration from two sixth-century Latin poems that similarly travesty Boethius. They are worth pausing over since they anticipate this chapter’s broader concern with reversals of fortune visited upon Boethius’s book long after Chaucer wrote Troilus. The first text is Ennodius’s De Boetio spatha cincto (Of Boethius Equipped with the Double-Edged Sword), a satirical epigram recording Boethius’s apparent notoriety for philandering.5 Here Boethius is presented as something of a would-be sensualist (“in Venerem constans,” without enjoying much success). The situation calls to mind Pandarus’s enthusiastic yet fruitless f lirting—“ ‘By god,’ quod he, ‘I hoppe alwey by-hynde’ ” (2.1107)6 —yet the importance of the text is not to be found in specific intertextual references, but rather in its ambient inf luence on the reception of Boethius. If Chaucer had encountered this little witty poem (as some of his compatriots had), he should have discovered a delectable anecdote to set alongside similar gossip about the unrestrained libido of other auctores such as Solomon, David, Virgil, or Aristotle. The other, more important Latin poem and possible contaminating inf luence is Maximianus’ Elegiae, which was routinely found on the late medieval school syllabus, despite the racy content of the nostalgic sequence of recollections (“not the most obviously appropriate subjects for study by impressionable schoolboys,” remarks Vincent Gillespie).7 Maximianus’ Elegia III sets forth an astonishingly impious image of the renowned Boethius applying his genius—but now pandering and prevaricating instead of philosophizing—to the business of uniting two young lovers. Boethius succeeds in overcoming the hindrance of a mother who stands in the way of consummation, but this ironically hastens the affair’s ignominious collapse. As this rough sketch indicates, Maximianus’ pitiable recollection of the follies of youth is an account of double sorrow that shares formal and philosophical features in common with Chaucer’s Troilus.8

C O N S O L AT I O N S O F PA N DA RU S

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Whether or not Chaucer drew directly from such sources, Troilus and Criseyde reframes the Consolation of Philosophy in ways that similarly play havoc with the consolation genre—producing instead, as already suggested by one of Chaucer’s earliest readers as recorded in MS Arch. Selden. B.24, a sort of Consolation of Fortune. Chaucer is just one of numerous later medieval poets who seize and redeploy exempla and sententiae originally found in Boethius’s famous book, and the purpose of this chapter is to track some of these “textual events” in the tradition of interpreting and interpolating Boethian concepts. Long after Ennodius and Maximianus, the Consolation indeed suffered several reversals of fortune in its late medieval reception, and as Derek Pearsall remarks it is one of the “ironies of history” that the poets who absorbed its teachings or topoi seem to exhibit a greater affinity for Fortune than Philosophy.9 In this body of literature, amatory fortunes are characteristically invoked to exert pressure on Boethius’s philosophical consolation (with its emphasis on fortitude and detachment), recontextualizing that consolation around new events. One inf luential example is Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c. 1340), a French dit in which Esperance administers a consolation to a lover-poet in a manner clearly ref lecting the matter and modus agendi of Philosophy in Boethius’s Consolation. Chaucer’s Pandarus and Gower’s Genius are partly fashioned after Esperance in that they too recommend fairly worldly remedies for the fortunes of love.10 Later writers went on to emulate them, as we will see. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was successively displaced and desublimated thereby, def lating or at least displacing its more scholarly pretensions. And yet given the provocation, modern critics have tended to take “Boethian philosophy” as an inf lexible measure against which to judge deviations from it in the poetry. As already established in the first chapter, though, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy is herself ambiguous and contradictory, straying from one line of argument to follow another, qualifying and redefining terms of reference through dialogue with the prisoner. It should come as less of a surprise, then, if medieval poets were to engage in a lively dialectic with the work itself, emulating but also amending and augmenting the Consolation of Philosophy. In Middle English literature the legacy of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is indeed intriguing and complex, particularly whenever its legacy is brought into contact with the phenomenology of amorous desire. In what follows I take Boethius’s treatment of sexual love in the Consolation as a point of departure for considering the event of amatory fortune, moving thence brief ly to consider Chaucer’s appropriation in Troilus and Criseyde of specific terms and tropes from Boethius. But the main exhibits of this chapter are two very different responses to Chaucer. One is Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, a contemporary apologetic and

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philosophical work that derives inspiration and doctrines from both the Consolation of Philosophy and Troilus and Criseyde. The other text is an early fifteenth-century diversion called The Chaunce of the Dyse, the object of which is to apply an encyclopedia of “Chaucerian” character-traits to contestants (i.e., the audience) by casting lots. What this chapter may be said to offer, then, are a series of vignettes in the history of ideas and their contingent textual transformations: examples of the surprising mediation and fortuitous recombination of elements originally found in Boethius. Loving Boethius Boethius, writing out of the experience of state persecution following his imprisonment, probably did not anticipate the problems of courtship with which so many medieval writers are preoccupied when they turn to the Consolation for the resources to deal with the confinements of love-longing. Comparison between the two sorts of difficulty brings out important differences. In an extremely suggestive remark attributed to Philosophy, Boethius writes: “ultimus tamen vitae dies mors quaedam fortunae est etiam manentis” (II.pr.3), or in the translation of Chaucer, “the laste day of a mannes lif is a maner deth to Fortune” (Boece II.pr.3.87– 88).11 The promise of fortune’s demise is emphatically a prisoner’s—not a lover’s—consolation holding out the promise of the end of undeserved suffering for the political prisoner. As soon as one approaches misfortune from the perspective of the lover, mindful of what one does not want to lose rather than of what one desires to escape, the question becomes, who wants it to end? If life and fortune are coterminous, so are love and fortune; and love can seem to make life worth living. Repositioned in this way, Philosophy’s judgment about the end of life reads more like a concession to the importance and indeed indispensability of Fortune—newly identified with human f lourishing—than an expression of its irrelevance or triviality. Yet Boethius does not fail to address sexual love and longing directly in his Consolation. Philosophy is ambiguous on just these grounds. She at one point condemns carnal desire in the moralistic terms of “voluptas” and “libido” (III.pr.7 and III.m.7), or as Chaucer says as consisting of so much “bodily jolyte” (Boece III.pr.7.16). In this case there is apparently no concession to the stirrings of erotic desire that motivates courtship and can eventually lead to marriage. This does not prevent Philosophy from claiming elsewhere that marriage is an acceptable form of romantic attachment: This love halt togidres peples joyned with an holy boond, and knytteth sacrement of mariages of chaste loves; and love enditeth lawes to trewe felawes. (Boece II.m.8.21–25)


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However, married love poses moral problems, notably in the celebrated fable of Orpheus and Eurydice (III.m.12). On the face of it, Philosophy’s fable does not concern sexual love, but rather “Vos haec fabula respicit, / Quicumque in superum diem / Mentem ducere quaeritis” (This fable apertenith to yow alle, whosoever desireth or seketh to lede his thought into the sovereyn day, that is to seyn, to cleerness of sovereyn good). Love is for Philosophy a metaphor for philosophical ascent in the neoplatonic mode. However, the fable does not sustain the exegesis; by a casual turn of events the little narrative strains against such philosophical abstraction. Speaking of Orpheus’s tender but tragic backward glance at his wife, which shows an apparent disregard for the law of the ascent, Philosophy remarks benignly: “Quis legem det amantibus? / Maior lex amor est sibi” (But what is he that may yeven a lawe to loverys? Love is a grettere lawe and a strengere to hymself than any lawe that men mai yyven) (III.m.12.47–48). She expresses herself in an astonishingly conciliatory way, “leniter suaviterque” (IV.pr.1.1), or “softly and delitably” (Boece IV.pr.1.1–2), despite the fact that her fable ostensibly illustrates a kind of intemperate, earthbound erotic desire that is an impediment to the very enlightenment she recommends. The power of the fable to evoke such a surprisingly sympathetic response (from her, no less) must be part of its meaning.12 It hardly demonstrates the excesses of desire in contrast to “chaste loves,” and if anything Orpheus’s transgression says rather more about the infernal, repressive nature of the laws of the underworld than anything about his failure in upholding them. The legendary power of love to bring harmony and suspend suffering in hell also argues against any simple moralizing against beastly “bodily jolyte.” In the event, the way the fable unexpectedly privileges sexual love as law unto itself—that is, the way it is presented as better than law—points to a paradox philosophy cannot ignore and medieval poets would celebrate. Chaucer introduces into his rendering of the Filostrato an original and provocative comparison between Troilus and Criseyde and Orpheus and Eurydice, and we may usefully think of the poem as a whole as a sustained elaboration of notions that are only half-formed in Boethius’s fable. As Phillipa Hardman has persuasively argued, the myth of Orpheus provides a “narrative parallel with the action of the poem.”13 Expressive of both the perils and pleasures of amatory fortune, Troilus and Criseyde ends on a tragic note that recalls the loss of Eurydice in the ascent of Orpheus. Pandarus himself echoes Philosophy’s response: “Thorugh love is broken al day every law” (IV.618). The romance and the fable arguably register the pitiable loss of the beloved in the event of transcending its difficulty; sexual love thus sustains beauty and pity in the face of tragedy, rather than being discredited by tragedy, in what amounts to an implicit theodicy. Indeed, the myth has this positive effect, deriving not from

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any dread moralization but from the way it promises future contingency. Ovid’s Metamorphoses functions to call to the reader’s attention the eventual reunion of Orpheus and Eurydice in a blissful afterlife (IV.788–91), looking to an alternative, optimistic ending of the myth, proposing a possible eventuality. Consequently, if the apotheosis of Troilus recalls the ascent of Orpheus (both of whom suffer the loss of a beloved), the tragic ending does not preclude a still happier future, restoring the lovers to deserved felicity.14 Chaucer composed a poem that is alive to the way events are open-ended, contingent, futural—suggesting with Pandarus that “thyng to come is oft in aventure” (I.784)—even beyond the given ending of a specific text. There are at least two other fortuitous moments where philosophy is subject to an event of love in Chaucer’s Troilus. Philosophy’s hymn to love (II.m.8) was first taken up by Dante, who converted its sentiment into equally high-minded poetry: in the Purgatorio 17.103–5 love is “the seed of every virtue growing in you, / And every deed that merits punishment.”15 But no longer strictly or one-sidedly metaphysical, love for Dante becomes immanent, pragmatic, even functional. It is a matrix out of which virtue and vice proceeds in the ethical relation. In Troilus and Criseyde, at the climax of the third book, the passage is given another turn in the consummation scene—the seed of love now becoming more reminiscent of physical than metaphysical insemination. Love, Troilus sings, creates “an holsom alliaunce” (3.1746), harmonizing all created things and cementing human bonds. Providentially, love serves “To cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde” (3.1767). Chaucer has, in effect, transposed neoplatonic doctrine into an erotic ditty. The other appropriated passage to consider in this light is Philosophy’s plant analogy (III.pr.11). We recall that Aristotle thought the human soul was best cultivated within a “fortunate climate,” and it so happens that in Boethius Lady Philosophy similarly observes: “yif any wyght enforce hym to bere hem into other places, they wexen drye [i.e., if anyone should transplant these trees or plants, they would die]” (III.pr.11). Chaucer grafts the organic image onto new stock. Criseyde, contemplating her separation from Troilus, has occasion to lament: What is Criseyde worth, from Troilus? How sholde a plaunte or lyves creature Lyve withouten his kynde noriture? For which ful ofte a by-word here I seye, That “rooteles moot grene soone deye.” (4.767–70)

Here what was a recommendation of the rational life has become an apt analogy for love’s vulnerability—the neglected plant illustrating a


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particular amatory tragedy that, as we will see, stimulated contemporary philosophical discussion. Long before any of this, the Greek poet Pindar in Nemean VIII took up the idea and pressed it to its logical conclusion when he likened a vine tree to human moral development. Nussbaum’s commentary on how Pindar’s vine tree signifies an “openness to fortune” applies equally well to amatory fortunes: “[The image] displays the thorough intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made, that are present in . . . any human life. [And the image] suggests that part of the peculiar beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability. The tenderness of the plant is not the dazzling hardness of a gem” (italics original).16 The tangled and rooted vine tree may miss something of the human aspiration to transcend our deepest vulnerabilities, and Chaucer as I say is sensitive to its potential tragic pathos. What he does, however, is generate a tragedy in which the fortuitous aspects of amatory experience are made especially visible and affecting. His early readers seem to have been particularly impressed by the fortunal aspect of love as presented in Troilus and Criseyde, sometimes taking the poem to be an argument for fortune and future contingency. Vernacular Ethics in The Testament of Love At its most intellectually ambitious, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love (c. 1385–87) attempts to produce a new consolation philosophically sophisticated enough to deal with problems of amatory fortune and political exigency thrown up by Troilus and Criseyde.17 Written soon after Chaucer completed his romance, Usk’s Testament is a long and protean prose work—part book of consolation, part dream vision, and part autobiography—the third book of which shall preoccupy me here for the way it raises the symptoms and affects of sexual love to a philosophical plane. In its didactic situation and structure, Usk’s Testament expressly emulates Boethius’ Consolation, taking the Roman prisoner’s philosophical ruminations as a springboard to ref lection. In both books a plaintive prisoner, unjustly detained for suspicious political activities, has a vision in which appears an allegorical figure with whom he enters into dialogue about love, free will, fate, fortune, and future contingency. A parallel progression from weaker to stronger remedies runs through each work. But in the Testament the philosophical consolation is administered by Love rather than Philosophy, and it turns out Lady Love is deeply beholden to Fortune. Usk’s real-life affairs go some way toward explaining why Love appears to be his choice of female wisdom figure: although my purpose is not to revisit old debates about Usk’s alleged treachery,

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certainly Usk, disgraced and imprisoned for parts he played in London municipal politics of the 1380s, must have sought to recover lost fortune and friendships partly by refashioning his public persona as an unrequited lover. His beloved pearl-maiden has been viewed as a cipher for the royal favor he sought in what is taken to be an indirect petition for clemency.18 But Usk, like Boethius, is doing much more than politicking. Both authors derive unexpected ethical demands, difficulties, and ideals from their personal misfortunes, reaching beyond contemporary political fashion or faction. At any rate, my purpose is not to accuse or acquit Usk for bearing witness against his former employer, but rather following Isabel Davis, to view the Testament as a rhetorically and conceptually interesting construction.19 Usk’s Testament of Love may in the first instance have been composed as an ulterior act of self-promotion in order to clear his name, exhibiting what Paul Strohm calls Usk’s characteristic use of texts to assert “personal control over vagrant and uncertain circumstances,”20 but the Testament is both much more and much less than that. It exhibits an urgent philosophical concern with intentionality and circumstantiality that call into question the author’s confidence in personal control. What Usk grapples with is an identity between the contingencies of ethical and erotic experience, made manifest in passionate desire and its postponement and the disparity between lover and beloved—genrespecific elements and affects that belong to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Usk swerves away Boethius’s emphasis on freedom and sufficiency as a result of this generic experimentation with the consolatory idiom, allowing him to explore the will’s dependency on exteriority and temporality. Near the end of the Testament, the image of the Tree of Love nicely conveys the contingency: the ground is free will, the trunk service, the branches fitting speech, and the fruit the “ladies grace” (3.837).21 It picks up on his complaint at the outset of the book, verbally reminiscent of Criseyde’s words quoted above, where the prisoner says, “Howe shulde the grounde without kyndly noriture bringen for the any frutes?” (1.25–26). Further, one can hardly resist making comparisons to the two trees of Genesis 2:9–17, particularly the fruit of the tree of knowledge with its traditional associations with erotic desire and experience; it is a motif Dante returns to in Purgatory 32–33 where the tree suddenly transforms from a barren to a blooming thing in the presence of Beatrice. In Usk’s Testament the lover is similarly promised: thy braunches must burjonen in presence of thy lady if thou desyre any frute of thy ladies grace, but beware of thy lyfe that thou no wodelay use as in askyng of thynges that stretchen into shame, for tha myght thou nat


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spede by no way that I can espy. Vertue wol nat suffre villany out of himselfe to spring. (3.836–40)

But this is no prelapsarian paradise where obedience guarantees happiness. Usk’s garden includes a “wodelay,” or covert grove for licentious delights, and is exposed to external elements. Love admits his tree is defenseless against storms, and in the case of damage one must wait for another season: “As tyme hurteth, right so ayenward tyme healeth and rewardeth” (3.867). This is a far cry from Langland’s Piers Plowman where the tree of charity and the trinity is provisioned with spiritual braces to resist the winds of covetousness and carnality. For Usk as for Chaucer before him (and Pindar with whom Usk has been fruitfully compared before), the natural world furnishes an apt analogy for the exposure of the soul to misfortunes—which is the possibility of love and, more broadly, the organic ethical relation love instantiates.22 What Usk’s Testament thus seems to attempt is a transfiguration and expansion of issues raised in Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer, having recorded the slightest nuances of romantic love, is acclaimed by Love as no less than “myne owne trewe servaunt the noble philosophical poete in Englissh” and peerless “in schole of my rules,” positioning the poet as an exemplary moral philosopher. In what is the earliest recorded reference to the romance, Love specifically refers her interlocutor to Chaucer’s “treatise that he made of my servant Troilus, [which] hath this mater touched, and at the ful this questyon assoyled” (3.559–64).23 At issue here is the origin of evil, but Usk’s Testament seems in other, more general ways to be marked by Chaucer’s Troilus.24 Pandarus, ever the mediating figure, looms as a specter over Usk’s Testament even if he is not literally present.25 Love seems to be an equally pragmatic and optimistic character. With all her practical wisdom, for example, she can sound like Pandarus—teaching courtly deportment (making lovers “expert their ladyes hertes to wynne” [1.203]), counselling boldness (“Who nothing undertaketh and namely in my servyce nothyng acheveth” [1.474–75]), and trusting in Fortune (“next the end of sorrow anon entreth joy” [2.939–40]). Yet Love is not quite as meddlesome; she is more respectable and obviously conceptual than Pandarus.26 It is as if the “consolatio pandari” were now being amplified, enlarged, and elevated to produce an ethical Consolation of Fortune. This explains the ambiguity of the loveobject whom Usk names Margaret. Like Criseyde, Margaret is womanly (“as a womanly woman in her kynde” [2.1246]), but also much more (“Margarite a woman betokeneth grace, lernyng, or wisdom of God, or els holy church” [3.1123–24]). As carnal as she is apparently spiritual, the polymorphous object of desire gathers together various affects, and like

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other beloved figures in medieval writing (Beatrice, Laura, the Pearlmaiden) seems designed to function as an erotic emblem enabling philosophical and theoretical investigations various postures and positions. By unmooring affectivity in this way, Usk’s Testament enables an ontological study of love that follows Chaucer’s Troilus in yet another way by transposing Latin learning into a new key, and here I broach a topic that is going to be of further moment in the next chapter on Gower’s Confessio Amantis. One example is the palimpsest these Middle English writers—Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and later Lydgate—make of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, generated new figures out of the original philosophical preceptor: Lady Philosophy becomes Pandarus, Venus, Love, and Fortune. Usk goes further in adapting scholastic theory, something he shares with Gower, as we will see. In particular, Usk’s novel treatment of affection and rectitude, restyled as an involuntary and irrepressible “love” for Margaret, allows him to produce what we may call a novel late medieval vernacular ethics. Usk’s Testament, Stephen Medcalf aptly observes, “may be the first work of original philosophy in the English language.”27 That it is written in the vernacular at a time when it would not be the obvious choice for such serious matters is part of what makes it original. Appropriately deferential to the very tongues and traditions he is displacing in this ethical undertaking, Usk employs the humility topos that is one of the hallmarks of vernacular writing. As he explains in the Prologue, English has an equal claim to being able to impart knowledge: Let than clerkes endyten in Latyn, for they have the propertie of science and the knowynge in that facultie; and lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also endyten their queynt termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes; and let us shewe our fantasyes in suche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge. (Prol. 23–27)

The apparent division of matters here—Latin science, French style— consigns English to another realm. Usk claims merely to desire “to gader the smale crommes and fullyn my wallet of tho that fallen from the borde amonge the smale houndes” (Prol. 75–76). Usk thus recognizes that he comes late to the table, but belatedness has its advantages. This is clear in the passage where he mentions Latin auctores—Boethius and other “great workmen”—on whom he depends: Yet also have I leve of the noble husbande Boece, although I be a straunger of connynge, to come after his doctryne and these great workmen and glene my handfuls of the shedynge after theyr handes; and, if me


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fayle ought of my ful, to encrease my porcyon with that I shal drawe by privytyes out of the shocke. A slye servaunt in his owne helpe is often moche commended; knoweyng of trouth in causes of thynges was more hardyer in the first sechers, and so sayth Aristotle, and lyghter in us that han folowed after. For theyr passyng study han fresshed our wyttes, and our understandynge han excyted in consideracion of trouth by sharpnesse of theyr reasons. (Prol. 78–85)

As A. J. Minnis has observed, Usk is here imitating the “Aristotelian” prologue in order “to justify and enoble the Testament of Love.”28 In this case, moreover, Boethius is invoked to authorize Usk’s undertaking to advance beyond Boethian doctrine. Arrogating to himself something of the authority he invests in Latin tradition, Usk inaugurates a new philosophy. The third book of Usk’s Testament deals with some of the most complex academic questions known to high scholasticism: the relationships between free will and divine foreknowledge, merit and grace, affection and will. The last is the culminating issue of Usk’s Testament, as was indicated in the Prologue: “And bycause this boke shal be of love and the pryme causes of sterynge in that doynge, with passions and diseases for wantynge of desyre I wyl that this boke be cleped The Testament of Love” (Prol. 57–59). The “causes of sterynge” describes the motive force of the soul that scholastic philosophers called affection or impulse. Without apparent scruple, Usk designates this as a kind of romantic love. Usk, as it has long been recognized, got the doctrine of affection from Anselm’s De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis necnon gratiae Dei cum libro arbitrio, a treatise Usk surreptitiously translates but nowhere mentions in the Testament.29 Anselm proposes that there lies behind the will two involuntary drives that incline the will to act virtuously: affectio commodi, the desire for useful goods, and affectio justitia, the desire for the good in itself. Usk’s book bears their impress in his discussion of affection as “an instrument of willynge” (3.623) that “some man hath more and some man lese” (3.655). But how does it happen that some have more or less affection? In what way does this moral psychology depend on the contingencies of fortune? And on what grounds is Usk justified for referring to the affection for the good as a kind of amorous desire such that sexual love can exemplify ethics? To establish a link between the will and fortune we must go beyond Anselm to an inf luential and slightly later account circulating in the thirteenth century under the title Liber de bona fortuna, which contains parts of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (8.2, 1246b37–1248b11) and Magna Moralia (2.8, 1206b30–1207b19).30 Aristotle asks how it happens that some people

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are fortunate in cases where wisdom is absent from or irrelevant to the successful execution of an action. Such is the case in navigation where (as a portion of the composite text we know derived from Eudemian Ethics says) “not the cleverest are the most fortunate, but it is as in throwing dice, where one throws nothing, another throws a high score, according to his natural luck.”31 Other passages (drawn from Magna Moralia) go on to restate the problem: on the assumption that “it is not possible to be happy without external goods, over which fortune is supreme,” from whence does fortune arise? Is it due to human nature, reason, or providence? Good fortune is unlikely to come from rational deliberation, unless thought itself comes about through chance, but the text leaves the issue largely unresolved. Yet its definition of fortune weighs on the side of nature rather than divinity. “Good fortune,” according to the Magna Moralia part of the text, “is nature without reason. For the fortunate man is he who apart from reason has an impulse to good things and obtains these, and this comes from nature. For there is in the soul by nature something of this sort whereby we are impelled, not under the guidance of reason, towards things for which we are well fitted.”32 Aristotle’s definition of good fortune—rendered in MS Vat. lat. 2083 as sine ratione natura—stimulated much discussion in later medieval quodlibets. If fortune is really natural, the schoolmen wanted to know how far this nature extends, whether uniformly or particularly among human beings? And what sort of cause is this nature, per se or per accidens? Consider the following three respondents to Liber de bona fortuna. First, Aquinas responded with a doctrine of divine inspiration according to which the ultimate cause is God.33 Aristotle’s sine ratione natura thus describes, for Aquinas, a “divine instinct” that gives “inner promptings.”34 Aquinas walks a fine line: seeking to avoid an infinite regression of causes (associated with the pagans who believed in the eternity of the world) without conceding the sufficiency of the will (hence refuting the pelagians), he produces a moral psychology that is at once consistent with Aristotle and Catholic faith.35 The upshot is that freedom is conditioned by events within the mind that appear to be fortuitous but are actually given by God. About a decade later Henry of Ghent in his Quodlibet VI, Q. 10, weighed in on the question by defining Aristotle’s bona fortuna sine ratione natura in ways that similarly delimit and redescribe the role of fortune in the mind. For Henry fortune is not rational, but neither is it just natural.36 Like Aquinas, Henry claims God directs the impulses that draw one toward good fortune, though he specifies that “special” providence can dispose fortune according to merit.37 This is not to say God will reward the worthy with good fortune, but that the worthy may receive good and bad fortunes that make them more worthy still. What Henry ends


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up with is fortune set adrift from any regulative ethical rule: it derives from providence, but not in a way that could ever be predicted by natural philosophy. When John Duns Scotus took up the issue in Quodlibetal Questions, Q. 21, he helpfully divided Aristotle’s fortune into “things that are in our power” but happen unintentionally, and “those that are not in our power, such as being noble, beautiful, or born rich.”38 The one he calls “fortune proper,” the other “improper” or, simply, “chance.” Fortune, for Scotus, is consequently not a merely impersonal empirical or statistical fact, but instead a moral condition or affection impinging on human will. In other words, chance happenings are only trivially fortuitous, as they are extrinsically caused, and “these can be due to God’s disposing them in a way according to theologians, though not according to Aristotle.” Inquiring as a natural philosopher rather than a theologian (in clear contrast to Aquinas and Henry who seek to transcend moral psychology), Scotus here expressly seeks after the primary intrinsic causes associated with the unique powers of the will: that is, “impulses” in the soul.39 We can see Scotus, in keeping with his interest in radical singularity (or haecceitas), grappling with the particularly intransigent matter of immanent events of mind. The Aristotelian Scotus comes into focus as a particularly important interpreter of Anselm’s De concordia, especially in the context of the use Usk makes of Anselm. Scotus follows Anselm closely in positing two affections of the will.40 But in one place he describes affection as an “initial intellection” subject to good fortune: so Scotus argues that the will acts only after it is presented with some “initial intellection [that] does not stem from reason but in some way from chance.” Quoting Augustine (“It is not in our power to be unaffected by what we see”), Scotus concludes that volition may be considered a “fortuitous and chance effect.”41 Scotus thus distinguishes between “reasons” in the will: “We must say, then, that a person has such a volition because reason revealed the object to him, not because rational considerations revealed the reason why he did what he did. This is something that happened on impulse.”42 This revealed reason, on the basis of which one consequently intends to act, is an impulse that comes about fortuitously to move the will (rendering the notion of Scotus the “voluntarist” quite outmoded, as scholars now recognize). Scotus has finally cleared the way for relating fortune to human will and divine providence without stripping events of their eventfulness and near proximity to human cognition. Offering a more detailed and dynamic account than did either Aquinas or Henry, and refusing to short-circuit good fortune by reference to general providence, Scotus advances the subtlest formulation of human will under the aegis of de bona fortuna.43 And just as important as annexing the affections to

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fortune, Scotus takes affectivity seriously as an indication that the will loves the good. The will, as passive recipient of affection, is “reduced to love” (reducit ibi ad amorem).44 In Usk’s Testament the fortunate will is subsequently configured around the intense erotics of sexual “love,” an affiliation that gives the English writer scope for reframing the natural philosophy he had inherited. Midway through the third book Usk shows that he has learned much about the freedom of the will from Anselm’s De Concordia, for example when it comes to defending the unconstrained, “spontanye wyl” (3.408). As the discussion comes increasingly to rest on the special capacities of the loving will, however, Love’s teachings evolve beyond that of Anselm in the direction of New Aristotelians such as Duns Scotus.45 Qualifying Anselm’s evident voluntarism, in other words, Love inquires into the amatory fortune of revealed reason or initial intellection driving the willto-love, personifying in the abstract something like the primordial condition of possibility for volition and, finally, virtue in an Aristotelian sense. It is in the latter chapters of the third book that she expressly teaches how it is that love predisposes the virtuous: “wyl is not lovynge, for he wol love, but he wol love for he is lovynge” (3.928–30). Usk has not fallen prey to circular reasoning but is in effect saying here, “Love is presupposed in virtuous action, not produced by it.” Love is the motive force or affective instrument of will before any discrete acts of volition are ever produced. In this rendering Usk departs from Anselm and, as a result, comes close to inhabiting the generic universe of Chaucerian romance. The passage is typical of the way Usk “changes [Anselm’s] term rectitude, meaning the end assigned to free choice, to the word love, meaning an act of the will and referring especially to his own will’s love of the Margaret.”46 The effect is to locate virtue within the passions of amorous desire, notwithstanding its potential to be refractory to virtue rather than inherently righteous (rectitudo). Love is the originary condition of the ethical relation that posits a future rectitude it cannot control or consummate, as explored in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Recall how Criseyde’s love instantiates the contingency of ethics when she takes responsibility for what happens to and remains exterior to her in the event. Her will is unavoidably subordinate to involuntary affection consolidated by the vision of Troilus (recalling Augustine’s “It is not in our power to be unaffected by what we see”). While we may agree with Criseyde when she protests, “Ne love a man ne kan I naught ne may / Ayeins my wyl . . .” (2.478–79), the reverse is not also true: no woman can be forced to love against her will, but neither can she love by force of will. Love is a gift of the ethical relation it aims toward much in the way that Scotus, describing volition, speaks of will as a “fortuitous and chance effect.”


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The contingency of romantic love goes deeper than this because it is immanent in the social domain, and the modality of romance is useful to Usk in allowing him to extrapolate the consequences. Love is not confined to events of initial intellection or impulsion, as is evidently the case even for Scotistic love; nor is it providential, following Aquinas or Henry. Love may go unrequited. In both Troilus and Criseyde and The Testament of Love the event of love presupposes something outside itself for its completion: sociality and the reciprocity of affection. Thus, according to the Testament, love is not its own reward. Love must be rewarded: . . . to have this lovyng wyl may no man of himselfe, but onely through grace toforne-goyng. Consyder nowe every man aright, and let sene if that any wight of himselfe mowe this lovyng wel get, and he therof first nothynge have, for if it shulde of himselfe spring eyther it muste be wyllyng or not wyllyng. Wyllyng by himselfe may he it not have, sythen him fayleth the mater that shulde it forthe bring. The mater him fayleth. (3.934–40)

Beyond whatever the will can achieve alone, the lover depends on the beloved’s mutual embrace. This is what so frustrated the prisoner at the beginning of the Testament when he complained about his remoteness from the beloved—his first words are, “Alas, Fortune, alas” (1.1). Love has him understand that what he formerly called “Fortune” is constitutive of the event of love, which is itself indispensable to the ethical relation Usk analyzes in the Testament. Love is a grace, the grace of Margaret that is not identical to divine grace of which Anselm speaks, since it is less certain than a providential promise of redemption.47 Whatever else she may represent, Margaret is “yever of the love, althoughe thou it use, and there lent she thee grace thy servyce to begynne. She is worthy the thanke of this grace, for she was the yever” (3.894–96). In this conception the freedom of the will is radically constrained and exteriorized, its spontaneity called into question by bona fortuna, as the lover prostrate before the beloved awaits what has yet to come. Potentially virtuous in its vulnerability, the ethical subject explored in Usk’s Testament of Love is admittedly fragile. Usk substitutes passion and privation for the contemplative virtue of Boethius, prizing the felicity of the lover (heteronomy) over the sufficiency (autonomy) of the philosopher. The consolation is not risk-free, but the liability of love is its only possibility. Playing Pandarus in The Chaunce of the Dyse The Chaunce of the Dyse has none of the gravity or speculative energy of The Testament of Love. It is after all a script for playing a dice game.48 If Usk

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attempts in some measure to intellectualize sexual love, The Chaunce of the Dyse is facetious and not a little frivolous in the use it makes of Troilus and Criseyde. But the specter of Pandarus hangs over this game just as much as it haunts Usk. It stands as evidence that Chaucer’s early readers found pleasure in turning Troilus and Criseyde to serio-comic oracular purpose, submitting themselves without scruple to Fortune without which there would be no game of Love.49 The authorship of The Chaunce of the Dyse remains unknown.50 It survives in two fifteenth-century anthologies, MS Fairfax 16 and MS Bodley 638, both of which have a majority of pieces in common: Chaucer’s dream visions, Clanvowe’s Book of Cupid, Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid, Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, and another game called Ragman Roll. The manuscripts are of the same type, so-called Oxford-group commercial miscellanies produced for the London book trade, sold to a lettered and rising middle class, and assembled according to buyers’ wishes.51 Notable here is the predilection for Chaucer as a poet of love and other private affairs (especially dreams). Intertextual allusions produce striking echoes across texts within the miscellanies—for instance, “There Jason falseth oon / ye falsen twoo” in The Chaunce of the Dyse (34) is a sort of chiastic form of the “There othere falsen noon, thow falsest two” directed at Jason in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (1377)52—and are suggestive of larger patterns of consumption. Chaucer’s preoccupation with the contingent distribution of good and bad fame (House of Fame), the casuistry of love (Parliament of Fowls), and the exemplarity of famous heroes and heroines (Legend of Good Women) all have important parallels in the game and the way it must have been played. But his Troilus and Criseyde is another major point of reference throughout The Chaunce, not just in its direct allusions to characters, but also in its verse form (the so-called Troilus stanza). The dice game is remarkable for the way it enables an audience to play within a dramatic space that belongs to well-known fictional characters, projecting images of themselves as “Chaucerian” lovers, confidantes, matchmakers, and so on, denoting their affiliation with the literary culture of early fifteenth-century England. In this it differs from similar fortune-telling games of the period.53 The game comes with instructions in the opening three stanzas, headed, in Fairfax 16, “Balade vpon the Chaunse of the Dyse,” to be read out by a host in the role of master of ceremonies. In a rudimentary form of bibliomancy, each player is directed to roll three dice to arrive at a specific lot; the lots are arranged in fifty-six stanzas keyed to various combinations of dice as sketched in the margins. The relevant stanza is then recited for the amusement of all. Although the host is responsible for delivering the verses, the game makes of all players performers who take the roles of dramatis personae, and there is indeed


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a strong rationale for thinking of such games as a sort of amateur theater. But this aleatory drama produces unpredictable performances. The performative nature of the text leaves much to chance, in what amounts to a variation on the sortes biblicae (taking random biblical passages to apply to personal situations), except that this game of love employs as its biblia a canon of texts composed by Chaucer. Leaving aside for a moment the randomized events that the game makes possible in play, one can see that when the fifty-six lots are read in sequence, the stanzas alternate between praise and blame, impersonating familiar good and bad characters, distributing good and bad fame. It is likely that The Chaunce of the Dyse was sometimes so perused: tellingly, the concluding stanza rounds off the text with a reference to “Thus laste of alle and knyttynge of oure tale . . .” (407), recalling of course the Parson’s promise to “knytte up al this feeste and make an end” (X.47) before delivering the last tale of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. However that may be, there is only the faintest narrative line, if any, to follow. The twentieth verse is evocative of the good fortune narrated in the first three books of Troilus and Criseyde, Ther is no thynge that gladeth so myn hert Ne that from thought so gretly dothe me brynge How so I be or in what peyne I smerte As yow to here that fresshly kan synge With plesant voys that to my thynkynge Was neuer wight set in no gretter ioye Syn that Troylus wanne first Creseyde in Troy. (134–40)

while the fifty-fifth verse could be said to track the dénouement: Creseyde is here in worde bothe thought and dede ffil neuer dise sith god was bore so trewe Cometh nere ech wight I prey yow taketh hede ffor tymes moo than peyntour chaungeth hewe Ye leue youre olde and taken newe and newe Thus highe ye ben of mercy and of grace That ye ne holden neither rewle ne space. (379–85)

The sequence could be modeled only very abstractly and allusively on the weal-and-woe of Troilus. Much more interesting and probable is the way The Chaunce of the Dyse haphazardly throws up allusions, attempting by chance to close the gap between literature and life, past and present, “game” and “earnest.” This is the way the game produces, for a coterie of readers, the conditions of possibility for events to happen that confer unforeseen meanings on literary experience, retrospectively and

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prospectively. For instance, Troilus seems to have walked off the page from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, evincing a transtemporal continuity between past and present. The speaker of this stanza (i.e., the host) goes so far as to seem to emulate Chaucer’s emotional involvement in the literary events of which he speaks (as this Troilus-like character “gladeth so myn hert” and “from thought so gretly dothe me brynge”), and thus reactivates the old affective charm of Troilus’ joy. Criseyde is similarly present at hand. But her character description is subject to a particular satirical pressure that suggests these “characters” are not so much transported whole by means of metempsychosis as they are metamorphosed, something for which Criseyde’s changeability may serve as a convenient metaphor (“Ye leue youre olde and taken newe and newe / . . . ye holden neither rewle ne space”). Such is the game’s main chronotope: fidelity to texts of the past is less important than their present fecundity in the roll of the dice. A reference to London as the legendary Troynovant (“new troye”) in one stanza of praise suggests as much: Ye ben welcome for vnto vs grete ioye Truly is that your presence is so nere ffor throu out al the cytee of new troye Of daunsynge and of freshnesse nys youre pere Ech wyght that lyst of yow may right wel here By kunnynge speche the god of loves lore Thus ys yow falle for me gete ye no more. (218–24)

The game places participants alongside celebrated lovers of a former age while putting them in and around “us.” What is exhilarating about the game is the mutual “presence . . . so nere” of lovers in the here and now. A deictic rhetoric is similarly employed to describe the fickle love-interest of Troilus—“Creseyde is here”—around which we are invited to gather. The Criseyde stanza is an example of one that is gender-specific, but by far the majority are capable of being attributed to either sex, which is a practical necessity of the game.54 So The Chaunce of the Dyse emphasizes continuities over time and space, while reveling in what must normally have seemed great differences, and in this regard the text seems quite free of the anxieties expressed at the start of the second book of Chaucer’s Troilus (“Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, / In sondry londes, sondry ben usages” [2.27–28]). Old “usages” indeed appear to be as relevant today as ever. But the game requires of its Chaucerian cognoscenti a sharp eye for subtle ironies where identifications are to be made. Exhibiting some caginess in the above-mentioned stanza of praise (“for me gete ye no more”), for instance, the text describes


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someone very much like Diomede who is expert in “god of loves lore”— which is sure to be scant praise. Another stanza gently mocks affected chivalry: reminiscent of Chaucer’s Squire or merry Absolon, this character is described as being well turned out and fit to accompany women, “As folke were wonte in Arthoures dayes take / With hem to Courte and hem felawe to make” (230–31). The learning that participants—the ideal readers who make up the Chaucer literati—must possess in order to enjoy and exploit such satirical pleasantries is an essential part of the game. The Chaunce of the Dyse f latters present company for being particularly bookish, if nothing else. One stanza praises a character for the ability to “speke of Musike or clergye / Of hunting haukynge or of Cheualrye” (235–36), all desirable courtly accomplishments. But the cultural literacy the audience may possess also becomes the target of satire: one character heeds “olde stories” and “kan by rote the wifes lyfe of Bathe” (295–98), resulting in a predictably shrewish disposition. Pandarus is among the cast of characters (“Ther is no beter pandare as I trowe / ffor al this londe throgh out suche be ye knowe” [160–61]), giving the first recorded English usage of the name as a nickname and typifying the way in which Chaucer’s characters get lifted out of old texts in order to apply more broadly. Pandarus is a special case: a notorious intermediary, he is as it were manifest in the very performativity of the game. Meddling in private lives, The Chaunce indeed panders to the audience, generating conditions in which passions may be kindled, creating occasions for talking about love, enabling hidden stratagems, impersonations, and innuendo. The game offers possible consolations of Fortune in the now familiar mode of the “consolatio pandari.” One can imagine the master of ceremonies, like a Pandarus or perhaps Chaucer himself, situating those in his charge well within Fortune’s domain: “Syth fortune,” players are told at the start of the game by a diffident host, “hathe of alle thynge gouernaunce / How euer ye happe excused holdeth me” (15). In the opening balade, in fact the host prays both to “god” (2) and “fortune” (21), the former deity for fitting outcomes and the latter for pleasing ones. The game is highly opportunistic. Whether specific lots are ever appropriate or purely arbitrary is left for the audience to determine, reading off their individual fates or fortunes from the game as though it were a horoscope. This is true even of one character who is said to rise above fortune—paradoxical as it must have seemed, given that a player would have cast dice to arrive at this good fortune: “Ye ben so wel stuffed of purveyaunce / That ye not rechche what auenture god sende” (360–61). Fortune has the governance, absolving the poet or the presenter of responsibility for what happens. And yet this disavowal suppresses any awareness of the odds involved in casting dice, concealing an early and

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elementary probability calculus that had some currency in late medieval Europe, and which math historians and probability theorists have long thought The Chaunce of the Dyse exemplifies.55 The game hardly engineers its outcomes, but an incipient calculus can be detected in its design. Three cubic dice yield a total fifty-six possible sets (6-6-6 descending to 1-1-1), indexed in this game to fifty-six stanzas. That sum was known as early as c. 1000, when Bishop Wibold of Cambray in his Ludus Clericalis arranged fifty-six virtues corresponding to various throws of dice.56 Yet the fifty-six sets are not all equally probable, since specific combinations of dice are more or less likely to come up for the caster. The statistical likelihood of such events, as identified by set theory, can be tabulated.57 But are they significant? One must tread carefully here because the probabilities are low in any event; whether slight differences would be perceptible to players is unclear. What we can say is that stanzas having higher probability are distributed more toward the beginning, but share out roughly the same amount of praise and blame. More provocative is the fact that stanzas of high probability include 30 (referring to Griselda), 43 (Wife of Bath), and 55 (Criseyde), while those of still higher probability include 20 (Troilus) and 23 (Pandarus). In this way The Chaunce of the Dyse may be said to give prominence to Chaucer allusions (or at least the odds are not stacked against them), though it is true that many other stanzas exhibit identical probabilities and make no explicit references. So ultimately the most significant events in this regard are the first and final stanzas (6-6-6 and 1-1-1, sets for which only one permutation of numbers is possible), possessing weak odds shared by only four other stanzas in the game; even if the odds of these stanzas do not on the whole differ greatly, clearly they were perceived differently. It is fitting that the first is a stanza of hyperbolical praise concerning singular and improbable virtue (“To yow may be made no comparisoun” [28]) will more rarely occur in the process of playing The Chaunce of the Dyse. There may be a latent association here with a tradition that goes back to antiquity where the highest dice throw, in some cases 6-6-6, is known as iactus Venerius.58 It is in fact tempting to see the silhouette of the goddess in this stanza’s character, a penumbral vision of Venus with her jewels (pearl and beryl), seashell (cockle), and fragrance (sweet cinnamon). The last stanza of the game is achieved by means of three aces, an unlucky set that speaks directly to the hapless character’s lot in life— Thus laste of alle and knyttynge of our tale Pore is the caste and right suche is the chaunce ffor though ye serve yeres ful a bale Youre trouthe shal no thynge yow forwarde auaunce I knowe the bet by myn ovne gouernaunce


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Ffor hasarde hath with maystry quytte me soo My while that I ioyles now leue in woo. (407–13)

which is rather akin to the dicey situations of fictional characters such as Amans and Beryn.59 Such calculations only take us so far, though, in determining the potential significance of the game. The goal of playing is clearly to generate humor and high spirits, rather than to determine a single winner. To that end, the shared enjoyment of The Chaunce of the Dyse depends on its minor equivocations, coincidences, confidences, and embarrassments—that is, the possibility that an event will personalize the game. And such events are incalculable. There is always the possibility of significant good or bad fortunes. What happens when the dice randomly falls on a stanza that nearly describes the behavior of one of the casters? Would individual players sometimes find it gainful to “own up to” the stanzas that pertain to them by lot in life? Here The Chaunce of the Dyse raises that larger hermeneutical question medieval poets regularly entertained: when and for whom, not just what, does a text mean? One example is Machaut’s Remede de Fortune where a love poem falls by accident into the hands of a beloved lady, fortuitously activating her sympathy for the distressed and paralyzed lover. For a counterexample there is of course Dante’s Inferno 5, which relates the notorious case of how Paolo and Francesca fell to reading the romance of Lancelot del Lac, whereupon the couple was incited to adultery on reading a passage that describes Lancelot and Guenevere kissing.60 In The Chaunce of the Dyse there is as much chance of shame as of gratification associated with selective reading. Who should enjoy (except insofar as to relish the wit) being on the receiving end of such raillery as, “Now trewly yow becometh al your gere / As wel as Cowe a sadel to bere” (258–59)? How desirable is it in polite company to be compared to Griselda, Criseyde, or the Wife of Bath? Other examples can be furnished by a fourteenthcentury dice game where one caster is shamefully exposed (“yi loue is not lele” but “is as comon as is ye cart way”) while another is impugned (“gyf yi dissire were knawn, hit were gret schame”).61 Indulging in the contingent moment, such opportunistic and obviously comical texts must have had their pleasures, producing a convivial atmosphere for f lirting, feigning, and showing off learning. They could also give rise to some anxiety. And yet there is none of the special sort of anxiety associated with gambling in the period when dicing was considered sacrilege, for indeed the fortune-telling game “seems largely to have escaped censure.”62 In the absence of any more “advanced” consolation, The Chaunce of the Dyse enables participants to play with Chaucer and Fortune—resulting in a game of sortes Chaucerianae.


CHAPTER 4 GOWER’S CONFESSIO AMANTIS AND THE NATURE OF VERNACULAR ETHICS

Mundus in euentu versatur ut alea casu, Quan celer in ludis iactat auara manus. [The world is tossed by chance, as dice quickly thrown by greedy hands at play.] John Gower, Confessio Amantis1

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ue to the specialized focus of some of the best modern accounts of medieval moral thought, there has grown up a partial and distorted impression of its historical development, occluding the characteristic contingency of moral rhetoric, practical reason, and action.2 The shortcomings of the leading studies have much to do with what is (or rather, is not) typically admitted as significant evidence for premodern ethical theory and moral psychology, since scholars typically draw their examples from university debates and tractates without taking into their purview literary works, sermon collections, confessional manuals, and various other—especially vernacular or demotic—sources. What view prevails as a result? The issue can be framed with reference to the legacy of Aristotelian ethics, chosen here for its particular relevance to texts discussed in this book. We have already looked at how Thomas Usk adapts neo-Aristotelian doctrine to sophisticated ends in Middle English. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is another late fourteenth-century work in which Aristotle looms large in the vernacular, though in quite a different aspect: the seventh book expounds neo-Aristotelian theoretical, rhetorical, and political teachings, and in addition Gower employs exemplary rhetoric throughout the work in a way that comports well with an understanding of Aristotle’s moral particularism. 3 And yet the English poet’s ethical pragmatism is regularly overlooked in histories of moral

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philosophy, leaving the impression that medieval morals were apodeictic not contingent. A rudimentary sketch of the prevailing view against which Gower’s practical reason must be set runs as follows: the medieval schoolmen, preferring the certitude of Christian metaphysics over antique ethics with its conditional foundations, tended to drop from their theories Aristotle’s original grounding of practical deliberation (phronesis) in commonplaces (endoxa, opinions that are probable or generally admitted) and inductive judgment (paradigma, reasoning from particular cases). Aristotle’s ethics was therefore heavily qualified and tamed by his medieval commentators and synthesizers, though of course there were anomalous cases such as John Duns Scotus whose particular extravagance, as discussed earlier, was a dogged interest in radical singularity and contingent affective motivation. It is safe to say that for most of the schoolmen, Aristotelian (or Ciceronian) practical reason had been assimilated to some stabilizing version of Augustinian eternal law.4 Under the pressure exerted by Augustine in particular, dogmatic and deontic accounts of natural law and right reason followed in order to compensate for the perceived lack of determinacy and transparency in the ancient understanding of practical reason.5 So, for example, whereas the good life used to be grounded in virtues acquired by means of circumspection and habituation over time, now it would be imperfect without the timeless infused virtues (i.e., the three theological virtues of grace, hope, and charity). The scholastic tradition in which these sorts of accommodation were being sought attempted to give moral agents clear natural or supernatural justification so that actions could conform themselves to the precepts of natural law (if you are an Aquinas) or divine revelation (if an Ockham).6 But those attempted syntheses ref lect only one type of interest in ethics and its moral foundations that we can find in later medieval Europe, and it is decidedly academic and ecclesiastical, situated within the confines of narrow disciplinary regimes with all their attendant presuppositions and routine procedures. Indeed the customary privileging of metaphysical foundation for medieval ethics is matched by a clerical Latinity—in its fashion correspondingly rarefied, exclusive, and universalist in its linguistic orientation—as if corroborating claims to determinacy and normativity in the sphere of ethics. Gower’s Confessio Amantis is a distinguished alternative “philosophical work” that locates ethical agency and deliberation within a broader network of contingent codes and particular cases, diffusing morality in and among narratives that may not at first appear to be very systematic. But my claim is that he produces a secular ethics equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of time and change by subjecting morality to narrative

G OW E R A N D V E R NAC U L A R ET H IC S

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time and change. As I have claimed elsewhere, Gower opens up ethics to the sensis communis, and he is characteristically rhetorical rather than metaphysical in his orientation to the good.7 I want to refine my analysis here to show how Gower situates ethics in the singular event of its motivation and enactment for a putative English audience. The Confessio is an extraordinary undertaking not just because it is done in verse and, predominantly, in the vernacular; the work equally vernacularizes ethics for an emerging English polity. The English ethical eclecticism exhibited in Gower’s Confessio gives us another way to conceive of the possibilities of medieval moral thought, and specifically to discover the contingent grounds of morality (at least as they may be compared with the special, numinous powers often assumed by the philosophers). Gower’s express purpose is clarified in a revised Prologue to the Confessio— And for that fewe men endite In oure englissh, I thenke make A bok for Engelondes sake . . . (Prol. 22–24)

and it stands to reason that his ethical approach will be conditioned by the poem’s Englishness. In this Gower does not ignore normative theory so much as engages it as one among other rhetorical reasons for action and thought. Moral rhetoric thus comes to be subject to the fortuity of circumstance, and one circumstance is the event of translation. Teaching Conquers Nature Gower’s Confessio Amantis translates natural morality into kynde. The Middle English kynde was regularly employed by contemporary writers as a double entendre to communicate the assumption that the “natural” is the source of something “moral,” and as Andrew Galloway argues, the idiom bespeaks larger social changes: “Middle English ‘kyndenesse’ shifts religious and social bonds away from hierarchy and towards affinity, and the exploitation of these lexical possibilities may easily be aligned with the many distinctive late medieval forms of community or corporate identity in which reciprocation and close affinity or ideas of such affinity cohere.”8 Gower, I too will urge and elaborate, privileges community over hierarchy in this sense. It is widely recognized that kynde is one of the most ambiguous terms in the Confessio Amantis, but what could bear further scrutiny is the way any natural justification for ethics is inevitably conditioned by the poet’s preferred means of expression—for kynde is not just ambiguous, the word is deeply English. However much critics disagree over the concordance of nature and morality, they have not stopped

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to consider in this context the discordance between English and Latin. Kurt Olsson, giving sustained attention to the nature nomenclature in the Confessio, argues that of the five main senses attaching to kynde one nature emerges as an ethical principle regulating the others: in essence Olsson’s view is that for Gower moral excellence consists in subordinating our lower animal nature to a higher jus naturae, or natural reason.9 Hugh White agrees that the language is equivocal and often ethically antithetical, but he reaches a much more melancholy conclusion about human reason: for him there is no escaping the stark division between a morally benign nature and an amoral (sometimes downright immoral) nature. Gower’s poem is at an impasse on this point. On the one hand, as this critic points out, nature stands for a moral order out of which good behavior springs and according to which conf lict is naturally resolved; on the other, it is presented as an irrational and amoral (occasionally immoral) impulse humans share with the animals.10 White is persuasive, given the preponderance of evidence on his side, but in the context of my argument the critical difference lies elsewhere: both scholars concede more to natural morality than Gower ever does, especially given the selfconscious way in which he writes nature into the work as one among other moral terms in the event of translation. That humans possess a natural inclination toward what is good is a view long associated with St Paul’s comment about the Gentiles “who have not the law” but “do by nature those things that are of the law,” because they have “the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them; and their thoughts between themselves accusing or defending one another” (Cum enim gentes, quae legem non habent, naturaliter ea, quae legis sunt, faciunt, eiusmodi legem non habentes, ipsi sibi sunt lex: qui ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis, testimonium reddente illis conscientia ipsorum, et inter se invicem cogitationibus accusantibus, aut etiam defendentibus [Romans 2:14–15]).11 The notion is elucidated in any number of later medieval philosophical or legal texts.12 For Alan of Lille humans are in possession of a naturalis ratio, for Bonaventure they are aided by naturale lumen, while Peter Lombard observes they are moved naturaliter velle bonum. Aquinas echoes the Pauline dictum in stating that the first principles of ethics are written in natural reason, scripta in ratio naturali. In the mainline philosophical tradition, plainly much stock was put in natural morality: an immutable and normative nature is variously cited as a stimulus to love, the ground of reason, the origin of shame, and basis of the Old Testament Decalogue and the New Testament commandments of Jesus.13 Just as interesting is the fact that the “law written on the hearts” is known as


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such only because it is transmitted in didactic and philosophical writings that issue largely from a clerical elite. There is much talk of natural law in the Confessio Amantis. The important question has long been whether Gower expresses much confidence in it as a basic moral order, impulse, or outcome. Olsson and White both think Gower affirms the existence of natural morality, however opaque or insufficient it may be in the ultimate scheme of things. For the latter critic nature is simply less likely to guarantee ethical results. In support of the view that nature subtends ethics, Gower speaks of the unkynde behavior of murderers whom nature repays in kind (e.g., III.2055–69; V.5901–6; VIII.213–22); the kynde nature of love (e.g., V.119; VII.4297–98); the vices that are avowedly “to kinde no plesance” (e.g., III.5–12; V.120–24); and the poet plays on the word kynde when he wants it to do triple-duty as a simultaneous description of some particular action, its intrinsic nature or species, and finally its relationship to humankind, for example in the droll and apparently circular statement, “It is al on to seie unkinde [i.e., both callous and unnatural] / As thing which don is ayein kinde, / For it with kinde never stod a man to yelden evel for good” (V.4923–25). There are many other instances, but one established interpretation seems to be that at least one nature is as spontaneous and transparent as an Augustinian and, later, scholastic “lawe of kinde.” But other complications besides ambiguity and multiplicity enter into Gower’s treatment of natural morality in the Confessio. For nature is not only a fraught concept by virtue of its conf lation and contiguity with other vulgar kindes, making it difficult to see how they could be consistent; nature is also destined to remain a tangle of derivative interpretations and examples. For one thing, Gower does not follow the examples of Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, Chaucer, or Langland in creating an individualized, personified Natura or Kynde who speaks directly on its own behalf as the custodian of natural morality. As Russell Peck has observed nature here is “never given a direct voice, never even placed in the reassuring position of God’s servant, as in Chaucer.”14 Gower’s language of natural morality is thoroughly mediated, diffuse, divergent, and refractory; and as a common noun (not a proper name) it is never independent of the narratives in which it is employed (and eventalized) in the Confessio. But it is not just that nature is subject to the displacing impersonations of the text and occurs only within the imagined communicative situation of the work. Still more significantly, Gower has marked kinde, in cases where it is employed as a normative principle or idiom, as having been first inscribed in clerical discourse and ecclesiastical Latin.

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Returning to consider the literary context of the previous examples, the problem quickly becomes apparent. Genius’s statement about the nature of envy is prefaced thus: For thus the wise clerkes telle, That no spirit bot of malice Be weie of kinde upon a vice Is tempted, and be such a weie Envie hath kinde put aweie And of malice hath his steringe . . . (II.3136–41; emphasis added)

Genius describes avarice in the following bookish terms: Bot, so as every bok recordeth, It is to kinde no plesance That man above his sustienance Unto the gold schal serve and bowe, For that mai no reson avowe. (V.120–24; emphasis added)

Similarly, he prefaces the punning lines mentioned earlier about the “unkinde man” who violates the law of “kinde” with the following candid acknowledgment, “The bokes speken of this vice . . .” (V.4917). To take one more, longer example of Gower’s procedure here: For who that wolde ensample take, The lawe which is naturel Be weie of kinde scheweth wel That homicide in no degree, Which werreth ayein charite, Among the men ne scholde duelle. For after that the bokes telle, To seche in al this worldesriche, Men schal noght finde upon his liche A beste forto take his preie: And sithen kinde hath such a weie, Thanne is it wonder a man, Which kynde hath and resoun can, That he wol owther more or lasse His kinde and resoun overpasse, And sle that is to him semblable. So is the man noght resonable Ne kinde, and that is noght honeste, Whan he is worse than a beste. (III.2580–98; emphasis added)


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Genius not only invokes an exemplary narrative drawn from textual tradition to support his case, but he also refers his knowledge of animal behavior to books. One thing that makes his repeated appeals to a literary and scholarly activity interesting is that Genius takes his knowledge of natural phenomena from an ambient culture (especially writing), so that one might be tempted to ask why he did not just go outside and observe nature for himself. More to the point, if natural reason has such primacy and transparency, presumably no one need depend on learned writings to discover it. Naturale lumen should have sufficed. If there is a natural morality, in other words, Gower’s grasp of it evidently does not come naturally, and he insists upon that fact. So Gower’s Confessio does something rather more peculiar than simply transmit natural morality: the work exhibits an interest in the clerical or generally discursive transmission of natural morality. Gower gives new meaning to the biblical and philosophical notion that the law is written, though it is here not inscribed on the heart; or if it is ever so heartfelt, then the law is first written in books and then, contingently, in “oure englissh.” The impression we are left with is that the “lawe of kinde” is encrypted as a cultural phenomenon—as wise clerkes telle and every bok recordeth—not at all naturally occurring or even universally recognized or intuited. But Gower is hardly being ironical or cavalier on this point, for he persists in translating natural morality to his readers in his own book. The results are paradoxical but not, so far as the poet’s express purposes are concerned, impractical. Having identified the scholarly milieu from which natural morality derives the poet has performed the ambidextrous task of assigning it a social and linguistic origin while redeploying it in a new social and linguistic context. Several scholars have observed that in the Confessio Gower vernacularizes clerical tradition or, what perhaps what amounts to much the same thing, clericalizes the vernacular. The point needs to be elaborated further in relation to other examples below, but what could bear specific emphasis already is that in appealing to the textuality of clerical authority, Gower in effect denaturalizes it; and rather than simply subverting the normative conditions of the theory of natural law thereby (as if that were his purpose), Gower seems to think he is better off reappropriating the theory to a shared cultural space. He is expanding its field of application in the discursive event, as he explicitly indicates in the Prologue, writing “for Engelondes sake,” making the law accessible and viable in a way that his major earlier writings (the French Mirour de l’Omme and Latin Vox Clamantis) never could. Thus he achieves something of what Galloway has identified in the Middle English usage of kynde, where it becomes aligned with “forms of community or corporate identity” and “affinity.”

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Gower’s referral of nature to culture is consistent with his general attitude toward learning and with his self-confessed appropriation of clerical culture for common profit. He begins the Confessio Amantis by ref lecting on his own relation to past scholarship: Of hem that written ous tofore The bokes duelle, and we therefore Ben tawht of that was write tho. (Prol. 1–3)

Not a passive consumer of books, he promises to translate and transform them: Forthi good is that we also In oure tyme among ous hiere Do wryte of newe som matiere . . . (Prol. 4–6)

An indication of his deep respect for old books is the fact that the poet feels he must acknowledge debts to them even when doing so threatens their very “nature.” Others have described a similar dynamic in relation to Gower’s language politics. Rita Copeland observes that he is participating in translatio studii, concerned as he is with elevating the authority of the vernacular on the backs of the Latin auctores.15 Larry Scanlon argues that Gower’s adoption of the role of vernacular transmitter has to do with the perceived failings of clerical culture; the poet is in effect substituting lay authority for an infirm Latinate tradition.16 These critics focus on the poet’s endeavor to challenge authority and tradition. Just as likely, however, Gower’s (or Genius’s) habitual every bok recordeth and the wise clerkes telle makes the tradition pertain more widely, if contingently, “In oure tyme among ous hiere.” Much the same can be said about the way Gower’s Latin interacts with English within the Confessio, for the bilingualism of the poem seizes on the opportunity to enact just the kind of cultural translation being describing. The prestige language has from one perspective no choice but to cede authority to the vernacular, since the Latin apparatus (verse prologues, prose glosses, speaker markers) depends on the English for its narrative and dialogic elaboration and justification, if not for a full translation (i.e., for readers who are not bilingual).17 Others agree that there is something in it for Gower to have the vernacular placed under the prima facia authority of the Latin. For example, Winthrop Wetherbee states that “exemplary narratives challenge the authority of the penitential discourse and moralizing Latin glosses that frame them,” and he goes on to speak of the vernacular “exposing the evasions of the Latin in the process of assimilating its concepts.”18 Diane Watt persuasively


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argues that in his guise as an English writer Gower is “concerned with creating a new vernacular authority.”19 I suggest Gower is authorizing a vernacular ethics. Natural morality is an “assimilated concept” that will not maintain a condition of unqualified normativity when translated into the vernacular, and therefore the authority Gower asserts must be transformed in the asserting of authority. In fact, natural law becomes another piece of moral rhetoric disposed among all the other examples in the Confessio. In defining the miscellaneous poem as ex floribus recollectum (Prol. 40*), Gower may be said to redefine the place of the “natural”: the cultured nature of the work that is implied by the vegetal metaphor suggests that morality is rooted not in abstract norms but in new vernacular narratives drawn from diverse fields. By cultivating this diverse heritage of dicta et facta memorabilia in the Confessio Amantis, Gower is attempting to establish a new common ground. He is finally less interested in the natural occurrence of “a certain basic instinctual order”20 than in cultivating an educated sensibility and training up a “second nature.” Naturam superat doctrina—teaching conquers Nature.21 Indeed within the fiction of the poem it rapidly becomes apparent that for Gower ethics is not guaranteed by nature, but arises organically out of learning and circumspection. Genius undertakes to provide Amans with such rhetorical raw material as he needs to develop his virtuous habits and conscience. Consuetudo est altera natura— habit is a second nature.22 The learning on which he depends to train himself up to virtue is not just scholarly. Amans is to look to historical knowledge (“These olde worldes with the newe / Who that wol take in evidence” [VII.2702–3]), customary evidence or examples that have cultural currency. Moral Conscience and Contingency Conscience has a central role to play in gathering, sorting, and applying the historical evidence from “olde worldes” to the diverse conditions that arise contingently in the “newe.” Genius all along teaches that it is left to Amans to “take that him thenketh good, / And leve that which is not so” (VIII.260–61). In this scheme of things the moral agent does not have anything like the certainty of infallible first principles to go on in sorting what is good, which further distinguishes Gower’s ethical approach from those of the academic philosophers for whom conscience is the cornerstone of natural morality. In such discussions the conscience was split between what was commonly known as synderesis and conscientia, the former containing the natural precepts that the latter deliberates upon and applies in action.23 As Philip the Chancellor explains, synderesis

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counterbalances the original impulse to sin and is therefore innate; it is not an acquired power. It is a natural rectitude, accessible as a function of reason, which Philip describes as an inner voice that “murmurs back in answer to sin.” For Bonaventure syndersis weighs naturally on the human will, naturale quoddam pondus,24 and embodies quite specific moral precepts (i.e., the commandments of the Decalogue and of Christ). Aquinas observes that the role of conscientia is to apply the natural law precepts of synderesis, whose purpose is again “to murmur back in reply to evil and to turn us towards what is good.”25 He developed the teaching of his master Albert the Great who identified synderesis with an “ensemble of innate principles.”26 In the fourteenth century with the development of Ockhamist thought, conscience becomes more closely aligned with the dictates of God (i.e., clear divine-command rather than mere murmur), though for practical purposes there is still a natural moral order known to reason and conscience.27 Gower does not yield much to the idealism or quasi-mysticism of the philosophers here. The Confessio indicates instead that the storing up of “evidence” is constitutive of an individual’s moral horizons, suggesting that conscience is an acquired faculty.28 For instance, Genius makes reference to a “reule of conscience” (I.1236), making its proper regulation depend on the “evidence” that is at hand, as already indicated in an earlier passage: that is, Amans is to “take evidence / To reule with thi conscience” (I.248). That conscience must submit to evidence and remembrances must make it—to some significant degree—conditional and contingent. What is the upshot of this view of conscience? How could Gower justify the moral conscience if it is subject to external contingencies? Gower explores the implications at a metaethical and narrative level, as shown in one fine example where conscience misfires. The precariousness of conscience is made emphatic in the “Tale of Pope Boniface” (II.2803–3084), an exemplum taken from fairly recent memory and adapted to Genius’s specific purposes in the Confessio Amantis. Of interest, first of all, is the relation that obtains (or fails to obtain) between Latin summary and English tale, illustrating the translation of clerical culture and the characteristic dispersal of its claims to authority which this tale of clerical corruption serves to effect in other ways. The accompanying Latin frames the tale by assigning its meaning to providence, depriving the case of its contingent eventfulness: Hic ponit Confessor exemplum contra istos in causa dignitatis adquirende supplantatores. Et narrat qualiter Papa Bonefacius predecessorem suum Celestinum a papatu coniectata circumuencione fraudulenter supplantauit. Set qui potentes a sede deponit, huiusmodi supplantacionis fraudem


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non sustinens, ipsum sic in sublime exaltatum postea in profundi carceris miseriam proici, fame que siti cruciari, necnon et ab huius vite gaudiis dolorosa morte explantari finali conclusione permisit. [Here the Confessor presents an instructive example against those supplanters in the cause of acquiring dignity. And he tells how Pope Boniface supplanted his predecessor Celestine from the papacy, with a scheme fraudulently constructed. But He Who deposes the powerful from their seats, not tolerating the fraud of this sort of supplantation, allowed the one who had been sublimely exalted to be thrown later into the wretchedness of deep prison, tortured by hunger and thirst, and at the last end to be uprooted from the joys of this life in a sorrowful death.]29

The tale comes as part of the second book dedicated to the vice Supplantation, which as we will see expressly bears a strong relationship to adventitious circumstance (i.e., it is a vice that exploits and produces fortunate turns of events). However, the Latin prose summary tends to reduce or suppress the eventfulness involved in the case: nowhere in the tale is the divine hand of providence invoked—except fraudulently, as we will see—to render events explicable. The absence of divine intervention and the human alienation from providence is the more evident. If the synopsis has any purchase on the vernacular narrative, then, it is by having imposed an exegesis that is at most latent in the pattern of events foretold. So there is already something curious going on in the strained relationship between Latin and English, normative exegesis and narrative exemplification: the latter, as others have suggested long before, characteristically threatens to supplant the former.30 In fact the Latin acts in a manner that is uncannily akin to the pope’s desire to tyrannize lay power: Boniface was known for his despotic attempts to overrule temporal lords, expressing his will in the notorious 1296 bull Clericis laicos. Scanlon thus reads the tale as an expression of Gower’s disenchantment with the Church, and the spurious if pious Latin exegesis must lend support to this anticlericalism.31 However, Genius’s narrative exposition should be able to summon a more complex response than the moralization requires, impelling readers forward as they take in the whole plot, evidence of Gower’s determination “to use the independent meaning of his narraciones not only to contradict but also to expand and enhance his ethical analysis.”32 The tale indeed has much to say about errors of judgment. The victimized Celestine was a godly hermit, “an holy clerk reclus, / Which full was of gostli vertus” (II.818), making it all the more astonishing that he should be deceived by his conscience. But so it happens. One night while sleeping in his chamber he is in this tale deluded into believing God has

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spoken directly to him. The mistake proves to be his tragic downfall. One would think he could have discerned evil spirits, but there is scant evidence of Celestine’s “gostli vertus” in the event. As if playing on the pope’s celestial-sounding name, Gower thus could be said to put in question the merit of eremitical isolation and training. As the story goes, an envious cardinal, the soon-to-be Pope Boniface, hatches a plan to unseat Celestine. The cardinal arranges to have the pope share his sleeping quarters with a “clergoun of yong age” (II.2850), a youth employed to carry out an evil deed. Boniface instructs the “clergoun” to apply a brass trumpet in the following manner: “Thou schalt,” he seide, “whan time is Awaite, and take riht good kepe, Whan that the Pope is fast aslepe And that non other man be nyh; And thanne that thou be so slyh Thurghout the Trompe into his Ere, Fro hevene as thogh a vois it were, To soune of such prolacioun That he his meditacioun Therof mai take and understonde, As thogh it were of goddes sonde.” (II.2868–78)

All the young clerk must do is administer the instrument to create the impression of a special divine dictation, producing a voice calling on the pope to resign his post. Carrying out the cardinal’s ingenious plan that very night, the clerk blows into the trumpet three times: and thus awake This holi Pope he made thries, Wherof diverse fantasies Upon his grete holinesse Withinne his herte he gan impresse. The Pope ful of innocence Conceiveth in his conscience That it is goddes wille he cesse; Bot in what wise he may relesse His hihe astat, that wot he noght. (II.2896–905)

The pope is left feeling that he has been privy to a special revelatory event, an order from above resembling, as if to invoke Ockhamist understanding of divine-command, the clarion voice of God. The nature of the ruse involved also has added resonance in light of earlier scholastic theories of synderesis, which as mentioned regard conscience as a murmuring back


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to sin; here the only thing approximating such a sound is the blaspheming speaking trumpet, “As thogh it were of goddes sonde.” G. C. Macaulay notes that chronicle versions upon which Gower would have drawn for the Tale of Boniface make no mention of the trumpet as a means of deception, strengthening the case that something like the “inner voice” is of signal concern to Gower in this tale.33 The young clerk has by speaking into the horn, as most anyone would recognize, successfully simulated the voice of God, recalling biblical and iconographical instances of such instruments acting as the vox Dei. 34 Numerous visual depictions show that the trumpet heralded war and apocalyptic judgments, and Gower elsewhere employs the instrument to proclaim death-judgments.35 There is an intriguing coincidence in Dante’s Inferno 19, where the same Boniface VIII, who ruled during the poet’s lifetime, is condemned to hell even before he died. Dante opens the canto with a declaration that he will sound his trumpet (suoni la tromba), giving extraordinary emphasis— and employing the instrument nowhere else like this—to the description of the infernal residence of the simoniacs (where the pope will come to settle).36 In Gower’s Confessio, however, the trumpet ushers in a false judgment. It is not hard to imaging that Gower meant the trumpet to travesty the last blast sounded in St John’s Apocalypse (“Et septimus angelus tuba cecinit: et factae sunt voces magnae in caelo dicentes: Factum est regnum huius mundi, Domini nostri et Christi eius, et regnabit in saecula saeculorum”; “And the seventh angel sounded the trumpet: and there were great voices in heaven, saying: The kingdom of this world is become our Lord’s and his Christ’s, and he shall reign for ever and ever” [Apocalypse 11:15]), announcing the final defeat of worldly institutions—albeit, as it turns out, in this exemplum a credulous papacy is overcome by a corrupt cardinal. The association serves Gower’s purposes well. For indeed, what is missing in this exemplary narrative of all-too-human opportunism and intrigue is a natural or supernatural moral source, setting into high relief the profound problem of ordinary ethical deliberation. Moral judgment here comes into focus as something rather more contingent than certain. In the event, the hermit is inadequate to the machinations of a canny cardinal whose savvy identifies him as a Supplanter. The Supplanter, Genius teaches, happens to be a particular type of malefactor who triumphs by trading on others’ misfortunes: For his fortune is to deceive And for to change upon the whel His wo with othre mennes wel. Of that another man avaleth,

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His oghne astat thus up he haleth, And takth the bridd to his beyete, Wher othre men the buisshes bete. (II.2350–56)

This may seem to be a mere conceit of the fraudulent: only they think they can control all eventualities, mastering the Wheel of Fortune. Genius shows in this example that the cardinal will himself suffer a worse reversal of fortune at the hands of his enemies, putting in doubt even his own foresight. But Gower does not cede such (albeit limited) power over fortune to criminals. The poet can be found asserting that human fortunes are the product of human behavior, good and bad: For after that we falle and rise, The world arist and falth withal, So that the man is overal His oghne cause of wel and wo. What we fortune clepe so Out of the man himself it groweth . . . (Prol. 544–49)

And again, Genius teaches that love and fortune are coterminous: “For after that a man poursuieth / To love, so fortune suieth” (IV.365–66). In Gower’s Vox Clamantis we find a similar sentiment, notably one that again challenges an old presumption about medieval fatalism: Si bene vix, sequitur bona sors; si vis male, sortem Pro motu mentis efficis esse malam. Si super astra leues virtutum culmine mentem, Te fortuna sue ducit ad alta rote: Set si subrueris viciorum mole, repente Tecum fortunam ducis ad yma tuam. Expedit vt sortem declines deteriorem, Dum tuus est animus liber vtrumque sequi. [If your will is good, a good lot follows; if your will is bad, through the operation of your mind you cause your lot to be bad. If you should lift up your mind above the stars by the help of virtue, Fortune will conduct you to the top of her wheel; but if you should become corrupted by a heavy burden of sins, you will quickly bring your fortune to the bottom with you. It is to your advantage to shun the worse chance, for your soul is free to follow the one as well as the other.]37

Perhaps this can be seen as early evidence of the “revised, more hopeful view of the individual’s relation to Fortune,” as described by Paul Strohm.38 The point is that individual agents should seek their own


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advantages, so far as bona sors is in the power of anyone; and when it is in their power, they should act ethically. Celestine is a negative example of this. Yet Gower also produces exemplum after exemplum showing that humans cannot control the misfortunes of love, fame, power, and so on, just as we see that neither Celestine nor Boniface is fortune-proof. What do we do with such ambiguity in the Confessio Amantis? Sometimes it seems fortune can be mastered, while other times it overmasters persons. In light of the former, ethical agency requires prudence; in light of the latter, no human capability would seem to suffice; the point of all this seems to be that prudential calculation is more likely, if not guaranteed, to result in happy outcomes. Gower drives the point home in the English political context with a short poem, “O deus immense,” probably addressed to King Richard II before his deposition: Saltem fortuna stabilis quia non manet tua. Principio scire fortunam seu stabilire, Non est humanum super hoc quid ponere planum; Fine set expertum valet omnis dicere certum, Qualia sunt facta, quia tunc probat exitus acta. [Fortune is stable at least in not remaining the same. To have foreknowledge, making Fortune stable Is not human, to posit anything plainly beyond this, But once the end is reached, everyone can speak with certainty, The sorts of things that are done, because then the outcome proves the deeds.]39

If Richard was about to come to an untimely finis, soon to be supplanted by an opportunistic Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, Gower may not have anticipated the rich irony of his words. Neither the poet nor the prince could possess the foreknowledge about which he speaks here. Gower advises the king to rule well and honorably in the meantime, not by ignoring the liabilities of contingent fortuna, but with cognizance of its possibilities for the future. This would apply as much to the new king as to his predecessor. The Confessio Amantis was in its earliest form composed “for king Richardes sake” (*Prol. 24), and later rededicated to Henry IV, and therefore involves itself in the very contingency of events for which it seeks prudent countermeasures. The long poem is characteristic in proposing a pragmatic, secular, this-worldly ethics to deal with equivocal fortunes. As in “O deus immense,” Gower’s Confessio Amantis recommends good rule as the only effective (if limited) means of staving off misfortune.

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Within the unsettled realm of mundane events (Mundus in euentu versatur ut alea casu, recalling the epigraph heading this chapter) Gower advocates for a shrewd ethical pragmatism that stands in counterpoint to moral metaphysics. Whereas other philosophers and mystics may speak of a sovereign apodeictic source of morality, the poet’s conscience has a more contingent mainspring. Gower is certainly skeptical of the idea of morality as theophany.40 God cannot be held responsible, Gower teaches in the Prologue to the Confessio, for ethics falls within the orbit of practical reason rather than deriving from divine dictation: Bot what man wolde himself avise, His conscience and noght misuse, He may wel ate ferste excuse His god, which evere stant in on; In him ther is defalte non, So moste it stonde upon ousselve . . . (Prol. 520–25)

A parallel biblical imperative, “Non dicas: Ille me implanavit . . . . // Deus ab initio constituit hominem, / Et reliquit illum in manu consilii sui” (say not: He hath caused me to err . . . . God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel [Ecclesiasticus 15:12–14]) must have spoken to Gower of the importance of moral autonomy even when it is not clear what one should do in a given instance. If there are obvious limitations to this pragmatic ethic, with all the weight it puts on self-governance and fallible perception, there are reasons to think its practitioners are not worse off than schoolmen or hermits (for even the Vicarius Christi in the example of the “Tale of Pope Boniface” is vulnerable). People may be better off for disavowing academic complacencies about the transparency and infallibility of natural law, in order that ordinary agents may come to possess circumspection Celestine lacked and avoid the fortunes Boniface exploited. Gower’s Moral Murmur So it would be mistaken to think Gower can provide no substantive moral (or for that matter biblical) justification for conscience in the absence of some (super)natural moral metaphysics. Gower avoids antinomianism by asking his audience to consider the meaning of the “Tale of Pope Boniface,” one moral case among others that challenges inf lexible clerical platitudes and becomes the basis for imagining a teachable conscience. The exemplary case, in other words, supplements even as it desublimates the philosophy of natural law, or rather it produces narrative ethics out


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of normative ethical theory. Conscience is best understood here as a heightened consciousness (recalling one of the original senses of the word, con, with + science, knowledge),41 a shared understanding among moral agents. The vernacular narratives of the Confessio are meant to make, move, and improve a public audience. At the same time, Gower presupposes the ideal polity he is attempting to vitalize. “The Tale of Pope Boniface,” for example, functions in place of synderesis, with its legacy of Latin authority and divine sanction, to generate a new conscience that is to act as the people’s moral murmur. Granted, the moral murmur advanced in the Confessio Amantis is more uncertain than any unmediated, numinous command (in contrast to the murmur of conscience described by Philip the Chancellor and Aquinas). But in Gower’s understanding there is no alternative, reliable heavenly trump. Chaucer may be said to tap into the same idea in the House of Fame where Aeolus’ two trumpets, Clere Laude and Sklaundre (1572–82), are sounded arbitrarily.42 Aeolus delivers his blasts, dispensing glory and infamy, at the command of Lady Fame (whom Chaucer identifies as the sister of Fortune, 1547). Now Chaucer is rather mordant when it comes to describing the “maner murmurynge” (1524) of those who populate the House of Fame: the “noyse” (1521) of the supplicants to Fame is compared to a hive of bees; and the House of Rumour is similarly resounding with self-important “noyse” (1927)—the circulation of true and false tidings.43 Such is the liability of murmur that it can amount to mere rumour, and become incoherent jangling. Gower shares with Chaucer serious doubts when he describes Murmur in aduersis (1.vii), an aspect of Disobedience originating in Pride, anatomized in the first book of the Confessio Amantis. The lover admits he is diseased in his heart with “With many a Murmur . . .” (1.1388–89), contemplating how he fails to gain a requital from his lady. Gower condemns Murmur in Mirour de l’Omme 2317–29, where it is likewise said to attend Pride. For all that, where Gower feels grumbling dissent is a moral imperative, namely as a just response to the venality of the Church, he does not hesitate to employ the dissident murmur to great effect. Gower seems to have developed a novel sense of the positive potential of murmuring throughout his works, even if he censures too much noise. In his Mirour de l’Omme Gower indicates that his fierce anticlerical critique is based on nothing less than a popular acknowledgment of the corruption of the Roman curia: “Ce que je pense escrire yci / Nest pa part’ moy, ainz est ensi / Du toute cristiene gent / Murmur, compleinte, vois et cry” (What I intend to write here is not from myself only, but is rather the murmur, complaint, voice, and cry of all Christian folk).44 In his next large work murmuring is sharpened into the Latin Vox Clamantis,

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a deeply ambiguous cry that at once claims to be common (“Vox populi cum voce dei concordat” [III.1267]) and uncommon (emulating the prophetic vox clamantis in deserto).45 By the time he came to write the Confessio Amantis, perhaps Gower discovered how best to align the dissident claims of a wider social conscience with his individual poetic practice. Here he is equally antagonistic to the corruption of Holy Church, but the English carries through the rebuke with a singular force and subtlety perhaps hitherto unavailable in French or Latin. It is not a consistently aggressive protest like that found in his earlier works, but rather an articulate vernacular murmuring by means of which Gower maximizes his chances and multiplies effects. The implications are profound enough. Not only is a pope, once in sublime exaltatum, cast down after his vain attempt at imposture. The vernacular also functions to undermine clerical exegesis while appropriating the clerks’ natural law—as if certifying that vox populi can sometimes become a vox Dei in the event.46

CHAPTER 5 TELLING FORTUNES IN LYDGATE’S FALL OF PRINCES

What else does the clamor of tragedies bewail but Fortune overthrowing happy kingdoms with an unexpected blow? Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy1 We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference. . . . The forces at work in history are ruled neither by a destination nor by a mechanics, but rather by the luck of the battle. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”2

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ohn Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1431–38) is both ambiguous and articulate about the eventful matters it chronicles. Recounting scores of verse tragedies—from the loss of Eden through to fairly recent events in European history—Lydgate’s Fall depends for its contents and effects on so many spectacular reversals of fortune. Lydgate’s immediate source for the work is Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas de nobles hommes et femmes (1409), a French prose redaction of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–60), yet from the standpoint of the fiction itself all the historical narratives contained in the work originally come down to medieval writers as gifts of Fortune. The sixth book of Lydgate’s Fall represents the scene of the initial donation. Fortune comes as an apparition—in an episode clearly evocative of Lady Philosophy’s visitation at the beginning of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy—to bestow on the de casibus author (“Bochas”) the very substance of the work, or at least part of the work, that is the Fall of Princes.3 As we will see, in this particular book the poet becomes a recipient of over a dozen histories drawn from Fortune’s store of tragic occurrences, her “secre bosum . . . ful of stories” (6.309).

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Lydgate looks on these gifts with considerable suspicion, but he is expressly indebted to them when it comes to his stated aim: Off noble stories to make rehersaile, Shewyng a merour how al the world shal faile, And how Fortune, for al ther hih renoun, Hath vpon pryncis iurediccioun. (Prol. 158–61)

The satisfying spectacle Lydgate makes of fallen princes produces “noble stories” despite but also thanks to the ignominy visited upon them. The rhyming couplet reinforces the notion that chronicles (“rehersaile”) are coextensive with calamity (“how al the world shal faile”), confirming that Lydgate’s Fall of Princes resides well within the jurisdiction of eventful Fortune. Lydgate thus eschews total contempt for the world in seeking to give fair descriptions of it, even immersing himself in temporal processes to make monuments out of tragic misfortunes. All this is generally the case for de casibus tragedy. But Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is especially conscious and expressive of the paradoxes and tradeoffs involved in bewailing misfortune in order to produce a work about Fortune. Lydgate’s major addition to the genre is to interpose sixty-nine envoys that issue moralizing “remedies” for Fortune, offering such advice as “Forthune hath no domynacioun / Wher noble pryncis be governed be resoun” (2.55–56). At various points throughout, then, Lydgate rationalizes and moralizes contingent events in a monitory rhetoric of human accountability, thereby making misfortune into another name for irresponsibility. The responsible prince, according to this advisory idiom, should not fear misfortune and may indeed aspire to overmaster Fortune. The envoys were added at the request of a putative master of Fortune, Lydgate’s patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as Lydgate explains near the beginning of the second book— This myhti prynce, riht manli & riht wis, Gaff me charge in his prudent auys, That I sholde in eueri tragedie, Afftir the processe made mencioun, At the eende sette a remedie, With a lenvoie conueied be resoun, And afftir that, with humble affeccioun, To noble pryncis lowli it directe, Bi othres fallyng [thei myht] themsilff correcte. (2.146–54)

and it is easy to understand the imperative driving this desire to intervene. Fortune poses serious problems for the conception and management

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of political subjects (if they allow themselves to be ruled more by events rather than state power) and the prince alike ( jeopardizing his prerogative over his subjects), and therefore public poetry must make fortune appear just to disappear. Cognizant of the difficulty, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes attempts to carry out such a vanishing act. The illusion is not sustained, and one of the great merits of Lydate’s Fall is that it makes the rhetorical struggle for moral comprehension visible. Regarding Lydgate’s conspicuous efforts to convert tragedy (the gift of Lady Fortune to Boccaccio) into what we may call a “comic art” of self-improvement (the new dispensation of duke Humphrey vis-à-vis the envoys), scholars have come down on different sides of the issue. In light of Lydgate’s ameliorative rhetorical interventions, Paul Strohm perceives a moral optimism “according to which, rather than found subject to Fortune, the prince might set himself above Fortune and might educate himself in the ways of Fortune’s avoidance.” Lydgate expresses a new confidence in reason and prudential foresight, among other classical virtues, which shows him partaking of “an emergent interest in the positive political management of Fortune’s ravages,” evidence of a new fifteenth-century Machiavellianism.4 As noted at the outset of this book, Strohm’s attempt to relocate the so-called Machiavellian Moment is salutary and in many respects sound. However, the poet’s practical wisdom can sometimes seem like no more than wishful thinking, less hard-headed Machiavellianism than moralism, particularly in those tragic histories where there appears to be no defense against misfortune. As Maura Nolan persuasively argues in her analysis of the first two books of the Fall, Lydgate’s engagement with history is equivocal and elegiac, “burdened by an awareness of the impossibility of reducing all history to a single moral and driven to articulate that impossibility at critical moments in the text.” Exhibiting sympathy for the victims of tragedy, Lydgate consequently “tempers Humphrey’s thesis.”5 The contingency of human history thus threatens princely power, even perhaps undermining the prince’s attempt to shape history in commissioning Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. Nor are the antiseptic envoys as practical and self-assured as Strohm implies. Nigel Mortimer shows that they are unsystematic and inconsistent, in which case Lydgate’s teaching varies with circumstances, becoming “largely ad hoc.” Often Lydgate emphasizes freedom over fortune, but sometimes he produces fortunal moralities.6 At one point indeed tragedy is defined as a formal and fortunal issue that springs up independently of moral error: “For tragedy, as poets specify, / Begins with joy, endith with adversity” (5.3120). Tragic matter has been identified with the gifts of Fortune at least since Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy: “What else does the clamor of tragedies bewail

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but Fortune overthrowing happy kingdoms with an unexpected blow?” 7 A generous (if only emblematic) patron of the arts herself, Fortune may be said to rival duke Humphrey. One way to put this is to say Lydgate strains to accommodate events within a moral horizon that denies their contingency, only to produce more contingent rhetoric; the poet explores the resulting differend, defined by Lyotard as “a case of conf lict . . . that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments.”8 Such conf lict comes about due to a “heterogeneity of phrase regimens,”9 revealing the largely contingent basis of all utterance, we may say. This chapter sees an analogous problem elucidated in the gift-exchange scene where, in the sixth book of the regimal Fall of Princes, Bochas acquires his matter from the goddess of mutability, Lady Fortune. The poet’s enterprise is thereby exposed as conf licted yet calculated, compromised and yet precisely mandated, situating him between opposing regimes of rhetoric. Book 6 expressly links the issue to Lydgate’s keen awareness of the identity between verbal artifice and Fortune, which helps explain why in the middle of this dialogue between Fortune and Bochas there is a discussion of the discipline of rhetoric. Rhetoric has always been the art of the fortunate utterance, implying the corollary assumption that utterances may be hazardous (e.g., mistimed, misconstrued, or inconsequential); at the mercy of circumstance, such effective language is ever contingent. Lydgate’s task is made still more precarious by the commission he receives from duke Humphrey. The signal example Fortune leaves Bochas to contemplate in the latter half of the sixth book is the fall of the “prince of eloquence,” Cicero, who for all his verbal dexterity could not save himself. Caesar’s backing of Cicero has particular resonance given Lydgate’s patronage arrangement, betraying ambivalence about the risky—not to say reckless—rhetorical events and policies to which the poet was party in composing the Fall of Princes for Humphrey in the 1430s. Fortune Favors the Poets At the beginning of book 6 Bochas is alone in his study, pen in hand, contemplating the doubleness of Fortune, when she suddenly appears in grand aspect to chastise him. Fortune is a spectacular and polymorphous figure—with her hundred hands, hermaphroditic body, and particolored cloak—as if an emblem of all the possibilities writers such as Bochas could imagine. She in fact emerges as a rhetorical figure come monstrously alive. Not so much a fixed entity as a figure of dynamic becoming, or a kind of apparition of an apparition, Fortune has indeed been composed and recomposed over time. This is the selfsame Fortune, described by


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Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, who is responsible for the “permutacioun” of things in the sublunary world.10 Lydgate has himself reconstituted her image out of the elements that went into the construction of Lady Philosophy (her costume, countenance, stature, and mystique) in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, thereby ironically transmuting Philosophy into Fortune (where before the one had impersonated the other). No doubt he takes a cue or two from Chaucer. These would represent just some of her textual metamorphoses (or rather, the manipulations of the poets). Now her literariness receives explicit treatment in Lydgate’s opening stanzas, where Fortune, a dreadful figure of pure potentiality and permutation, may be said to embody multiple events: Now lik Ector, now dreedful Thersites, Now was she Cresus, now Agamenoun, Sardanapallus off condicioun; Now was she mannyssh, now was she femynyne, Now coude she reyne, now koude she falsli shyne. Now a mermaide angelik off face, A tail behynde verray serpentyne, Now debonaire, now froward to do grace, Now as a lamb tretable & benigne, Now lik a wolff of nature to maligne, Now Sirenes to synge folk a-slepe Til Karibdis drowne hem in the deepe. (6.59–70)

Lydgate has added to his source such specific references to legendary heroes and monsters, pointing up Fortune’s peculiar role in manifesting and motivating poetry. An apt comparison can of course be made to Lady Fame, whom Chaucer calls a sibling of Fortune, appearing as she does to change shape in front of the viewer’s eyes in his House of Fame.11 Fortune, like Fame, is responsible for circulating rumor or tidings. Lydgate’s Fortune is just more of a subject than a master of rumor; in a superb irony, she will call herself a victim of bad fame. The assimilation of fortune to poetry, and then to rhetoric more generally, becomes increasingly salient as we proceed. Fortune begins to speak Bochas about issues of representation, addressing Bochas’s current literary activities and apparent writer’s block: How thou trauailest, besiest the in veyn, In thi studie euer diligent, Now in the west, now in the orient To serche stories, north & meredien, Of worthi princis that heer-toforn ha been. (6.87–91)

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Fortune claims that this writerly work is of a piece with her own, for just as Bochas praises and blames princes, so she metes out good and bad fame with the blows of her two trumpets (106–26). Writing in the de casibus mode is doing the bidding of Fortune. Chaucer’s House of Fame clearly stands behind this reference to a trumpeting Fortune publishing good and bad fame; yet Lydgate’s goddess has just as much affinity with Thomas Hoccleve’s Fortune who, as he complains, keeps a wax tablet (“Oute of youre tables me planed han ye”).12 Bochas exhibits one fault, Fortune goes on to say, in foolishly attempting to alter the register (that is her prerogative). In this case, acting as no mere conduit of Fortune, the poet has foolishly chosen to add remedies (which we know are added for Humphrey): All thi labour thou spillest in veyn, Geyn my maneres so felli to replie, — Bi thi writyng to fynde a remedie, To interupte in thi laste dawes My statutis [and] my custumable lawes. (150–54)

Lydgate is here translating his source (“. . . remedier contre noiz loix et contre noz coustumes”), but the passage has added resonance given that the English poet, in supplying remedial envoys, amplifies this aspect. In reply, Bochas acknowledges that the mutable world he describes in the Fall of Princes is Fortune’s domain, but he reserves the right to speak of what does not change: “vertuous [lyf ] abiding vnmutable” (6.243). It is a pragmatic and philosophical response to worldly fortune, on which Lydgate lays special emphasis: A man that is enarmed in vertu Ageyn thi myht to make resistence, And set his trust be grace in Crist Iesu, And hath al hool his hertli aduertence On rihtwisnesse, force & on prudence, With ther suster callid attemperaunce, Hath a saufconduit ageyn thi variaunce! (6.253–59)

The passage is original to Lydgate, and Strohm uses it to support his argument that Lydgate injects a new ethos into the de casibus tradition. It is a new idiom, or “phrase regimen,” at odds with fortunal rhetoric elsewhere. The classical virtues with which the fortune-proofed prince equips himself are meant to free him from the Wheel of Fortune. Yet Strohm fails to note that Bochas—not Lydgate—proffers these words of worldly wisdom.13 And it turns out that Bochas’s defense of virtue and freedom is by no means very strenuous in what follows, so that it strains credulity to say


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that Bochas is expressing Lydgate’s views in an unmediated way in the dialogue. Lydgate in fact exposes Bochas’s complicity with Fortune. After complaining about Fortune a while, Bochas rather abruptly and apologetically changes course and says he should not discourse about metaphysics. No philosopher himself, Bochas will not inquire into “vnkouth pryuites” (6.288–301) such as predestination and free will, questions that, he concedes, do not anyway “apperteene, Fortune, vnto the” (6.300). Adopting the obsequious posture of one who comes before a wealthy patron, Bochas proceeds to ask Fortune instead for further tragic instances so that he can complete the Fall of Princes— I desire of hool hert & enteer To haue a copee of princis namys all, Which fro thi wheel[e] thou hast maad to fall. (6.306–8)

Bochas reckons that Fortune keeps an archive containing all the poet requires: Thi secre bosum is ful of stories Of sondry princis, how thei ther liff haue lad, Of ther triumphes & ther victories, Which olde poetis & philisophres sad In meetre & prose compiled han & rad, Sunge ther laudis, ther fatis eek reserued Bi remembrance, as thei haue disserued. (6.309–15)

The “copee of princis namys all” that Bochas seeks from Fortune recalls the “noble book off this Iohn Bochas” (1.423) that belonged to Humphrey’s library and was first bestowed upon Lydgate, and indeed there is a sense in which the one transaction is being substituted for the other in a clever metalepsis of the poet’s patronage arrangement. But in fact Lydgate dissociates Fortune and Humphrey, producing a momentary double bind for the poet, and vacillates in his attitude toward his dual sources of inspiration. Should he pay greater respect to one or the other patron? At this stage in the dialogue, for example, in what might otherwise seem to be a non sequitur, Bochas begins praising the art of rhetoric for reconciling peoples and bringing peace. (This is Humphrey’s thesis.) Speaking out against Fortune as before, Bochas describes the improving effects of rhetoric in the world: In [ther] discordes tween kyngdames & cites, Afftir the sharpe[nesse] of thi cruel rage Onli bi mene of speche & fair langage,

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Folk be thi fraude fro grace ferr exilid, Wer be fair speche to vnite reconcilid. (6.374–78)

The notion that eloquence stands opposed to Fortune is a far cry from her own view of Bochas’s Fall of Princes, since she has already credited the work for promulgating good and bad fame. To which “phrase regimen” his writing is committed remains the crucial question throughout. Of course, Bochas has not forgotten his original request that Fortune divulge her “secre bosum . . . ful of stories,” enabling him to finish the Fall of Princes. His denunciation of her thus seems not a little disingenuous, even quite fey, and exposes the double bind again. Confirming the suspicion, Bochas “wex debonaire” and “gan speke faire” (6.428–30), placating Fortune with the very rhetoric (“fair langage”) he has just described to conciliate, not defy, Fortune. He begs her “for to forthre his book, / That his name, which was litil knowe, / Be good report myhte be ferther blowe” (6.432–34). His speech on the efficacy of rhetoric has thus been deployed not to overmaster Fortune, but to muster Fortune in a bid to secure worldly fortune and fame. Fortune is rightly suspicious of Bochas, and here she charges him and other poets with hypocrisy and infidelity. She observes how eager other men have been to steal her “secretes,” “conceitis,” and “counsailles” (6.452–54), but says they end up misrepresenting her to the world. Bochas is charged with duplicity, exhibiting inconsistency “of woordes & thynkyng” (6.472), as just witnessed.14 Of particular moment is the question of how Fortune is represented in literary fictions such as the Fall of Princes, and thus we find her protesting her innocence before she grants the poet another chance to misconstrue events. She would rather poets “take me as thei fynde” than call her a “froward fals goddesse” (6.198–203), repudiating the allegories she is compelled to inhabit when she is furnishing poets with conceits they use against her in the first place. That she feels defamed by the poets is of course deeply ironic, until we remember that they control the means of expression by which we come to know Fortune. Recall that Fortune’s trumpets are identified with the work of poetic composition. So Fortune does not just preserve an archive of tragic histories; she represents a tragic history of misinterpretation. A rhetorical figure, she is an abstract representation of contingencies and potentialities, enlisted in a personification allegory in which she is cast as the villain. Most notorious, perhaps, is the way she was once impersonated and travestied in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Ever a mediated fiction and monstrous fabrication, Fortune is a pretend figure standing in for eventful reality. Lydgate’s de casibus text freely employs the device, and shows her resisting the insincere ministrations of writers, and this


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is precisely the position we find Fortune in when she accuses Bochas of projecting false images of her: In this mateer your witt doth neuer feynte, Ymagynyng liknessis in your mynde, Lik your conceitis ye forge me & peynte, Sumtyme a woman with wenges set behynde, And portreye me with eien that be blynde. Cause off al this, breeff li to expresse, Is your owne coueitous blyndnesse! (6.456–62)

The importunate Bochas, like so many writers before him, seeks to establish his own fame by defaming Fortune. She accuses him of instability and selfishness—the very vices she is said to exemplify—and of distorting the representation of worldly fortune. The implications for the Fall of Princes as a whole are now interesting to contemplate, for the issue of how poets employ “conceitis” to forge and paint Fortune presents an occasion to consider larger epistemological and ontological issues. Fortune is herself suggesting that she is a monstrous invention of the poet’s mind: she claims to have been solipsistically reduced to sameness (“liknessis in your mynde, / Lik your conceitis”), when she is by definition a force of multiplicity and difference. The problem here is one of rhetoric and representation, and particularly of the aesthetic representation of the event. Fortune is in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes metonymic of the contingent, mutable historical events she disposes but does not adequately stand in for as proxy. Bochas—attempting to derive narrative artifacts from Fortune at the same time as disavowing the sovereignty of Fortune—conscripts this figure as both accomplice and adversary. What could this mean to the larger undertaking that is the Fall of Princes? One approach to the paradox is to say Fortune is and always has been a convenient fiction, a way of abstracting, regimenting, and neutralizing the real. Fortune is an eviscerated event, evacuated of the very meaning and force she is supposed to convey; she is the monster Derrida refers to as the arrivant, a figure of the future that as soon as it is recognized becomes domesticated.15 This suggests that to figure a volatile contingency is to fix and falsify the Heraclitean f lux of events—in this case, in and by means of poetic composition and perhaps cognition itself. Another approach is to admit that poetry is produced out of the radical contingencies concealed, so to speak, within the bosom of the monster Fortune. A periphrastic figure, Fortune stands for what is otherwise refractory to explanation, and insofar as rhetoric is continuous with this inchoate reality, language comports us toward the arrivant in its very

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expressiveness. In other words, language is at least as difficult to stabilize as the unstable reality language represents. So Fortune becomes the name of that which gives access to a dynamic becoming, welcoming the future to come, which can only ever be presented figuratively. Michael Witmore raises a similar point in his study of “accidental” knowledge: if accidents are by definition matters of fact rather than rules, narrative is a necessary condition of their intelligibility.16 There is no way to tell that something happened other than by telling. The de casibus tradition makes huge concessions to this difficult reality, or what happens when “the event in its becoming . . . escapes History.”17 Authors of such texts wishing to recapture something of the essence and estrangement of time and change, to show principalities rising and falling, or to recount the perils of office holding and statecraft in the past, are in this way necessarily beholden to the figure of Fortune. Fortune is just the artifactual sign of temporal resources to which poets must turn again and again, a sign of the inescapable differend. The only way forward seems to be to tell on. By the second day of tale-telling in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pampinea has a similar insight about how endless the discourse on Fortune is. “Excellent ladies, if the ways of Fortune are carefully examined, it will be seen that the more one discusses her actions, the more remains to be said.”18 Every day that passes brings a new turn of events. So it is not surprising, after all, that in the Fall of Princes Fortune finally agrees to help extend Bochas’s enterprise, “That of thi book the processe may proceede” (6.506). She will not sanction any moralizing efforts, of course, and perhaps by helping Bochas’ processe (overwhelming readers with more, and yet more, misfortune) she hopes to encumber those efforts. Fortune’s awkward, pleonastic phrase “processe may proceede” serves to foreground the contingent, temporal abundance in which Bochas is about to become further immured prior to any moralization. Recall that Lydgate had promised to add moralizing envoys “Afftir the processe” (2149). Chaucer too made conspicuous use of the term proces to describe speaking and storytelling in Troilus and Criseyde, and it is often inf lected to signify events independent of their moral consequences.19 Lydgate has Fortune commend Bochas for his diligent “processe” (6.106), and allows him to fall further within her contingent and transitory domain where audiences are lavished with copious rhetoric. The reciprocal arrangement between Bochas and Fortune thus exposes the compromises moral poets make to their material with its “heterogeneity of phrase regimens.” Now Lydgate may be said to have displaced the satirical implications somewhat by describing the deal Bochas makes with Fortune, for as noted


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earlier Lydgate has transformed a first-personal, confessional voice of his source into reported dialogue. But Lydgate does not escape so easily from the scandalous notion that the de casibus text shares common ground with Fortune, existing on a continuum with the very forces it opposes in the abstract. Lydgate is just as avid as Bochas was for poetic fame, after all. Fortune grants Bochas, That thi name and also thi surname, With poetis & notable old auctours, May be registrid in the Hous off Fame Bi supportacioun of my sodeyn fauours, Bi assistence also of my socours Thi werk texpleite the laurer for to wynne . . . (6.512–17)

Winning the “laurer” is a constant preoccupation of Lydgate. Often affiliating himself with a lineage of court poets and orators, Lydgate could not have written these verses without striking a chord deep within. In the Troy Book, Lydgate invokes similar motifs in his account of the author of Troilus and Criseyde. For it is thanks to Chaucer’s excellent “processe” that he improved the language (“Gan oure tonge firste to magnifie / And adourne it with his elloquence” [3.4242–43]), and earned the “laurer of oure Englishe tonge” (3.4246), becoming an English Petrarch whose name is now registered in the House of Fame. This is a typical Lydgatean view of the rewards of writing: one effects change in order to become a timeless fixture. As Lydgate says in his own words in the fourth book of the Fall of Princes, Writyng caused poetis to recure A name eternal, the laurer whan thei wan In adamaunt graue perpetuelli tendure . . . (4.64–66)

He cites Virgil, and further on he will mention “Petrak, in Rome laureate” (4.108). Lydgate will protest that he is too dull to follow such august examples, but this is posturing.20 Long before Dunbar named him “Lydgate laureate,” Lydgate had effectively struck an exploratory committee. As Robert Meyer-Lee argues, Lydgate adopts a “laureate pose” that enables him to arrogate the cultural capital of the professional writer. By praising poets and poetry in the epideictic mode, Lydgate achieves a corresponding elevation of his own craft; and having made Chaucer an English laureate, Lydgate invents a position he can now occupy.21 Fortune furnishes the means by which one poet proceeds to fill the space left by another.

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Ciceronian Rhetoric in the Event In her own voice Fortune goes on to recount the scandalous histories of well-known robbers, charlatans, churls, and tyrants, satisfying Bochas with a silent procession of the fallen. The last to appear is Cicero (“Tullius”). Fortune, before vanishing, tells Bochas to take note: “This is,” quod she, “pleynli to termyne, The famous man, [the] prynce of elloquence That gaf to Latynes the scole & the doctrine Of rethorik, as welle of that science. For which I will thou do thi dilligence To write with othir of this Tullius Al hool the caas, & gynne at Marrius.” (6.973–80)

Cicero occasions one of the several discussions of rhetoric that occurs in the Fall of Princes, enlarging the scope of the book so that it takes up not just rhetorical doctrine but also one of the original practitioners. As for the Ciceronian ideals embodied in rhetorical theory, Lydgate’s sensibility was formed by contemporary humanist texts and traditions. Lydgate found support for an idealistic view of rhetoric in Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou Trésor, a thirteenth-century book of instruction in which rhetoric is described in high-minded terms as “that noble science which teaches us to compose and organize and say good and beautiful words, full of meaning, in keeping with the nature of the utterance.” Brunetto goes on in this encomiastic vein, spelling out what would become a humanist tenet: It is the science of which Cicero speaks in his book, saying that he who surpasses other men in the same way other men surpass the animals has mastered a very lofty thing, that is, speech. Therefore everyone should strive to know it, even though naturally and without instruction no man can master it. Without doubt we need it every day, and many things we can achieve merely by saying well the proper words, things we could not do through force of arms or any other means.22

Brunetto’s rhetorical theory is adopted and expanded into book 7 of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the earliest discussion of rhetoric in English (compare Confessio VII.1507–1640 and Brunetto’s Trésor III.1–78). Cicero is credited with teaching the original “forme of eloquence, / Which is, men sein, a gret prudence.”23 It is recognized that Gower goes further than his predecessor Brunetto in elevating rhetoric above the other sciences in the trivium.24 Lydgate was well acquainted with the Confessio and evinces a similar optimism in the verbal science.


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Lydgate often speaks of the superiority of rhetoric and the high calling of rhetoricians, oftentimes in passages that are his own in the Fall of Princes, leading more than one generation of scholars to attribute protohumanist impulses to the English poet.25 For one thing, the poet sees himself standing in a tradition of accomplished writers. As Rita Copeland observes, “Lydgate traces his own professional lineage from Chaucer back to Cicero and recasts Ciceronian rhetoric in the image of vernacular poetics.”26 In an original prologue on poets and writing at the beginning of book 4 of the Fall, for example, Lydgate writes: God sette writyng & lettres in sentence, Ageyn the dulnesse of our infirmyte, This world tenlumyne be crafft of elloquence. (4.30–33)

This is what Lois Ebin has observed is Lydgate’s lofty vision of rhetoric’s role in human enlightenment: “Lydgate’s critical vocabulary reveals a confidence in the power of poetry to dispel mortals’ darkness, inspire them, and move them to virtue.”27 The epideictic logic involved here is again easy to trace: if rhetoric is so exalted, then Lydgate is extolling his own craft.28 Yet Lydgate’s self-aggrandizing gestures are tempered by a corresponding realism about what can be achieved. Rhetoric is always a prudential discipline that “weel shewes / What men shal uoide & what thing vndirfonge” (6.3295–96). Rhetoric thus should have material effects in the world. The ancient Amphion exemplifies the civic function of rhetoric in having established Thebes: . . . as Amphioun, with song & elloquence Bilte the wallis of Thebes the cite, He hadde of rethorik so gret subtilite. In his langage ther was so gret plesaunce, Fyndyng therbi so inli gret proffit, That al the contre kam to his obeissaunce, To heere hym speke thei hadde so gret delit; The peeple enviroun hadde such an appetit In his persone, in pes & in bataille: Heer men may seen what rethorik doth auaille! (6.3491–500)

Lydgate borrowed the example from Brunetto (perhaps via Gower’s Confessio), but in any case his fondness for Amphion the city-builder is clear, for he already inserted a comparison earlier (6.339).29 If poets still have a role, it is to use their rhetorical power to negotiate and manipulate

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political power. English poets, according to Lydgate’s Fall, should correct and ennoble present rulers: Ther cheeff labour is vices to repreve With a maner couert symylitude, And non estat with ther langage greeve Bi no rebukyng of termys dul and rude. (3.3830–33)

Scholars have described this as illustrating Lydgate’s “simple moralistic view of poetry,”30 or a mollifying “don’t-rock-the-boat attitude,”31 but Lydgate is on the contrary reiterating his belief that criticism should be communicated to princes—and done so effectively—with a concealing rhetoric. As Brunetto himself had taught, when the subject matter is unpleasant or the audience is “predisposed against you . . . then you would have to have recourse to concealment.”32 Several of Lydgate’s short poems exhibit this pragmatic and expedient view of rhetoric, and here his theory seems to become not just practical but pessimistic. As a practitioner of rhetoric conscious of the different predispositions of audiences, Lydgate certainly knows about the fortunes of rhetoric in the world. In his short poems he offers succinct expressions of the idea that effective language is highly contingent.33 For example, the opening of his Isopes Fabules suggests fables have diverse applications depending on the “lust” (13) of the individual recipient. By implication, poets must be a little fortunate. Consulo Quisquis Eris offers a playfully exaggerated statement of one of the first principles of rhetoric: With hooly men speke of hoolynesse, And with a glotoun be delicat of thy ffare, With dronke men do surfetys by excesse, And among wastours no spending that thou spare; With woodecokkys lerne for to dare, And sharpe thy knyff with pilours for pilage; Lyke the market so preyse thy chaffare, And lyke the audience so vttre thy language. (17–24)

Lydgate is comically inf lating the maxim that the orator must accommodate his speeches to persons and events, and on the assumption that his audience of the poem is learned and witty, the poem is cast appropriately. But Lydgate may be making a deeper point if he is taken as not just prescribing but rather as describing what occurs in rhetorical situations: no orator should speak of holiness only to the holy (or folly with the foolish, etc.), but in practice this may be just how utterances appear to be received by respective types whether or not one intends it. Rhetoric


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has the capacity to be misconstrued because it is capable of altering with circumstances. Elsewhere Lydgate is openly distrustful of the amphibious nature of rhetorical artifice. That it can be false and superficial is a topic Lydgate explores in Ryme Without Accord, a short poem that sets to rhyme and verse such discordant concepts as a cowardly knight, a false friend, a fighting priest, and so on. Each stanza ends with a rhyming refrain, “It may wele ryme, but it accordith nought,” giving way in the last stanza to a desperate prayer—as if in f light from the inescapable paradox that sweetness is no guarantee of light. Again Lydgate, however much he is committed to it, knows the liabilities of his vocation. Lydgate’s most extraordinary exploration of this problematic is The Churl and the Bird, a bracing moral fable that bears close comparison with Gower’s Tale of Phebus and Cornide and Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale for other reasons besides the fact it is so skeptical about the fortunes of rhetorical speech. The Churl and the Bird also dramatizes the event for readers, involving them in the narrative. It begins with hearty praise of rhetoric in terms with which we are already familiar— Problemys, liknessis & ffigures Which previd been fructuous of sentence, And han auctoritees grounded on scriptures Bi resemblaunces of notable apparence, With moralites concludying in prudence . . . (1–5)

There follows further description of the way poets use “dirk parables” (16) and other figurative devices to convey their meanings stealthily: Poetes write wonderful liknessis, And vndir covert kepte hem silf ful cloos. (29–30)

Lydgate is describing common rhetorical techniques of indirection, concealment, and similitude; at the same time he is announcing an interest in rhetorical theories that posit a covert sense veiled under liknessis, something that develops into a main topic, or rather event, of the fable. In it a churl traps a bird that regularly sings with “soote sewgred armonye” (73) from a laurel tree in his garden—itselft metonymic of rhetorical artifice. Once captured she will not sing, and the bird demands to be set free with the promise that she will return every day to sing in the tree. The churl threatens to roast the bird instead, in response to which she offers him three “greete wisdames” (159) in exchange for freedom. The churl agrees and the bird f lies to the laurel to dispense wise proverbs: do not give credence to every tale you are told, do not desire the impossible,

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and do not grieve for lost treasure. Along with the morality comes mockery: the bird announces that concealed within the entrails of her body is a precious stone weighing one ounce, a golden jacinth that would have conferred upon the churl strength, riches, renown, beauty, and peace— some of the very virtues attributed to eloquence in rhetorical theory. For example, It causith love, it maketh men gracious And favorabil in euery mannys siht, It makith accord attween folk envious, Comfortith sorweful, makyth hevy hertis liht . . . (246–49)

But the attempt to teach a churl the price of such a rare stone would amount to throwing “perlis whihte / To fore rude swine” (256), according to the bird. The citation from the Sermon on the Mount (“neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turning upon you, they tear you” [Matthew 7:6]) in which Jesus teaches his disciples not to squander their preaching on an unreceptive audience is another indication of the fable’s preoccupation with rhetoric and its reception. 34 At this juncture it may seem the churl has inadvertently exchanged a precious gem for three lousy proverbs, and moreover that this missing gem is an emblem of higher wisdom he lacks. He is filled with regret, until the bird reveals that there is in fact no such magical substance hidden in her body. She was telling a fable. She chides the churl for forgetting her original doctrine: he should not have believed every tale he is told, nor should he have desired the impossible, nor lamented his lost treasure. The bird speaks of the futility of teaching such “proverbis of substaunce” (310) to a churl, reinforcing her earlier point that there is no escaping habituated ways of seeing the world. The poet restates the bird’s wisdoms in a final verba auctoris. Lydgate’s fable seems in many ways to erode the credibility of its own moral rhetoric, and indeed generates a crisis of confidence—much as Fortune does when complaining about poetical conceits in the Fall of Princes. For one thing, Lydgate shows that the rhetoric is not always effectual, for proverbial wisdom does nothing to change behavior in The Churl and the Bird. Moral rhetoric is wasted on fools, just the sort who may need it most. Moreover, the enchanting but absent stone figures the difficulty of knowing whether the fable itself has a moral core. This is the problem of likeness that we had occasion to observe in Fortune’s dialogue with Bochas. The Churl and the Bird similarly invites us to ask: Is anything concealed (covert) under its attractive plumage? What the bird finds


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particularly risible is the churl’s failure to notice that her body could never have contained the one-ounce stone: Al my body weieth nat an vnce, How myth I than have in me a stoon, That peisith more than doth a grett iagounce? (316–18)

The language of weight and weighing—peis and peisen—function metaphorically to signify heavy or ponderous speech, giving credence to others’ speeches, or weighing in the balance. Due to the absence of the stone at the center of the bird, should we not say the tale is similarly lightweight? Should readers beware of being tricked into thinking it has substance? These are rhetorical questions that suggest practical solutions. The churl should have known the bird lied, judging by her exterior. The same may be true for the audience of The Churl and the Bird. Meaning is conveyed in the eventful process of reading. The process is nearly dizzying. The bird’s first preachment (“Thou shuldist nat, aftir my sentence, / To euery tale yeue to hasty credence” [322]) is a species of the self-referential statement (well known as the liar’s paradox) that medieval philosophers called insolubilia.35 If we give credence to her rhetoric, we should doubt her; if we doubt her, we cannot help but give credence to her rhetoric. There is no way of accessing the real (or putative core) meaning of this irony. One can argue that the irony empties the bird’s rhetoric of significance, but in fact the significance is driven home by the irony: for whether you believe the bird is telling the truth, you cannot help but confirm her wisdom about the need for circumspection. In an analogous way, then, the fable is self-confirming despite—or rather, because—it seems so self-consuming. The Churl and the Bird is no straightforward negative exemplum instructing readers in how to avoid deception. The audience is in a much more precarious situation, weighed in the balance, tempted by sweet rhetoric, subject to the play of exterior surfaces and semblances. Our credulity, tricked and tested, is exercised by an impenetrable event. The fable’s meaning is not found inside; it is rather derived fortuitously, as it were, from the outside in experience. (Here we may recall Gower’s Confessio Amantis with its stress on experience and evidence.) Equally, the tale resides at the edges of Lydgate’s corpus. The Churl and the Bird has thus been called a “parergon” for lying outside his ordinary literary practice.36 But it is also a parergon (Greek “outside the work”) in exemplifying its own exemplary rhetoric. Something extra that comes to “intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking,”37 the parergonal work may be said to frame its own eventfulness. Lydgate’s fable is thus significant because it marks out the limits of his body of work.

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The Prince of Eloquence For all the mock seriousness of these pieces, Lydgate’s rhetorical performances show how self-conscious he is about the pitfalls of his craft and career. The Fall of Princes is just as ambivalent and even anxious about the political ramifications of rhetoric in the event. Here we must turn to Lydgate’s self-construction as a present-day Ciceronian for hire. The Prologue to the Fall recounts other famous practitioners who fulfilled their public office as writers, thus juxtaposing Lydgate’s commission with theirs. Lydgate lauds Chaucer for fulfilling a laureate-like role as “cheeff poete off Breteyne” (1.246), since Chaucer has done his part to “refourme [the English language] with colours of suetnesse” (1.278–79). Lydgate then goes on to mention Seneca, Cicero, and Petrarch—making up an auspicious guild of writers to which Chaucer belongs and Lydgate aspires. Lydgate effectively enrolls himself among the classical rhetors and modern poets in what follows at the end of the Prologue, and Cicero is central to this effort in the Fall of Princes. Lydgate notes approvingly that Julius Caesar was registered in “the scoole off Tullius [Cicero]” (1.367), directly following up this allusion with a reference to his own service to duke Humphrey. The implicit questions that motivate this sequence should be obvious. How do the two rulers compare? And do writers in their employ receive similar benefaction? Like Caesar, Humphrey is exemplary for consulting learned men and gleaning wisdom from books: Duc off Gloucestre men this prynce calle, And natwithstandyng his staat & dignite, His corage neuer doth appalle To studie in bookis off antiquite, Therin he hath so gret felicite Vertuously hymsilff to ocupie, Off vicious slouthe to haue the maistrie. (1.393–99)

Having in his possession the “noble book off this Iohn Bochas” (1.423) about worldly fortunes, Humphrey is next said to have sought from Lydgate an English translation: He gaff to me in comaundement, As hym sempte it was riht weel sittyng, That I shulde, afftir my cunnyng, This book translate, hym to do plesaunce, To shewe the chaung off worldli variaunce.


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And with support off his magnificence, Vndir the wyngis off his correccioun, Thouh that I haue lak off eloquence, I shal procede in this translacioun, Fro me auoidyng al presumpcioun, Lowli submyttyng eueri hour & space Mi reud language to my lordis grace. (1.430–41)

It is a rare and bold move to suggest that Lydgate is Cicero to a new Caesar, but Lydgate contrives the notion nonetheless even as he employs some deference in staking the claim. His subservience to his patron entails “auoidyng al presumpcioun” but simultaneously elevates him to the role of the patronized—allowing him to occupy an office analogous to that of the “prince of eloquence.” In light of Humphrey’s political opportunism, the advantages of this rhetorical and patronal relationship do not all accrue to Lydgate. Julius Caesar is one of the Nine Worthies who had been enlisted before in Lydgate’s works to support Lancastrian ambitions, most notably in The Serpent of Division (c. 1422) and in “Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London” (c. 1431). Nolan has recently talked about the ways in which Lydgate’s Serpent, a prose narrative dedicated to the rise and fall of the great Roman “emperor” who became entangled in civil war, could have functioned as a “mirror for princes” in the period of acute political crisis following the death of Henry V in 1422.38 And Mortimer is not the first to suggest that Humphrey himself contracted The Serpent. The duke may have been aware of the way Caesar functioned ideologically and diplomatically, in this case serving as a memorial the soldier-king Henry V.39 Susanne Saygin thinks the text was likely written at Humphrey’s behest in 1425, ref lecting his concern to stave off the rival Beaufort faction.40 In any case, when the political situation changed about a decade later, so would have the topical implications of the comparison. Given the association of Caesar with the fifth and sixth Henrys, what might Humphrey have gained by taking on that mantle in the Fall? Lydgate was in fact not the only one to make such an audacious comparison to Caesar (though he was among the first). Some time after 1434 the papal nuncio Piero del Monte presented Humphrey with an adaptation of Poggio Bracciolini’s treatise on the virtues and vices, and in the dedication he lauds the duke for being as warlike and studious as Caesar. Just as Lydgate had done, Piero del Monte singles out the duke’s intellectual curiosity and scholarship.41 Later, he brought to Humphrey’s attention a dilemma, debated among the Italians, about whether Scipio or Caesar was the better ruler.42 At around the same time, in a letter of thanks for his

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large donation of books to Oxford University, Humphrey is compared to “Julius Caesar, who founded a library in Rome, for he, like Gloucester, combined the attributes of a great soldier with those of an enthusiastic scholar.”43 In light of such parallels, Jennifer Summit asserts that “Lydgate’s Fall of Princes needs to be read within this context of Humphrey’s efforts to cultivate a persona as learned statesman.”44 Yet the boldness of the original analogy lies not merely in fashioning Humphrey as a Roman scholarstatesman, but in promoting him to the rank of a celebrated potentate at a sensitive time in English parliamentary history. Here the duke is aligned with the most illustrious member of the triumvirate. Back in The Serpent of Division, the comparison served as an appropriate advisory. The governance of Rome, writes Lydgate, was entrusted to three rulers: And for a special cavse this office and this occupacioun bassent of all the hoole Senate was committed vnto thre; leste yif that oon offendid, the oother tweyne shulde be mighty and strong to correcte the iijde; and another cavse was this, while that tweyne were occupied in Conqueste owtewardes, the iijde shulde gouverne at hoome.45

After the death of Henry V the English parliament established a regency council, and however much it differed from the Roman executive, comparisons must have seemed inevitable.46 Humphrey served alongside his brother John duke of Bedford and the Bishop Henry Beaufort, and among the three eminences there was great antagonism. If the Roman triumvirate was torn apart by the serpent of division, then it fell to Lydgate to instruct the present regime how to avoid such a fate as they set out on their next fifteen years of rule (before Henry VI took full control in 1437). A cautionary tale produced at the request of a powerful regent, The Serpent would also serve as a useful political instrument, suggesting present rulers are prudent enough to seek such no-nonsense advice. Nearly ten years later, however, Humphrey should have found it convenient to recast the significance of the historical precedent: now he would have seen himself as occupying the role of Caesar beset by enemies within the executive. The Serpent was no longer a prospectus; that work would have been read differently in the event, retrospectively. The optimism of the early years having waned, realpolitik remained, however, as indicated by Humphrey’s political manoeuvring at about the time Lydgate was charged with translating the Fall of Princes in 1431. Early on in the fraught minority period, Humphrey had aggressively if unsuccessfully sought to wrest power from the council, and then, at about the time Lydgate prepared his commendatory verses to be placed at the beginning of the Fall, Humphrey began asserting himself again. Here were new opportunities, a far as the duke was concerned. Earlier, with the protectorate coming to


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an end with the coronation of Henry VI in 1429, Humphrey lost his title as protector and defender of the realm. His salary was reduced accordingly. But when the boy-king traveled abroad to claim the French crown (between April 1430 and February 1432) the duke was given new powers, becoming lieutenant and warden of England, temporarily realizing some of his earlier aspirations. From this vantage he began to exploit the new political situation and, as Meyer-Lee observes, “consolidate a king-like power.”47 Humphrey first attempted to recover a handsome salary. And, as R. A. Griffiths notes, “Gloucester took advantage of his lieutenancy in other ways: to avail himself of the king’s patronage . . . . The duke presided over parliament in January 1431, seated on the throne, and it was he who celebrated St. George’s day at Windsor in 1430 and 1431 in the king’s place.”48 He was also responsible for a set of partisan appointments that would replace advisors who had long served in the king’s household. It seems the strategy amounted to reshaping an incipient king’s court into what John Watts calls a “political interest group,” something Humphrey was finally unable to pull off.49 But his ambitions were clear, and what he required was rhetoric to support them. Turning to Lydgate some time in 1431, Humphrey thought he could develop the Fall of Princes into a vehicle of political persuasion. Lydgate’s job would be to elevate the duke to the position he thought he deserved— granting him legitimacy within the realm, if not of England, then of the English imagination.50 The poet’s dedication gives the clearest expression to this aim by juxtaposing Caesar and Humphrey, introducing the former as applying to “bookis . . . gret attendaunce” (Prol. 1.370) while the latter studies “bookis off antiquite” (396). Further, the English duke is a “prynce ful myhti off puissaunce” (Prol. 1.373) serving as sole regent in the absence of Henry VI, as Lydgate is at pains to spell out when he specifies that Humphrey . . . is lieftenant, and hath the gouernaunce Off our Breteyne, thoruh whos discrecioun He hath conserued in this regioun, Duryng his tyme, off ful high prudence, Pes and quiete and sustened riht . . . (Prol. 1.376–80)

Fashioned here as a second Caesar, Humphrey has to be an exception to the rule of the Fall of Princes. Indeed Lydgate goes on to describe the duke as an exemplary fortune-proof prince, Settyng a-side alle chaungis of Fortune; And wher he loueth, yiff I shal nat tarie, Withoute cause ful loth he is to varie. (Prol. 1.390–92)

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Transcending “alle chaungis of Fortune,” however, is perhaps just another way of saying Humphrey has now risen to new heights in the administration of Henry VI. Of course, the factionalism in which Humphrey was mired had its risks for the duke and those close to him. The Fall of Princes turns out to be more appropriate to Humphrey than he, at least, should ever have wanted to imagine. The long poem Humphrey commissioned inadvertently became a monument to its patron prince, as most commentators end up observing, not so much to his achievements as to his fecklessness. “Eventually Humphrey himself is inscribed into the de casibus tradition which his commission did so much to foster.”51 Given the nature of the enterprise, we may agree that Lydgate’s Fall of Princes inevitably anticipates such reversals. In addition, anyone who observed the particularly self-seeking policies of his wilful patron may have reasonably expected an ignoble end. This was perhaps Lydgate’s special burden, knowing “that his patron should be engaged in the same kind of political tension which he was describing in his work as the cause of the fall of so many princes.”52 Six books into the work all this is implicit—but then several years after Lydgate dedicated his work to a Caesar-like Humphrey, the full story emerged about the ruler’s own vulnerability to Fortune. Lydgate’s vocation as a Ciceronian poet thus comes with a price to his own security, and the poet, displaying considerable candor, explicitly reckons with the risks involved in his work. He represents the rise and fall of Cicero vis-à-vis Caesar in book 6 of the Fall. Entering upon his task, Lydgate’s Bochas feels insufficient to the job of writing eloquently about the most excellent of orators (“Myn hand I feel quakyng what I write” [6.2989]), which may explain why Lydgate has compressed the account as presented in Laurent’s Des Cas. There may also be some defensiveness in this abridgment (for the history is followed by a chapter against defamers of rhetoric). Interestingly, however, Lydgate does not eliminate the story or sanitize events, but charges ahead despite the implications for himself and Humphrey. After elucidating Cicero’s reputation and exemplary record of public service— The name of Tulie was kouth in many place; His elloquence in eueri lond was ryff; His langage made hym stonde in grace And be preferrid duryng al his lyff. (6.3151–54)

Lydgate lists his major works including De Officiis, De Re publica, and the beloved De sompno Scipionis. The English poet inserted these titles, probably based on his familiarity with Cicero’s works, copies of which were held in the abbey library at Bury St Edmunds and which, moreover, duke


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Humphrey sought for his private collection.53 This must also sharpen the subsequent catastrophe. For despite all Cicero’s achievements, he fell victim to Fortune: . . . this saide Tullius, as I reede, Mid his worshepes stood alwey in dreede Of Fortune; for in conclusioun, He be envie was ban[y]shed Roome toun. (6.3175–78)

He was exiled a second time for writing against Antony’s affair with Cleopatra. Pompilius, whom Cicero had once defended in one of his speeches, then executed Cicero at the insistence of Antony. Adding insult to injury, Cicero’s writing hand was cut off (6.3267–69). That the “prince of eloquence” is himself powerless before enemies comes as a potentially damaging, and difficult, admission for the aspiring poet. Is rhetoric no proof against misfortune? Cicero is not the only accomplished writer or rhetor to succumb in the course of the Fall of Princes. Lydgate has occasion to mention that Ovid was exiled (4.100), the “laureat poete” Orpheus was killed (1.5839–45), and Dante was banished (9.2515). Such hard realities notwithstanding, Lydgate suggests in his own chapter on poets and poverty in book 3 that court poets are sheltered by the patronage system. They are thus afforded the chance to remove themselves from the domain of Fortune (“Thei shold be quieet fro worldli mocioun, / And it sequestre out of ther remembraunce” [3.3840–41]). The famous poets, he demonstrates, all found supportive princes who afforded them a certain “freedom” from poverty in particular: Daunt in Itaille, Virgile in Rome toun, Petrak in Florence hadde al his plesaunce, And prudent Chaucer in Brutis Albioun Lik his desir fond vertuous suffisance, Fredam of lordshepe weied in ther ballaunce, Because thei f lourede in wisdam and science, Support of princis fond hem ther dispence. (3.3858–64)

But Lydgate is constructing a fantasy of patronage. In truth, as David Wallace observes, Humphrey was less a sponsor of liberty than an editor, censor, and taskmaster.54 Lydgate, we have seen, describes the duke’s style of micromanagement (under whose “wyngis off . . . correccioun” Lydgate labors, “Lowli submyttyng eueri hour & space” [1.431–40]). But the fantasy is necessary for sustaining his fraught but no less fruitful relationship with a powerful patron whose fortunes were insecure to the point of threatening the poet’s livelihood.


CHAPTER 6 MORAL LUCK AND MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR

No life is ever free from the possibility of unanticipated irony, because it has not been plotted in advance. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time1 . . . for oftyntymys we do many thynges that we wene for the beste be, and yet peradventure hit turnyth to the warste. Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur 2

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alory’s Morte Darthur, at least in its most romantic aspect, makes fortune nothing less than a measure of heroic masculinity in the form of adventure-seeking knights undertaking brave forays into the unknown. Here the manly man is a knight errant, and errantry constitutes knighthood as a special form of agonistic struggle—albeit no sooner than a series of chance events destroys the homosocial fellowship of the Round Table. Of course, difficulty and misery is the lot of the warrior class, and one need look no further than Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy for a justification of this way of life. A comparison between the man-atarms and the wise man enlarges the ethical scope of that life: A wise man ought not to regret his struggles with fortune any more than a brave soldier should be intimidated by the noise of battle; for difficulty is the natural lot of each. For the soldier it is a source of increasing glory; for the wise man it is the means of confirming his wisdom. Indeed, virtue gets its name from the virile strength which is not overcome by adversity. 3

That Boethius puts so much stock in worldly vicissitudes and valor may surprise readers, until it is remembered that, as already discussed in the

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first chapter, “all fortune is good.” There is consequently something desirable about any turn of events that allows men to exercise and exhibit “virile strength”; some interpreters may infer that it is even reasonable to seek out dangerous adventures—in what amounts to a familiar kind of male masochism in specific literary contexts—as a means of accruing glory. In the analogy, Boethius is specifically summoning an ancient political and military ethic, exemplified in the Roman ideal of virtus, and applying it broadly to stoic morality. In the later Middle Ages this moral quality found expression in chivalric romance, where the opportunities for showing martial prowess are considerably expanded and idealized within fictional narratives. In this chapter I investigate the virtue of contingency as presented in Malory’s Morte Darthur, an experimental and eventful narrative that, by amplifying the fortunal dimensions of knighthood, achieves its various ethical effects. There are many illuminating discussions that bear on the contingency of knight errantry in medieval romance, and my analysis is greatly indebted to them. Morton Bloomfield speaks of the predominance of “irrational or unmotivated episodes” around which the knight’s vocation is formed and deformed within the genre. Such episodes saturate the romance world and become a necessary temporal condition of the identity of the chivalric champion.4 Bakhtin calls this temporality “adventure-time.” As he observes, the hero “plunges headfirst into adventures as if they were his native element . . . . By his very nature he can live only in this world of miraculous chance for only it preserves his identity.”5 Similarly, A. J. Gurevich has noted that the lives of knights are grounded in a sense of the urgency of time: “perceived time as an inseparable element of their own mode of life.”6 Best known is Erich Auerbach’s description of the way “trial through adventure is the real meaning of the knight’s ideal existence.” 7 So temporal process has thus long been recognized as essential to knighthood, and Malory’s Morte Darthur can be said—adopting Bakhtin’s terminology—to hyperbolize time in the expected fashion. Malory indeed ties the knight’s fortunes to what happens in time, furnishing occasions for knightly becoming that exceed what even his sources attempt. Jill Mann has shown that Malory frequently intensifies the temporal dimension his narrative by cutting out causal explanations from his French sources, favoring an “aesthetic” that gives fuller scope to a plurality of causes.8 Elizabeth Edwards has followed with an extended examination of the erratic, episodic quality of the narrative and its uncanny effects. Malory’s Morte presents a deeply haphazard world that knights must negotiate. The reader too is left with a sensation that things in this narrative “ just happen.” Edwards describes “the paradox that the end of the

M O R A L L U C K A N D M A L O RY

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Arthurian world turns out to have been predicted for hundreds of pages and to happen wholly by accident.” 9 We can of course point to multiple causes of the destruction of the Arthurian fellowship—including the invidious behavior of delinquent elements active in the fellowship (Mordred and Agravain), and the corresponding breach of the homosocial compact sustaining its corporate structure (in the exposure of Lancelot’s adultery); the inherent contradictions of the chivalric ethos that has been described as a shame culture lacking a moral base; the absence of a rational form of jurisprudence besides might-makes-right; and, quite mysteriously, the wages of sin resulting from Arthur’s historic transgression (unwitting incest with his half sister). Compounding the difficulty are such momentous accidents as the poisoned apple intended for Gawain and the adder sting prompting the climactic battle with Mordred. Each of these precipitants belongs to a causal sequence that is “unhappy” (a favorite word of Malory in the latter stages of the Morte Darthur) and somewhat enigmatic, since no one action or event alone seems decisive. At several critical junctures causality yields to the casual and accidental, the intended yields to the circumstantial, and the predictable yields to the unpredictable. Thus Edwards asks, “What causes the death of Arthur? All the events are linked, and yet the actual cause is constantly giving way to some contingent element which has occurred as an accidental result of what appears to be the main plot. There is a slippage or deferral to the plot.”10 Contingency is indeed something like a principle of emplotment throughout the Morte, and I will consider a couple instances of its temporal unfolding. But there is one major objection to consider before we can begin to describe this as an ethical emplotment. Courtly romance, Auerbach has famously argued, employs the rhetoric of contingent fortune only to cloak the economic bases of class privilege. As he observes in his well-known analysis of Chevalier au lion, “Only members of the chivalric courtly society are worthy of adventure, hence they alone can undergo serious and significant experiences.”11 Auerbach goes on to describe the mimetic mechanism by which knights, taking adventures that happen to come, paradoxically prove their election to an estate they already securely possess. Appealing to the principle of manifest nobility, chivalric romance thus could be said to neutralize the anarchic forces of Fortune by enlisting them to benefit the establishment. From a slightly different angle, but reaching similar conclusions about the significance of events, Barbara Nolan analyzes this phenomenon in terms of a “moral essentialism” whereby the inborn excellence of the knight makes successful adventures inevitable.12 The most emphatic examples of the vindication of class privilege and inborn excellence in Malory’s Morte Darthur are

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Torre the cowherd’s son and Sir Gareth the kitchen-knave, both of whom confront events that gradually confirm their hereditary rights. Because in such cases the quality of persons is given prior to events, arguably nothing happens to endanger the prevailing aristocratic order; indeed everything that happens simply shores up that order in the event. The only ethical content that can be discovered, then, is what Auerbach calls a “class ethics,” which is the putatively apolitical but nevertheless quite savvy manner by which the ruling class “describe[s] its own life in extrahistorical terms, as an absolute aesthetic configuration without practical purpose.”13 A choice example of this purposeless aesthetic configuration of class is the narrator’s commendation of Trystram’s hunting and hawking: “Wherefore, as me semyth, all jantyllmen that beryth olde armys ought of right to honoure sir Trystrams for the goodly tearmys that jantylmen have and use and shall do unto the Day of Dome, that thereby in a manner all men of worshyp may discever a jantylman frome a yoman and a yoman frome a vylayne. For he that jantyll is woll drawe hym to jantyll tacchis and to folow the noble customyes of jantylmen” (375). A gentleman is known by his gentle deeds. But these are truisms that themselves conceal an array of distinctions and possible discriminations opened up by events in Malory’s Morte. Certainly there is no going back to reform the feudal hierarchy in which chivalry f lourished. (Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court recounts one modern man’s bloody-minded attempt to reform Malorian chivalry, and the cure proves worse than the disease.) Yet even Malory’s Morte Darthur ends up demonstrating how vulnerable the old political establishment is to Fortune. In the Suite du Merlin, Malory’s main source for the early sections of the Morte Darthur to be discussed in this chapter, Arthur is called the “King of Adventures,” which paradoxically suggests control over and by Fortune. Merlin goes on to admonish the sovereign, “Know that just as adventure gave you your crown, so will it take it away.”14 Here we may recall Arthur’s vision of Fortune raising him up on her wheel before dashing him to the ground in the Mort Artu or in the Alliterative Morte Arthure; Malory’s Morte Darthur gives a brief account of the nightmare vision near the end.15 Arthurian political society is burdened by the consciousness of its own contingency, and by the end of the cycle we bear witness to the ultimate failure of the Arthurian ideal. But there is a more particular and ongoing irrationality with which knights must contend in the narrative, and that is very historicity of existence within the Kingdom of Adventure. The advantage of the “class ethics” is not so much political as it is ethical—enabling fine moral discriminations even for knights whose class privilege is secure. Most knights remain privileged political subjects, but what in this chapter I will call


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their individual “moral luck” may be diverse. They exist on a fairly level playing field, but this is all the better for us to be able to notice the moral significance of what happens to them. The genre is indeed recognizable for the way it creates the space in which worth is measured by doing rather than being, retrospectively assigning value to individuals by virtue of their accomplishments. It is on this plane of existence that the conditional and contingent nature of moral agency and autonomy comes into focus. As Nolan writes, “while great knights will come of high birth, not all men of high birth are great knights.”16 Even among the knights themselves, there can be consequential moral distinctions; individuals have what we may call, following Scotus, their own recognizable haecceitas. Some distinctions come about because of bonds of affinity, others due to religious piety or regional conf lict, but in this chapter I will be especially focus on instances that arise from the performance of individual deeds. Knights may all be noble, but they tend to be known by their works. Another way to put this is to say romance presupposes a broad-based social equality in order to experiment with ethics in the event—sometimes in ways that the ruling class itself may have found disconcerting. As Howard Patch long ago noted, there is an ancient identification of Fortune and Occasio, or the patroness of the timely moment or right situation.17 Arthurian literature is known sometimes to have made the link explicit, as for example when in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval Fortune appears half bald with a long forelock (the appurtenances of Occasio).18 I propose that the Morte is a study of ethics occasioned and conditioned by temporal events that confound class and category, even if they provide occasions for them. In the Morte there are numerous instances in which fortune operates either to exacerbate or alleviate ethical dilemmas and thwart intentions, and I focus on particularly troubling instances where events—the singular situatedness of being—exert pressure on the values, duties, and determinations of the noble knight. These pressures are especially noticeable in early stages of the Morte Darthur, where individual knights attempt to make a name for themselves, although they are always vulnerable and Arthurian chivalry crumbles due to so many reversals of fortune.19 Gawain’s Vilony Gawain’s first, formative adventure is the scene of a typical sort of moral casuistry in the Morte Darthur. The young Gawain is one of the first to join the order of the Round Table. The son of the deceased King Lot has come to be knighted at the wedding feast of Arthur and Guenevere, whereupon his prowess is immediately tested in a “straunge and a mervailous

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adventure” (102). A lady on a white palfrey enters the court seeking a defender to win back her stolen brachet, before she is instantly carried off by an intruding knight. Arthur is persuaded by Merlin to respond to these inexplicable events, “for thes adventures muste be brought to an ende, othir ellis hit woll be disworshyp to you and to youre feste” (103). At this inceptive occasion the king is being schooled in chivalry (to say nothing of the education of Gawain), and by the end of the wedding feast Arthur will have ascertained enough from the adventure to formalize rules of knighthood in the Pentecostal Oath (75). But in the meantime a triple adventure threatens to attenuate the idealism of the f ledgling order of the Round Table, even before it has been established as the preeminent order. The episode involving Gawain is headed, “here begynnith the fyrst batayle that ever sir gawayne ded after he was made knyght” (103). On this short but significant quest Gawain—the newly knighted nephew of King Arthur—is charged with returning the white hart chased by the brachet. He encounters two events that allow him to demonstrate his nobility and natural ability; a third event proves to be a great and instructive catastrophe. He sets out with his brother Gaherys acting as his squire, and they promptly meet two feuding brothers in the forest. The brothers are fighting over the white hart, which they had earlier happened to see being chased by hunting hounds toward the court of King Arthur. The point of the scene is at once obvious. Unlike the quarreling pair, Gawain and Gaherys are the image of true brothers in arms. Gaherys has already proven himself a kindly advisor to his elder brother, for before they set out after the white hart Gaherys had urged Gawain to suppress his envy of another knight who was given a choice seat at the Round Table. But there are broader implications. Gawain and Gaherys together represent the original innocence of the Orkney brothers before their fraternal strife threatens to rend apart the Round Table at the end of the Morte Darthur. Indeed they embody the optimism and civility of the Arthurian court in its infancy, which is here contrasted with what remains outside it—Sorluse and Bryan “of the Foreyste” (104). Gawain orders them to “go unto kynge Arthure and yelde you unto hys grace” (104), which is sure to confirm the new knight’s courtesy and enhance his prestige at court. In the next encounter Gawain reveals his physical strength. Chasing the white hart across a river he comes across an antagonistic knight who demands a joust. Gawain handily dispatches his adversary, who (it will be important to recall) had refused to yield. The approving comment of Gaherys—“that was a myghty stroke of a yonge knyght” (105)— suggests that what Gawain has done is beyond reproach. Having given his


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adversary every chance of surrendering, Gawain is blameless; and having shown such prodigious strength, the young knight is praiseworthy. Finally, Gawain discovers the white hart. But here his fortunes take a turn for the worse when, inadvertently, he commits shameful manslaughter and forever alters his course. Things begin innocently enough when Gawain releases his greyhounds to track the hart. But through a series of events that have cascading consequences, the hero becomes increasingly entrammeled, and given the dramatic complexity of the scene the passage is worth quoting at length: Than sir Gawayne and Gaherys rode more than a paas after the whyte herte, and lete slyppe at the herte thre couple of greyhoundes. And so they chace the herte in to a castel, and in the chyef place of the castel they slewe the hert. Sir Gawayne and Gaherys folowed afftir. Ryght so there com a knyght oute of a chambir with a swerde drawyn in hys honde and slew two of the greyhoundes evyn in the syght of sir Gawayne, and the remanente he chaced with hys swerde oute of the castell. And whan he com agayne he seyde, “A, my whyght herte, me repentis that thou arte dede, for my soveraigne lady gaff the to me, and evyll have I kepte the, and thy dethe shall be evyl bought and I lyve.” And anone he wente in to hys chambir and armyd hym, and com oute fersely. And there he mette with sir Gawayne and he seyde, “Why have ye slayne my howndys? For they dyd but their kynde, and I wolde that ye had wrokyn youre angir uppon me rather than uppon a dome beste.” “Thou seyst trouth,” seyde the knight. “I have avenged me on thy howndys and so I woll on the or thou go.” (105–6)

Pausing here for a moment we can glimpse an unexpected dilemma thrown up by the adventure. Gawain has been chasing a hart that belongs to someone else. Should he have been pursuing the animal in the first place? What status does the hunt have now? And how could one judge between Gawain’s respect for the other knight’s property and Gawain’s duty to Arthur? This is just one of the first of several double binds inf licted upon knights in Malory’s Morte, but of course for Gawain there is no chance to appreciate the situation in such general, speculative terms. It is too late for Gawain to rectify the situation, and part of his misfortune will lie in his being deprived of the ability to make substantive choices about this own fate. Here it leads him further into danger. Overcoming this challenger quite as easily as he had subdued the previous one at the riverbank, Gawain makes one fateful decision. Unlike before, he shows none of his earlier magnanimity, even when his adversary “cryed mercy

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and yelded hym and besought hym as he was a jantyll knyght to saue his lyf.” Gawain becomes a victim of his developing zeal and newfound strength, as witnessed in what transpires: “Thou shalt dey,” seyd sir Gawayne, “for sleynge of my houndis.” “I wol make amendys,” seyde the knyght, “to my power.” But sir Gawayne wolde no mercy have but unlaced hys helme to have strekyn of hys hede. Ryght so com hys lady oute of a chambir and felle over hym, and so he smote of hir hede by myssefortune. (106)

By accident Gawain chops off the lady’s head instead of the knight’s. As it turns out, Gawain’s guilt is in no way extenuated either by the fact that he did not intend to kill the lady, or by the apparently good fortune that the knight remains alive. These are not morally decisive. Gawain’s own deeply felt regret is clear enough in this instance, though ultimately his understanding of his moral culpability remains limited. He attempts to acquit himself of the deed: So sir Gawayne was sore astoned of the deth of this fayre lady, that he wyst nat what he dud, and seyde unto the knyght, “Aryse, I woll gyff the mercy.” “Nay, nay,” seyd the knyght, “I take no forse of thy mercy now, for thou haste slayne with vilony my love and my lady that I loved beste of all erthly t[h]ynge.” “Me sore repentith hit,” seyde sir Gawayne, “for I mente the stroke unto the. But now thou shalt go unto kynge Arthure and telle hym of thyne adventure and how thou arte overcom by the knyght that wente in the queste of the whyghte harte.” (106–7)

He behaves as though his “mercy” could have significance after killing the knight’s beloved. Gawain’s manslaughter is a vilony at least equal to the disrespect he showed in originally refusing to give clemency to the knight; now the two are inseparable events. But Gawain’s insistence that he “mente the stroke unto the” and his boast “thow arte overcome” suggest a restricted view of ethical responsibility. He seems to seek sanctuary in intentionality. He has yet to fully comprehend how he stands accused according to the principle expressed by Gaherys: “Alas,” seyde Gaherys, “that ys fowle and shamefully done, for that shame shall never frome you. Also ye sholde gyff mercy unto them that aske mercy, for a knyght withoute mercy ys withoute worship.” (106)

Subsequent events transpire to enlighten Gawain. He begins to disarm himself in the castle when Gaherys warns him just in time (“What woll


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ye do? . . . Woll ye unarme you in thys contrey? Ye may thynke ye have many fooes in thys contrey” [107]), as a band of knights appears. They perform a disciplinary function in the tale. After attacking Gawain, they scold: Thou new made knyght, thou haste shamed thy knyghthode, for a knyght withoute mercy ys dishonoured. Also thou haste slayne a fayre lady to thy grete shame unto the worldys ende, and doute the nat thou shalt have grete nede of mercy or thou departe frome us. (107)

Gawain is saved by the timely intervention of four ladies who “besought the knyghtes of grace for sir Gawayne” (107). In this careful moral choreography, Gawain is shown the compassion he never extended to the knight of the castle. Now the ladies’ prisoner, Gawain is told again that he is to blame for what has happened. One of them says, “ ‘Hit ys youre owne defaute,’ seyde the lady, ‘for ye have done passynge foule for the sleynge of thys lady, the whych woll be grete vylony unto you’ ” (108). His present injury is said to be fit punishment for the past misfortune, as though indicating again—but now in increasingly explicit terms— that moral guilt in this case of vilony outstrips intention. The assumption becomes more apparent when, with the severed head dangling from his neck, Gawain is sent back shamefaced to Camelot. Merlin, delivering the bad news to Arthur, describes Gawain’s misadventure with the knight and his lady in terms that show a sustained interest in the morality of the coincidence of Gawain’s offense and its accidental outcome. Merlin speaks of “how he slew the lady, and how he wolde gyff no mercy unto the knyght, wherethorow the lady was slayne” (108). The running together of various causes makes sense only if Gawain’s guilt is somehow aggravated by chance. When Guinevere holds court and sentences Gawain “ever whyle he lyved to be with all ladyes and to fyght for hir quarels; and ever that he sholde be curteyse, and never to refuse mercy to hym that askith mercy” (108), we understand that he is responsible not only for what he meant to do but also for what he could not avoid. I have been suggesting that the morality of his case is complicated in such a way that it is impossible to decide Gawain’s guilt apart from eventualities. Consider the alternative. If he were to press his case on intentionalist grounds, Gawain could conceivably enjoy the relief in knowing that he never realized his original intentions, having only accidentally killed the lady. But no honorable knight resorts to such moral calculus, and Gawain is learning about honor, whereby it is apparently not good enough to mean well. Medieval moral philosophy and jurisprudence was not unfamiliar with the problem that is thrown into high relief in the romance. (On ref lection one can see why it has to be problem for moral

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agents in life as in literature: if possessing good intentions were sufficient, morality could happily consist of entirely private mental states.) Quite apart from the generic conventions shaping Malory’s Morte, Gawain would likely be judged culpably negligent under the law. Gawain may never have meant to harm the lady, but in mercilessly attempting to kill the knight his intention slips indirectly from abortive action to the inadvertent accomplishment. Malory here illuminates the circumstantial contaminants affecting the will, addressing a serious ethical issue that Aquinas, for example, raises in a fascinating passage on killing by chance. Aquinas follows Augustine in stating that, simpliciter loquendo, since sin derives from voluntary acts, agents are typically not guilty of homicide. But once we get beyond simple cases, we recognize cases in which guilt proceeds from accidental circumstances: What is not willed or intended as such may nevertheless be incidentally willed or intended. We may incidentally cause something by removing the obstacle against that thing happening. It follows that somebody who does not remove such occasions of homicide as he could and should remove will in some way be guilty of voluntary homicide. This can come about in two ways—when a person engages in nefarious activities which he should not always have engaged in, or when he does not take due care. This is why the law lays down that if a many engages in legitimate activities and uses due care, he is not guilty of any homicide that may ensue; if, on the other hand, he engages in illicit activities, or even fails to take due care in some legitimate enterprise, he is guilty of any homicide that may incur.20

The specter of such a causa per accidens within the will—producing accidental intentions—is something Malory’s Morte may be said to investigate. In this instance Gawain cannot segregate moral guilt from the incidental consequences, and we need a concept to account for the effects of chance on the morality of the knight. What such adventures as Gawain’s indicate is the interdependence of ethics and eventualities, as in the way in which people are sometimes judged not only for what they have decided or enacted, but also for circumstances with which they happen to be closely affiliated. This is a phenomenon Anglo-American philosophers have discussed under the rubric of moral luck.21 They observe the way moral agents regularly enlarge the scope of their agency and responsibility to cover fortuitous events never intended, deserved, or chosen. Proximity is often enough to generate a sense of moral accountability. Insofar as these experiences describe ordinary practices, moral luck f lies in the face of a widespread modern theoretical presumption in favor of autonomy and rational choice. Yet what


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we are discussing is an everyday consciousness of being unable to separate luck from other moral considerations; there are analogous limits to mens rea in law.22 Personal and social integrity is sometimes valued over autonomy, and effects can take precedent over intentions, something we have had occasion to discuss in an earlier chapter detailing the worthy impingements of sexual desire in Troilus and Criseyde. Several kinds of luck enter into moral deliberation and may illuminate Gawain’s case. Malory has plunged him into an aleatory element as if to see what happens ethically in the event. It is just Gawain’s hard luck, as a result, to be faced with specific dilemmas. To fulfill his duties to Arthur, he must quest for the white hart. But he learns too late that it was never his hart to capture. In this case he may reserve some freedoms (the freedom to choose), but not others (freedom from the choice). Such a dilemma is a matter of “circumstantial luck” in the recognition that moral choices are themselves sometimes unforeseen or fortuitous events. Sometimes this is a matter of being forced into a choice between two evils, as is just the case here. Moreover, Gawain is subject to the equally significant contingency of “outcome luck,” which is the assessment of moral conduct in terms of consequences. In this case he may have lapsed in failing to show mercy to the knight of the castle; this leads to the accidental slaying of the lady. From this perspective, too, Gawain’s moral luck is to achieve success in the hunt for the hind at the cost of other goods. A third kind of contingency affecting the ethics of his case is “constitutive luck,” which refers to the habits, training, imagination, and other resources with which one is equipped to respond to eventualities. Here Malory may invite us to ref lect on the youth and inexperience of Gawain, whose anger and ardor betray him. In sum, moral luck consists of the awareness that the chances one has to act for good or ill are as much a matter of circumstances, outcomes, and constitution as they are a result of reason or intention. Balin’s Pite The tale of “Balin or the Knight with the Two Swords” features a hero who has much in common with Gawain. Both are devoted to kindred, display a keen desire for vengeance, and show great prowess in arms, and as Beverly Kennedy observes Balin’s death “foreshadows” the death of Gawain.23 But Balin’s string of bad luck far exceeds anything suffered by Gawain. This tale is a pitiable account of thwarted intentions, confused identities, and conf licting allegiances, all with calamitous consequences for one of the supposed best knights of the world. That Balin’s life is ruinous despite his ostensible excellence is, as Edwards observes, one of

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the central enigmas of the narrative.24 The situation comes about largely due to the extraordinary scope given to accidental circumstance in this section of the Morte Darthur, far more than is ever given in the Suite du Merlin. As we will see, separate causes converge and multiply their effects, repeatedly depriving the knight of any meaningful agency by absorbing him into an anarchic plot. Given such irrational contingencies and the novelty of this narrative, Malory’s tale especially foregrounds the dilemmas of moral luck. The tale begins conventionally enough with the generic promise of chivalric romance: events will prove the knight. A damsel bearing a sword enters court. She announces to the king: Thys swerde that I am gurte withall doth me grete sorrow and comberaunce, for I may nat be delyverde of thys swerde but by a knyght and he muste be a passynge good man of hys hondys and of hys dedis, and withoute velony other trechory and withoute treson. And if I may fynde such a knyght that hath all thes vertues he may draw oute thys swerde out of the sheethe. (62)

When Arthur fails, the damsel adds: “he must be a clene knyght withoute vylony and of jantill strene of fadir syde and of modir syde” (62). Balin of Northumberland is introduced as a most unlikely candidate for sworddrawing: he has been delivered from prison where he was confined for allegedly murdering a cousin of the king, and moreover he is “poore and poorly arrayed” (39). Balin is attracted to the “adventure” nonetheless. Malory lays great stress on his self-assurance: the narrator’s comment (“But in hys herte he was fully assured to do as well, if hys grace happed hym, as ony knyght that there was”) restates Balin’s appeal to the damsel (“Thoughe that I be pourely arayed yet in my herte mesemyth I am fully assured as som of thes other, and mesemyth in myne herte to spede ryght welle” [63]), setting up a commonplace distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic qualities. This is Balin’s own appeal to the merits of the “heart.” Consider the changes Malory makes to his source here. Whereas the narrator in the Suite du Merlin endorses the view that Balin is the most excellent knight, in the Morte the narrator only reports Balin’s personal stance toward excellence; and whereas in the Suite the damsel requires the excellent knight to be strong and virtuous, only in Malory’s Morte must he also be nobly born. The effect of these two alterations is to raise the stakes on the issues involved. Malory expands the claim about what the adventure can reveal about inner worth at the same time as he narrowly focalizes the adventure around the viewpoint of the knight. The question becomes whether the narrative bears out Balin’s moral piety.


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Balin’s “poure araymente” (63) puts off the damsel, requiring Balin to justify himself and further spell out his position. In the Suite Balin asserts that he was once rich and is still courageous.25 Malory instead has him make a bold statement that elaborates the notion of intrinsic worth, effectively elevating his noble self-image to the level of a moral platitude: “A, fayre damsell,” seyde Balyn, “worthynes and good tacchis and also good dedis is nat only in araymente, but manhode and worship [ys hyd] within a mannes person; and many a worshipfull knyght ys nat knowyn unto all peple. And therefore worship and hardynesse ys nat in araymente.” (63)

The opposition set up here between “araymente” and the virtues “within a mannes person” again appeals to the conventional dichotomy between exterior and interior self, shallow appearances and substantive reality, superficial judgment and authenticity. It is a view of “worship” that would have resonated with the fifteenth-century gentry and nobility, whose idealism about the sources of inner worth is exhibited in other parts of the Morte.26 This view is consonant with the bel inconnue motif in narratives such as the Tale of Sir Gareth, where the noble identity of an unknown youth is proved to all by his deeds, winning him the worship he deserves. By pulling the sword so “easyly” (63), Balin has apparently joined in the meritocratic process. The sword seems to give Balin the opportunity to cut to the quick of his moral character, leading Jill Mann to conclude, “the adventure does not confirm Balin’s nature, it reveals it.”27 Yet subsequent events, if we are to read off his nature from them too, do not bode so well for Balin. If good fortune reveals a noble essence here, then what does misfortunes reveal later? How much hangs on his initial success when so much ruin follows? And recalling what he says about how virtue is hidden “within a mannes person,” why should anyone trust that an external action such as sword-drawing gives access to this secret knowledge? Malory has made Balin the major proponent of normative morality in the Morte Darthur, putting to the test the very “class ethics” he expounds. The adventure of the sword goes far beyond its original extraction, ramifying its effects and accumulating other meanings; here Balin’s conservative morality is compromised. Balin refuses to return the sword to the damsel, and she demurs with this appalling prophecy: “ye ar nat wyse to kepe the swerde fro me, for ye shall sle with that swerde the beste frende that ye have and the man that ye moste love in the worlde, and that swerde shall be youre destruccion” (64). It may be tempting to see Balin’s obstinacy as the source of all future troubles, as though his rash behavior

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were some original sin the effects of which he must suffer for the rest of his life; but even this illuminates the troubling way in which events break down in this narrative. As it turns out, Balin is more sinned against than sinning. According to Merlin, the damsel with the sword is “the falsist damsell that lyveth,” (67) for she has come bearing a weapon cursed by the Lady of the Lyle of Avylion. As Merlin explains, “that knyght that hath encheved the swerde shall be destroyed thorow the swerde; for the which woll be grete damage, for there lyvith nat a knight of more prouesse than [Balin] ys” (68). The adventure of the sword involves future mishaps because that is the kind of sword it is, not because of the kind of person Balin is. Balin is still, notionally, one of the best knights of the world. One of the demands of knightly excellence is to submit to unknown adventures, and on principle Balin thinks he is justified in taking the sword. Balin thus responds to the damsel’s prophecy: “I shall take the aventure . . . that God woll ordayne for me” (64), embracing the full contingency of the future by expressing what is a kind of chivalric creed in Malory’s narrative. Later his brother Balan will console Balin with the words, “but ye must take the adventure that God woll ordayne you” (70), and when Balin is required to engage in a final pas d’armes at the end of the tale he will say, “what aventure shalle falle to me, be it lyf or dethe, I wille take the adventure that shalle come to me” (89). Original to Malory, the first two statements appear to confer on fortune a spiritual significance that empties it of contingency, since insofar as God ordains events, they cannot be purely arbitrary, impersonal, or irrational. But as I have argued before in the context of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, no providential faith can strip adventures of their radical contingency insofar as events remain unforeseeable. Balin is baff led by several causes, and moreover the bizarre events into which he is thrown do not produce a pattern of successful overcoming of the sort that makes romance a typically optimistic (providential) genre. Consider what happens next in Malory. The Lady of the Lake comes to court to claim a gift from Arthur in exchange for her previous bequest of Excalibur, but she asks for the head of either Balin or the damsel girt with sword. She says the one has killed her brother, the other her father. In this event the rules of courtesy are confounded, since while the king owes a gift to the Lady of the Lake he is also beholden to Balin (whom Arthur has acquitted of murder by admitting, “I was mysseinfourmed ayenste you” [64]) and he has no reason to turn against the damsel. Before there is time to negotiate, Balin decapitates the Lady of the Lake. Balin subsequently explains that the Lady of the Lake is an old enemy: she “was the untrwyste lady lyvynge, and by inchauntement and by sorcery she hath bene the destroyer of


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many good knyghtes, and she was the causer that my modir was brente thorow hir falsehode and trechory” (66). Balin’s vengeful action is an infraction of the king’s promise of safe-conduct, and it earns Balin the wrath of Arthur. In the Suite he implores the king in no uncertain terms, “I recognize that I have sinned greatly. For God’s sake, forgive me.”28 There is no comparable confession and appeal in the Morte. The question of whether Balin has sinned is left unanswered. What Malory gives us instead is a conf luence of causes that produce double binds and starkly opposing claims (something the Gawain episode already exhibited in its own way), evincing an image of a capricious world where humans are not self-determining. Thus Malory does not enable readers to apply a simple moral metrics to events, but rather allows that events unfold in a way that will consistently challenge the notion of personal responsibility.29 In this tragic world mishaps are compounded by further accidents. The Morte Darthur seems to revel in the resulting ironies and tragic outcomes. The chief example is when Arthur sends Lanceor against Balin. In the encounter Balin cautions the knight: “Peradventure, . . . ye had bene bettir to have holde you at home. For many a man wenyth to put hys enemy to rebuke, and ofte hit fallith on hymselff ” (68). However, the warning better applies to Balin in the event. He successfully defeats Lanceor, causing all sorts of mishap—making this event a highly explosive one. First, Lanceor’s death occasions the suicide of his lady Columbe. Both will redound upon Balin’s poor reputation back at Arthur’s court. Moreover, now Balin’s life is forever at risk. A dwarf suddenly appears to him in order to explain that “the kynne of thys knight woll chase you thorow the worlde tylle they have slayne you” (71). Then on top of all this, Merlin comes on the scene and prophesies that this will be the site of a great battle between Lancelot and Tristram. But the worst is still yet to come. Merlin explains: because of the dethe of that lady thou shalt stryke a stroke moste dolerous that ever man stroke, excepte the stroke of Oure Lorde Jesu Cryste. For thou shalt hurte the trewyst knyght and the man of most worship that now lyvith; and thorow that stroke three kyngdomys shall be brought into grete poverte, miseri and wrecchednesse twelve yere. And the knyght shall nat be hole of that wounde many yerys. (72)

The way relatively minor events precipitate cataclysmic future events would be risible if the tone of this narrative were not so consistently doleful and the repercussions so chilling. Hardly any of the individual events could be predicted or prevented—despite their being prophesied pages in advance. In his English rendering of the Suite du Merlin,

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Malory has intensified the emergency of the whole state of affairs that leads from Lanceor to the Grail lance with which Balin will strike the dolorous stroke. Whereas in the French Merlin asks Balin why he did not save the lady Columbe, in the English Merlin accuses Balin of negligence: “thou haste done thyselff grete hurte that thou saved nat thys lady that slew herselff; for thou myghtyst have saved hir and thou haddist wold” (72). Looking back we can see that Balin did attempt to take the sword from the lady (“but she helde hit so faste he myght nat take hit oute of hir honde but yf he sholde have hurt hir” [69]), in which case Balin seems right to protest Merlin’s allegation by saying Columbe had acted “suddeynly” (72). There does not seem to be much he could have done to stop Columbe’s suddenness. And yet Balin does not escape blame for the eventuality either in the French or the English; the dolorous stroke is the consequence. Here Malory’s version differs only in the degree of ambiguity affecting Balin’s culpability. He preserves none of the religious dogmatism—or, correspondingly, moral clarity—of the Suite du Merlin. There Merlin pronounces a biblical judgment upon the knight’s sin: “It is my opinion that in you we have recovered our mother Eve, for just as from her deeds there resulted the great sorrow and misery by which we all pay, suffering from day to day, so the people of three kingdoms will be impoverished and devastated by the blow you will strike. And just as there was a prohibition against eating the dolorous fruit, so is there a prohibition from the High Master himself against doing what you will do.”30 Balin is presented as an irresponsible knight subject to an imminent divine justice; the figural correspondence to Eve and her original transgression leaves little doubt about the knight’s personal responsibility. By comparison, events in the Morte are deprived of obvious providential significance, and moral judgments are correspondingly moderated.31 Malory thus alters the conditions under which his characters are to be judged, in this instance, by retaining Balin’s guilt while at the same time disregarding the unconditional religious morality according to which he has been found guilty. This would produce incoherence if it did not belong to a pattern of events that generate moral luck. When Balin expresses regret for his unintended actions, then, he may be seen as exemplifying the concept of “agent-regret” that sometimes attends grave misfortune. 32 He is not admitting ordinary guilt, but rather his responsibility for events outside his control (and here we may say that the knight stands in an ethical relationship to the event in the future anterior tense, what will have been, upon which rules or meaning are conferred only retrospectively). After Columbe commits suicide, Balin says: “Me repentis sore the dethe of thys knyght for the love of thys damsel, for there was muche tr[e]w


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love betwyxte hem” (69). This does nothing to extenuate his negligence, but on the contrary can be taken to express his moral implication in the tragic event. Subsequent events plot his moral failure as a knight. Another way to put this is to say the “moral of the story” just is the story, in which case there is no substitute for retailing events down to their wretched conclusion; in fact the compulsion to read on is generated by the plot, arousing an interest in what happens and, by extension, how happenstance may supervene on moral judgment. 33 As it turns out, Garlon, a knight who goes invisible, kills two of Balin’s companions. Balin tracks Garlon down to the castle of his brother King Pellam. In revenge for the death of Garlon, Pellam fights Balin. In the course of battle Balin breaks his sword and unknowingly wounds Pellam with Longinus’s legendary spear, taken from the Grail chamber, causing the destruction of the castle and a holocaust in the surrounding country. This dolorous stroke is a notable example of the way Malory has heightened the moral luck of events in the way I’ve described. In the heat of battle Balin has rushed into a bare bedroom that is the Grail chamber, but the event is devoid of the portentousness of the Suite. As Kennedy explains, “Malory eliminates all the descriptive details, including the mysterious warning voices, which suggest that Balin has entered a holy place and committed sacrilege.”34 With the first forewarning, the Suite carefully sets up the scene, clearly amplifying a numinous dimension so that the significance of events is not missed, all to emphasize Balin’s personal responsibility for what happens: “He heard the voice clearly but did not, for that, leave his path but dashed into the room . . .” Then a second voice attempts to prevent him from touching the lance: “Do not touch it! You will sin!”35 In Malory’s Morte there is not time for such explicit advisories, and as a result there is no way of making clear-cut moral discriminations; recalling Gower’s interest in the limitations imposed on conscience, here too we see that the knight does not have access to anything like so clear a moral guide as a divine command. Only in the Suite, then, could Balin be labelled unequivocally a “wretched, unfortunate sinner.”36 This is not to say Balin is innocent in the Morte Darthur, only that the sources of his corruption are diffuse in the narrative. The nexus of events is too complex for anyone to untangle—although they can be plotted. The tragedy encountered here is incomprehension in the face of contingency, for which one may be liable anyway. The final two episodes are just as remorseless for Balin. He helps a knight stood-up by his lady, but when Balin reveals that the lady has been unfaithful, the knight kills both the lady and his rival; the knight’s sorrow therefore doubles because he has killed the one he most loves—thanks

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to Balin. Finally, Balin fights a routine joust at a crossroads and, because he wears a shield with no identifying marks, unwittingly he battles his own brother Balan to the death. Balin is thus repeatedly complicit in the destruction of others (including his own kin, whose name is evocative of Balin’s own and emphasizes the shared cost). Balin does enjoy some brief good fortune when, earlier, he won back the good will of Arthur by fighting on his side against King Royns and King Lot. He proved his worthiness in helping Arthur achieve preeminence over various competing kingdoms. But the narrative is largely one of disappointment and destruction, as the plot (something of a burial plot) of the story shows. At what point do events and outcomes tell against the stature of a knight? Is it sufficient for Balin to have a good “heart” in the absence of successful deeds in the end? What can it mean to be a knight “moste of worship withoute treson, trechory or felony” when Balin has little chance to avoid such vices? What, in other words, individuates the knight? If knights are typically summoned by events into the opening where their mental and moral qualities are laid bare, then we should be able to settle these questions according to the modus agendi of romance. But it is precisely in this modality, as we see, that difficulties arise. Outcomes are not consistent with the knight’s declared moral condition, pitting generic imperatives against normative statements; and this is what makes the tale, according to Edwards, a “heretical text.”37 It is the problem Balin himself encounters throughout in that he is betrayed by his own orthodox beliefs in the genre to which he ironically belongs. Conceding that the manly virtues are hidden within the “mannes person,” and that “many a worshipfull knight ys nat knowyn unto all peple,” the knight throws himself at the mercy of circumstances to confirm his identity; he yields himself to romance in the hopes that it will give back. His first adventure seems to fulfil the promise, corroborating his self-assured views of knighthood, but subsequent events put at risk his worship in the world. As a result, Balin’s tragic narrative—thanks especially to Malory—takes the romance of adventure further than many comparable tales characteristically do, pressing hard on the issue of whether the knight’s essential goodness is meaningful in the face of unrelenting misfortune. But if it is beginning to sound as though Balin is deserted by romance, overlooked or consigned to a place outside the generic universe, I want to end by suggesting that in fact he may be considered its true beneficiary. The tale ends with the judgment of Arthur who, upon hearing what has happened to Balin and Balan, remarks: “thys ys the grettist pite that ever I herde telle off of two knyghtes . . .” (92). Pity points to a peculiar kind of moral luck, regret felt


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for a life that is not lived well despite the best of intentions; there is no greater pity. If, as Mann states, the tale is a “whole series of actions in which Balin does what he did not want or intend to do,”38 Malory’s text ends with this terrible realization about the limits of moral agency and autonomy. But then this is perhaps the redeeming feature of the narrative and the excellence of the knight subject to its irrational imperatives: having become so subject to the romance of adventure, Balin finds his singular and authentic identity confirmed—rather than cancelled—by the tragedy. Existing perilously within the contingent and agonistic realm of romance, Balin is only a most emphatic example of the one who is touched by events (i.e., continget), realizing the aspirations of all heroes of chivalric romance. More than most knights-errant, Balin finds himself to be particularly gifted and given over to temporality and exteriority, accorded an exemplary place in the romance world, individuated by a strange adventure. *

* *

In his preface to the Morte Darthur William Caxton commends the book to prospective readers for their moral edification. “And I, accordyg to my copye, have doon sette it in enprynte to the entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jentyl and virtuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke” (cxlv). On his view, the Morte is a nostalgic throwback to a world in which causes and consequences are symmetrical and hence justifiable: individual moral agents deserve their good and bad fortune. This ethical doctrine is simply the obverse of the “class ethics” usually ascribed to chivalric romance: individuals encounter events worthy of their identities. In either case a scheme is envisaged by which justice is immanent in the pattern of “honor” or “shame” meted out in the world. Fortune and misfortune is thus rationalized and reduced out of existence. But none of this describes how Malory’s Morte Darthur, in hard cases such as we have examined in this chapter, imagines the moral order. Perhaps this is the reason Caxton has not himself provided an index tabulating the virtuous and vicious characters, but instead leaves it to the reader to discover the pattern: “Doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renomme” (cxlvi). Yet this too expresses a moral optimism at odds with the Morte Darthur. By Caxton’s measure, Gawain and Balin should deserve their shame and rebuke; misfortune must be their punishment in a fairly straightforward way. The alternative to this view

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would seem to be a lot of confusion, but out of the complexity I think we can discern a realignment of ethics and a redefinition of what it means to deserve misfortune. Malory’s Morte at these moments offers a nuanced analysis of events impinging on moral agency, and to account for his complex ethical universe we could stand to broaden our understanding of what counts as an ethical adventure.

NOTES

Introduction: Conceptual Personae 1. Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections in Four Parts: Written in French by the Duke of Rochefoucault, Now Made in English (London: M. Gillyf lower, 1694), no. CCCLXXX. 2. Odo Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental: Philosophical Studies, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 7.84 [p. 65]. 4. Francesco Petrarch, “Preface: To the Noble and Distinguished Azzo Da Correggio,” Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 1. An early fifteenth-century English translation of a small part of the work survives in Cambridge University Library MS Ii. VI.39; see F. N. M. Diekstra, ed., A Dialogue between Reason and Adversity: A Late Middle English Version of Petrarch’s De Remediis (Assen: Royal Vangorcum, 1968). 5. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 127. 6. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, VI.1569–70, in The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979). 7. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27; reprinted 1967), 1.54; Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, vol. 3, ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 1233. 8. François Dastur, “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,” Hypatia 15.4 (2000), p. 182. 9. The standard works to consult are Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la Tradition Littéraire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967); Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); and Jerold C. Frakes’s The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). See also the special issue edited by Catherine Attwood on “Fortune

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10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

NOTES

and Women in Medieval Literature” in Nottingham French Studies 38.2 (1999). An exhibition showing artifactual materials held at the Folger Shakespeare Library has resulted in a sumptuous illustrated book edited by Leslie Thomas, Fortune: “All Is but Fortune” (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000), suggesting that the iconography has wider public appeal. Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 73. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 75–76. Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 1–32. The paradox is one Derrida addresses in the punning neologism destinerrance, the letter addressed but not guaranteed to reach its destination. For some commentary on this area of Derrida’s thought, see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” MLN 121.4 (2006), pp. 893–910. François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 75. Paris, B. N. lat. 6765, fol. 58v, a codex containing verses thought to have been authored by Serlo of Wilton. Excerpted and translated in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, vol. 2, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 496–97. Vox Clamantis II.69–70, in The Complete Works of John Gower, Vol. 4, The Latin Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). Eric W. Stockton, trans., The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), pp. 99–100. These poets echo the paradoxes of Matthew 16:25 (“For he that will save his life shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it”) and 25:29 (“For to every one that hath shall be given, and he shall abound; but from him that hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away”), in The Holy Bible: Douay Version Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed. Richard Challoner (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1956). Dante, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 1: Inferno, 7.84 and 94 [pp. 64–67]. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 1.6 [p. 149]. Love is one of four instances of fidelity to the event discussed in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005): “it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity” (232).

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21. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 54–72; and Derrida, “Mes Chances,” pp. 20–22, 22. Hanna F. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 23. Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 24. Most recently, Michael Witmore’s Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) has given an adroit treatment of the supposed watershed. While he observes that the earliest recorded instance of accident in English is found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (III.918), Witmore’s purpose is to show that it becomes a powerful sign of the times in the Renaissance stage and study. A much more important recent book is Jacques Lezra’s Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). In his brilliant but mercurial exposition Lezra pursues a cluster of textual events transmitted through the works of Lucretius, Descartes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare among many others, tracing a line of descent within which textual events (e.g., translations and adaptations) introduce something accidental into the system, generating early modern history. Other examples include Frederick Kiefer’s Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1983), and as mentioned already Pitkin’s Fortune Is a Woman, both of which indicate again where the privileged site of analysis lies. 25. John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 26. Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 1. 27. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

1

On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event

1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), IV.pr.7. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 2. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), 2.9 [p. 269]. 3. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), IV.33 [p. 176]. 4. Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1968), p. 7 [I.i.2]. 5. Augustine, City of God, p. 176 [IV.33].

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6. Cicero, De Divinatione II.7, as translated by William Armistead Falconer, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923). Cited in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 68. 7. The distinction comes down to which causes escape human foresight. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Dominican Editors, vol. 5 (New York: Blackfriars, 1964), 1a Q. 22 art. 2: “The universal cause is one thing, a particular cause another. An effect can be haphazard with respect to the plan of the second, but not of the first.” 8. Alberti Magna Opera omnia, 1:423. Translated in Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 25. 9. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 181. See also, for a considerably reduced version of his doctrines, Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002). 10. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1984), p. 108. 11. Cited in Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, p. 75. Gracia is translating Boethius’s second edition from Samuel Brandt, ed., In “Isagogen” Porphyrii commenta, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 48 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1906). 12. Cited in Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, p. 77. 13. Boethius, De Trinitate 1.24–31 in H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, eds. and trans., Boethius: The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 6–8. See Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, p. 98. 14. There are several circumstantial details that make the work richly ambiguous (and perhaps f lawed). Henry Chadwick, in Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), argues that the work progresses from stoic moralism to platonic metaphysics. Seth Lerer, in Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), speaks of the movement from “extrinsic” rhetorical to “intrinsic” philosophical demonstrations keyed to the gradual understanding of the prisoner. Boethius’s rhetorical handbook De topicis differentiis shows how important producing arguments to suit occasions was to his rhetorical theory. Yet arguably the Consolation of Philosophy does not hang together. Scholars increasingly suggest that the dialogue dramatizes its own failure. See John Marenbon’s Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Joel C. Relihan’s Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 15. For Aristotle happiness conduces to those who are fortunate enough to possess such external goods as “good birth, good children, good looks. For no one will be entirely blessed if he is entirely disgusting to look at,

NOTES

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17.

18.

19.

20.

135

or basely born, or both solitary and childless . . . it seems to require this sort of fortunate climate” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin [Indianapolis: Hacket, 1985], 1099a31–b8. See John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Goods of Fortune,” Philosophical Review 94.2 [1985]: 173–96). Neither is the good soul immune from the unexpected reversals of fortune: “Some maintain, on the contrary, that we are happy when we are broken on the wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes, provided that we are good . . . . [T]hese people are talking nonsense” (Nicomachean Ethics 1153b17). See Bernard G. Dod’s “Aristoteles latinus” and C. H. Lohr’s “The medieval interpretation of Aristotle” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Jean Dunbabin, “Robert Grosseteste as Translator, Transmitter, and Commentator: The ‘Nicomachean Ethics,’ ” Traditio 28 (1972), pp. 460–72. See Alastair Minnis and Lodi Nauta, “More Platonico loquitur: What Nicholas Trevet Really Did to William of Conches,” in Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed. Alastair Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 1–33; Lodi Nauta, “ ‘Magis sit Platonicus quam Aristotelicus’: Interpretations of Boethius’s Platonism in the Consolatio Philosophiae From the Twelfth to the Seventeenth Century,” in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, ed. S. Gersh and Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 165–204; Mark Gleason, “Clearing the Fields: Towards a Reassessment of Chaucer’s Use of Trevet in the ‘Boece,’ ” in The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of De consolatione philosophiae, ed. Alastair Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 89–105; and Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire, Antécédents et postérité de Boèce (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1967), pp. 318–19. See Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, Library of Living Catholic Thought (Chicago: Regnery, 1964). On Aquinas’s reception of the new Aristotle see H. V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 187; P. Mercken, “Transformations of the Ethics of Aristotle in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo settimo centenario: Atti del Congresso Internaziononale (Naples: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1977), pp. 160–61; and R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, Aristote: L’Éthique à Nicomaque (Louvain: Publicationes Universitaires, 1970). Where the Nicomachean Ethics gets cited more than any other of Aristotle’s works, according to Mark D. Jordan, “Aquinas Reading Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, ed. Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 229–49. Summa Theologiae, vol. 42, 2a2ae Q. 129 art. 8. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1124a15–25.

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21. This composite text is a peculiar medieval synthesis of Aristotle’s writings, surviving today in fifty-six manuscript copies. Found as early as the thirteenth century in Vaticana MS Vat. lat. 2083 (dated 1283) and, later, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century school texts such as British Library Add 18377 and Yale Beineke MS 225. As yet unedited, Liber de bona fortuna is described in the catalogue of Aristoteles Latinus, codices descripsit Georgius Lacombe . . . Pars prior (Rome: La libreria dello stato, 1939–), pp. 72 and 160, and in John M. Rist’s “The End of Aristotle’s On Prayer,” American Journal of Philology 106.1 (1985), pp. 110–13. Remarks on the text and its inf luence can be found in C. Fabro, “Le Liber de bona fortuna de l’Éthique à Eudème d’Aristote et la dialectique de la divine Providence chez saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 88 (1988), pp. 556–72, and T. Deman, “Le Liber de bona fortuna dans la théologie de St Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 17 (1928), pp. 38–58. 22. Rist, “The End of Aristotle’s On Prayer,” p. 111–12. He supposes the work may have been translated directly from a Greek original. 23. Fabro, “Le Liber de bona fortuna,” pp. 556–57. 24. See Summa Theologiae, vol. 24, Appendix 6, “St Thomas’s Use of the De Bona Fortuna,” pp. 142–47; Von Gordon Anthony Wilson, “Henry of Ghent’s Critique of Aristotle’s Conception of Good Fortune,” Franziskanische Studien 65 (1983), pp. 241–51, and also his “Good Fortune and the Eternity of the World: Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus,” Recherches de Théologie e Philosophie Médiévale 45.1 (1998), pp. 40–51. 25. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio (Opus Oxoniense), II, dist. 3, part 1 in Opera omnia, ed. C. Balic (Rome, 1950–), 7.458ff. Translated in Paul Vincent Spade, ed., Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 57–113, and excerpts translated in Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, eds., Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, 2nd edn. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973), pp. 624–32. For detailed treatment see Peter King’s “Duns Scotus on the Common Nature,” Philosophical Topics 20 (1992), pp. 50–76, and for comparative analysis see Gracia’s Introduction to the Problem of Individuation. 26. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 4.106 [p. 85], as translated in Spade, Five Texts. 27. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 6.170 [pp. 101–2], as translated in Spade, Five Texts. 28. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 6.188 [p. 107], as translated in Spade, Five Texts. 29. As cited in King, “The Problem of Individuation,” p. 9, and discussed in Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation, pp. 90ff. 30. Cited in Jeffrey R. DiLeo, “Pierce’s Haecceitism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 27.1 (1991), p. 91. 31. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 6.185 [p. 106], as translated in Spade, Five Texts.

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32. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 6.186 [p. 106], as translated in Spade, Five Texts. 33. Ordinatio, II, dist. 3, part 1, q. 6.194 [p. 109], as translated in Spade, Five Texts. Cf. King, “The Problem of Individuation,” p. 19, who observes that “a given individual differentia is that which produces a given from an uncontracted nature, and no more can be said about it.” 34. King, “The Problem of Individuation,” p. 20. 35. See S. J. McGrath’s The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006); John Caputo’s Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); and Sonya Sikka’s Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). As Bruce Holisinger says in The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 6, “Had he not been denied a vacant chair in the history of Catholic philosophy at the University of Freiburg, it is likely we would know Heidegger today as one of the great twentieth-century exponents of medieval thought.” Quotations from Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift come from the English translation of Harold Robbins, “Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories and of Meaning” (Ph.D. diss. De Paul University, 1978), sometimes modified in view of the German original printed in Martin Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre- des Duns Scotus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1916). 36. “This investigation into the history of problems ultimately has a systematic goal . . .”: see the “Author’s Book Notice (1917),” translated by John van Buren in Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 61–62. 37. Heidegger, “Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories,” p. 14; Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre- des Duns Scotus, p. 11. 38. Heidegger, “Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories,” p. 15; Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre- des Duns Scotus, p. 12. 39. Heidegger, “Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories,” p. 184; Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre- des Duns Scotus, p. 177. Such is the problem of abstraction that Heidegger opines. Here Heidegger cites Duns Scotus on the irreducibly manifold nature of objects in the world: Tota entitas singularis non continetur sub universale, the totality of being singular is not contained in the universal (citing Ordinatio, II dist. 3). 40. Compare McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, pp. 81–83. See also Sean J. McGrath, “Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language,” Review of Metaphysics 57.2 (2003), p. 356: “Scotus’s view that the singular thing is intelligible in itself yet never fully grasped in abstract cognition confirmed Heidegger’s conviction that something of the thing is always left out of categorical or theoretical knowing.”

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41. Heidegger, “Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories,” pp. 88–89; Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre- des Duns Scotus, pp. 86–87. 42. The concept Ereignis has mundane and highly technical senses within Heidegger’s corpus, and senses are known to change over the course of his writing. For the evolution of the term in early and later Heidegger, see Richard Polt, “Ereignis,” A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 375–91; and see the entry on Appropriation (Ereignis) in the Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s Philosophy, ed. Alfred Denker (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000). The condensation of meanings of the term is noted in Michael Roth’s The Poetics of Resistance: Heidegger’s Line (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 38: besides “own,” “proper,” “property,” and “demonstration,” “Ereignis must also be thought as ‘event’ and it is usually translated as ‘event of appropriation’ so as to ref lect some of these relationships. In the event of Ereignis, entities are brought forth into their own, becoming what they are.” 43. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 13. 44. For Heidegger, to borrow the words of Nietzsche, the “doing is everything.” Ethics is on Heidegger’s understanding something akin to Nietzsche’s idea of popular morality: just the sort of superstitious thinking in which the pure manifestation of “doing, acting, becoming” is anthropomorphised and imagined to derive from a pregiven being. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 179. Joanna Hodge, in Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 2–3, observes that Heidegger only rejects a “restricted conception of ethics” that is about rules of conduct because it “takes the question of human f lourishing in isolation from the wider context in which human beings find themselves.” What she discovers in his work is the possibility of an “unrestricted conception” of ethics that supplies the very grounds of possibility for being human, prior to the distinctions, divisions, and identities human beings apply to the world. Ethical inquiries in this case would start from the supposition that “identity is a continuing project of renegotiation between scarcely definable forces.” 45. Robert Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 202–23. See also François Dastur, “Language and Ereignis,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 364, on the way the event witnesses us into being. 46. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 97; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), pp. 260–72. 47. Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 12.

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48. For Derrida this is true of democracy l’a venir, arrivant, perhaps, and destinerrance, all concepts that instantiate something of the futurity of ethics. On friendship as a paradigm case of being able to identify contingent conditions of possibility only when it is too late to generate or regulate them, see Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and his Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso 1997), p. 182. 49. Art sets truth to work rather than predicating truth. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), pp. 35. See Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 44–53, for a lucid elaboration of the difference between the ready-to-hand object and its appearance in painting. The effect of painting is to make appearing appear. And appearing by definition happens, comes about, imposing itself on the viewer. It is this condition of appearance that we should not rush to occlude in attaching definitions to objects. In his In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 30–34, Marion gives the example of the lecture hall rising in appearance, the “eventmental” nature of which would be impossible to describe after the event of the lecture itself. 50. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 85. Compare p. 458. 51. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 144–45, 159, 378. 52. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 332–36. His example is the text of an injunction: only the historical persons to whom it is addressed will obey or disobey the order, while the historian’s task is simply to describe the order. In literary experience, however, insofar as the form of texts as injunction is respected rather than neglected, the critic indeed occupies the role of the addressee of the text and thereby a potentially “historically effected consciousness.” 53. Michael Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139 and 154. Advocating an “effective” history—laying the stress on effects rather than causes—that “deals with events in their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations,” Foucault would like to inaugurate a new sort of history writing. For him the “event . . . is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it . . . . The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conf licts.” Marion offers a lesser known but more philosophically sophisticated account of history as an event as effected rather than caused, particularly as related to the work of the historian; see Being Given, pp. 165–70 and 228–29.

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2 Love and Ethics to Come in Troilus and Criseyde 1. H. D., Collected Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 292. 2. All citations of Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). References hereafter appear within parentheses. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 3. 4. Line 4753 as cited in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 66. 5. Guillaume de Machaut, “Le jugement du roy de Behaigne” and “Remede de fortune,” ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt, William W. Kibler, Rebecca A. Baltzer (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), l. 2695. 6. John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979), 1.50–54. 7. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 123. 8. Studies include Alan Gaylord, “Uncle Pandarus as Lady Philosophy,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 46 (1961), pp. 571–95, who argues that the philosophy of Pandarus is a sad “parody of the philosophical counsel offered to Boethius” (p. 572); D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), who posits a “backdrop of Boethian philosophy” (p. 68) against which idealizations of erotic love are judged inadequate; John P. McCall, “Five-Book Structure in Chaucer’s Troilus,” MLQ 23 (1962), pp. 297–308, who sees the five book structure of Troilus and Criseyde as leading to a repudiation of Fortune in a way paralleling the Consolation of Philosophy; Monica E. McAlpine, The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), who describes the lovers’ careers as comic or tragic according to a standard set by Boethius; Katherine Heinrichs, “ ‘Lovers’ Consolation of Philosophy’ in Boccaccio, Machaut, and Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), pp. 93–115 and Martin Camargo, “The Consolation of Pandarus,” Chaucer Review 25.3 (1991), pp. 214–28, both of whom refine but restate the conclusion of Gaylord that a knowledge of Boethius serves to correct misunderstandings and complete the meaning of the text. However, Camargo does not think Chaucer shows an unqualified acceptance of Boethius. Others who argue for a qualified Boethianism include B. L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the “Consolation of Philosophy” of Boethius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917), who long ago made the claim that “Chaucer never expresses complete acceptance of the Boethian doctrine . . .” (p. 79); and Jill Mann in “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” The

NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 75–92, who shows that Chaucer’s moral psychology is more complex than that of Boethius. Cf. Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 181; John Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 79–102. H. A. Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 99 and 134–35; and McAlpine, The Genre of Troilus and Criseyde, pp. 177–80. I take my cue from Mark Lambert, “Troilus, Books I-III: A Criseydan Reading,” in Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), pp. 105–25. Medievalists have long considered the nineteenth-century term “courtly love” problematic. Theory nevertheless persists in enlisting the concept to its cause (witness Lacan, Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari), and it is ever a mark of the modernity of any theory that it takes the medieval to be so monolithic and aprioristic. While there are recognizable features of the medieval courtly romance in such treatments of the phenomenon, the theorists are generalizing about what was really an aggregate of practices, discourses, and narratives. For the historical perspective one could start with Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). Although Levinas does not to my knowledge use the term, still he evokes the generalized concept. Yet readings of courtly love need not be discarded when they are insufficiently historical, a point that links up with what I argued in the previous chapter: anachronism sometimes produces a necessary anamorphosis. As Žižek says, “sometimes, the aberrant view which misreads a situation from its limited perspective, can, on account of this very limitation, perceive the ‘repressed’ potentials of the observed constellation”; see Slavoj Žižek, “History Against Historicism,” European Journal of English Studies 4.2 (2000), p. 110. Despite the importance of autonomous reason and self-ref lection in Chaucer’s works, eros retains a countervailing critical and ethical function. Mark Miller, in Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 108, accordingly sees that in the Knight’s Tale, “Erotic desire creates for Palamon and Arcite an ordering of the will that could never be the product of deliberation, and that might well not stand up to any process of ref lective consideration . . . . Palamon and Arcite are subject to a kind of necessity that violates the Knight’s conditions of autonomous action . . . . But nonetheless the Knight also makes it clear that such loving opens up a space of exhilarating freedom, a space in which these lovers confront a perfection that calls them out of the identities they had once seen as theirs, a space in which they care about something so deeply that it now serves as an organizing principle for everything in them and in the world they inhabit.”

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14. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 3: Purgatory, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 18.43–75 [pp. 174–77]. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 11. 16. Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 111. 17. On Levinas’s many debts to and departures from Heidegger see, for example, Robert John Sheff ler Manning’s Interpreting Otherwise Than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993). 18. John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 7. 19. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 38. 20. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 86. 21. The kabbalistic parable of the divine feminine as a “lovely princess, beautiful in every way,” who “opens a little window in her hidden palace and reveals her face to her lover, then swiftly withdraws, concealing herself,” as described in the thirteenth-century Jewish mystical work Zohar is matched by the Christian allegory of God “as noble wooer” attempting to win the love of a high-born maiden in a besieged castle in the roughly contemporary Ancrene Wisse. See Ancrene Wisse: Parts Six and Seven, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1991), pp. 20–22; and Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment, trans. Daniel C. Matt (London: Paulist Press, 1983), pp. 123–24. In addition to adapting the amatory discourse of the Song of Songs, both texts adopt something of the chivalric values current in the late medieval period. I am grateful to Marla Segol for drawing my attention to the medieval kabbalistic text in her paper, “Levinas and the Mystics,” delivered at the 2004 International Medieval Congress. 22. See Jaroslav Pelikan, Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante’s Paradiso (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), especially the third chapter in which he discusses Beatrice’s smile that seems to transport Dante to mio paradiso. 23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 254. Levinas seems to have become increasingly circumspect about the transcendence of love over self, dropping the romantic model from his account in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. However, Levinas indicates the centrality of erotic experience even there when he redescribes philosophy as the “wisdom of love,” inverting the usual etymological priority. 24. See, for example, John Finlayson, “Definitions of Courtly Romance,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980–81), pp. 44–62. Note the classic discussions of Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

NOTES

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

143

trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 123–42; and the related discussion of Morton Bloomfield, “Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance,” in Essays and Explorations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 123. Cf. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 96–97, who observes some burlesque elements in the presentation of Lancelot’s infatuation with Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier de la Charrette. Gaunt argues that the comical elements of the lover’s infatuation signal the poet’s ironical attitude toward fin’ amor, but I suggest that that archness is so common as to be constitutive of the discourse. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 270. See Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 48. Cf. David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 129–31. Cf. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 57. Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns Wives, and Amazons (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 188. Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination, p. 129. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 123–24. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 126. As was made explicit in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 452, in which Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt urge “a wholly integrated and sequential account, a history of causes and effects.” Slavoj Žižek in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), pp. lii–lvii, profitably resists the presumption that political critique is only possible and powerful when analyzing effects into their respective causes: he urges that “true materialism” does not explicate historical change but rather “consists in precisely accepting the chanciness without the implication of the horizon of hidden meaning—the name of this chance is contingency” (italics in original) Political critique will regain its relevance only when it humbly acknowledges that there is no deeper meaning to human history, no redeemable sense to suffering and violence. Therefore, Žižek urges what he calls the “ethical struggle to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe.” It is a painful but recognizable post-Holocaust consciousness of the inadequacy of historical explanation to our singularity as ethical subjects (for on what grounds is it defensible to say we now understand such suffering?), and it can go to inform a new materialist historiography, something several theorists besides Žižek are attempting to inaugurate. Levinas in Totality and Infinity, p. 55, speaks of the way the interiority or secrecy of the

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36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

NOTES

subject (glimpsed, for instance, in the suffering in the camps) cannot be totalized: “Totalization is accomplished only in history—in the history of the historiographers, that is, among the survivors.” François Lyotard devotes much energy in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 56–58, to describing how “Auschwitz” is a name that “marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned.” Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986), p. 143, is also preoccupied with the impossibility of history: “How is it possible to say: Auschwitz has happened?” How can one write the disaster? In a similar spirit Thomas Docherty in After Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 253, calls for a radical ethical and epistemological reorientation toward the singularity of historical events, promoting a post-Marxist position that “accepts the fundamental unknowability of the world and its history.” “The mere opposition advanced by Marxism is not enough for a radical criticism; it must be fully implicated in the much more radical pursuit of the unknown rather than the always-already-known-butmerely-forgotten; and it must be fully implicated in the ethics of alterity” (p. 253). Disasters, catastrophe, alterities, differends—we do justice to history and its subjects sometimes only by recognizing that such untimely events are inassimilable. See Monica E. McAlpine, “Criseyde’s Prudence,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), p. 215. She is adopting a phrase originally used by Derek Pearsall, but not his ironical conclusions as set out in “Criseyde’s Choices,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings No. 2 (1986), pp. 17–29. Whereas Pearsall argues that Criseyde is evading responsibility by representing herself as moved inexorably by forces outside herself, McAlpine locates responsibility itself within agency under duress. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Stratchey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21.101–3. See Jacques Lacan’s The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), especially pp. 146–52; and The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 69. For a clear exegesis see Slavoj Žižek’s chapter, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 89–112. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 146. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 149–50. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 69. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 7. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 152. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 128.

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45. Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 146; see also Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 84–85. 46. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. xxii. For relevant essays, critical and commendatory, see Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Tina Chanter (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001). Simon Critchley, in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 136, speaks of sexual politics as Levinas’s “blind spot.” See also Claire E. Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 47. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993): “Beloved woman. Not female lover. Necessarily an object, not a subject with a relation, like his, to time. She drags the male lover into the abyss so that, from these nocturnal depths, he may be carried off into an absolute future” (p. 194). 48. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 86. 49. Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein (Being-with) as defined in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 149–68, stands behind my discussion of sociality here. Heidegger’s inf luence on the thought of Levinas is considered by Robert John Sheff ler Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993). See Levinas discussing “sociality” in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, 1985), pp. 79–81. 50. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 59. 51. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), pp. 154–57. 52. The distinction between desire and need is crucial to understanding the novelty of Levinas’s approach. He defines desire in one place: “Desire ‘measures’ the infinity of the infinite . . . . This desire without satisfaction hence takes cognizance of the alterity of the other,” as Levinas says in “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 56. The other side of human longing is “need,” which satisfies itself by assimilating the other to the same, whereas “desire” is ever futuretending; see Totality and Infinity, p. 117. Ultimately, Levinas acknowledges the “ambiguity of love” in Totality and Infinity, pp. 254–55. But even here the “need” of love attests to the ethical relation lying beyond the self. 53. See McAlpine, “Criseyde’s Prudence,” p. 215, and Mann’s arguments in Feminizing Chaucer (D. S. Brewer: Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 18–25, 80–88, and 129–32.

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54. But we should also bear in mind that the “courtly experience” of the love lyric is not restricted to late medieval court society: a lover’s willingness to suffer and submit to the superior other has been discovered in many cultures and over a much longer period of time; see the first chapter of Peter Dronke’s Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, Vol. 1: Problems and Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 55. Just think what little difference it would make to redefine the situation in which the courtly lover makes his or her choices, say by removing her from the medieval to any modern society. It will always be possible to redescribe ethics as politically determined by forces that are beyond the control of individual moral agents. Ethics—if it exists at all—is a given feature of intersubjective and political affairs; it is a gift of being. 56. Simon Critchley, “The Other’s Decision in Me (What Are the Politics of Friendship?),” in Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p. 263. 57. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 68–69. I allude to Derrida’s coy phrase, “as if it were possible to think a responsibility without freedom” (p. 231), epitomizing the contingency of the ethics and politics of the perhaps he describes in this book. 58. Mann, “Chance and Destiny,” p. 82. 59. The sense is the same as Christine de Pisan’s reference to a virgin who once “was yolden in to” the Temple of Venus, in The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, ed. from MS C. U. L. Kk.1.5, ed. Diane Bornstein (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), p. 53. 60. For these alternative views, see Fradenburg’s discussion of Criseyde’s consent as a form of traumatism and compensation in Sacrifice Your Love, pp. 225–26; E. T. Hansen on Criseyde’s consent as a means of saving face and surviving in Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 170; and Pearsall who argues in “Criseyde’s Choices,” p. 20, that Criseyde effectively masquerades as passive in such moments only to preserve her freedom from responsibility: “She has discovered the great principle of survival, and the solace of the survivor: true freedom is the ability to convince yourself that you have no choice but to do what you want to do.” 61. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, p. 87. 62. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 86. 63. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 86. 64. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 266. 65. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1970), p. 5. 66. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 68. 67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 256; emphasis added. However, Levinas may be said to perpetuate a medieval eroticism wherein genders are sometimes inverted: according to an inf luential reading of troubadour poetry, the domna has always been defeminized and attributed a “semi-masculine identity” as an enabling condition of male power. See Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, pp. 84ff., on the “three genders.”

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68. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, p. 83. 69. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 106.

3

Consolations of Pandarus: The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse

1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), III.m.12. 2. Guillaume de Machaut, “Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne” and “Remede de Fortune,” ed. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), line 2695. 3. See Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, eds., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Kingis Quair: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997); on the annotations see p. 18. They are transcribed in C. David Benson and Barry A. Windeatt, “The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 25.1 (1990), pp. 33–53. See the discussion by Julia Boffey, “Annotation in Some Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde,” English Manuscript Studies 5 (1995), pp. 1–17, who thinks the annotations are those of the main scribe who was working in Scotland. 4. See, for example, Alan Gaylord, “Uncle Pandarus as Lady Philosophy,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 46 (1961), pp. 571–95; Katherine Heinrichs, “ ‘Lovers’ Consolation of Philosophy’ in Boccaccio, Machaut, and Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), pp. 93–115; Martin Camargo, “The Consolation of Pandarus,” Chaucer Review 25.3 (1991), pp. 214–28; and Ann W. Astell, “Visualizing Boethius’s Consolation as Romance,” in New Directions in Boethian Studies, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2007), pp. 111–24. 5. Two surviving manuscripts of Ennodius’s full corpus circulated in Chaucer’s England, and selected works also made their way into contemporary anthologies; see Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Ennodius in the Middle Ages: Adonics, Pseudo-Isidore, Cistercians, and the Schools,” in Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages, ed. James Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 91–113; and for a survey of manuscripts see Christian Rohr, Der Theoderich-Panegyricus des Ennodius (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchh, 1995), pp. 64–178. On the personal and political circumstances of Boethius’s relationship with Ennodius see Stefanie Kennell, Magnus Felix Ennodius: A Gentleman of the Church (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 108–9, 121–22, 186–97. The poem De Boetio spatha cincto is edited in Wilhelm von Hartel, Magni Felicis Ennodii Opera omnia, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 6 (Vienna, 1882), carm. 2, 132 [p. 602]. It is translated in Danuta Shanzer, “Ennodius, Boethius, and the Date and Interpretation of Maximianus’s Elegia III,” Rivista di Filologia 111 (1983), p. 183.

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6. All citations of Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). 7. Vincent Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 156. 8. Maximianus’s “Boethius” shares the verbal dexterity, the mocking sense of humour, and general sense of vitality that is characteristic of the English Pandarus (not Boccacio’s Pandaro). More generally, like Pandarus in the first book of Troilus, Maximianus has his procurer emulate the opening sequence of Boethius’s Consolation. Maximianus’s elegy and Chaucer’s romance arguably also express ambivalence if not outright embarrassment over the lover’s transcendence over sexual desire. See J. Allan Mitchell, “Boethius and Pandarus: A Source in Maximian’s Elegies,” Notes & Queries 50.4 (December 2003), pp. 377–80. The Latin text is edited by Aemilius Baehrens, Poetae latini minores, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1883), pp. 332–36. 9. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), p. 161. 10. Chaucer’s debt to the French poem is well known; the importance of Machaut’s to Gower’s Confessio Amantis is discussed at length by Peter Nicholson in the first chapter of his Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 11. Latin quotations are taken from the edition of H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, eds. and trans., Boethius: The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). For Boece I use the edition in the Riverside Chaucer. 12. Cf. Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 79. 13. Phillipa Hardman, “Narrative Typology: Chaucer’s Use of the Story of Orpheus,” Modern Language Review 85.3 (1990), p. 549. 14. Hardman, “Narrative Typology,” p. 552. 15. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 3: Purgatory, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 17.103–5 [p. 169]. 16. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1–2. 17. Once attributed to Chaucer, the Testament comes down to us in William Thynne’s 1532 printed edition. Recent editions include R. Allen Shoaf, ed., The Testament of Love (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1998), and Gary Shawver, ed., Testament of Love: A Critical Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Parenthetical references to the text in Shoaf ’s edition will appear throughout. 18. On the factionalism into which Usk was swallowed and the pragmatic petitionary function of his Testament, see especially Paul Strohm,

NOTES

19.

20. 21.

22.

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“Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83–112, and the seventh chapter of Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 145–60; Marion Turner, “ ‘Certaynly His Noble Sayenges Can I Not Amende’: Thomas Usk and Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 37.1 (2002), pp. 27–39; and Michael Hanrahan, “The Seduction of The Testament of Love,” Literature and History 7 (1998), pp. 1–15. For another approach, see David R. Carlson, “Chaucer’s Boethius and Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition,” in The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, ed. Robert A. Taylor, James F. Burke, Patricia J. Eberle, Ian Lancashire, and Brian S. Merrilees (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1993), pp. 29–70, who argues that Usk’s work is not reducible to factional politics. In the second chapter of Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 38–44, Isabel Davis makes a strong case for considering Usk alongside other examples of life writing (e.g., The Book of Margery Kempe), since we do not have independent access to Usk’s intentions or traumas (besides those “facts” given in his writing). Moreover, Usk tends to intellectualize his experiences to such a degree that no single political purpose is ultimately discernable. This may be explained compositionally: Stephen Medcalf, in “The World and Heart of Thomas Usk,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 222–51, accounts for the “deepening and intensifying of [Usk’s] thought” by proposing two separate writing stints. The primary motive of the first half of the Testament was to repossess his lost fortunes; by the time he came to the second half he may have obtained the favor of the king and been able to turn his mind to other things; he may also have written the second half when imprisoned by the Lords Appellant, providing a different stimulus. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, p. 145. A fair amount of scholarly debate has been generated on the question of whether Usk’s tree bears any relation to William Langland’s tree in Piers Plowman B.XVI, but there is—to borrow Peter Dronke’s phrase—a “veritable forest of trees” that may have informed such a construction. Besides trees that represent Christian doctrine (including Langland’s), there are analogous trees of courtly love (la plante d’amours), and also Ramon Lull’s Arbre de Filosofia d’Amor that bears comparison with Usk’s Tree of Love in its blending of sexual and spiritual allegoresis. See Peter Dronke, “Arbor Caritatis,” in Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett, ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 207–53. The book gradually works up to this conclusion. Early on Love repudiates Fortune (109, 127, 201), but it turns out that she relies on fortuitous

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23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

NOTES

events in a manner that will be familiar from our earlier analysis of the “event” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Medcalf, in “The World and Heart of Thomas Usk,” p. 244, associates Usk’s Tree of Love with Pindar’s vine tree as discussed by Nussbaum as a sign of the fragility of goodness. When Love asserts that Chaucer’s teachings are conveyed “without any maner of nycite of starieres ymagynacion” (3.565), we must stand amused at her disingenuousness. One could hardly find a more fitting description of the poet than as one who employs such stratagems. As a competing philosophical “treatise” in the Boethian tradition, Troilus and Criseyde is notable for introducing ambiguities and difficulties that may be too swiftly passed over in the Consolation of Philosophy. Cf. Medcalf, “The World and Heart of Thomas Usk,” pp. 239–42. On precise borrowings from Pandarus see Turner, “Certaynly,” pp. 27–39. Verbal parallels between Troilus and Criseyde and Usks’ Testament are noted in R. Allen Shoaf ’s edition of The Testament of Love, pp. 15–16. Marion Turner, “Certaynly,” p. 30, argues that “the moral platitudes of the Testament are subverted because they are often taken from the lips of Pandarus, a character who undoubtedly lacks moral authority” (p. 30). I think Usk’s Testament is more robust and daring than Turner assumes, because it sees in Pandarus’s amorality the very challenge for moral philosophy. Stephen Medcalf, “Transposition: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 181–95. A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 164. The third book of Usk’s Testament is as George Sanderlin discovered, “modeled on, and in large measure translated from, this treatise of St. Anselm,” although there are critical changes as we will see. See George Sanderlin, “Usk’s Testament of Love and St. Anselm,” Speculum 17 (1942), pp. 69–73; Medcalf, “Transposition: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” pp. 187–95; Shawver, Testament of Love, pp. 31–32; and Shaof, The Testament of Love, Appendix 3. As mentioned in the first chapter, the work remains unedited, and I make use of modern translations of passages corresponding to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics and Magna Moralia as given in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 1977. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, pp. 1910–11. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Dominican Editors, vol. 24 (New York: Blackfriars, 1964), Appendix 6, “St Thomas’s Use of the De Bona Fortuna,” pp. 142–47. See also C. Fabro, “Le Liber de bona fortuna de l’Éthique à Eudème d’Aristote et la dialectique de la

NOTES

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

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divine Providence chez saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 88 (1988), pp. 556–72, and T. Deman, “Le Liber de bona fortuna dans la théologie de St Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 17 (1928), pp. 38–58. Aquinas cites Aristotle approvingly in the responsio at Summa Theologiae, vol. 24, 1a2ae Q. 68, art. 1: “Aristotle [in cap. De Bona Fortuna] says that it is not good for those who are moved by divine promptings to take counsel according to human reason; but that they should follow their inner promptings, because they are moved by a better principle than human reason.” We can see him finessing a solution: “Man is master of his acts, including those of willing and not willing, because of the deliberative activity of reason, which can be turned to one side or the other. But that he should deliberate or not deliberate, supposing that we were master of this too, would have to come about by a preceding deliberation. And since this may not proceed to infinity, one would finally have to reach the point at which man’s free decision is moved by some external principle superior to the human mind, namely by God, as Aristotle himself demonstrated [citing Liber de bona fortuna]” (Summa Theologiae, vol. 30, 1a2ae Q. 109, art. 2). Good fortune is only natural to individual natures, because if it arose from human nature uniformly, everyone would be fortunate; see Von Gordon Anthony Wilson, “Henry of Ghent’s Critique of Aristotle’s Conception of Good Fortune,” Franziskanische Studien 65 (1983), p. 243. Wilson, “Henry of Ghent’s Critique,” p. 250. John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Felix Alluntis and Allan B. Wolter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 477. Duns Scotus, God and Creatures, pp. 477–78. See John Boler, “Transcending the Natural: Duns Scotus on the Two Affections of the Will,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67.1 (1993), pp. 109–26, and Mary Elizabeth Ingham, “Scotus and the Moral Order,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67.1 (1993), pp. 127–50. Duns Scotus, God and Creatures, p. 480. Duns Scotus, God and Creatures, p. 481. Not everyone could tolerate such accounts of natural philosophy. Salutati’s De fato et fortuna (1396) expressly opposes Aristotle’s Liber de bona fortuna, denying that fortune should be analyzed independently of providence: “nothing can be done except what was in the will of the first cause, not even to make human thoughts, impulses, and actions fortunate, since the favorer of these and happiness is the benevolence and grace of God alone.” His is only a more extreme version of the view of Aquinas and Henry, which Duns Scotus does not share. As cited in Charles Trinkaus, “Coluccio Salutati’s Critique of Astrology in the Context of His Natural Philosophy,” Speculum 64.1 (1989), p. 65. Duns Scotus as cited by Ingham, “Scotus and the Moral Order,” p. 132.

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45. Cf. Medcalf, in “Transposition,” pp. 188–89, and “The World and Heart of Thomas Usk,” pp. 237–28, on the alterations Usk makes to Anselm in this passage on the spontaneous will. Medcalf thinks Usk as more Platonic than Aristotelian. 46. As Sanderlin notes in “Usk’s Testament,” p. 70, Usk takes every opportunity to substitute “love” for terms that do not have the same semantic field in Anselm’s De Concordia. The Anselm passage can be found in Shoaf ’s edition of The Testament of Love, Appendix 3, p. 443. 47. Medcalf, “Transposition,” p. 191. 48. The only printed edition is that of E. P. Hammond, “The Chance of the Dice,” Englische Studien 59 (1925), pp. 1–16; line references to the text will be given in parentheses. For more on medieval divination and dice games including this one see both Rhiannon Purdie, “Dice-Games and the Blasphemy of Prediction,” in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 167–84; and W. L. Braekman, “Fortune-Telling by the Casting of Dice: A Middle English Poem and Its Background,” Studia Neophilologica 52 (1980), pp. 3–29. 49. The game is mentioned in passing in a chapter on “the game of love” in John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 154–202. Cf. Gower’s description of love as the result of random lot in Confessio Amantis 1.47–54 and 8.2377–90, in The English Works of John Gower, vols. 1 and 2, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979). 50. John Stow, in A Survey of London, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; reprinted 1971), p. 143, quotes the satirical ninth stanza and remarks “Chaucer, chance of dice” in the margin next to it. Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (New York: Haskell House, 1965), p. 126, says a more likely candidate is John Lydgate. Ethel Seaton, in Richard Roos, c. 1410– 1482 (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), pp. 308ff., proposes that Richard Roos composed the The Chaunce of the Dyse, littering the text with improbable anagrammatic allusions to people in the royal household. 51. See Manuscript Bodley 638: A Facsimile, intro. Pamela Robinson (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), ff.195r–203v; and Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, intro. John Norton-Smith (London: Scolar Press, 1979), ff.148v–54r. 52. As noted by A. S. G. Edwards, “The Chaunce of Dice and The Legend of Good Women,” Notes & Queries 34 (1987), p. 295. Several references to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are indicated in Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, vol. 1 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), pp. 44–45. Seaton in Sir Richard Roos, p. 309, notices resemblances between The Chaunce of the Dyse and Ragman Roll. 53. Ragman Roll makes only very oblique references to literature (alluding to Danger, Venus, and Mercury). Another fortune-telling dice game extant in four manuscripts has none; see Braekman, “Fortune-Telling.”

NOTES

153

54. One could explain this as a carnivalesque suspension of prescribed gender roles, or perhaps simply “equal opportunity” satire and seduction; the inclusivity of the game deserves further scrutiny. In contrast, the above-mentioned game Ragman Roll, which survives in the same witnesses, is directed exclusively to women: “My ladyes and my maistresses echone . . .” An excellent discussion of the issues involved in female readership and role-play in The Chaunce of the Dyse can be found in Nicola McDonald’s “Games Medieval Women Play,” in The Legends of Good Women: Contexts and Receptions, ed. Carolyn Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 176–97, an essay I did not encounter early enough to incorporate into this chapter. 55. Those who see The Chaunce of the Dyse as evidence of probability theory include D. R. Bellhouse and J. Franklin, “The Language of Chance,” International Statistical Review 65 (1997), pp. 73–85; Donald Ervin Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 4: Generating All Trees: History of Combinatorial Generation (New Jersey: Addison-Wesley, 1976); and Edna E. Kramer, “From Dice to Quantum Theory to Quality Control,” The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 291–315. 56. M. G. Kendall, “Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics II,” Biometric 43 (1956), pp. 1–14; and Kramer, “From Dice to Quantum Theory,” pp. 55–56. 57. Three six-sided dice have a total of 216 possible combinations and 56 sets of combinations. The Chaunce of the Dyse calls for specific sets of numbers, not sums or sequences: e.g., casting 2-2-3 or 3-2-2 will do just as well as 2-3-2. Now one cubic die has a 1/6 chance of ending up giving a specific number; the probability for three dice is calculated as 1/6 3 3 5 0.46%. But some sets have a higher probability because, of all the possible sums or permutations, the numbers required for the game need not come up in a specific order: so while the combinations 1-1-1 or 6-6-6 represent only one possible set of rolls, 2–2-1 has three possible sets of rolls (1-2-2, 2-1-2, 2–2-1), and 3-2-1 has six possible sets of rolls (1-2-3, 1-3-2, 2-1-3, 2-3-1, 3-1-2, 3-2-1). Accordingly, probability alternates between ~0.5% (the chances of six different stanzas), ~1.5% (thirty stanzas), and ~3% (twenty stanzas). 58. Cf. Cicero, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), II.lviii.121: “Nothing is so uncertain as a cast of dice and yet there is no one who plays often who does not sometimes make a Venus-throw and occasionally twice or thrice in succession. Then are we, like fools, to prefer to say that it happened by the direction of Venus rather than by chance?” Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XVIII.65–66, observes that a six is lucky, one unlucky. And a triple six has been considered a fortunate cast at least since Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 33 and Plato’s Laws 986e. For these and related

154

NOTES

59.

60.

61. 62.

references see David M. Robinson, “The Wheel of Fortune,” Classical Philology 41.4 (1946), p. 209, and T. J. Buckton, “Dice,” Notes & Queries s4–I (1868), pp. 179–80. The thwarted desire of Amans is described as a such a loss in Gower’s Confessio Amantis 8.2377–90; Beryn has bad luck with dice in “The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant’s Tale of Beryn,” in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1992), lines 923–30. See Susan Noakes, “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca,” Philological Quarterly 62 (1983), pp. 221–39. Their misreading comes about, Noakes argues, because the lovers invest so much meaning in a particular passage (solo un punto), failing to read on in the romance that should have served as a cautionary tale against adultery. As edited by Braekman in “Fortune-Telling,” pp. 18–29. Purdie, “Dice-games,” p. 182. Assuming some importance in the social life of the later medieval English gentry, such games were perhaps considered somewhat classy—whereas dicing was condemned as a mere “tavern sin” when practiced among the lower orders.

4 Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics 1. John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979), Prologue. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 2. One only has to think of the important studies of Étienne Gilson or Frederick Copleston, but I also have in mind recent and quite popular histories of moral philosophy such as Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), and Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); John Marenbon’s Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992); and J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. See, for example, Charles Runacres, “Art and Ethics in the ‘Exempla’ of Confessio Amantis,” in Gower’s “Confessio Amantis”: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 106–34; William Robins, “Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), pp. 157–81. And see my Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). 4. For brief surveys of the medieval reception of Aristotle see Bernard G. Dod’s “Aristoteles latinus” and C. H. Lohr’s “The medieval interpretation

NOTES

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

155

of Aristotle,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Thomist philosophy is representative for having introduced what H. V. Jaffa calls “divinely implanted” natural law into the ethical theory of Aristotle. For discussions of the signal differences see Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 187; P. Mercken, “Transformations of the Ethics of Aristotle in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas,” Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo settimo centenario. Atti del Congresso Internazionale (Napoli: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1977), pp. 160–61; and R.-A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, Aristote: L”Éthique à Nicomaque (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1970). Daniel Westberg’s Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 26–30, surveys the critical opinion that was popularized by Alisdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, p. 278. Oscar J. Brown in Natural Rectitude and Divine Law in Aquinas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1981), p. 63, describes Aristotelian ethics as a “ ‘socialization’ of moral science” that Aquinas had to modify. On Augustine’s “eternal law” and his own firming up of moral principles see John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 191–99. On the Thomist synthesis Westberg asks: “How is it that Aquinas can seem so Aristotelian in his description of human action and yet be so Augustinian in his insistence on the need for conformity to the eternal law?” (p. 34); see further pp. 95–100 for discussion of the stimulus to neo-Plantonize Aristotle in Augustine, Albert the Great, and Bonaventure. For example, D. J. M. Bradley’s Aquinas and the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997) argues that the philosopher developed natural law theory to “stabilize the foundations of Aristotelian practical wisdom” (p. xii). On Thomism and Ockhamist ethics in the fourteenth century see F. Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, vol. 3 (London: Search Press, 1953), especially pp. 96–110. Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, especially pp. 36–78. Andrew Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to ‘Kyndenesse,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 55.3 (1994), p. 374. Kurt Olsson, “Natural Law and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 11 (1982), pp. 229–61. For a wider discussion of medieval kyndes see Peggy A. Knapp, Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social Economies from Chaucer’s England to Shakespeare’s (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 80–89. Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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11. Biblica Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, ed. Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado, 4th edn., Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos 14.1 (Madrid: La Editorial Catolica, 1965); with translations from The Holy Bible: Douay Version Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed. Richard Challoner (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1956). 12. For a historical survey see D. E. Luscombe’s “Natural morality and natural law,” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, pp. 705–19. The following examples are drawn from White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness, pp. 8–20. 13. Westberg, Right Practical Reason, p. 101. 14. Russell A. Peck, ed., John Gower: Confessio Amantis, vol. 2, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2003), p. 14. Nor is Genius related as closely as he has been in previous literary incarnations to Nature. As Winthrop Wetherbee observes Genius has “become a spokesman for cultural, as well as natural, values”; see his “John Gower,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 601. On the background see George D. Economou, “The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower,” Chaucer Review 4 (1970), pp. 203–10. 15. See Chapter 7 of Rita Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 16. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 251–52. 17. See Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 202–5, for the view that the Latin apparatus exists to perform an “auto-exegesis.” See also the relevant discussions of Richard K. Emmerson, “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999), pp. 143–86; Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology 95 (1998), p. 7; Joyce Coleman, “Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to Be Read,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002), pp. 216–17, 227, 234–35. 18. Wetherbee, “John Gower,” pp. 591 and 599. See also his “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1991), pp. 7–35. 19. Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 29. 20. White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness, p. 180. 21. Headverse at VII.i of the Confessio Amantis. 22. Marginal notation at 6.664ff., as translated in Peck and Galloway, Confessio Amantis, vol. 3, p. 426, acting as an authorizing gloss to the line “Usage is the seconde kinde.” The best account of the intersection of rhetorical and

NOTES

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

157

memorial culture in medieval texts remains Mary J. Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially her fifth chapter, “Memory and the Ethics of Reading.” It would be easy enough to redescribe all this endoxa—as Roland Barthes would when he notes that in the literary context Aristotle’s probable opinions amount to a middling, self-censoring “esthetic of the public”—as only another form of orthodoxy or ideology. See Barthes’ The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 22–23. Janet Coleman takes this dour, antipopulist approach to the ethical eclecticism of Gower’s Confessio when she calls it “an encyclopedia of current prejudices and ideals”; see Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350–1400 (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 129. On the distinction and for the following examples I owe much to Timothy C. Potts’ Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and Bradley’s Aquinas and the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness, p. 14. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, p. 128. Westberg, Right Practical Reason, p. 101. See the discussion of Ockham’s thought in Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, vol. 3, pp. 103–10; Luscombe’s “Natural Morality and Natural Law,” pp. 713–15; and Marilyn McCord Adams’s “The Structure of Ockham’s Moral Theory,” in The Contexts of Casuistry, ed. James F. Keenan and Thomas A. Shannon (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995). As Potts observes in his Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, p. 19, “the idea of conscience being formed by training was a blind spot” in medieval philosophy. Confessio gives the lie to this notion of premodern morals, making Gower an indispensable historical source. Translated by Andrew Galloway in, John Gower: Confessio Amantis, vol. 2, ed. Russell Peck. TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000), p. 349. See Derek Pearsall, “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 13–25, and n. 17 above. Often the arrangement on the manuscript page of the synoptic commentary suggests as much, that is, when the Latin is found transcribed into the text-columns of the English poem; see both Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s Help,” pp. 1–40, and Derek Pearsall, “Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 73–97. But my point stands whether or not this is so in individual copies of the poem: the Latin summaries occlude the temporality of reading and impose a relatively static synopsis on events. See Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 248–62. Scanlon seems ultimately to agree with the Latin exegesis when he argues that Boniface’s final ruin is proof of divine retribution, suggesting that the only real

158

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

NOTES

authority and power resides in God: “Gower disenfranchises clerical power by making it entirely spiritual” (p. 262). Yet the downfall of the supplanting prelate is not attributed to God in the tale; it is rather something that comes about contingently, specifically by means of military action, since Boniface happens to be taken captive by the forces of King Louis as the result of Boniface’s arrogating secular authority to himself. Gower removes every spiritual sanction from his vernacular tale, so that the reasons for the pope’s captivity are explicable in temporal rather than spiritual terms. Runacres, “Art and Ethics,” p. 129. Macaulay, The English Works of John Gower, vol. 1, Notes, pp. 490–91. Origen thought the trumpet represents “the efficacy of the Word of God”; see Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1941), p. 62, citing Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Graeca, XIII.319. On the sort of blasphemy involved in simulating the voice of God, see Patrick Gallacher, Love, the Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 123–24; and Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 258–62. See “The Trump of Death,” Confessio Amantis, I.2021–53. As in the “Tale of Pope Boniface,” the trump of death in the first book sounds a false alarm and yet inspires credulity in its audience (see especially lines 2214–25). Comically, Dante the pilgrim is mistaken for Boniface (who is not dead yet, but whose arrival is expected), when one damned soul says, “Is that you? Already? Here? Upright?” See Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary, Vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 19.52–54 [p. 179]. Boniface is also roundly denounced by Peter in Paradise 27. Vox Clamantis II.209–16. I have altered the translation of Eric W. Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), pp. 102–3. Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 1. R. F. Yeager, ed. and trans., John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2005), pp. 36–37. Two notable examples in which Gower also seems alive to the dangers of a divine-command ethics are the Tale of Mundus and Paulina (1.761ff.) and the Tale of Nectanabus (6.1789ff.), both of which can be read as parodic Annunciation narratives in which women are duped when they mistake the voice of man for the vox Dei. See further the chapter on “The Annunciation Pattern in Amorous Persuasion,” in Gallacher’s Love, the Word, and Mercury, pp. 26–43. Potts, in Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, p. 2, observes: “Where the prefix . . . modif[ies] the meaning of the noun, the original sense is that of knowing something (in company) with someone else.”

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42. All references to The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). 43. One could also compare Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, I.2459, which obliquely calls to mind the 1381 Rebellion; the Wife of Bath’s Prologue 406, for Alison’s treatment of her fourth husband; and the description of the vice in Parson’s Tale, X.498–513. 44. Line 18445 of John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme in The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 1, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899– 1902), p. 214; William Burton Wilson, trans., The Mirror of Mankind (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992), p. 253. 45. See Vox Clamantis in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902), p. 141. Gower identifies himself with the insular visionary John of Patmos (Prol. 57–58), while the title of the work alludes to the lone, messianic desert-dweller John the Baptist (see Isaiah 40:3 and Luke 3:1–6). On Gower’s simultaneous appropriation of and ambivalence toward the common voice see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 209–10. 46. On the identity of the vox populi and vox Dei see Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme 12721–26, and Vox Clamantis III.1267; but for a rather pessimistic assessment of the people see Gower’s short Latin poem, “De lucis scrutinio,” in John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: MIP, 2005), pp. 12–17.

5 Telling Fortunes in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes 1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), II.pr.2. 2. Michael Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 155. 3. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27; reprinted 1967); parenthetical citations will be given in the text throughout. Lydgate fails to mention Laurent more than once, and falsely makes it appear he is translating Boccaccio (“Bochas”) directly; and whereas Boccaccio and Laurent employ the first person throughout, Lydgate speaks in third-person in reference to “Bochas book.” 4. Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 95–96. A similar claim has been made about Lydgate’s Troy Book. See C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s “Historia desctructionis Troiae” in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), p. 123: “Lydgate seems to want to replace Guido’s pessimism with practical advice on how to win good fortune for oneself . . .” 5. Maura Nolan, “ ‘Now Wo, Now Gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes,” ELH 71 (2004), p. 532.

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6. Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 58–60. 7. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy II.pr.2. 8. François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xi. 9. Lyotard, The Differend, p. 128. 10. Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1541. All citations of Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). 11. Chaucer, The House of Fame, 1368–76 and 1547. 12. Thomas Hoccleve, “The Series: 1. My compleinte,” lines 267–68, in ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). That Fortune keeps an unreliable written record is consonant with an earlier notion that Fame is a writer (De scriptorum fama), as we learn from Dialogue 43 in Book 1 of Francesco Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). 13. Strohm, Politique, pp. 98–99. Eager to establish the protohumanism of Lydgate, Strohm omits intervening lines (i.e., 254–55) that refer to divine grace alongside the classical virtues. 14. A comparison can be made to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women where the God of Love accuses the poet of heresy; taking on what James Simpson calls the “posture of a patron,” Cupid represents a tyrannical reader of the poet’s works. See James Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), pp. 73–100. This may be a fruitful analogy, but in the Fall of Princes I take it that Fortune represents a force that competes with the poet’s princely patron. 15. See Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 79; and “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–94, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 386–87. 16. Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 1 and 39. 17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 110. 18. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 127. There are, as Elissa will say, an “infinite number” of narratives in Fortune’s store from which one could draw (p. 192). Fortune has already provided the historical Boccaccio with ample material for the second day of the Decameron, the express purpose of which is

NOTES

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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to recount stories about suffering bad fortune but ending up with unexpected happiness. Pandarus is found calculating whether or not to “make a proces” (2.268), and Criseyde mistrusts his “paynted proces” (2.424); Cassandra recounts the dubious history of Thebes “by processe al by lengthe” (5.1491). Proces thus refers especially to what passes in and as history (“This world that passeth soone as f loures faire,” 5.1841), the exigency and impermanence of which Troilus and the poet seem happy to transcend in the moralizing conclusion to Troilus. In Troy Book Lydgate employs the term again to refer to Chaucer’s Troilus, perhaps recognizing its pertinence there: “The hoole story Chaucer kan yow telle, / . . . no man bet alyue, / Nor the processe halfe so wel discryve.” See John Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1998), 3.4234–36. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 144–46. Lydgate’s “laureate poetics” receives illuminating treatment in Robert Meyer-Lee’s Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 57–60. Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure (Livres dou Trésor), trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 5. John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS e.s. 81–82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900; reprinted 1979), IV.2651–52. Rita Copeland, “Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 53.1 (1992), pp. 65–69. Lydgate’s humanism is elaborated by James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 52. See also Lois A. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 38; Alain Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 68; and Walter Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961; originally published in German in 1952), pp. 214–16. Copeland, “Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric,” p. 74. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates, p. 32. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 57–60. Amphion likewise functions as a paragon of rhetoric in the Siege of Thebes; see John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2001), 286ff. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), p. 233. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 180. Brunetto Latini, Trésor, p. 298. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, Secular Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS o.s. 92 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934;

162

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

NOTES

reprinted 1961); parenthetical citations will be given according to line numbers in the respective poems. The Holy Bible: Douay Version Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed. Richard Challoner (London: William Clowes, 1956). Fourteenth-century examples include Pierre d’Ailly’s Conceptus et insolubilia (1372) and John Wyclif ’s Summa insolubilium (c. 1350). See Paul V. Spade’s article on insolubilia in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 246–53. Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 37. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 56. See Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially pp. 33–70 and, on the later “Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London,” pp. 184–86. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 82–86. Lydgate’s Serpent is a timely de casibus text that could have paved the way for the commissioning of the Fall of Princes: “when Humphrey turns to Lydgate for a translation of the Des Cas in 1430–31 it is possible that he does so because he has already received work from the same monk.” On authorship see the edition of John Lydgate, The Serpent of Division, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), pp. 4–5; and Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1997), p. 23. Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 30–47. See Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 290–94, who rejects the hypothesis that Humphrey commissioned The Serpent, and casts serious doubt on Saygin’s account of the work’s topicality in particular. Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature: 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 29–31; K. H. Vickers, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester: A Biography (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), p. 370. Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 49–50; Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), pp. 90–93. A dedication copy of del Monte’s work survives in Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.i.34. K. H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography, (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), p. 403; Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, p. 63. Jennifer Summit, “ ‘Stable in Study’: Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Duke Humphrey’s Library,” in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 212.

NOTES

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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Lydgate, The Serpent of Division, p. 49. Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, p. 57. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, pp. 79–80. Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 2nd edn. (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998), p. 41. This is the “failed coup” described in John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 118–20 and 155–58; and in Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, pp. 41–42. Cf. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pp. 53–61. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, p. 56: “Ultimately, Humphrey’s career reads much like one of the casus of the Fall: the trial of his second wife, Eleanor of Cobham, for witchcraft in 1441 when Humphrey was heir presumptive to the throne, his subsequent loss of royal favor and removal from the Privy Council in 1445, and his arrest and suspicious death in St Saviour’s Hospital during the Bury St Edmunds Parliament in February 1447 all chart his fall from inf luence.” Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England, p. 305. See B. L. Ullman, “Manuscripts of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,” English Historical Review 52 (1937), pp. 670–72; M. R. James, “Bury St. Edmunds Manuscripts,” EHR 41 (1926), pp. 251–60; R. A. B. Mynors, “The Latin Classics Known to Boston of Bury,” in Friz Saxl: A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1957), p. 202; and Vickers, Humphrey, pp. 351, 361, 365, 412, 436. See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 333, who goes on to say Humphrey “managed to keep Lydgate in a subservient role by being stingy with his largesse.” Compared with the patronage arrangements of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Lydgate was worse off than the Italians pressed into service of tyrants—for Lydgate “let the lunatic-in-chief run the asylum.” See also Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 37.

6

Moral Luck and Malory’s Morte Darthur

1. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 45. 2. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols., ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 1175. All subsequent references are to this edition. 3. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), IV.pr.7. 4. Morton Bloomfield, “Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance,” in Essays and Explorations: Studies in Ideas, Language, and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 97–128.

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5. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Michael Holquist, ed. and trans., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981), p. 152. 6. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 136. 7. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 135. 8. Jill Mann, “ ‘Taking the Adventure’: Malory and the Suite du Merlin,” in T. Takamiya and D. S. Brewer, eds., Aspects of Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981), pp. 71–92. By removing from his sources any assurances that what is happening in the plot is the causal result of character f laws or fate or even providence, Malory lets events unfold for themselves in all their baff ling arbitrariness. There is always the possibility that something of the effect of chanciness comes by accident: not always confident in Malory’s artistic abilities and conceptual sophistication, critics have conceded that his own method of redaction is more haphazard than systematic. 9. Elizabeth Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 128. 10. Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative, p. 174. 11. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 137. 12. Barbara Nolan, “The Tale of Sir Gareth and the Tale of Sir Lancelot,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. 155. 13. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 138. 14. Martha Asher, trans., “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” in The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, Volume IV, ed. Norris Lacy (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 232–33. Mann discusses the passage in “Taking the Adventure,” pp. 88–89. 15. For some pictorial examples, see Alison Stones, “Illustrations and the Fortunes of Arthur,” in The Fortunes of King Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 116ff. 16. Nolan, “The Tale of Sir Gareth,” p. 158. 17. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), pp. 115–16. 18. Norris J. Lacy, “The Ambiguous Fortunes of Arthur: The LancelotGrail and Beyond,” in The Fortunes of King Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 96–97. 19. Kenneth Hodges, in Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Morte Darthur (New York: Palgrave, 2005), describes multiple “chivalries” that come to the fore at different points in the text. According to his analysis (see especially pp. 80ff., 104–8, 120–23), some parts are especially preoccupied with determining intentions apart from external happenstance; other parts relish the way in which the successful performance of deeds determines self-worth. My analysis is restricted to those latter examples where what matters most is accomplishment.

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20. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Dominican Editors, vol. 38 (New York: Blackfriars, 1964), 2a2ae. Q. 64 art. 8. 21. The problem of moral luck was famously debated in a symposium in which Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel participated, as recorded in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 50 (Supp. 1976), pp. 115–51. Their separate contributions were reprinted in Nagel’s Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Williams’s Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). As Nagel defines it in Mortal Questions, p. 26, “Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgement, it can be called moral luck. Such luck can be good or bad.” The issues involved are given lengthier treatment in the following books: Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and S. L. Hurley’s Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Claudia Card in her The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) brings moral luck theory to bear on identity politics and oppression, for example, relating to gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity. I have also benefited from sundry shorter studies: Judith Andre, “Nagel, Williams, and Moral Luck,” Analysis 43 (1983), pp. 202–7; Michael J. Zimmerman, “Luck and Responsibility,” Ethics 97 ( January 1987), pp. 374–86; and articles collected in Daniel Statman, ed. Moral Luck (Albany: SUNY, 1993). 22. Concepts analogous to moral luck are routinely applied in the courts where, as Nagel writes in Mortal Questions, p. 30, “The mens rea which would have existed in the absence of any consequences does not exhaust the grounds of moral judgment,” as in the law of torts. 23. Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 218 and 229–30. 24. Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative, p. 24. 25. See “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” p. 186: “My lady, don’t despise me for my poverty; I was richer once. There is still no one here to whom I would refuse my shield.” 26. As noted in Raluca Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 89: “The concept Balin puts forward, that virtue lies in a man’s heart, not in his garments, appealed to the early readers of the Winchester manuscript; in it there is a side note to this part of the text that reads: ‘Vertue and manhode ys hyed wythin the bodye.’ ” In her book Radulescu argues that the fifteenthcentury gentry share Malory’s interest in worship, fellowship, and lordship. Yet these establishment concerns hardly describe the contingency and instability of worship in the tale of Balin, the rest of which Radulescu does not examine. 27. Mann, “Taking the Adventure,” p. 77. 28. “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” p. 187.

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29. For a contrary view of moral agency in Malory’s Morte see Marilyn Corrie’s illuminating article, “Self-Determination in the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” Medium Aevum 73.2 (2004), pp. 273–89. 30. “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” pp. 190–91. 31. Shortly we will encounter further suppression of theology. Such revisions are consistent with Malory’s usual practice of restricting religious sentiment and doctrine, particularly in the Grail quest and the final downfall of Arthur where—as Vinaver observes in his Introduction to The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, p. xcii—Malory violates the “letter and the spirit of the French.” 32. Williams, “Moral Luck,” pp. 43–44. 33. For an account of how plots can generate desire for narrative see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 34. Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, p. 228. 35. “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” p. 212. 36. “The Post-Vulgate, Part I: The Merlin Continuation,” p. 213. 37. Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative, p. 52. 38. Mann, “Taking the Adventure,” p. 84.

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Wilson, Von Gordon Anthony. “Good Fortune and the Eternity of the World: Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus,” Recherches de Théologie e Philosophie Médiévale 35.1 (1998): 40–51. ———. “Henry of Ghent’s Critique of Aristotle’s Conception of Good Fortune.” Franziskanische Studien 65 (1983): 241–51. Windeatt, Barry. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Witmore, Michael. Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Zimmerman, Michael J. “Luck and Responsibility.” Ethics 97 (1987): 374–86. Žižek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing.” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994. 89–112. ———. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991. ———. “History Against Historicism.” European Journal of English Studies 4.2 (2000): 101–10.

INDEX

accident, 5, 96, 113 and individuation, 14–16, 20–2 and intention, 119–21 and usage, 133 n24 see also adventure; contingency; event; fortune adventure, 1, 8, 20, 28, 30, 32–4, 52, 111–14, 116, 122–4, 128–30 adventure-time, 112 Aers, David, 35–6 affect, 6, 20–2, 31, 40, 45, 53, 55–6, 57–61, 132 n20 see also love Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 25 agency, see under ethics Alan of Lille, 72 Albertus Magnus, 13, 78 Alliterative Morte Arthure, 114 Amphion, 99, 161 n29 anachronism, 11, 13–14, 25–6, 141 n12 Anselm, 57, 59, 60 Aquinas, Thomas, 9, 13, 19, 70, 72, 78, 85 Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 19 Summa Theologiae, 19, 58, 72, 120 Aristotle, 19–20, 52, 57–9, 60, 69–70, 157 n22 Liber de bona fortuna, 19–20, 57–9, 136 n21, 151 n43 Nicomachean Ethics, 19, 134–5 n15 Auerbach, Erich, 112, 113–14 Augustine, St., 11–12, 59, 70, 120

Badiou, Alain, 13–14, 132 n20 Bakhtin, M., 112 Barthes, Roland, 156–7 n22 Bauman, Zygmunt, 27–8 Bible, 4–5, 72, 75, 81, 84, 102, 126, 132 n17 Blanchot, Maurice, 143–4 n35 Bloomfield, Morton, 112 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1, 2, 27, 87, 96, 160–1 n18 Boethius, 5, 6, 12, 14–18, 22, 28, 47–9, 56–7, 140 n8 Commentary on the “Isagoge,” 15 Consolation of Philosophy, 14–15, 16–18, 47, 50–2, 53–4, 56, 87–90, 91, 93, 111–12, 124, 134 n14 De Trinitate, 15, 20 Greater Commentary on Aristotle’s “De interpretatione,” 21 Bonaventure, 72, 78 Boniface VIII, 78–81, 84 Bowlin, John, 7 Bracciolini, Poggio, 105 Caesar, 90, 104–8 Caputo, John, 31–2 Caxton, William, 129–30 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 62, 63, 65, 66, 85, 91, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 109, 141 n13, 159 n43, 160 n14 Troilus and Criseyde, 5, 8, 27–46, 47–9, 51–3, 55, 60–1, 62, 63–4, 133 n24, 161 n19

184

IN DEX

Chaunce of the Dyse, The, 8–9, 61–7 Chrétien de Troyes, 113, 115, 143 n25 Cicero, 13, 90, 98–9, 104–9, 153 n58 Cohen, Jeffrey J., 3 conscience, see under ethics contingency and causality, 6 and the ethical relation, 32, 45–6 future contingency, 52, 53–4 and knowledge, 12–13, 36–7, 127, 143–4 n35 and love, 28, 42–3, 54, 57, 60–1 and plot, 112–13, 122 and the political, 36, 89–90, 114 and rhetoric, 69, 88, 90, 91–6, 100, 102 see also accident; adventure; event; individuation; fortune Copeland, Rita, 76, 99 courtly love, 8, 29, 32–3, 37–41, 45–6, 141 n12, 146 n54 Critchley, Simon, 42, 145 n46 Dante, 1, 5, 31, 32, 52, 54, 67, 81, 109 Dastur, François, 2 Davis, Isabel, 54 death, 27–8, 50 de Beauvoir, Simone, 38 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 4, 13, 25, 29, 40, 96 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 6, 13, 32, 95, 103, 139 n48 differend, 90, 96, 143–4 n35 Docherty, Thomas, 25, 143–4 n35 Dronke, Peter, 146 n54 Duns Scotus, John, 14, 20–2, 23–4, 25, 59–60, 70 Ebin, Lois, 99 Edwards, Elizabeth, 112–13, 121–2, 128 Ennodius, 48, 147 n5 epideixis, 97, 99 eternal feminine, 32, 142 n21

ethics and agency, 5–6, 7, 29–32, 33, 41–2, 44, 57–61, 70, 77–8, 122–9 class ethics, 114–15, 123 conscience, 77–81, 85, 127 desire and need, 32–3, 40, 45, 145 n52 free will, 30, 42 and givenness, 2, 5, 15, 24, 42, 58, 60, 114, 129, 146 n55 Heidegger’s ethik, 24, 138 n44 intentionality, 118, 119–20, 128–9 involuntary homicide, 120 mens rea, 9, 121 moral autonomy, 27–32 Moralität, 24 and morality, 24 moral luck, 5, 9, 115, 120–1, 126, 127, 128–9, 165 n21 natural law, 70, 71–8 and politics, 34 responsibility, 5, 28, 31, 33, 37, 43, 65, 84, 88, 120, 125–6 and risk, 27–8, 30, 44, 46, 61, 111–12 secular ethics, 8, 70–1, 83 Sittlichkeit, 8, 24 and sociality, 39 the third party, 45–6 vernacular ethics, 9, 56–7, 71–86 virtue, 7, 19 event, 2–5, 6 and anamorphosis, 4 and appearance, 139 n49 and art, 25–6 das Ereignis, 24–5, 138 n42 and discourse, 75, 96, 101 and ethics, 5–6 and history, 26, 36, 95–6, 143 n35 and love, 5–6, 27–46, 132 n20 the perhaps, 32 and temporality, 13–14, 24, 25, 54, 95, 112, 126 theories of, 2, 4, 8, 13–14, 22, 24, 25–6

IN DEX

see also adventure; contingency; fidelity; fortune; singularity; probability exteriority, 31, 32, 54, 61, 123, 129 fidelity, 13–14, 22, 25, 132 n20 fortune etymology of, 2 and fame, 85, 91, 160 n12 gifts of, 2, 5, 11, 14–16, 28, 87–90 and history, 6–7, 9, 35–6, 87, 93, 94, 95 and ideology, 6, 35–6, 112–15 inner promptings of, 58–9 and love, 27–32, 50–3, 55, 60–1 and Occasio, 115 and periodization, 6–7 personifications of, 1, 3, 4, 11–12, 14, 87–96, 115 and providence, 4–5, 7, 11–13, 17–18, 58–9, 93, 124 and reason, 2, 5, 6, 20, 58–60, 89, 114, 151 n34 remedies for, 92 and rhetoric, 88, 90, 91–6, 100, 102 and vice, 79, 81–2 Wheel of Fortune, 3, 16, 28, 36, 82, 92 and will, 82–3 see also accident; adventure; contingency; event fortune-telling games, 8–9, 61–7, 152 n53, 153 n54 Foucault, Michel, 26, 87, 139 n53 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye, 28 Freud, Sigmund, 37 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 25–6, 139 n52 Galloway, Andrew, 71, 75 Gaunt, Simon, 38, 143 n25 gender, 7, 9, 29, 33, 35, 37–8, 45, 64, 111–12, 113, 146 n67, 153 n54, 165 n21 Gillespie, Vincent, 48 Gower, John, 9, 69–86

185

Confessio Amantis, 2, 28, 49, 67, 69–86, 98, 99, 101, 103 “De lucis scrutinio,” 159 n46 Mirour de l’Omme, 75, 85, 159 n46 “O deus immense,” 83 Vox Clamantis, 4, 75, 82, 85–6, 159 n45 and n46 Gracia, Jorge, 15 Griffiths, R. A., 107 Grosseteste, Robert, 19 Gurevich, A. J., 112 haecceitas, 21–2, 23, 24, 25, 59, 115 see also Duns Scotus; individuation; singularity Hardman, Phillipa, 51 H. D., 140 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 14, 22–4, 25, 31, 145 n49 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 7–8 Henry IV, 83 Henry V, 105–6 Henry VI, 105, 106–8 Henry of Ghent, 58–9 Hoccleve, Thomas, 92 Hodges, Kenneth, 164 n19 Holsinger, Bruce, xiii Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 88, 89, 90, 93, 104–9, 163 n51 individuation, 15–16, 20–2, 23, 129 see also accident; haecceitas; singularity insolubilia, 103 intentionality, see under ethics Irigaray, Luce, 38, 145 n47 Isidore of Seville, 153 n58 Joyce, James, 5, 11 Kay, Sarah, 38, 146 n67 Kennedy, Beverly, 121, 127 Lacan, Jacques, 29, 37–8, 44 Langland, William, 55

186

IN DEX

Latini, Brunetto, 98, 99–100 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 29, 31–3, 38, 39–40, 43–6, 143–4 n35, 145 n52 Lezra, Jacques, 133 n24 Liber de bona fortuna, see under Aristotle Lombard, Peter, 72 love, 5–6, 27–46, 48, 50–3, 53–4, 55–6, 60–1, 132 n20 see also affect Lydgate, John, 9 Churl and the Bird, 101–3 Consulo Quisquis Eris, 100 Fall of Princes, 2, 87–100, 104–9 Isopes Fabules, 100 Ryme Without Accord, 101 Serpent of Division, 105–6, 162 n39 Troy Book, 97, 161 n19 Lyotard, François, 4, 90, 144 n35 Macaulay, G. C., 81 Machaut, Guillaume de, 28, 47, 49, 67 Machiavelli, 7 Malory, Thomas, 2, 9, 111–30 Mann, Jill, 41, 43, 45–6, 112, 123, 129 Marquard, Odo, 1, 5 masculinity, see gender Maximianus, 48, 148 n8 McAlpine, Monica, 37, 41 McGrath, S. J., 23 Medcalf, Stephen, 56 medievalism, 22–3, 25, 29, 141 n12 Meyer-Lee, Robert, 97, 107 Miller, Mark, 141 n13 Minnis, A. J., 57 Montaigne, Michel de, 7 morality moral essentialism, 113 Moralität, 24 moral luck, 5, 9, 115, 120–1, 126, 127, 128–9, 165 n21 moral murmur, 78, 80, 84–6 see also ethics

moral luck, see under morality Morson, Gary Saul, 111 Mort Artu, 114 Mortimer, Nigel, 89, 105, 108, 163 n51 Nagel, Thomas, 165 n21 New Historicism, 36, 143 n34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6 Nolan, Barbara, 113, 115 Nolan, Maura, 89, 105 Nussbaum, Martha, 53 Olsson, Kurt, 72 Orpheus, 51–2, 109 Ovid, 109 parergon, 103 Patch, Howard, 115, 131 n9 Paul, St., 72 Pearsall, Derek, 49, 100, 144 n36, 146 n60 Peck, Russell, 73 periodization, 6–7 Petrarch, Francesco, 1, 31, 97, 104, 109, 160 n12 Petrina, Alessandra, 108, 162 n40 Philip the Chancellor, 77–8, 85 Pierce, C. S., 22 Piero del Monte, 105 Pindar, 53, 55 Pitkin, Hanna F., 7 plant analogy, 52–3, 54–5, 149 n21 Pocock, J. G. A., 7 Premierfait, Laurent de, 87 Des Cas de nobles hommes et femmes, 87, 92, 97, 159 n3 probability, 65–7, 153 n57 profanation, 39–41, 44–5 Ragman Roll, 62, 153 n54 Reith, Gerda, 7 rhetoric, 1, 9, 16, 69, 71, 77, 98–101, 134 n14 see also under fortune

IN DEX

Richard II, 83 Rist, John, 19 Rochefoucauld, Duc De La, 1 Roman de la Rose, 28 Runacres, Charles, 79 Salutati, Coluccio, 151 n43 Saygin, Susanne, 105 Scanlon, Larry, 36, 76, 79 Scheler, Max, 45 Simpson, James, 160 n14 singularity, 3, 8, 21, 23–5, 59 see also event; haecceitas; individuation sociality, 39, 61, 145 n49 sortes biblicae, 63 Strohm, Paul, 7, 54, 82, 89, 92, 100 Suite du Merlin, 114, 122–3, 125–6, 127 Summit, Jennifer, 106

187

time, see contingency; event; fortune tragedy, 6, 28–9, 51, 88–9, 89–90, 125, 127–9 Twain, Mark, 114 Usk, Thomas, 8, 53–61 vernacular, 8, 9, 56, 69, 71, 75–7, 79, 85–6, 99 see also under ethics Wallace, David, 109, 163 n54 Watt, Diane, 76–7 Watts, John, 107 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 76 White, Hugh, 72 Williams, Bernard, 9, 165 n21 Witmore, Michael, 96, 133 n24 Žižek, Slavoj, 141 n12, 143 n35

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