This dissertation argues that Chaucer primes readers to confront pressing questions about the ethics of literary representation and the nature of interpretation by thinking biographically, of the author’s crimes against women. He does so by reappropriating a set of critical tools from the medieval commentary tradition, specifically the scenario on which the repentant narrative of the Ovidian biography hinged: that of a woman reader encountering a work that was never intended for her. Unlike Ovid and his medieval commentators, who defend morally dubious poetic content by deflecting blame onto this feminized figure or by claiming to reveal the deeper moral meaning she cannot see, Chaucer revalues this feminized figure and her supposed hermeneutic faults. Rather than simply dismissing the moral concerns about fictive mimesis which the unanticipated woman reader had been invented to address, however, Chaucer follows the woman reader’s gaze and finds that ethical reflection can be conducted narratively, without moralizing commentary: at times her prurient and literal-minded mode of interpretation is precisely what his poetry requires. For Chaucer, the moral value of a work does not inhere in what the work represents, or in a moral that is prescribed to neutralize morally dubious content, so much as in what it does not represent: the narrative gaps and fissures which present themselves to the imaginative reader for further reflection. So understood, Chaucer harnesses performed authorial biography to reject simplistic concerns with fiction’s imitative potential and to make the reader a co-creator in meaning, even as he acknowledges the author’s responsibility to help facilitate ethical modes of readerly engagement.

The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Corrective Form

by

Chad Gregory Crosson

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Steven Justice, Chair

The long and sharp debate over Geoffrey Chaucer’s moral aims for the Canterbury Tales has been shelved in recent years, not resolved. The question of his moral aims is unavoidable by design, but it is also irresolvable by design. At least that is my claim: I show that Chaucer’s fictional narrative devises a corrective process based on grammatical emendation that was tied, by a long-standing analogy, to moral reform. Through his narrative, Chaucer pushes his reader to retrace the corrective structure in the Tales, yet the sort of corrective process he recreates is so closely akin to moral practice as to make any distinction between the two difficult. The resulting form is a defining characteristic of the Tales and answers why his moral aims have been irresolvable: in this literary form, the literary and moral are inseparable; they become versions of each other.

Medieval grammatical and textual practice inherited this analogy of correction from traditions of classical grammar. Grammatical theory, pedagogy, and practice all developed around the correction of error in several related areas – grammar, pronunciation, style, and (eventually) scribal reproduction. Grammarians and scribes understood correction as a task requiring chronic vigilance and recursive reform, and they treated these various arenas of fault and correction as analogous to each other. But they further used language that suggested an analogy with moral reform, so that evocations of textual emendation could allude to moral correction; in turn, moral error could as easily allude to textual and scribal error. Medieval grammarians and thinkers recognized that errors persist not only despite emendation, but even as a result of emendation. Roger Bacon insisted that correction perpetuated error, and handbooks like the correctoria, which listed textual variants to help correct copies of the Bible, themselves fostered errors; they perpetuated what they were designed to eliminate. And just as grammarians and scribes recognized error as inevitable, they understood emendation as recursive: since authors and scribes need chronically to re-correct their work, they could never consider emendation complete. The dissertation’s first chapter traces this history of correction: its theory in antique and medieval grammatical arts, its practice in scribal emendation, and the development of the analogy between these unending processes of verbal correction and the process, also unending, of moral correction.

The remaining three chapters treat the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, more than his predecessors, explicitly notes the recursive logic of error, as famous passages in the Troilus and his “Adam Scriveyn” show. At the same time, he bases his narrative poetics on this recursive logic, developing from it a structure and theme for his Tales.

The discussion of Chaucer begins in chapter two, perhaps unpromisingly, with the notoriously unsatisfactory Tale of Melibee, where Chaucer recreates the recursive process of correction to suggest both the ambitions and the dangers of his artistic and moral project. The Melibee’s narrative – like the rigorous training of the grammar student, like the tireless work of scribal correctors, like a monk’s continual attempts at self-reform – outlines paths of correction while perpetually creating new material for emendation. The tale portrays a slow, incremental repetition that only gradually brings about change. In that way, the tale displays the ambitions of the project. Its dangers are clear enough, because it is notoriously unsatisfactory. Chaucer however deliberately stages those dangers in the Melibee and contrasts the dangers with a solution.

Chapter three shows this solution at work in the structure of the Tales as a whole. The work revolves around topics discussed by the pilgrims, but these topics will either dissolve or change through shifts in the storytelling or by the pilgrims’ interruptions. Indeed, the series of tales soon abandon the very ideas and vocabularies that set them in motion and frame their narratives. The pilgrims not only adopt each other’s terms and ideas, but modify and sometimes distort them, creating the incremental repetition of the Tales. But while in the Melibee that incremental repetition illustrates literary pitfalls, in the Tales it becomes a means for literary innovation: the certainty of error and the corruption of discourse provide an artistic method. What looks on the small scale like accident and entropy proves on the large scale to be recursion, and by this Chaucer shapes the narrative of the Tales to the analogy he inherited from classical grammar traditions. Thus the work’s pilgrimage is not strictly anagogical, as Chaucer’s Parson and D.W. Robertson suggested it was, but also literal, errant, and discursive. Through Chaucer’s narrative design we understand that pilgrimage involves going astray, that a moral path must always be redirected. And while the Tales’ conclusion indicates an end is near, as the pilgrims approach Canterbury, such a conclusion still leaves the pilgrims in a wandering state; their physical and moral journey remains incomplete.

Still, although he depicts the certainty of error, Chaucer emphasizes that persistent correction leads to renewed possibilities. I make this point clear in chapter four, as I read the Melibee in the context of Fragment VII, vis-à-vis both the tale of Sir Thopas and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale presents a singular literary opposition to the Melibee, that the recursive process of correction, more than just an analogy for Chaucer’s idea of pilgrimage, is a tool for literary creation. Similarly, rather than just indicating humankind’s perpetual state of sin, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale points out humankind’s enduring re-creative potential. We can witness how repetition produces the interminable narrative of the Melibee, where the protagonist needs constant re-correction. However, synthesizing the surrounding tales, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale reveals repetition with a difference, an incremental repetition whereby the Tales as a whole will revisit topics, but never in the same way. What this recursive process lends to Chaucer’s moral outlook is not doomed repetition or the failure of humankind, but the idea of human renewal, of a society replete with possibilities.

Through this argument, my dissertation resolves a conundrum in critical history: why the question of Chaucer’s moral aims has been widely contested but more recently shelved. The exegetical method of the 1950s and early 1960s in Chaucer studies presented an approach that relied on Augustinian doctrine and allegorical exegesis to convey a determinate moral message. Those who rejected this allegorical method tended to point instead to Chaucer’s artistic complexity. However, an inability either to dispose of or to defend the exegetical method seemed to exhaust that debate, since the question of his moral aims is now largely ignored. Yet the very fact of this debate should make us ask: what is it about his poetry that invites disagreement on a topic so fundamental and leaves it unamenable to resolution? This debate betrays a unique quality of his art: something about it that generates the question of a moral agenda but makes that question irresolvable. I argue that Chaucer develops a method by which he can consider moral concerns without subordinating his art to those concerns. The Tales’ corrective process and its resulting structure have made his moral aims elusive because the elusiveness of moral clarity is precisely the lesson he learned from this tradition. However, while the Tales may evade moral clarity, the recursive nature of correction allows Chaucer to present both texts and humans as ever-malleable subjects, and provides the literary occasion for ongoing intellectual, artistic, and moral exercise.

Far more than any other Middle English author, Chaucer makes frequent and explicit

claims about the intention - or "entente" - with which his works are composed. What Chaucer

means by proclaiming his intention, however, is not transparent. Voiced by parodic or

discursively compromised authorial personae, Chaucer at once asserts the hermeneutic salience

of his "entente," while pressing the term to serve in ways counter to the intentio auctoris of

scholastic commentaries, whereby the author's intention is circularly defined as identical to a

work's moral use. As the first account of intentional hermeneutics across Chaucer's career, this

dissertation shows Chaucer supplanting a rhetorical and linguistic conception of the author's

intention with one both psychologistic and legal in nature, whereby his works are viewed as

intentional acts judged in terms of the author's motives in composing them, rather than as written

artifacts whose "menynge," defined as their moral usefulness, is legible through the compiler's

arrangement (ordo) of exemplary narratives. Chaucer thus establishes the author's intention not

as his purpose legible in the arrangement of a text, but rather as a hermeneutic for explaining and justifying his works viewed as individual acts. My dissertation thus re-frames a longstanding

critical debate about the categories of medieval poetry conceived in terms of its fitness as vehicle

for ethical edification. I set out to define what Chaucer means by his "entente" by considering his

deployment of the term across his fictions, and thus to show how intention defines a category of

writing -- at once more ethical and more aesthetically autonomous -- that we know as his

literature.

Dance history is relatively new to the academy and much of its history has only begun to be written; knowledge about the medieval period remains especially sparse. One reason for this is due to the nature of the sources available. The great number of references to dancing suggest its popularity, but provide little information about how it was performed. In the absence of more detailed sources, it has long been assumed that dance was neither theorized nor choreographed. This study aims to correct these and other long-held misassumptions, and to help fill a gap in dance’s history by examining the cosmic dance and its relationship to, and influence on, dance theory and practice in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The idea that the stars and planets move in a harmonious, orderly (“cosmic” or “celestial”) dance and that humans should imitate that dance is articulated in Plato’s Timaeus. And, because dance was so central to the Timaeus, it became a kind of shorthand for medieval writers (and dancers) to refer to many of the work’s essential concepts. I argue that dance was conceived and defined as the visual manifestation of harmonia, the same force that moved celestial and terrestrial bodies, connecting the macrocosm (the celestial dance) to the microcosm (human dancing). I begin by identifying this and other of Plato’s ideas (or theories) of dance in the Timaeus and how they were transmitted to, and received in, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through Calcidius’s partial translation of the Timaeus and his commentary on it, and other key works in the Neoplatonic tradition. I then look at how those ideas were interpreted and applied to dance imagery and practice by different individuals or communities in texts which include Dante’s Comedia, the Gemma animae of Honorius Augustodunensis, the Carmina Burana, and La Court de Paradis. My study shows that dance assumed a new range of cultural, artistic, and literary possibilities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century school and court, and it demonstrates the continuity in the literary and intellectual expression of dance that reflected and influenced how dance was conceived and performed for nearly two millennia.

This dissertation shows how the "discernment" discourse in late medieval England shaped the form of thought and the form of life for enclosed religious, and how laypeople in their turn used it in the same way. The term discretio, latinate and monastic in origin, was already centuries old by the time it began to be used to sharpen specific technical definitions in vernacular contemplative advice. Additionally, it had a double meaning in these texts: a monastic sense, which I call "ascetic prudence," or the moderation of ascetic exercises; and a visionary sense, discretio spirituum, a spiritual gift that helps individuals trace the source of their impulses and visions. In both of these applications, the mechanism of discretio differed depending on who was using it. When others like spiritual directors and theologians used signs to test a dévot's practices or visions, he used what I call "semiotic evaluation" or "semiotic discernment"; when the dévot him- or herself tracked the trajectory of internal impulses or mindset, he or she used what I call "hermeneutic evaluation" or "hermeneutic discernment." Middle English contemplative texts used both of these mechanisms to teach their audiences the proper form of thought and the proper form of life, though they usually did not name discretio explicitly (though occasionally translating it as discrecyon or wis).

More importantly, these texts reframed discretio for a wider audience. Rather than describing a purely self-directed spiritual gift, discretio represented in the newer context of the papal schism and various continental heresies a way for spiritual directors to test and delimit the spiritual authority of their advisees and readers. Clerically-authored works like The Scale of Perfection, The Chastising of God's Children, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and The Myroure of Oure Ladye demonstrate how this worked for their increasingly mixed religious and lay audiences. Translating discretio from a latinate to vernacular context, however, did not limit it to a discourse of clerical authority. Vernacular readers learned that although they should rely upon their advisor's judgment for maintaining the proper form of life, they ought to regulate their own form of thought. The works of two renowned English female visionaries, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are cases in point. They show that the late medieval English discernment discourse was unstable and incoherent, and that non-male practitioners could use it as a tool to think through theological problems and questions of spiritual authority. Ultimately, discretio in Middle English spiritual advice enabled rather than limited vernacular readers' spiritual authority and the literary expression of their sometimes-singular forms of life.

My introduction explains the state of current scholarship on discretio and explores the historical usage of the Latin term and its translation into Middle English in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Most scholars characterize discernment as comprised of only discretio spirituum, and describe it as a late medieval male professional (clerical, medical, and inquisitorial) discourse that especially targets female dévots and visionaries, and their spiritual authority. I demonstrate, however, that there is more to the practice than a set of criteria formulated by male professionals for testing the authenticity of others' spiritual experience, which I designate "semiotic evaluation." Early Christian authors like John Cassian and Augustine of Hippo deploy terms depicting the objects of discretio in order to describe the regulation of one's own thought, which I call "hermeneutic evaluation." Early Middle English texts like the Ancrene Wisse and Richard Rolle's Form of Living also use varied terms to describe this self-regulation. These texts set a precedent for late medieval English discernment, which inherits a wider range of valid spiritual authorities.

The first chapter, "Teaching Discretio in Advice for the Contemplative Life," discusses the dissemination of discernment in its dual mechanisms, semiotic and hermeneutic evaluation, through The Scale of Perfection, The Chastising of God’s Children, and The Cloud of Unknowing. The authors of these vernacular works propose different forms of discernment based on readers' presumed level of contemplative expertise. To counteract any misdirected religious enthusiasm in novices or intermediate (Proficient) contemplatives, Hilton in the first part of the Scale and The Chastising of God's Children emphasizes the spiritual director's expertise in semiotic discernment, obedience to which results in the reader's ascetic prudence and maintenance of the correct form of life. The Scale's second part and The Cloud of Unknowing, however, introduce hermeneutic discernment as the Perfect contemplative's self-regulation of thought, the mastery of which is equivalent to the height of contemplation itself. Thus, these latter works argue that hermeneutic discernment confers on the Perfect authority to lead potentially singular lives since correct form of thought leads to the correct form of life.

The second chapter, "Discretio as Form of Thought," focuses on the assumption of spiritual authority by a particular reader, Julian of Norwich. Analogous moments in the Short Text and Long Text attest to her use of hermeneutic discernment, and a specialized type of discernment that I call affective discernment, by revealing the formal traces of the process of her personal contemplative experience. I show that in the Short Text, Julian uses the word "stirrings" to mark moments of doubt about her expertise in discretio spirituum, which then become the very framework for her Long Text. These moments in which discerning the spirits operates most clearly in the Short Text actually reveal a theological crux, the disjunction between the coexistence of a loving God and human sin, which she exposes in the later text. Indeed, the same passages on discernment are reconfigured in the Long Text into the visions of the Lord and Servant and of Mother Christ in order to reconcile this theological disjunction. Julian, therefore, uses hermeneutic and affective discernment as intellectual tools to work through her theological doubts, and as spiritual ones to confirm the Holy Spirit's guidance in the translation of her visionary experience into legible texts. Moreover, she demonstrates that discretio is not merely a clerical instrument of surveillance and authorization: any contemplative reader could gain spiritual and literary authority by mastering discernment as a form of thought.

The third chapter, "Adapting Discretio," explores how monastic writers alter discernment to respond to the mixed lay-monastic readership of Sheen Priory and Syon Abbey in the early fifteenth century. I use Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and four works composed for the Syon-Sheen monastic complex––the Speculum devotorum, the Speculum inclusorum, The Myroure of Oure Ladye, and The Orcherd of Syon––to show how the Sheen and Syon brethren taught discretio for various religious exercises, and particularly for holy reading. Because Syon-Sheen ministered to its community members through books, applying discernment to reading was an essential skill for their contemplative practice. Like the fourteenth-century spiritual directors before them, these writers advocated for the use of different types of discretio based on the reader's religious status: semiotic discernment for lay readers and hermeneutic discernment for monastic readers. This vocational separation allowed lay readers to use imaginative sentential biblical interpretation to act "meekly" toward the text, while it allowed monastic readers to use self-reflection prompted by the text to order their thoughts. The separation of discernment's senses along vocational lines reveals how Syon-Sheen simultaneously strove to become the center of English devotional life while also policing the boundaries of spiritual authority, which now belonged in gradations even to the laity. Discretio continued to be tied up in the discourse of clerical authority into the fifteenth century.

The fourth chapter, "Unifying Discretio," deals with the ramifications of discernment’s vocational divide in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. I argue that an exemplary layperson, Margery Kempe, seeks to establish her semi-religious lifestyle by unifying the two types of discretio in her Book. She uses "lay" semiotic discernment, ascetic prudence and meekness to text and to spiritual advisors, to attain to the higher level of "monastic" hermeneutic discernment, or knowledge of self and of God. Like Julian of Norwich before her, she uses hermeneutic discernment as an intellectual tool to examine her own theological crux: the basis of the spiritual authority conferred on herself by mystical speech. In Book 2, Kempe creates a disjunction between God's authority and that of her spiritual director in order to investigate whose judgment ultimately authenticates her speech. She concludes that God's judgment relativizes all human judgment, which undermines the utility of using discretio to authenticate her speech to begin with; but even so, discretio is useful as a means to articulate this understanding. The demonstration that God's authority stands behind her mystical speech establishes her text's authority and the validity of the mixed contemplative life that she pursues.

This dissertation examines experimentalist modes of inquiry in Middle English literature and natural philosophy. In the thirteenth century, natural philosophers at the universities proposed experimentalist procedures in which natural phenomena could be imagined and thus investigated. To do so, they relied on the concepts and methods of the Aristotelian corpus, as well as on an array of rhetorical and poetic techniques. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Middle English writers deployed and refined these procedures in their literary practice. A variety of vernacular works produced in this period—chiefly among them, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the York pageants of creation, devotional lyrics on the topic of the eucharist, Julian of Norwich’s Vision, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament—stage mental experiments that show how the material world might be perceived and probed for its imperceptible causes.