UC Irvine

Much of what occurs in medieval romance is described as happening “by chance.” Accordingly, the well-known trope of Fortune governs the experience and structure of romance as its characters grapple with contingency, the unpredictable, and the marvels, quests, and adventures that define the romance genre’s attempts to articulate the experience of uncertainty. In the Middle Ages, however, the vocabulary for talking about indeterminacy was essentially limited to chance and fortune. Only in the 1600s did early modern mathematicians and philosophers such as Blaise Pascal and Thomas Bayes begin to articulate the mathematics of probability, refining the notion of “chance” to include the category of risk. For centuries this notion of calculable risk was thought to be virtually synonymous with uncertainty, and romance scholars continued to talk about any instance of “chance” within romance as general uncertainty. Recently, however, economists studying principles of innovation have defined uncertainty as one of many conditions of indeterminacy. What it means to face risk is not the same thing as facing absolute uncertainty, and different decision-making processes are needed to navigate these forms of indeterminacy. In my dissertation, “Expanding Fortune’s Reach: Trusting Uncertainty in Romance,” I show that while medieval romance poets were not working with the modern definitions of risk and probability, they wrote their romances as if they were. Drawing from both early modern and modern principles of statistics, mathematics, and economics, I show not only how romance poets intuited nuances in the forms of indeterminacy, such as risk and uncertainty, that would emerge centuries later, but also how the romance genre itself theorizes uncertainty. By arguing that medieval poets already intuited the nuanced distinctions between risk and uncertainty, my work challenges commonly held periodization schemes. This implies that artists and poets are often steps ahead of formal philosophical or scientific articulation. The experience of uncertainty is and has been so fundamental to human experience in the world, that, as we see in these romances, poets could model it through literature before it was formalized in mathematics. My research both furthers our understanding of the romance genre in particular as it explores decision-making in the context of uncertainty and allows us to understand the challenges of acting in the face of uncertainty writ large. While the experience of uncertainty is a widely studied aspect of literature, considering uncertainty as one of many forms of indeterminacy allows us to explore the general experience of uncertainty with more clarity as we contemplate what it means to find the “right” path when there is no path to see.