The king's two bodies

Acknowledgements Introduction: Chaucer and the problem of normativity 1. Naturalism and its discontents in the Miller's Tale 2. Normative longing in the Knight's Tale 3. Agency and dialectic in the Consolation of Philosophy 4. Sadomasochism and utopia in the Roman de la Rose 5. Suffering love in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale 6. Love's promise: the Clerk's Tale and the scandal of the unconditional Notes Bibliography Index.

Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales

was interesting to Petrarca for a different reason. He came from the ultima Thule, the penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos (Virgil, Bucolica, Ecl. I); that country which the wantonness of more genial climates had represented as perpetually enveloped in fogs and darkness. To later times the literature and poetical genius of Britain is familiar; no tongue so barbarous, as not to confess us the equals, while in reality we are in intellectual eminence the masters of mankind. But this was a spectacle altogether unknown in the times of Petrarca. The discovery he made was hardly less astonishing than that of Columbus when he reconnoitred the shores of the Western world. . . . [Petrarch] embraced the wondrous stranger from a frozen clime, and forsaw, with that sort of inspiration which attends the closing period of departing genius, the future glories of a Spencer, a Shakespear and a Milton.1

Beyond Rome: Mapping Gender and Justice in The Man of Law's Tale

This Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie. Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole, And at the window out she putte hir hole, And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers, But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers Ful savourly, er he were war of this. Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys, For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd. He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd, And seyde, “Fy! allas! what have I do?”1

Naturalism and its Discontents in the Miller's Tale

Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem by figures including the maligned Chaucer editor John Urry, and contextualizes its first modernization by a literary forger inspired by the 1790s Shakespeare controversies. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive

Early contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stretched the idea of contract to encompass all realms of society: the political, the economic, the familial. Contract is still a fundamental concept for many modern disciplines; indeed, it names fields in political philosophy, in economics, and in law. There was no such governing notion of contract in the fourteenth century, no metaphor of exchange that could link together ideas about agency, conditions, profit, and responsibility from different disciplines and provide a theory of the basis of society itself. Retrospectively it may seem that scattered ideas about contract were, in fact, being developed: for instance, by the common law in the actions called debt, covenant, and trespass; by constitutional theory, in conciliarism; by economic thought, in a miscellany of glosses and laws redressing fraud and regulating prices and markets; by theology, in discussions of will, intention, and the marriage sacrament; by the civil law, in Roman law of contract; and by canon law, in treatments of individual consent and incapacity in marriage. Yet nothing about this discontinuous hodgepodge predicts that a fundamental connection among those topics will emerge in later political theory. To find a powerful combination of social analysis and political philosophy that takes up the issues deliberated by the later contractarians, we can call upon a medieval allegorist. In a brilliant intellectual synthesis, the fourteenth-century English text we call Piers Plowman draws ideas about agency from three separate arenas in order to inaugurate a proleptic general consideration of contract: the three ideas are unity of person (from marriage law), just price (from economic thought), and constitutional monarchy (from political philosophy). Centuries before modern contract theory, Piers Plowman manages to think across disciplinary boundaries, to see agency in its various philosophical, legal, sexual, economic, and political contexts, and to invite its audience to compare the different accounts of agency

Elizabeth Fowler

Papers

Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman

A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Richard Firth Green