A History of Magic and Experimental Science

This thesis applies an interarts approach to the Middle English dream visions, Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess (BD), The House of Fame (HF), The Parliament of Fowls (PF), James I of Scotland’s The Kingis Quair (KQ), and the anonymous Pearl. It considers the application and presentation in these poems of ideas relating to hearing and vision, and the arts which engage them, music and figurative art. The first chapter outlines relevant theoretical contexts of speculative and practical music: antique Neoplatonism (via Calcidius, Proclus, and Macrobius), Augustine, twelfth-century liberal arts treatises, and French attitudes toward musical composition, lyric narrative, and the proper expression of emotional truth. The second chapter follows with an analysis of music (including harmony, discord, noise, and vox) in BD, with an emphasis on meaningful sound and lyric composition; HF on the symbolism of corporeal speech; PF in relation to harmony, polyphony, and discordant concord; and concluding with the internalisation of harmony and triumph of artistic self-realisation in KQ. The second part of the thesis concerns vision and visual art, with a chapter on natural philosophical, theological, and mystical theories of bodily and mental vision, spiritual illumination, the comparison of nature and art, and the literary techniques of visualisation, enargeia and ekphrasis. These themes are elucidated with reference to Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, and the Roman de la rose. The final main chapter examines creative recollection and the relationship between poetry and visual experience in BD; the instability of perception and visualisation of abstract process of motion and transformation of meaning in HF; and contemplation, symbolism, illumination, and Grosseteste’s theory of multiplication of species in Pearl.

'Y slepe, and myn herte wakith' : music and visual art in Middle English dream visions

How to account for the courtly love complex of the troubadours and minnesingers has been an unsolved puzzle ever since the romanticists discovered it as a scholarly problem. For about three generations, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Provencal and German lyrical poetry was preoccupied with a strangely uneven love pattern. In the classic version of this poetry, the male lover presents himself as engrossed in a yearning desire for the love of an exceedingly beautiful and perfect woman whose strange emotional aloofness and high social status make her appear hopelessly distant. But the frustrated and sorrowful lover cannot overcome his fascination and renders faithful “love service” to this “high-minded” and exacting lady who reciprocates in a surprising manner: She does not grant him the amorous “reward” which he craves, but she gives him what immeasurably increases his “worth”: She rewards him with approval and reassurance. The great lady accepts him as being worthy of her attention, but only at the price of behavioral restraint and refinement of manners, that is, at the price of courtois behavior. As the contemporaries put it, courtoisie is the result of courtly love.

The Social Causation of the Courtly Love Complex

Title: "Unity In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales : A Study of Interrelationships In Four

Unity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: A Study of Interrelationships in Four Pairs of Tales.

terly (1988), Review of English Studies (1988), PMLA (1987), and Style (1986). IKE MANY OF HIS subjects, Henry IV of England apparently found Christianity and chivalry equally persuasive. On the one hand, he supported the death penalty for heretics. On the other, when John de Werchin, the famous seneschal of Hainault, challenged the Knights of the Garter to single combat one by one, Henry, citing "Artur nostre predecesseur," responded by arranging for jousts at Smithfield in 1408, where the visitor lost to the earl of Somerset (Beltz liv, 403-07). Readers are not surprised, therefore, that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seems to be both Christian and aristocratic. They seldom agree, however, on the precise sense in which it is either. Does the poem capture Christianity as an aristocratic idea? Or is the idea of aristocracy subordinated to a Christian and ultimately nonaristocratic purpose?' No other English poem, perhaps, puts the ancient question more complexly: What does a hero like Ingeld have to do with Christ? (Alcuin 183). I want to suggest first that an aristocratic-Christian conflict, though present in the poem, is superficial. After trying to filter out "cheualry" and the "kny3tyly" from "nobelay" and the "nobele," I argue that nobility is inscribed both as the dominant aristocratic value in Gawain and as a dangerous possibility within Christianity itself.2 The poet uses the economy of the gift both to realize this dangerous possibility and to subsume and cancel it.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/462781.pdf

Gawain and the Gift

greater equanimity, they have gone even further in marking out his deviations from the orthodox line. By wide agreement among themselves they have seen the De mundi as expressing either pantheism3 or a paganism that has little or no Christianity in it at all.4 1 Ed. Barach and Wrobel (\"Bibliotheca philosophorum mediae aetatis, \" No. 1 [Innsbruck, 18761). 2 XII, 270. a See, e.g., Victor Cousin, Ouvrages inedits d'Abelard (Paris, 1836), \"Introduction,\" p. cxxix, which makes Bernardus a precursor of Giordano Bruno; and De mundi (\"Einleitung,\" pp. xvii-xviii), which rejects this view but speaks with approval of Bernardus' Scheinpantheismus. See also A. Clerval, Les Ecoles de Chartres au moyen dge du Ve au X VIe sikcle (Paris, 1895), pp. 260-61. In his Histoire de la philosophie mdi'vale, De Wulf shifts in successive editions between pantheism and monism: cf., e.g., 2d. ed., p. 233, and 5th ed., I, 203. But see n. 6 below. For theories that the entire Chartrian school, to which Bernardus is related, are pantheistic in tendency, see also Clerval, pp. 253 if.; B. Haur6au, Notices et extraits de quelques mss. latins de la Bibliothbque nationale (Paris, 1890), I, 70, and Haurdau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris, 1872), I, 403; W. Jansen, Der Kommentar des Clarenbaldus von Arras zu Boethius De Trinitate (Breslau, 1926), p. 93; and B. Geyer, Die patristische und scholastische Philosophie (Ueberweg's \"Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie\" [11th ed.; Berlin, 1928], Vol. II), pp. 234 f. 4 R. L. Poole (Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning [1st ed.; London, 18841, pp. 117Against this current, Professor Gilson, now twenty years ago, set forth an article5 in which he demonstrated the errors of the paganist views and at the same time alleged, against the charge of pantheism, that the De mundi, in fact, contains the elements of a dualistic philosophy, if not of an even wider pluralism. The force of his demonstration was such that of his two positions the second re-

The Fabulous Cosmogony of Bernardus Silvestris

HE spell of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is upon us. From its jeweled and witty lines to the speed and address of its drama, its enigmatic author has fashioned a comedy that is subtle, moving, and full of happy enigma. Whatever its relation to ultimate Indra myths, to Celtic motifs, to a mythical Gallic precursor, its poetic qualities are its own, and they do not depend primarily on the supposed structural ingenuity of its \"source\" nor the delightful circumstance that the poet could read at French. That he was a man of learning and an artist is obvious. But the nature of the learning as well as the art is often enough obscured, not always unfolded, by a scholarship preoccupied by special interests or frustrated by felicitous poetic statement which sometimes resists the effort o track it down and understand fully what it is saying. We no longer need to worry about where the head-chopping challenge comes from nor the wintry horseman nor the love temptation set in Gawain's bedroom, though the part played in the poem's prehistory by that clever former Frenchman is perhaps another matter, whichever Frenchman he may turn out to have been. Pentangle, penitential, Andreas Capellanus, Knights of the Garter or of the Couronne, coats of arms, calls to arms, and the Wars of Alexander, all stand beside the Celts, uncovered or suspected, in the poem's hybrid genealogy. What its own character is, however, whether it is a mimetic or a didactic piece, something allegorical or something symbolic, now arises to disturb the current reader, naturally enough in a

"Sir Gawain," Dear Brutus, and Britain's Fortunate Founding: A Study in Comedy and Convention

THE trouble with Courtly Love is that it gives its lovers no rest, and the modern critical devotee is hardly less jealous for his favorite theory of its nature and source than was the troubadour. Ovid is out of the game by now, whatever that genial professor added to the science in the twelfth century; for, where man is ennobled by the soaring fire of Courtlyfin' amors, the De amore teaches a view of sex which-as William of St. Thiery, following the hint of

Andreas, Plato, and the Arabs: Remarks on Some Recent Accounts of Courtly Love

There have been so many accounts in recent years of what Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "means" that one hesitates to add to their number. When that addition depends on the reading of such well-worn pieces of evidence as Gawain's shield, the temptations and confessions, and his troublesome use of the word couetyse, hesitation grows deeper still, like Gawain's blush. There remains, however, testimony in the text touching on all these matters which has never been adequately examined. To look at it with special care will throw some further light on what is happening, morally and psychologically, in the poem. The assumption of the present essay is that Sir Gawain is not an allegory, though it contains at least one overt and extended allegorical device (with an immediate interpretatio by the poet himself). That it is instructive, allusive, and readily applicable is certainly the case, even if one refrains from calling it simply an exemplum. In the end it is also a witty piece of social comedy, whose poetic form uses and transforms the merely didactic materials it embodies. However critics may differ among themselves about the nature of the poem and the methods therefore of exegesis suitable to it, all will agree that one must start with the littera and there be as precise as possible. It is on the littera, in a particular sense, that the present essay will dwell. It will also attempt to narrow the range of sources from large and general traditions to some actual texts the poet seems to have been reading. Let us begin with the device on Gawain's shield, the pentangle, whose significance the poet describes, with all deliberate intent, as a series of five interrelated pentads summarizing our hero's moral virtues.' These virtues he will place in contention against the peril that his quest will face him with. Among them, he has been found faultless in his fyue wyttez and his fyue fyngres never fail him;2 his trust on earth is in Christ's five wounds, and his earnest contemplation, bringing to him strength, are the five joys of the Virgin Mary. But the group of pentads that most requires our scrutiny is the last:

Sir Gawain in a Dilemma, or Keeping Faith with Marcus Tullius Cicero

ALMOST from the beginning and announced with appropriate sentence the Wife of Bath gives us warning: "Experience though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynough for me To speke of wo that is in mariage...." Supporting as it seems the traditional homiletic texts by personal experience, the aphorism would appear to be leading us to realms that are sober enough, but the argument that follows close upon it lands us at the very heart of comedy. The good wife's discourse is hardly under way before we begin to divine the delicious possibilities. We are transported to that farcical land where the great and continuing warfare is the battle of the sexes, even as, with perverse femininity, she proceeds to stand the ancient authorities on their heads. In the choice between virginity and natural love, the good wife opts for love. If by old satiric tradition women are chattering, conniving, wasteful, willful, quarrelsome, lecherous, and vainwell and good. She does not deny it, she asserts it (with illustrations). So much the worse for men; let them beware. There is doctrine here, if you please, and the lady no doubt believes much of it; we shall find a good deal more before she sets feliciter to her Tale. That, however, is not the point which should hold our present eye. The good wife may be made indeed of the stuff of the heresiarch, as one has wittily told us, but her heresy, if so it be, romps at the moment in the fields of laughter. And why not? "Wo in mariage"-the old debate for her has meant something more than pain or misery. Ever since she was twelve she has schemed and argued and fought to have her way. But it is a fight which she has thoroughly enjoyed, being what she is and her opponent man. One of its results, unfortunately, is the partial deafness from which she suffers, brought on by an angry clout from her fifth usband; but another is a developed skill in debate, which makes 1 The substance of this essay, which will form a chapter in a forthcoming book on Chaucerian comedy, was presented as a lecture at University College, University of Toronto, in February, 1959. Its debts to scholarship, unremarked by footnotes, are patent, as are also its novelties of matter and argument.

Theodore Silverstein

Papers

The Fabulous Cosmogony of Bernardus Silvestris

"Sir Gawain," Dear Brutus, and Britain's Fortunate Founding: A Study in Comedy and Convention

Andreas, Plato, and the Arabs: Remarks on Some Recent Accounts of Courtly Love

Sir Gawain in a Dilemma, or Keeping Faith with Marcus Tullius Cicero

Wife of Bath and the Rhetoric of Enchantment; Or, How to Make a Hero See in the Dark