The Philosophical Entente of Particulars: Criseyde as Nominalist in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

That the philosophical tenets of scholastic nominalism underwrite Chaucer's poetry has been firmly established in Chaucer studies, yet whether Chaucer's allegiance on the question of universals lies with realist or nominalist epistemology—or with neither—still remains a point of critical contention.¹ This philosophical problem of universals structures the conflicts of Chaucer's eponymous heroes in Troilus and Criseyde, who oscillate between voluntarism and cosmic determinism. Chaucer's "much loved Criseyde," in particular, has been the notorious subject of critical praise and blame.² Due to her "opacity" she has been read by critics from the 1970s to 90s as a helpless and tragic victim of patriarchal society who warrants empathy or, alternatively, as an independent-minded individual whose calculated self-equivocation, adaptability, and agency are worthy of admiration.³ C. David Benson, E. Talbot Donaldson, and in the early twentieth century George Lyman Kittredge have all abstained from passing judgment on Criseyde, deeming her to be "baffling" or an "open text who is capable of generating multiple fictions."⁴ Neither a "calculating woman" nor an "innocent" victim "seduced by treachery," Criseyde has, to use Charles Muscatine's words, a "consistent ambiguity."⁵ Criseyde's ambiguity, however, need not exclude her characterization as a nominalist. Richard J. Utz, Jamie Fumo, and T. E. Hill have all identified Criseyde as a nominalist but there has been no ethical evaluation of her agency within a Boethian framework that privileges realist metaphysics, despite Eugene Vance's perceptive observation that "ethical questions of semiosis bearing on our motives and intentions in the way we exploit the equivocity of signs" are of special importance in Troilus.⁶ I contend that Criseyde's agency, rather than her lack of agency, is lamented by Chaucer. Preoccupied with the ephemeral particulars of present existence, Criseyde is a nominalist whose misdirected agency bespeaks a self-directed and self-serving intentionality that is oblivious to the ethical correspondence between "words" and "things," or particulars and universals. By abstaining from lauding Criseyde's nominalist intentionality, Chaucer endorses a realist position that affirms not only an ontological but also an ethical connection between signs and what they signify. Like her theoretical nominalist uncle Pandarus and her practically minded father Calkas, Criseyde misconstrues signs and words to attain her personal ends.

Thomist-inspired realism in the later Middle Ages claimed that Platonic abstracts or universals exist independently of—and prior to—particular objects. Reacting against this view, scholastic nominalism and its foremost proponent William of Ockham held that abstracts or universals lack an extra-mental reality and that particular or individual objects have "essential" or substantive reality.⁷ Universals, or Ockhamist ficta, are intellectual abstractions or concepts predicated on propositions or syllogisms that are generated by the intellect's ability to internalize, prior to coalescing, what it encounters outside of itself. These propositions in the mind, signifying ficta, "are spoken words" according to Ockham, whose very terms "are only concepts and not the external substances themselves."⁸ Lacking substance, objective reality, and participation in "the essence or quiddity of any substance," universals have logical being only within the mind, and their existence or "being" is dependent on "their being cognized," that is, on the willful or willed understanding of the cognizant.⁹ By thus rendering objective reality a byproduct of mental phenomena and emphasizing experience as a precursor to ascertaining rational truths, nominalism "Aristotelianize[s] the universal" and "makes inaccessible to rational man a metaphysical and moral order."¹⁰

This "metaphysical and moral order" remains occluded for Criseyde, who is unable to penetrate beyond the particulars of present existence to grasp transcendent universals. Criseyde lacks Prudence's third eye (V, 744-45), which enables a conceptualization of universals that structures a comprehension of the particulars that participate in them.¹¹ As David Williams illustrates, the triocular figure of Prudence denotes an Augustinian distentio of the intellect, or a global awareness of time, which allows one to simultaneously perceive the fragmentary nature of time (its "particular" division into past, present, and future categories) alongside time's...