Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve by Eleanor Johnson (review)

This book is the first extended consideration of a hitherto underappreciated tradition in late medieval English literature: the mixing of prose and verse, on the model of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy—a formal technique that aims at the transformation of readers’ interior and social dispositions. Eleanor Johnson’s study shows that major and minor authors of the age of Chaucer manipulated form in decidedly Boethian ways in order to develop and define literature’s ethical and public uses.

Johnson has written a literary history driven by the formalist concerns of the writers she studies. The Consolation of Philosophy became for late medieval writers a model of the powerful combination of prosimetrum and protreptic—a genre that “teaches ethical transformation to a reader by modeling an ethical transformation in its own narrator” (9). According to Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, the sensual properties of language arranged in prose or meter prepare the soul to receive and to be reoriented toward truth and goodness. Her song pierces Boethius’s soul and prepares it to be reordered by the rationality of her prose. Ethical transformation thus comes to the narrator in a medium also available to the reader: literary form. In this theory of literary ethics, literature transforms readers through its aesthetic properties—“the literary devices, forms, topoi, tropes, and styles by which a work engages its readers’ sense perceptions” (3).

However, the Boethian theory of moral transformation by way of aesthetics underwent a number of permutations as later writers reconfigured the relationships among prose, meter, and ethical function. Chapter 1 shows how continental writers including Alain de Lille, Dante Alighieri, and Guillaume de Machaut made different forms of prose or verse achieve the effects Boethius had assigned strictly to one or the other. Chapters 2 through 4 treat Chaucer’s own experiments with the ethical affordances of prose and verse in the Boece, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales. In chapters 5 and 6, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve are shown to hack traditional prosimetrum as they abandon the protreptic goal of personal ethical transformation in favor of literary experimentation and theorizing about the possibility of protrepsis. The book thus treats two kinds of works: those that want to use literary form to convert readers, and those that prefer to dwell theoretically on the artificial and merely conventional relationship between form and ethics.

To the former belong the disciples of Boethius—Alain de Lille, Machaut, the Chaucer of the Boece and Troilus, and Thomas Usk. These writers maintain Boethius’s confidence in form and the example of a transformed narrator to accomplish protrepsis, but they play with the affordances of prose and meter. Usk’s Testament of Love, for example, eschews verse in favor of a prose that embodies simplicity and forthrightness “to curry affective identification between narrator and reader by creating architectures of sonic and rhythmical likeness in its songful prose” (178). In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer stages a theoretical debate between pilgrim narrators who undertake protrepsis in good faith and those who consider poetry a waste of time. With The Parson’s Tale and the Retractions, Chaucer “forcefully and permanently eject[s] poetry from the Canterbury Tales,” while prose remains to effect an ethical conversion in Chaucer the narrator and author, albeit without any “unified didactic goal or message that emerges for a reader” (165).

Of the eleven works Johnson studies in detail, only four fit the standard definition of prosimetrum in exhibiting a regular, proportioned mixture of prose and verse: the Consolation; its model, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii; Alain’s De planctu naturae; and Dante’s Vita nuova, which, Johnson argues, is not a standard protreptic. The rest mix forms, to be sure, but usually different versions of the same form. Machaut’s Remède de Fortune, for example, “recreates the...