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

As a term of critical inquiry, “aesthetics” often evokes associations of the analysis, appreciation, codification, and even formulation of beauty. Yet as Eleanor Johnson shows in Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, the aesthetics of Middle English literature functioned in multiple and surprising ways: as the result and natural outgrowth of ideation in poetry and prose, rather than its antecedent; as a deliberately deployed mixture of literary modes and styles intended to effect ethical transformation in readers; and as a meta-category of literary-philosophical endeavor within which late-medieval authors engaged and reconfigured their classical and medieval predecessors. Johnson argues that Middle English writers reconfigured the Boethian prosimetric tradition in service of vernacular protrepsis. In making this argument, she defines and deploys analytical terms that will inspire new attention to what she calls “the Boethian paradigm of ethically transformative writing and reading”(94). These terms, specifically prosimetrum (the mixed form), protrepsis (ethical transformation through narrative), ethics, aesthetics, and (briefly) criticality, may be familiar; but Johnson’s meticulous analysis of mixed-form Middle English texts demonstrates their analytic power in service of new readings of some of the most well-known texts of the English Middle Ages. She shows how the twin traditions of mixed-form texts and ethically transformative narrative guided and shaped the literary endeavors of Late Medieval English authors, even as they revised, reconfigured, and remade that tradition into one of the most influential and widely used vernacular poetics of medieval English literature.

Much of the book’s argumentative power derives from its self-proclaimed New Formalist approach. Indeed, the introduction, “Formalism and Ethics: the Practice of Literary Theory,” includes a short subsection titled “A Brief and Recent History of Formalism”—an extremely clear (if brief) overview of New Formalism as a critical movement and its intersection with medieval studies that will be useful for a variety of readers. Johnson divides her study into six chapters framed by the theoretically-driven introduction and conclusion. Following the theoretical introduction, Chapter 1 explicates the prosimetric architecture upon which the edifice of ethical reading—protrepsis—is built. Johnson demonstrates the Boethian foundations of prosimetrum and protrepsis within the Consolation of Philosophy (and to a lesser degree the De institutione musica), as well as the tradition of ethical transformation achieved by sensible aesthetics: causality in prose and likeness in meter, both of which elicit rational and aesthetic responses from their readers. The chapter then turns to Boethius’s medieval reception in Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Guillaume Machaut’s Remède de Fortune. Johnson shows how each of these vastly influential texts, sharing didactic and dialogic narrative structures, rework Boethian prosimetrum for their own purposes, and in doing so, establish a tradition of adapting and reconfiguring the mixed form as a conceptual, formal, generic, and syntactical strategy of philosophical translatio.

Chapters 2 through 4 turn to the Chaucerian re-figuration of the Boethian tradition. The second chapter, “Sensible Prose and a Sense of Meter: Chaucer’s Aesthetic Sentence in the Boece and Troilus and Criseyde,” argues that Chaucer’s deliberate decision to render Boethius’ mixed form Consolatio as Middle English prose was “rooted in a desire to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of prose form, and with how prose aesthetics might produce ethically transformative assent on its own, independent of metrical action”(57). This argument for the prosimetric quality and protreptic potential of vernacular prose demonstrates how Middle English reception of Boethius reconfigured the mixed form through through style, register, genre, tone, and meter—even prose meter. The implications of this argument for vernacular poetics are rich, and should inspire more explicitly formalist work on Middle English prose. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Chapter 3 argues that the Troilus formulates an aesthetically-driven ethics of tragic poetry, dependent on...