Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love After Aristotle (review)

Medieval scholarship has always recognized as important the question of whether medieval secular philosophy shaped vernacular literature in ways not in tune with Church teaching, and if so, how. In this smart and fast-paced book, Jessica Rosenfeld discovers in medieval texts an important constellation of ideas that seem to stem from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The European transmission in Latin of the entire text of the Ethics dates from the thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s intellectual standing as a natural philosopher was at its height. Previously, only the first four books had been available; they promoted ethical reflection on the catalogue of virtues and the value of the mean (or “moderation”). The addition of the later books, however, identified the goal of humanity as happiness, endorsing as man’s supreme good and final cause a variety of forms of it that include physical and worldly pleasure as well as intellectual happiness and friendship. Such ethical claims could not fail to have a radical impact on medieval thinking since they ran directly counter to an orthodoxy concerned to promote sacrifice in this world and an etherealized version of happiness in the next. How did vernacular authors negotiate this tension?

Rosenfeld explores the ramifications of their responses following a chronological arc from the troubadours to Chaucer. Her argument is multistranded, advancing on several fronts. One of her themes is the question of the relationship between happiness and activity. She also engages with Aristotle’s ethical rationalism, assessing the effects of its conflict with the ethics of will or desire that the Middle Ages inherited from Augustine. The most important theme that she works with, however, is that of love, as indicated by her subtitle. The complete text of Aristotle’s Ethics valorizes pleasure and enjoyment in mundane relationships in a way that challenges the sacrificial and mystical strains in medieval concepts of love, including “courtly love,” and that in general opposes any celebration of deferred enjoyment. Her analysis lingers on the Roman de la rose, speeds through the dits amoureux of Machaut and Froissart together with The Book of the Duchess, takes in Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and Langland’s Piers Plowman, and nods rather cursorily at Dante before landing safely on Chaucer, whose most fully discussed text is Troilus and Criseyde.

According to Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry is addressed to “medieval English literature” (1), a strange claim in view of the fact that (as this overview makes plain) 80 percent-plus of it is about texts in languages other than English. Rosenfeld sometimes gives the unfortunate impression of returning to the bad old days of “sources and analogues” in which non-English works are merely pre-texts for the understanding of real, that is, English, literature. Ethics and Enjoyment is indeed most of all about enjoying Chaucer, who occupies a place of privilege among the dits and again at the volume’s end; but the irritation that this tired trope of Eng. Lit. arouses in scholars from other disciplines is to some extent mitigated by Rosenfeld’s claim that Chaucer’s modernity can best be illumined by the thinking of Jacques Lacan. For me, it was a pleasure to see the thought of this formidable French analyst, whose seminar on ethics starts out from a direct engagement with Aristotle, weave in and out of the intellectual fabric of Rosenfeld’s book, and assume a star role in its coda (160ff.), where similarities between Lacan’s “ethics of the real” and the medieval interpretation of Aristotelian love and contingency are demonstrated (162).

Probably the book’s best chapter is the one on the Rose. Here Rosenfeld introduces into her overall argument a preoccupation with labor as an ethical category, a category that has more to do with Aristotle’s insistence on ethics as act than on the familiar duality of active and contemplative ways of life. This irruption of the theme of...