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Reviewed by:
  • Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing, and: Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature
  • Matthew Giancarlo
Edwin D. Craun. Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 217. £50.00; $85.00.
J. Allan Mitchell. Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 187. $90.00.

Poetica ethicae subponitur quia de moribus tractat: as Judson Allen noted almost thirty years ago in The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages, it was a particularly medieval notion that poetry should be “classified as ethics because it deals with behaviour” (9). But as the durable ethicist tradition in literary criticism shows, it is not a dead one. Ethics and poetry continue to cohabit fruitfully both in medievalist criticism and in literary study in general. A recent resurgence of interest in ethics does not so much portend the onset of “ethical chic” (as J. Allan Mitchell notes glancingly in his introduction) as point to the long-standing centrality [End Page 317] of such concerns, both within texts and about them, especially for medievalists.

Edwin Craun's Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing focuses tightly on the subject of correctio fraterna, “fraternal correction of sin,” as the ethical duty “of admonishing others charitably for their evil conduct in order to reform them” (1). This was both a clerical and laical responsibility, biblically sanctioned and prelatically endorsed. The first two chapters of Craun's book establish the conceptual background of fraternal correction in scriptural, patristic, and canonical sources, as well as the complexities of its ethical demands. Fraternal correction is “a matter of precept divinely ordained and therefore obligatory” (24); it is a practice both moral and ethical and, when done compassionately and privately, charitable; and it is uniquely available to clergy and laity alike, to both women and men, as an authoritative disciplinary practice. It also presents challenges and potential contradictions. The injunction to correct sin runs up against the equally strong precept against ethical judgment (“Judge not and you shall not be judged”), and it opens the door to hypocrisy, raising the thorny issue of when, and to what extent, sinners may admonish other sinners, as well as the question of what marks the ethical boundary between virtuous correction and vicious or slanderous reproof. From these concerns there developed a fascinating body of clerical discourse on the practice of fraternal correction that was equal parts biblical exegesis, moral theology, pastoral training, and rhetorical theory. Craun's explication of it is clear and quite engaging.

In the four following chapters, the practices and implications of fraternal correction are mapped onto Piers Plowman, Wycliffite theology, and the “Lancastrian reformist lives” of Mum and the Sothsegger and the Book of Margery Kempe. A central development during this period was the shift from an exclusive focus on the pastoral correction of individuals to the ideological and political critique of groups: correctio fraterna was invoked as a framework for the clerically sanctioned remonstration of the clerisy itself as a class. Analyses of the characters of Meed, Clergy, Lewte, and Will, and a particularly fine close reading of Piers Plowman B.11, show how Langland adroitly manipulates the “ethos of the corrector” for public reformist purposes (65, 71–79). Chapters 4 and 5 on Wyclif deepen this analysis, showing how the renegade theologian “transformed fraternal correction into a disciplinary process” necessitating both admonition and punishment “not only for the soul of the cleric, but also for the common good of the church” (88). Fraternal correction [End Page 318] offered a license for Wyclif's radical critique of the clergy and for advocating disendowment, both to be enforced by corrective secular power (91–92). Thus it emerged in Wycliffite discourse as an individual ethical duty and as a public communal tool “to redistribute power in institutional life” (97). This was especially so in the polemical agenda of later Wycliffism, which dropped many of the meliorating requirements of prelatically sanctioned correctio. Little surprise, then, that the early fifteenth century seems to have brought a retreat from the more daring speculations on fraternal correction, even as figures such as the beleaguered truth-teller of...

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