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

Those who think that literary theory began in les années soixante in France should think again. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century university chambers resonated with the excitement of new critical approaches to Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Boethius (as well as to the Bible). In detailed commentaries on these and other authors, critics discussed the nature of poetry, the ethical purpose of literature, authorship and authority, imagination, and literary form and structure. This avantgarde discourse was conducted entirely in Latin and on Latin writings. Eleanor Johnson argues that from one Latin form in particular, the prosimetrum, which combines prose and lyric poetry, late fourteenth-century writers learned a previously untried way of authoring fiction in English. The capacities for ethical transformation through protrepsis that they saw in the two celebrated instances of the late antique prosimetrum—The Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella and The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius—provoked Chaucer, Usk, Gower, and Hoccleve to experiment with new literary practices. Through the deeply sensuous education they obtained from study of Boethius’s mixed formal work in philosophy, they learned to make prose sing and verse teach. In the end, Johnson suggests, these English authors learned Boethius’s lesson so well that they went beyond the protreptic character of mixed form. They wrote works, such as Troilus and Criseyde, and Hoccleve’s Series, that drew attention to its artfulness and constructedness, in short to its literariness, as a formal method. They developed a way of writing that encouraged their readers not only to observe and follow the ethical messages of the prosimetrum but also to reflect on how its formal method achieved that ethical result. In short, the mixed form, in their hands, became a vehicle for vernacular literary theory. From the moral exhortation of protrepsis came literature; from scholastic training came habitus; from theory, experience—and from the Sorbonne—the modern critic.