Hill John M. - Chaucers Neoplatonism

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This study began many years ago with a paper given at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, noted below, and with two others at New Chaucer Society conferences, first in Boulder, Colorado, and then in Portland, Oregon. I thank NCS conference and special session organizers, especially Peggy Knapp, for my participation in a 2002 session on Chaucerian aesthetics. Earlier drafts of the book received suggestions from friends, colleagues, and anonymous readers, for which I am grateful. Chaucers Neoplatonism would be less robust without the revisions those suggestions encouraged. The Naval Academy Research Council provided support for several weeks in several summers, for which I am grateful. Finally, I especially thank Albrecht Classen for his generous support and guidance, which led to a contract with Lexington Books.

Chapter 3, although greatly expanded, has material previously published in Friendship in the Middle Ages, which appeared in the Handbook of Medieval Culture, Volume I, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2015), 56581. I am grateful for permission to republish part of that essay. Chapter 5, while also greatly expanded, contains material first published in The Countervailing Aesthetic of Joy in Troilus and Criseyde, The Chaucer Review, a special issue on Chaucer and Aesthetics, eds. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, 39, no. 3 (2005): 298322. Again permission to republish has been most kind. Some of chapter 5s themes appeared earlier in Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Friendship in Troy. I thank Susan J. Ridyard and Robert G. Benson for accepting that paper and for arranging its publication, along with others from the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. See New Readings of Chaucers Poetry, introduced by Derek Brewer, eds. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 16582.

Finally, I must thank Lindsey Porambo and Nick Johns at Lexington Books for their superb editing and production assistance.

And of course, as always, my wife, Barbara, not least for putting up with my Chaucer talk as this project developed and grew over the years. Her patience and her great cooking were inspirational.

My title names Chaucers philosophical inclination and his big subjects, by which he would establish himself as something more than a maker of verse, indeed as a poet standing in literary fame along with Virgil and Dante, Homer, Ovid and others. Despite the servants servant he creates in the Troilus narrator, one who professes his unsuitability and who dares not even pray to Love, Chaucer sees himself standing on a pillar of famea poet of Love and Friendship. He would stand as a tragic poet of the wedding of noble friendship literature to love story in Troilus and Criseyde, and as a comedic poet-reporter of the sometimes turbulent fellowship shown by his pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Among those pilgrims, and in their stories, the deep friendship we see in Troilus is replaced by often short-lived gestures toward sometimes discriminatory fellowship, that is, variously exclusive rather than always inclusive community, given pilgrim notions of felicity. Fidelity in Love will transpose also and variously into notions of carnality, wedded love, and religious love. That latter love involves urgings of mercy and, eventually, community in Christ. Chaucers philosophical orientation also poses an underlying issuethe positing or crediting required for reasonable supposition or belief. A rational Neoplatonist will posit truth even in unlikely places or manifestations.

Although Chaucer does not explore belief or supposition psychologically or elaborate it philosophically, although interpretation and misinterpretation receive attention, supposition really matters almost as a poetics, often expressed as wonder, as in the narrators reading about Alcyone and Morpheus in The Book of the Duchess (wonder yf it were so, l. 233); or it is expressed as leve, something one believes out of necessity there where there is no proof, as in Men shal nat wenen every thyng a lye (believe everything a lie) that has not been seen with ye, the eye (PLGW, G1011). This latter point, made wryly, concerns heavens joys and hells pains, certified by the negative assertion that Bernard the monk never saw everything. And, God knows, a thing is nevertheless so even though no one has seen it. The same can be said of truths asserted in old books, truths poets presumably discovered because they loved the law of nature (kynde). Thus, though we have no immediate proof of those asserted truths, we should to the doctryne of these olde wyse / Yeven credence, in every skylful wyse, / And trowen on these olde aproved storyes (G PLGW, 1921). That skillful extending of credence to old doctrines and wise men can even include a gesture of faith, as in feyth and ful credence (F PLGW, 31), a gesture premised on, given in consequence of, delight in books. Moreover we can, in good feyth, assert that new wisdom (newe science) comes from old books (PF, 25).

Wonder, belief, credence, trusting, warranting, good faiththose versions of supposition, moreover, have everything to do with any topic Chaucer treats poetically. To believe at least provisionally or not in the truth of poems and fictions is at the heart of his thinking about readers, books and tidings in his early work (along with passing meditations on varieties of dream form and story). Of course the subject of love and other things, such as the nature of dreams, fictions, loss, books and their meanings, problems of interpretation, nobility, authority and tyranny, choice, pathos and woman kind come up in one or more of his dream visions: