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1994 Colloquium Paper Abstracts

"Faith: Intellectual Vice or Theological Virtue?"

 According to Aquinas, part of what defines faith as a theological virtue of the intellect is that acts of faith result from free choice. Now, 'theological virtue' is a species of the genus 'virtue'. Therefore, faith must also be a virtue of the intellect. However, in order to be an intellectual virtue, a habit must provide the agent who has it with adequate justification for the beliefs it elicits. But a belief held because of adequate justification is not freely chosen. A dilemma follows: either faith is an intellectual virtue, and it elicits beliefs based on adequate justification (i.e. not freely); or faith is a theological virtue, and it elicits beliefs which are freely chosen (i.e. on the basis of no adequate justification). But if faith is a theological virtue, as Aquinas argues, then it is also a virtue of the intellect. I offer a solution to this dilemma in terms of the kind of justification a faithful agent could have for her beliefs which would make them both freely chosen and nonetheless justified.
 
 

"The Hexaemeron in Peter Lombard's Sentences: Moses and the Greeks"

 The hexaemeron, or commentary on the six days of creation, belongs to a genre of exegesis distinctive from others in its concern with natural philosophy. The hexaemeron which appears in the Sentences of Peter Lombard displays how Greek cosmology was made to conform to the theological observations of the Bible, and the Mosaic cosmogony modified to fit the Greek conception of the physical universe. Since Lombard assumed that the latter was indisputably correct, he was eager to present Moses as a philosopher who pre-empted the Greeks in their deduction of the rerum natura. Moses is the superior figure possessing the plenitude of knowledge, but Lombard's effort to conform Mosaic thought to the Greek conception of the physical universe indicates that he accepted the latter as readily as the former, as if the Greek doctrine on the physical universe were a kind of revelation.
 
 

"Deception and Duplicity: Chaucer's Theseus"

 Chaucer critics following in the wake of Charles Muscatine have frequently viewed the character of Theseus in the Knight's Tale as a representative of order and rationality in a disordered world. In this paper, I will take a different approach to Theseus, reading his actions in the Knight's Tale as refracted through the lens of his past history as the seducer and abandoner of Ariadne -- a history which Chaucer recounts in his Legend of Good Women and alludes to in narrating the story of Palamon and Arcite. In order to better understand Chaucer's strategy in the Knight's Tale, I will also examine the treatment of Theseus in his sources, Statius's Thebaid and Boccaccio's Teseida, as well as Chaucer's analagous construction of a past history involving seduction and abandonment for Arcite in Anelida and Arcita.
 
 

"Straitlaced Satire: The Lollards in Satan's Clothing"

 A strikingly unusual Lollard text, written probably c. 1400 and identified by Anne Hudson according to its genre as Epistola Sathanae ad Cleros, speaks in the voice of Satan commending the clergy for their great help in furthering Satan's cause and 'destroying Christ's friends'. The typically straightforward Lollards occasionally use satire elsewhere in sermons, but this letter from Satan is quite different in that it adopts an alien persona throughout: the identity of the Lollard author(s) is completely submerged. In view of the Lollards' admonitions against 'playing', the Epistola Sathanae appears to be a transgression of their own code. However, attention to the treatise on miracle plays shows that the Lollards have left themselves a loophole in which to play; if imitating God in a miracle play takes away one's fear of God, then imitating Satan should do the equivalent. Thus the Epistola Sathanae can be understood as an attempt -- legitimized within their own teaching against play -- to remove the dread of both clergy and Satan by comically appropriating Satan's voice and authority.
 
 

"The Other Virgil"

 The set of Latin texts attributed to one Virgilius Maro Grammaticus can be dated between 635 and 709. Along with much conventional information on grammar they contain quotations from imaginary authors (a Latin 'Homer', a 'Horace' who writes doggerel), appeals to absurd authorities (the rhetorician Galbungus) and copious quantities of sheer nonsense. Attempts to explain this odd mixture have for the most part focused on identifying the author (was Virgilius a Toulousian adept of the Kabbalah? a subversive Gaulish cryptographer?) or his literary milieu (was he close to the circle that produced the Hisperica Famina?). I argue that a more fruitful approach can be found in genre: Virgilius' texts are an early example of academic humor, and his true congeners Lucian and Lewis Carroll.
 
 

"Tuning Texts: The Quality of Melodic Expressivity in the Early Medieval Spanish Responsory"

 The interaction between text and music in any sung piece is complicated and even confounding, yet in that interaction is the beauty and power of vocal music. Nowhere in the history of Western music is this interaction more important than in early medieval liturgical chant, a sprawling, almost organic mass of monophonic vocal music of fundamental importance to the forming Christian liturgy. As the basis for all that follows in Western art music, one would think we'd have these little melodies figured out by now. In truth, most of their stories have yet to be told; one of the few things that can be said for certain is that early chant is not simple and melody and text interact in ways that seem to be beyond our Romantically conditioned musicological grasp. I will briefly demonstrate some of these complexities in the Early Spanish chant repertory and then comment on means of escaping the reliance on empirical description with which most chant scholarship has contented itself.
 
 

"'Entiende bien mis dichos e piensa la sentencia': Intentionality and the Reader in the Prologues to The Book of Good Love and La Celestina"

 However clearly an author may indicate his or her intention in a prologue, once the text is out of the author's hands it becomes an independent object whose potential meanings are only realized through the act of reading. Both Juan Ruiz and Fernando de Rojas repeatedly emphasize the moral and didactic intention of The Book of Good Love and La Celestina respectively, demonstrating an awareness of the multifarious, even contradictory meanings readers of all times have given to their texts. In this paper I study how these authors' interpolations of the reader dramatize the complex phenomenon of reading, anticipating twentieth-century formulations of Reader Response theory.
 
 

"Gil Vincente: 'Gloria eterna das letras lusas'"

 The late-medieval poet Gil Vicente (1465?-1537) can be seen not only as the founder of Portuguese theater, but also as an immediate literary antecedent to the Portuguese Renaissance. Vicente's bilingual plays ended the "silent century of Portuguese court poetry" and rehabilitated Portuguese literature. Although the versification in his Spanish dramas sometimes suffers from lusismos (linguistic encroachment from Portuguese), the lyrical qualities of the works outshine the rhyming problems. Vicente's religious dramas evince substantial experimentation with audience distance, metatheater, and attempted realism; his secular plays de-familiarize and enrich traditional folk ballads by modifying rhyme schemes and enhancing the stories. Vicente's theatrical innovations and his turn towards social satire present an interesting synthesis of medieval aesthetics and ideology with the first sparks of the Renaissance.
 
 

"Cudra Cwidegiedda: Proverbs and Meaning in the Old English 'Wanderer'"

 If we understand proverbial utterances in the "Wanderer" as a reflection of social and moral consciousness, we fail to acknowledge their poetic purpose. The poem, traditionally described as one man's search for happiness, is driven by a tension between the proverbs which constitute a public but repressive discourse and the proverbs which describe the speaker's private grief. This paper examines the connection between these personalized narratives and the speaker's proverbial utterances. How do proverbs simultaneously create and resolve this conflict? Drawing upon Alcuin's Destruction of Lindisfarne, I argue that we may explore the interaction between narrative and proverbial utterances by comparing the poem's structure with a common medieval proverbial and consolatory idea: a non-cynical form of our maxim, "misery loves company." Using this axiom as a structural principle, the poet suggests how proverbs unify individual experience and universal narrative, thereby furthering a contemporary discussion of wisdom poetry.
 
 

"Politics in the Convent: The Election of a Fifteenth-Century Abbess"

 A fifteenth-century parchment records the election of Perrine du Feu as abbess of Saint-Georges de Rennes in 1434. This document, commissioned by the community to assure the incontestability of the election's results, is important for preserving such a detailed account of the election procedure of a community of medieval nuns. The document also yields information about the politics behind the vote, providing an interesting glimpse into the community's governmental processes. Despite the document's carefully maintained image of unanimity, the decision was clearly reached only after maneuvering between two opposing factions. Within current efforts to recover the history of medieval women, this glimpse into the governmental processes of a community of women contributes valuable evidence for the exercise by women of responsible roles. The political arena of the convent provides an opportunity unique within medieval society for the study of women governing themselves.
 
 

"Are Sir Orfeo's Eyes Open? Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Attitudes toward Literacy and Writing and the Lay of Sir Orfeo"

 If we read Sir Orfeo as a work that incorporates concerns about the relationship between oral and written forms of cultural production into its narrative, and if we investigate attitudes toward the written evidence with regard to bureaucratic or royal administrative texts in the latter half of the thirteenth and first decades of the fourteenth centuries, we gain a specific, detailed understanding of the relationship between oral and written forms of cultural production during this historical moment. In particular, we get an idea of their comparative importance and their respective associations with and implications in power relations.
 
 

"Marketing Mysticism"

 The arrival of the printed book brought with it an outpouring of religious devotional and instructional works in English, an enormous range of material aimed at every kind of potential audience. One type of work with an established and growing audience of clerical and lay readers was the prose instruction in meditation, examples of which were often reprints of texts created in the fourteenth century or even earlier by writers such as Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, and the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse. Wynkyn de Worde published all these authors and more. A work he first printed in 1514, the Fruyt of Redempcyon, by Simon, the Anker of London Wall, shows not only de Worde's attentiveness to the desires of a reading public for particular types of religious works. It also shows his desire to adapt, shape and create religious works for his market.
 
 

"Merchants' Tales and Other Historical Fictions: Narrative and the Man of Law's Tale"

 The imagery of tale-telling merchants bridges the transition between Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and its frame-text. The Tale is, explicitly, a merchant's product; the narrator claims a merchant as his source. It is also a didactic work framed within the contexts of chronicle and allegory or fiction: just as merchants garner profit from the circulation of goods, the Man of Law traffics in tales and the reputations created from their circulation, thereby purchasing moral/didactic profitsÑor the appearance thereof. In pretending to tell a history, a tale true to its origins, the Man of Law reveals the fictionalizations whereby he authorizes his tale. Such a business reflects his image in the General Prologue: "Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, / And yet he semed bisier than he was" (I.321-2). Appearance is the substance of the Man of Law's professional i dentity, as well as his prime commodity.

"Cain and the Commentators"

 Recently, violent crime has become the American public's biggest concern. While a billboard in Times Square counts the bodies, political experts and newspaper editors debate the causes of and solutions to our latest problem. This concern is by no means a recent phenomenon. Throughout history, many societies have experienced cycles of escalated violence and responded with fluctuations in public concern. Medieval society certainly behaved this way: the great popularity of movements like the Peace and Truce of God indicate that, at times, the carnage was too much. By studying the story of Cain and its reception, I hope to gain some insight into medieval attitudes towards violence and public order. Not only did Cain commit a violent crime, he lived to tell about it, and he asked a question which probably occurred to many medieval people: Am I my brother's keeper? In this paper, I will discuss the answers offered by a few early medieval commentators.

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