Medieval Studies Dissertation Abstracts

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GOWER AND LITERARY TRADITION: JEAN DE MEUN, OVID, AND THE CONFESSIO AMANTIS

Lauren Kiefer, Ph.D. Cornell University, August 1994

This project attempts to alert the reader to John Gower's literariness. I argue that in the Confessio Amantis, Gower deliberately turns away from the straightforward didacticism of his earlier works and of the Middle English penitential tradition, and adopts instead the narrative strategies of poets such as Jean de Meun and Ovid. I also link Gower's literary complexity in this Confessio with the work's secular concerns, arguing that Gower's growing awareness of the complex social problems surrounding him led him to abandon the didactic stance of his early works.

Chapter One outlines Gower's progression from the rigid structures and spiritual emphasis of his earlier major works to the complexity and secular emphasis of the Confessio Amantis. In particular, I examine Gower's revisions of the Vox Clamantis as evidence of his growing social and political concerns, and show how the first chapter of the Confessio deliberately rejects the medieval penitential manual's paradigm of divine justice, preferring instead a paradigm of personal responsibility.

Chapter Two outlines the poetic strategies which Gower borrows from Jean de Meun. In particular, this chapter explores the way Jean and Gower turn the traditional function of the exemplum on its head, by using the form to impugn the credibility of the narrator. While traditional exemplum narrators choose and revise stories for clarity and appropriateness, Jean's and Gower's narrators make choices and revisions which merely reflect their own limitations.

While Chapters One and Two examine isolated tales within the Confessio, Chapter Three discusses the way several tales interact with each other. Gower's Ulysses tales - "Ulysses and the Sirens," "Ulysses and Penelope," "Nauplus and Ulysses," "Achilles and Deidamia," and "Ulysses and Telegonus" - place him in dialogue with both Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Trojan historiographical tradition. I show how Gower deliberately rejects the didactic tendency of medieval historiography in favor of the more elusive poetic strategies of the epic and romance traditions, just as he rejected the didacticism of the penitential and exemplum traditions in favor of Jean's elusive structures.

FORMS OF KNOWING: THEORIES OF COGNITION IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Robert Charles Pasnau, Ph.D. Cornell University, August 1994

Scholastic philosophers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries advanced original and sophisticated accounts of the nature of cognition and mental representation. This dissertation analyzes some of the debates of that period, beginning with Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and going on to consider a number of his most penetrating critics: Henry of Ghent (d. 1293), Peter John Olivi (1248-1298), William Ockham (ca. 1285-1347), and William Crathorn (f. 1330's). The study begins with some of the theoretical foundations of scholastic theories of cognition, such as the nature of cognition, the link between cognition and immateriality, and the sense in which mental representation rests on a similarity between our ideas and the external world. Debate over these issues led later scholastics to give increasing attention to epistemology and the threat of skepticism. Henry of Ghent's epistemological focus led him to formulate an interesting and original argument for the Augustinian theory of divine illumination. Other scholastics - in particular Olivi and Ockham - were similarly concerned that the standard Aristotelian theory of cognition, as formulated by Aquinas, would lead to skepticism. Their response was to reject a central feature of Aquinas' account: that our knowlege of the external world is mediated by internal impressions (species). Olivi and Ockham eliminate such intermediaries entirely. For them our knowledge of the external world is thoroughly direct, and they reject the distinction, which I argue is central to Aquinas' account, between acts of cognition and internal objects for those acts. I conclude that the work of Olivi and Ockham is significant primarily because it challenges the picture of mind that comes so naturally to us: that the mind is a repository of images and ideas that are the inner objects of our perceptions and thoughts.

The dissertation's second volume contains translations of the central texts.

RELIGIOUS WOMEN AND THEIR MEN: IMAGES OF THE FEMININE IN ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE

Dorothy Patricia Wallace, Ph.D. Cornell University, May 1994

This dissertation charts the Anglo-Saxon use of feminine figures as thresholds onto wisdom and as conduits of social, rhetorical, and linguisitc transformations. By comparing Anglo-Saxon literature, both Latin and Old English, with its source materials, this study discerns a uniquely Anglo-Saxon treatment of the feminine.

The first two chapters of this thesis address the literary, social, and political conditions informing this idea of the feminine as a liminal and transformative power. The third chapter considers the women writers of the eighth-century "Boniface Correspondence" as they challenge traditional rhetorical modes to transform epistolary topoi into psychologically forceful turns of phrase.

The theme of women transcending traditional modes of communication and ways of understanding is most apparent in the images of the strong women and queens found in the literature that I discuss in the fourth and fifth chapters: Bede's commentary on Proverbs and Old English religious poetry. Strong women though they be, these figures derive their power to initiate social and epistemological transformations only through subsuming their wills to male figures. As literary counterparts to aristocratic women who moved between families and kingdoms, feminine figures such as Eccelsia, Elene, and the Virgin Mary negotiate between contrasting world views to lead their followers to new social, epistemological, and spiritual realms.

The final chapter of this thesis considers the homilies and saints' lives of Aelfric, a product of the tenth-century monastic reform. In contrast with his sources, which make their heroines angelically masculine or neuter, Aelfric deliberately makes his Agatha and Eugenia female with powerful wills so that their decision to serve God is their own, not the inevitable result of an infallible saintliness. By breaking with a tradition of construing feminine figures as abnegating their wills, Aelfric emphatically preaches the importance of human choice and responsibility, essential to the welfare of the war-ridden England of the early eleventh-century.

ROBERT KILWARDBY'S DE ORTU SCIENTIARUM: A COMMENTARY ON AND TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST TEN CHAPTERS

Mary Katherine Welch, M.A. Cornell University, August 1994

While Robert Kilwardby's De ortu scientiarum (written ca. 1250) is recognized as one of the most important classifications of the sciences of the Middle Ages, very little scholarly attention has been given to the details of the work. Instead, historians have tended to look at De ortu scientiarum as supplementary evidence for other things, such as the manner in which Aristotelian science and philosophy were absorbed by the Latin West in the thirteenth century, or the roots of Kilwardby's well-known condemnation (as Archbishop of Canterbury) of thirty errors in grammar, logic, and natural philosophy at Oxford in 1277. This thesis focuses on De ortu scientiarum itself, providing a commentary on and translation of the first ten chapters, which encompass Kilwardby's introduction to the sciences in general and his discussion of natural science in particular. The thesis compares these chapters with relevant chapters in two twelfth-century introductions to the sciences, the Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor and De divisione philosophiae of Dominicus Gundissalinus, in order to illustrate the significant advances Kilwardby represented in systematizing and organizing natural science.

An investigation of chapters 1-5 of De ortu scientiarum reveals that Kilwardby was especially concerned with defining the parameters of the subject matter of human science, also known as philosophy. Human science is discovered through human reason, a characteristic which distinguishes it from divine science, also known as theology, which is based on revelation from God. Kilwardby does not treat divine science in De ortu scientiarum, but shows an interest in clarifying those areas where the subject matter of divine science and human science seems to overlap. Since one part of philosophy, speculative philosophy, also treats "divine things," and since the metaphysical subdivision of speculative philosophy actually treats God Himself, Kilwardby takes care to emphasize the difference in approach that may be obscured by common terminology. Comparison of these chapters with Hugh of Saint Victor's Didascalicon, an introduction to the sciences written over a century before De ortu scientiarum, reveals that Kilwardby's careful attention to the distinctions between the respective subject mattter of divine and human science resulted in a better defined outline of philosophy.

In chapters 6-10 of De ortu scientiarum, Kilwardby moves to a detailed introduction of the lowest branch of speculative philosophy, natural science. The principles of organization permeating this introduction reveal a pedagogically-minded approach. He begins with the most general observations of matter and motion and then moves to more specific problems that emerge when one defines the discipline. Kilwardby illustrates in Aristotelian fashion that natural science's subject matter, movable body as such, provides a clear and consistent reference point for distinguishing the parameters of natural science, mathematics and metaphysics. Comparison of Kilwardby's treatment of natural science in De ortu scientiarum with that of Dominicus Gundissalinus in his twelfth-century De divisione philosophiae reveals the extent to which Kilwardby systematized natural science. Gundissalinus introduces natural science by summarizing the contents of Aristotle's works on natural science, rather than analyzing the principles of the discipline which those works reveal. The conclusions permitted by this limited study of the initial chapters of De ortu scientiarum suggest the urgent desirability of a much more thorough study of the entire work.

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