• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Learning to Love by Rachael Nicole Deagman Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ David Aers, Supervisor ___________________________ Sarah Beckwith ___________________________ Fiona Somerset ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan ___________________________ Caroline Bruzelius Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 ABSTRACT Learning to Love by Rachael Nicole Deagman Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ David Aers, Supervisor ___________________________ Sarah Beckwith ___________________________ Fiona Somerset ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan ___________________________ Caroline Bruzelius An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Rachael Nicole Deagman 2010 ABSTRACT This study examines medieval edification in all of its rich senses: moral improvement, the building up of community, and the construction of a city or edifice. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and architectural sources, my dissertation investigates virtue formation and explores what kinds of communities nourish or hinder those virtues. The Christian virtue of love stands at the center of my project. Drawing from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, I show that medieval Christians learn the craft of love in a lifelong process into which they are initiated as apprentices to those who teach the craft in the Church. For parishioners in late medieval England, apprenticeship in the craft of love entails participation in sacramental practice, particularly in the sacrament of penance. Chapter one considers Jacob’s Well , a fifteenth-century penitential manual written by an anonymous author that uses architectural allegory to describes the penitential process. I argue that the author, a self-proclaimed “man of craft” apprentices the reader into sacramental practice. The author is both an exemplar to the reader and apprenticed to Christ. In chapter two, I explore the role of the narrative exempla in Jacob’s Well . The exempla often resist the paradigm set forth in the allegory of the well. My chapter shows that learning to read these stories trains the reader to recognize forgiveness and sin in others and then to use this recognition to evaluate one’s own story. Chapter three considers William Langland’s richly complex fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman . iv The horrible failures of the sacrament of penance in this poem cause the Church to crumble. The allegorical Wille is left within this Church with the enjoinder to “learn the craft of love.” For Wille to learn the craft of love means more than learning to forgive and to be forgiven – it means learning to be charitable. For Langland, a charitable Church is yet to be practiced, yet to be constructed. My last chapter examines Pearl , a late fourteenth-century apocalyptic allegory written by an anonymous poet. The poem opens with a jeweler lamenting the loss of his pearl in a garden. As the poem progresses it becomes clear that the jeweler is a father who mourns the death of his infant daughter. In a dream vision, his daughter appears to him as a Pearl Maiden, one of the 144,000 virgins from the Book of Revelations. In an inversion of the usual parent-child relationship, the Pearl Maiden teaches the jeweler to recognize that their interlocking narratives stem from the same Christian tradition, although his particular narrative is one of penitential practice and hers is one of grace. The Pearl poet’s architectural allegory focuses on the completed City of New Jerusalem rather than on the upbuilding or crumbling of the Church. v COTETS Abstract …………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………..…vii Introduction ……………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1. Building Community: The Allegorical ……………………………. 13 Structure of Jacob’s Well 2. Representing Resistance: The Narrative …………………………….. 94 Exempla in Jacob’s Well 3. The Formation of Forgiveness in Piers Plowman……………………. 155 4. Al Songe to Loue þat Gay Juelle: Telling the ………………………. 240 Tale of Virtue in Pearl BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………… 294 BIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………….. 305 vi ACKOWLEDGMETS I could not have completed this project without the support and generosity of many people. My apprenticeship at Duke has been in much more than just medieval studies. I find it difficult to properly thank my teacher, David Aers, for the many gifts he has given me. He has shown extraordinary generosity, inestimable encouragement and tremendous concern as the director of my dissertation. I am deeply indebted to him for teaching me as much about my life and the way I hope to live it as he has about medieval literature. I am grateful to Sarah Beckwith for sharpening my thinking and writing with her insightful comments and difficult questions. I am blessed to have such incredible teachers who knew when to wipe away my tears and when to have a good laugh. I thank them both for their friendship. I hope to find a way to pass along to others a fraction of the gifts they have given to me. My other committee members have been indispensable in helping me to complete this project. Fiona Somerset has attentively read and commented on each chapter. Her feedback has been particularly helpful in the later stages of the process. Early on Maureen Quilligan helped me to find my voice. I thank her for this. Caroline Bruzelius has taught me everything I know about medieval architecture and has also been a wonderful rolemodel. I would also like to acknowledge Beth Robertson, Bruce Holsinger and John Stevenson, my teachers at the University of Colorado. I would like to thank Beth for vii encouraging my interest in medieval literature in the beginning and for her continued friendship. Bruce Holsinger taught me how to read and write. I would not be at this point without him. I am very grateful to John Stevenson for being so generous with his time and for his insightful professional advice over the years. Christine Moreno has been an unwavering support and an inspiring friend. I thank her for continuing to remind me what happens when a weeble wobbles. My warm thanks go to my graduate student colleagues at Duke. I have benefited greatly from my time with Heather Mitchell and Jim Knowles. I appreciate their valuable insights about medieval literature and about the academic environment more generally. I am tremendously grateful for my friendship with Sheryl Overmyer Grubb. She has taught me a great deal about the virtues and has played an important role in my growth as a scholar and as a person. My thanks go to Siegfried Wenzel for helping me to think about Jacob’s Well and to Stanley Hauerwas for reading and commenting on this project. I thank Greg Jones, Dean of the Divinity School, for helping me to better understand forgiveness and for supporting my work beyond the Duke community. I hope that my family knows the depth of my gratitude and love. I thank my parents, Ken and Fran, and my brother, K.C., for giving me my roots and then giving me my wings. I feel fortunate to know that my roots will always be solid no matter how shaky my wings may be. I dedicate this to them. viii ITRODUCTIO In After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre has shown that man is essentially a story- telling animal and that the telling of stories plays a key role in educating us into the virtues. 1 This narrative concept of selfhood has two requirements. First, each person is understood to be the subject of a narrative that runs from birth to death. As such, that person must be accountable for the actions and experiences that compose a narratable life. 2 The second correlative requirement is that the storyteller must recognize one’s own narrative in relation to the stories of others: I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives. Moreover this asking for and giving of accounts itself plays an important part in constituting narratives. Asking you what you did and why, saying what I did and why, pondering the differences between your account of what I did and my account of what I did, and vice versa , these are essential constituents to the very simplest and barest of narratives. 3 In other words, MacIntyre argues that engaging in this type of story-telling and accounting for one’s story in relation to others means asking two questions: “what is the good for me?” and “what is the good for man?” Moral enquiry aspires to answer these 1 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, repr. 2003), 216. 2 MacIntyre, 217. 3 Ibid, 218. 1 questions both theoretically and practically. The systematic asking of and the attempt to answer these questions in word and in deed provides the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. This quest is an education in self - knowledge and as to the character of that which is sought. Without the virtues, this quest would be fruitless: The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.

Load more

  313

Copy Link