Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Narrative Pattern of the 'Alchemical Marriage’ (2025)

Juggling the Middle Ages, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences Newsletter

Review of Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish, edited by Cary J. Nederman, Nancy Van Deusen, and E. Ann Matter

Parergon, 2010

IV The Central Middle Ages

Annual bulletin of historical literature, 1989

IV The Central Middle Ages (900–1200) (i) European History

Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 1990

'Making Sense of the Early Middle Ages': EHR Review article June 2009

Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus, vol. 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 133-151

Book Review: Early Medieval Text and Image 1: The Insular Gospels Early Medieval Text and Image 2: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket

Irish Theological Quarterly, 2020

Understanding the Middle Ages. The transformation of ideas and attitudes in the medieval world. By Harald Kleinschmidt. Pp. xix+401 incl. 50 ills. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. £45. 0 85115 770 X

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2002

Unknowing the Middle Ages

2014

“Unknowing the Middle Ages” argues that attention to a late-medieval preoccupation with the unknowable helps untangle the work of literary discourse from historical and theological modes of inquiry. The project asserts that the topos of the unknown in late-medieval English literature offers more than some mystery to be revealed; instead, it winds through the poetic fabric of narrative and provides structure for some of the most often-studied Middle English texts. I begin by illustrating how, in the thirteenth century, many putatively “literary” texts reflected a theological emphasis on explication and disclosure. Buoyed by the institutionalization of Scholastic thought and an ecclesiastically-sanctioned program of surveillance, epistemology and religious ethics began to coalesce across textual communities from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 well into the fourteenth century. What resulted was an eschatological poetics focused on revelation, sometimes to the detriment of a concurrent desire to create a united Christendom. By focusing on fourteenth-century Middle English texts, my project traces what I see as an important shift away from the teleological clarity of this revelatory poetics. I identify what I call a late-medieval “poetics of unknowing,” an act of literary refinement that recognizes impossibility as a productive site for poiesis. In other words, a “poetics of unknowing” reorients the impossible not as endpoint but as the ethical site from which Middle English literary discourse takes place in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to trace this “poetics of unknowing” as a strategy that emerges under specific historical circumstances, each of my four chapters addresses a figure whose textual history extends at least five hundred years, and who, across these centuries, had come to signify a historical or theological truth. The central focus of each chapter is to consider how, in late-medieval literary narratives, authors come to un-know the truths that had established the popularity of these figures. When translated into literary contexts, these four figures—Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde— overlap at questions of representation, exceeding the logics of the texts that they inhabit, expressed through the difficulty their readers have had putting them—and the epistemological conundrums they embody—to rest. Chapter one traces the evolution of the medieval Herod the Great from a paragon of madness in the writings of early Church Fathers to the comical, raging showman of the late-medieval English mystery cycles. Across these English plays, playwrights re-imagine Herod’s role as the one true foil of Christ, at once willfully impudent toward yet presciently aware of Christian eschatology. Herod’s hubristic performances and vivid on-stage deaths become shorthand for an entire legion of similarly fruitless attempts to alter the course of Christian history. An obsession with Herod’s impotence, shared by medieval writers and modern scholars, all but guarantees one of two possibilities: either he will not be able to transmit the real threat he poses to the Christian system or the villainy he engenders will inherit his impotence in the face of real power. This chapter also urges an expanded understanding of medieval typological thought, and, through it, a reconsideration of the literary stakes of medieval religious drama. These pageants, far from eliciting a naive confabulation of theological and cultural identity, illustrate an important medieval tension between the authority of inherited exegetical practices and the practical utility of narrative invention when it comes to understanding the complex narrative of Christian history. In chapter two, I turn from biblical history to the foundational narrative of English secular history, the Matter of Troy. Rather than treat how England un-knew its own history by forging a genealogical relationship with the classical past, I concentrate on a later invention to the Troy-England tradition, the figure of Criseyde. Criseyde emerges in the twelfth century as a figure whose betrayal of her lover Troilus provided misogynistic medieval readers with a knowable moral lesson to explain the Fall of Troy. In the minds of medieval readers, Criseyde became, a historical figure whose actions foretold the inherently untrustworthy dispositions of all courtly women. Chapter two offers a focused reading of Chaucer’s revisionist account, Troilus and Criseyde, which not only challenges the historical record, but also the very possibility of a knowable past. I explore the relationship between Chaucer’s narrator and Criseyde in order to show how Chaucer’s Troilus attempts to un-know Criseyde through an ethics of re-telling that focuses on the moments that exceed narrative certainty. Judging by the impressions that Chaucer’s ambiguous heroine created for generations of readers, it becomes clear that Chaucer’s text successfully re-opens the question of English history Criseyde was invented to help settle. In chapter three, I turn to a dream vision that fits neither Kathryn Lynch’s rubric for the “high medieval dream vision” nor the demands for clarity to which other thirteenth-century literary narratives worked toward. The Middle English elegy Pearl, written in the late fourteenth century, challenges the epistemological demands of its genre by insisting that even within the scene of dream revelation, divine knowledge remains suspended in the impossible-to-reach realm separating material from divine worlds. As a poem, Pearl tests the very boundaries the maiden cautions against, raising a paradox: to what degree can one communciate the immaterial knowledges that escape human cognition while writing from within the material world? I look more specifically at the relationship between a complex history of pearl symbolism and contemporary theological, mathematical, and scientific debates in order to show how Pearl reveals a shared concern among these discourses regarding the incommensurability of language and faith. Rather than affirm the pearl as an object that the good Christian can obtain or recover, Pearl interrogates the limits of symbolism and material knowledge to instruct the dreamer in exactly what can and cannot be known about loss. The final chapter addresses the political stakes of literary unknowing through a reading of one of the most lasting legends in European history, the legend of Prester John. Although a twelfth-century invention, the figure of Prester John maintained a mystique, and an unknowability, well through the thirteenth century’s investment in debunking Eastern splendor. In fact, many of the tropes of wonder, suppressed by more naturalistic travel accounts, survive through the Letter of Prester John. I argue that as historical belief in a kingdom of Prester John began to fade, the hope he inspired survives through literature, where John cements his importance as a figure who came to represent the untapped potential of the geo-political unknown. Given the legend’s association with a fantasy of a globalized Christendom, fiction provides a fitting landscape in which his unknowability can be less problematically explored: here John’s elusiveness becomes not a hindrance to finding his kingdom, but indicates the degree to which, through literature, he guards and continually reshapes the limits of what was geographically knowable. As my conclusion explores, the ultimate purpose of this dissertation is to outline a reading method applicable to a number of late-medieval texts. I offer unknowing as a reading ethic that underwrites a late-medieval movement toward understanding the literary as a sovereign discourse. By focusing on four better-known figures of medieval literary history, I create a background of historical certainty against which the literary “poetics of unknowing” labors.

Intellectual Life in The Middle Ages, ed. C. M. Smith, B. Ward,