Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition

White, Hugh

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187301.001.0001

Cited by 41 publications

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“…Winthrop Wetherbee’s contribution to R. F. Yeager’s 1991 Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutability, Exchange , for example, examines both English poets’ discourse of authority in relation to the allegories of the Rose and Boethius. Hugh White’s 2000 Nature, Sex and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition also compares the influence of the Rose on Gower and Chaucer, returning again to the realm of personification studies and characterizing Gower as better reconciled to the Rose ’s depiction of a problematic Lady Nature. The first international meeting of the John Gower Society, held in 2008, bodes well for an increase in scholarly attention to all aspects of Gower’s works, including Gower’s relation to the Rose .…”

Section: Middle English Poetry and `Rose' Reception In The Age Of Chamentioning

confidence: 99%

TheRoman de la roseand Middle English Poetry

Kamath¹

2009

Literature Compass

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The late medieval French allegory, Le Roman de la rose [The Romance of the rose], the conjoined production of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, has long been recognized as an important literary influence on Middle English poetry. The majority of recent studies focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s translation, citation, and adaptation of the Rose. Directions in scholarly study include increasing attention to the formal complexity and polyvalence the model of the Rose provides, on‐going interest in constructions of sexuality and gender, and a greater emphasis on the inter‐relation of Chaucer’s response to the Rose with the responses of French and Italian poets, including Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Deguileville (or Digulleville), Christine de Pizan, and Giovanni Boccaccio. The discovery of a new manuscript fragment of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose and the re‐assessment of earlier linguistic exchange also set forth interesting possibilities for future exploration. Beyond the field of Chaucer studies, scholars of late medieval England’s alliterative poems, notably Cleanness but also Piers Plowman, have re‐examined the ways the Rose may have shaped the construction of devotional, sexual, and social ideologies within this poetic tradition. The growing interest in Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower and in the English poetry of the fifteenth century, especially the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, has brought further recognition of the Rose’s widespread influence, as well as the continued influence of Rose‐inspired intermediaries, including not only Guillaume de Deguileville and Christine de Pizan but also Evrart de Conty, Alain Chartier, and Charles d’Orléans. Recalling the attribution of the Rose’s authorship to an English ‘John Moon’ in early literary histories demonstrates one curious later misreading of Hoccleve’s Middle English response to the Rose and may also provoke a deeper appreciation for the strong continuity of interest in the Rose shared by French and English readers during the turbulent era of the Hundred Years War.

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Section: Middle English Poetry and `Rose' Reception In The Age Of Chamentioning

confidence: 99%

TheRoman de la roseand Middle English Poetry

Kamath¹

2009

Literature Compass

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“…Again Fuller reads as if the "actual discourse" of music theory takes place in a hermetically sealed world of its own. 31 Nature functions as a moral middle term in so far as it can be less valued compared to art (which requires human reason); see White (2000). Nevertheless the phrase "against nature" is always negative.…”

Section: Misunderstanding Gender and Its Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading and Theorizing Medieval Music Theory: Interpretation and Its Contexts

Leach¹

2011

Music Theory Spectrum

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“…If we are wrong about what people think about Nature, we will be hopelessly wrong about what they think – and feel – full stop. (White 2000, p. 2)…”

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“…3 3 Economou (1972, p. 2). In 2000, Hugh White added to Economou's study in his Nature, Sex and Goodness in the Medieval Literary Tradition by considering Natura in the tradition of English vernacular literature. He concludes that nature did not indicate how humans regarded their physicality and ‘situated‐ness’ in time and place.…”

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The Place of Nature in Twelfth‐Century Spirituality

Ritchey¹

2009

Religion Compass

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This essay considers recent scholarship on nature and spirituality in the twelfth century, the period when Europeans ostensibly 'discovered' nature. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways in which certain developments in twelfth-century Christian spirituality can participate in and enlarge the emerging conversation on the material conditions of human spirituality that is presently taking place in religious studies more generally as a result of our current ecological consciousness. Twelfth-century Christian spiritualities illuminate how people have created a material context through which they can better achieve spiritual experiences. Experiments in twelfth-century Christianity can help us greatly in thinking about how individuals and communities have crafted a place in the natural world as a technique for enhancing the experience of god's presence.Ecotheology, goddess religions, environmental ethics, ecofeminism, thea/ ologies: such varied subdisciplines, each having emerged roughly three and a half decades ago with the belated recognition of the destructive potential of human technology, indicate the degree to which the field of religious studies currently percusses with inquiry into the relationship of people's spiritual lives and the physical, environmental context in which they are inevitably entangled. This ecological consciousness has affected the study of religion, and of spirituality in particular, so that the role of place, that is, of the constructed material context of spiritual experience, has become critical to an appreciation of how humans order life in terms of god and ethical behavior. In this essay, I wish to consider recent scholarship on nature and spirituality in the twelfth century, the period when Europeans ostensibly 'discovered' nature. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which certain developments in twelfth-century Christian spirituality, as medievalists are currently examining them, can participate in and enlarge the emerging conversation on the material conditions of human spirituality that is presently taking place in religious studies more generally. Twelfthcentury Christian spiritualities show us some of the ways in which humans 'take place', to borrow a phrase of Jonathan Z. Smith (1987). They point to how people create a material context through which they can better 596 Sara Ritchey

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Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition

Cited by 41 publications

References 0 publications

TheRoman de la roseand Middle English Poetry

TheRoman de la roseand Middle English Poetry

Reading and Theorizing Medieval Music Theory: Interpretation and Its Contexts

The Place of Nature in Twelfth‐Century Spirituality

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