Matter and Form in Medieval English Literature

Justin Barker, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation, “Matter and Form in Medieval English Literature”, investigates the relationship between Aristotelian philosophy and vernacular poetry. By challenging the commonly held view that medieval (particularly Aristotelian) views on matter do not contribute to theories of medieval poetry, I argue that these views should inform our understanding of late medieval poetics. To this end, I show that poets used objects as metaphors to express how a writer should think about literary matter and form. In doing so, poets draw from the Aristotelian idea that together, form and matter create substance; and these same poets rely on objects, in their narratives, as a way to explore this idea. The writers I investigate thus use objects to think about literary craft in concrete terms. By extension, I examine how, throughout the medieval period, Aristotelian matter and form presented intellectual challenges to philosophers, from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham, who questioned how we come to know and interpret the matter of the world around us. Their debates influenced how late medieval authors constructed views on authorship and perceived their own literary authority relative to their subject matter. While no single source documents the extent of a poet such as Chaucer’s dependence on university learning, I argue that philosophical textural culture, popular vernacularizations of science, and allegorical poetry (e.g., Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose) allow us to plot the transmission of Aristotle’s theories of matter and form into late medieval vernacular poetry. In particular, this project examines how poets subtly invoked Aristotelian theories of matter and form to explore authorship, literary authority, and authorial control of subject matter, as well as how these theories invite us to interrogate the author-audience relationship, the role of vernacular instruction, and the signification of language. To that end, each chapter investigates how fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors, including Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Capgrave, drew from Aristotelian theories of matter and form to interpret the poetic matter and form of their own writing. Chapter one demonstrates how Aristotelian debates about the structures of the material world (i.e. about matter, form, and substance) dovetail with Chaucer’s poetic concerns about literary creation and interpretation, particularly in the Squire’s and Manciple’s Tales. Both tales, I show, examine how the material world has the potential to shape poetry. Chapter two turns to a canonical, frequently taught, and conceptually complex fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and argues that scenes of the material world, in particular, illustrate that the poem is deeply entrenched in the material world and that the material world contributes to the text’s poetic function. The third chapter shows that medieval views of matter as indeterminate illuminate Thomas Hoccleve’s and John Metham’s views on authorial identity and poetic authority in response to the challenges of their subject matter. In it, I contend that these authors are important to the Chaucerian tradition because they expand Chaucer’s interests in the relation between literary matter and poetic authority. The final chapter takes up John Capgrave’s fifteenth-century saint’s life, The Life of Saint Katherine. I argue that the poem is concerned with the problem of matter: with how bodily and literary matter are unstable and changeable. And yet, by negotiating the discourses of Aristotelian natural philosophy and theology, he finds a way to remedy matter’s indeterminate status. This dissertation thus shows that metaphors drawn from Aristotelian matter and form allow poets to express their interests in how poetry is created, how knowledge is acquired from literary texts, and how creative insight emerges from shared knowledge of poetry and the material world.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Malo, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Medieval literature|Literature

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