No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from the Shipman’s Tale to Melibee Karla Taylor Surprisingly, Chaucer's Tale of Melibee enters the Canterbury Tales as the solution to an aesthetic problem. The Host interrupts Chaucer's first tale, Sir Thopas, with an expression of sensory displeasure and (since at root the aesthetic concerns the senses) a qualitative evaluation: "Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche," he tells Chaucer, adding, "Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!" (VII 923, 930).1 The Host's earthy disgust points to the send-up in Sir Thopas's stultifying tail-rhymes—every one in the book, and every one hagridden with cliché. All form and no content, Sir Thopas betrays the obsolescence of the tail-rhyme romance, which had transplanted an Anglo-Norman tradition into English.2 Since Anglo-Norman was no longer anyone's native language by the late fourteenth century, such romances were residual cultural and literary forms. Chaucer's "rym dogerel," introduced as a "rym I lerned longe agoon" (VII 925, 709), is mired in nostalgic iteration. Cast in a form no longer capable of renovation (or so this introduction suggests), Sir Thopas presents the upheavals of a multilingual culture as an aesthetic problem. The terms with which the Melibee is introduced are also aesthetic. Chaucer forewarns his audience that his version of Prudence and Melibee will differ from its predecessors in form, though not in meaning.3 Most insistent among the differences, indeed the stylistic signature of the tale, are its doublets, which Chaucer defends as somwhat moore Of proverbes than ye han herd bifoore Comprehended in this litel tretys heere, To enforce with th'effect of my mateere. (VII 955-58) [End Page 298] Broadly, the ethical and social problem the Melibee treats is how to diffuse the violence of a powerful man, allegorically by fostering self-governance within Melibee's wounded mind, and, more naturalistically, by reconciling Melibee with his enemies. The formal and linguistic properties of the doublets, in which Chaucer never settles for one way of saying something when he can find many, address this problem as effectively as the semantic content they encode. The Melibee, I will argue, entails the emergence of a new civic vocabulary in English as the solution to the problems of a fragmented society; in this solution, the aesthetic form of the doublets plays a decisive part. Since the aesthetic dimensions of both tales treated in this essay—the Melibee and its mirror-image Shipman's Tale—rely, moreover, on linguistic variety, the dynamic delineated here creates an aesthetic that is both social and semantic. Social and Semantic Aesthetics The social dimension of aesthetic forms is transparently recognizable in medieval social theory.4 The Book of Nature was the work of Deus artifex, its proportion, measure, and harmony embodying the aesthetic as the principle of divine creation. The ideal human social order conformed, in turn, to the pattern of the natural cosmos: the hierarchical ranks—rising from peasants to tonsured clerics and mounted warriors, crowned kings and mitred popes—mirrored those of created being, from stones, plants, and animals through humans, stars, and angels. The ordered analogies offered a social theophany to match the theophany of the natural world. Thus the aesthetic was both a shaping influence on social conceptions (such as estates theory or the theocratic theory of kingship) and powerful evidence for their rightness. The aesthetic resemblance of the social to the natural justified the social status quo—and, more elusively, offered a pleasure like that afforded by the patterned symmetries of the planetary spheres or chambered nautilus shells. The faithful mirroring of apparently natural givens is a conservative social use of aesthetic forms. The capacity of the aesthetic to mystify entrenched ideologies in this manner sometimes results in its perceived opposition to history.5 The social dimension of the aesthetic, however, need not serve to naturalize human power or ideas. The aesthetic can also provide a means to grasp social and cultural realities through intentional human artifacts, or, for the artisan, a means to forge such realities. Thus, for instance, traditional oriental rugs illustrate a different dynamic interaction among formal and social aspects of...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.