Chaucer and the Ethics of Time

By Gillian Adler

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer’s sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer’s diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters’ ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838377

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NEW CENTURY CHAUCER

Chaucer and

the Ethics of Time

N E W C E N T U R Y C H A U C E R

Series Editors

Professor Helen Fulton, University of Bristol

Professor Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University

Editorial Board

Professor Ardis Butterfield, Yale University

Dr Orietta Da Rold, University of Cambridge

Dr David Matthews, University of Manchester

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are the most-studied literary texts of the Middle Ages, appearing on school and university syllabuses throughout the world. From The Canterbury Tales through the dream visions and philosophical works to Troilus and Criseyde, the translations and short poems, Chaucer’s writing illuminates the fourteenth century and its intellectual traditions. Taken together with the work of his contemporaries and successors in the fifteenth century, the Chaucerian corpus arguably still defines the shape of late medieval literature.

For twentieth-century scholars and students, the study of Chaucer and the late Middle Ages largely comprised attention to linguistic history, historicism, close reading, biographical empiricism and traditional editorial practice. While all these approaches retain some validity, the new generations of twenty-first-century students and scholars are conversant with the digital humanities and with emerging critical approaches – the ‘affective turn’, new materialisms, the history of the book, sexuality studies, global literatures, and the ‘cognitive turn’. Importantly, today’s readers have been trained in new methodologies of knowledge retrieval and exchange. In the age of instant information combined with multiple sites of authority, the meaning of the texts of Chaucer and his age has to be constantly renegotiated.

The series New Century Chaucer is a direct response to new ways of reading and analysing medieval texts in the twenty-first century. Purpose-built editions and translations of individual texts, accompanied by stimulating studies introducing the latest research ideas, are directed towards contemporary scholars and students whose training and research interests have been shaped by new media and a broad-based curriculum. Our aim is to publish editions, with translations, of Chaucerian and related texts alongside focused studies which bring new theories and approaches into view, including comparative studies, manuscript production, Chaucer’s post-medieval reception, Chaucer’s contemporaries and successors, and the historical context of late medieval literary production. Where relevant, online support includes images and bibliographies that can be used for teaching and further research.

The further we move into the digital world, the more important the study of medieval literature becomes as an anchor to previous ways of thinking that paved the way for modernity and are still relevant to post-modernity. As the works of Chaucer, his contemporaries and his immediate successors travel into the twenty-first century, New Century Chaucer will provide, we hope, a pathway towards new interpretations and a spur to new readers.

NEW CENTURY CHAUCER

Chaucer and

the Ethics of Time

GILLIAN ADLER

illustration

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2022

© Gillian Adler, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN        978-1-78683-836-0

eISBN      978-1-78683-837-7

The right of Gillian Adler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham, United Kingdom

To my parents

and to Hunter,

caro mihi valent stillae temporum

the drops of time are so precious to me

Augustine, Confessions, XI.2

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1Elegiac Time and the Pleasure of Forgetting in the Book of the Duchess

2Seeing Time and the Illusion of Control in Troilus and Criseyde

3‘What may ever laste?’: Narrativising Transience in the House of Fame

4The Process of Time in the Parliament of Fowls

5Nonlinear Time in Chaucer’s Frame-Narrative and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Itake pleasure in recording my sincere appreciation for the vibrant conversations I have had with colleagues and mentors over the years in which this book has evolved. I am especially grateful to Peggy Ellsberg, who has been an extraordinary adviser, interlocutor and friend since I first began reading Chaucer. Special thanks to Christine Chism, Matthew Fisher, Arvind Thomas, Zrinka Stahuljak, Thomas O’Donnell, and William Shullenberger for their unstinting encouragement, feedback and kindness. I am indebted to Paul Strohm, as this book developed in unexpected ways from our frequent discussions of time in medieval life, and from his generous support and friendship. I would further like to thank the editors and staff at the University of Wales Press, who have advocated this book from the beginning and assisted me during various stages of writing and revising. Finally, my most profound debts are to my siblings and my parents, to whom this book is lovingly dedicated.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Individual works by Chaucer are abbreviated in accordance with The Riverside Chaucer, p. 779.

INTRODUCTION

Somewhere along the road from London to Canterbury Cathedral, Harry Bailly, the host of the pilgrimage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , worries aloud about the passage of time. In a harrowing speech, he repeatedly personifies time as a destructive force. ‘The tyme wasteth nyght and day’, Harry Bailly remarks, figuring ‘nyght’ and ‘day’ as victims, rather than fragments, of time (MLT 20). Time is a thief, which ‘steleth’ these durations from human possession, but also a precious belonging, the loss of which ruins (‘shendeth’) us (21, 28). This series of proverbial analogies continues as Harry Bailly compares time to virginity and, adopting a more sinister tone, associates the loss of the present moment with corporeal decay. ‘Lat us nat mowlen thus in ydelnesse’, he directs the company of pilgrims, concluding his moralistic sermon on the tragic, irreversible flow of time with the gruesome image of mildew and rust corroding sluggish bodies (32).

As a master versifier of the aphorisms of time and the self-appointed timekeeper of a storytelling contest, Harry Bailly seems peculiarly unaware of his own susceptibility to ‘ydelnesse’. He delivers his lengthy speech to ensure the progress of the competition during the course of pilgrimage and, specifically, to hasten the Man of Law, the pilgrim lined up to speak next, to commence his narration of a tale. Although his knowledge of how to tell the hour of the day is apparently superficial (‘he were nat depe ystert in loore’), his assessment that the sun has run ‘the ferthe part, and half an houre and moore’ of the artificial day reflects such a degree of learnedness and precision that he is able to conclude the hour is ‘ten of the clokke’ (4, 3, 14). According to Peter W. Travis, this moment is remarkable as an early instance of a literary character figuring out ‘the exact, equinoctial hour of the day’ through ‘a technically convoluted temporal periphrasis’.1 However, it turns out to be, quite frankly, ‘wrong’, a fault in timetelling that matches Harry Bailly’s inability to monitor the passage of time during his extensive admonishment against wasting it. His speech, marked by its length and the frequency of metaphors, constitutes a fitting preamble to the Man of Law’s own significant delay as soon as he is called upon to narrate. The Man of Law’s digression, cataloguing the very topics he will avoid discussing, is glaringly circuitous given that he has just promised – using formal legal language, no less – to begin. All of these temporal aspects of form in the Headlink to the Man of Law’s Tale indicate a humorous irony, as Harry Bailly is supposed to be an expert timekeeper and his pilgrims are meant to follow his lead.

The relationship between Harry Bailly’s pseudo-philosophical meditation on time and the narrative form it takes is a starting point for the present book, Chaucer and the Ethics of Time. This study analyses the interplay between the theme of time and the structures of time in several of Chaucer’s major works, arguing that it is key to seeing a ‘temporal ethics’ in his poetry – namely, that time is crucial in directing how human beings ought to behave. The moral dimension of time in Chaucer’s works is complex, suggesting the poet’s sense that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ uses of time and temporal perspectives depend on circumstances and intentions, rather than a categorical set of rules. As Mark Miller writes, philosophy for Chaucer ‘is more a matter of probing a difficult and evolving set of problems than it is of laying out doctrines that can be neatly summarised and classified according to schools of thought’.2 In this light, Harry Bailly’s own ‘ydelnesse’ is little indication that he wastes time; to idle has a ‘productive potential’, as Adin Esther Lears discusses, and even constitutes a sort of literary principle of the Middle Ages.3 In the literature that embraces this principle, according to James Simpson, an author ‘enacts yet somehow resists the possibility of literary waste’.4 Harry Bailly’s idleness in fact serves a variety of functions, including the broaching of time-related predicaments that form a thematic current throughout the Canterbury Tales and that recur in Chaucer’s other works. He is among many characters who call attention to dilemmas such as the elusiveness of the present moment, the inevitability of change and the ephemerality of temporal goods. Characters in Chaucer’s works lament sudden reversals of fortune, which creates the impression that chance prevails over free will in the determination of the course of their lives. They express fears that linear time-passage will hinder mortal pleasures such as creativity, labour and love, and, even when they become aware of temporal patterns and, conversely, the uncertainty of the ‘future’, to use Chaucer’s neologism, they find it difficult to instrumentalise their knowledge of time-concepts from the standpoint of history. Chaucer demonstrates tremendous sensitivity to the various ways in which time fragments human vision and, accordingly, affects ethical choices.

For all the speeches that bewail time as an ever-expiring commodity and a mutable phenomenon, however, Chaucer’s narratives provide as many counterpoints to the suffering of temporality. These narratives ponder not only time-related predicaments, but also the potential of time-perception to foster stability, order and ethical decision-making. Chaucer emphasises ancient and medieval virtues that were popularly allegorised as prophets or as skilled keepers of time, indicating the relationship between ethics and temporal consciousness. For instance, temperance, or the moderation of earthly pleasures, was represented in pictorial illustrations as a lady wearing a clock atop her head or clasping an hourglass,5 as this virtue was believed to help achieve a balanced life, characterised by an even tempo, and to foster self-restraint and self-regulation. Prudence, meanwhile, often was personified as a lady with three faces to signify that the individual who cultivated prudence, which Thomas Aquinas described as both a moral virtue and an intellectual virtue, predicated on reason, could use the knowledge of the past to make wise decisions in the present and for the future on behalf of both individual well-being and the common good of the community.6 Temporal understanding was also tied to other virtuous qualities, thought to foster a worldly ‘pacience’, which meant, according to the MED, ‘the calm endurance of misfortune’ and ‘forbearance’, deriving from the Latin verb patior, ‘I suffer’. Thus, when Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest describes the poor widow of his tale as having ‘in pacience ladde a ful symple lyf, / For litel was hir catel and hir rente’, he links her ‘pacience’ to her ability to endure the loss of good fortune since last being married and thus to suffer change in time (NPT 2826–7). This study seeks to demonstrate how Chaucer generates a literary and narrative ethics encompassing these various time-related virtues through temporal discourse, form and often the reciprocity between the two. Without imparting conventional moral dichotomies or dispensing simple keys to an ‘art of living’, Chaucer’s works suggest that one can take measures to develop an ethical temporal perspective and even rely on subjectivity to harness time to one’s individual advantage when grappling with the temporal dilemmas that arise from the position of historical immersion, such as the concern that there is no free will and that the human vision of time is fundamentally limited.

Recent scholarship by Eleanor Johnson and Jessica Rosenfeld has addressed the crossover between medieval ethics and literature, expanding previously narrow definitions to argue that medieval ethics is concerned ‘not exclusively … with political or interpersonal conduct’, as Johnson writes, but also ‘with bringing oneself to a deeper understanding of one’s soul and closer to an understanding of universal truths’.7 Johnson examines how the mixed form of medieval literary works effects a ‘protrepsis’, or ethical transformation, which involves self-understanding. Rosenfeld similarly focuses on ethics as a legitimate avenue to earthly happiness, rather than to God alone, in thirteenth-century writings influenced by the rediscovery of Aristotle. Both scholars thus reveal how medieval morality reaches beyond the individual’s relationship to the civic and the divine. They also envision the centrality of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy [De consolatio philosophiae] (524 CE) to how ethics unfolds in the narratives of late medieval writers, especially Chaucer, who translated and adapted a version of the Consolation into the Middle English work known as Boece. In the work of translating the Consolation (a title which henceforth will refer to the various forms of Boethius’s text that existed within the Middle Ages),8 Chaucer created a personalised source for many of the Boethian references he makes in his other narratives and discovered the possibility of enacting an ethical transformation in the reader by portraying the ethical transformations of characters.9 Building on discussions of the Boethian dimension of Chaucer’s narratives through the particular lens of time, this study considers how Boethius also imparted certain discourses and allegories with which Chaucer could explore the quest for worldly felicity and stability in his works. In the Consolation, the visionary dialogue between Boethius’s fictional self and the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy reveals the importance of an interior sense of time to this felicity and stability. Time manifests to the human eye as a haphazard phenomenon, perceived as the splintered dimensions of past, present and future, rather than as a continuous whole, but Lady Philosophy nonetheless locates redemption in the re-vision of time. Expressing the education of her pupil in terms of a medically diagnostic and curative process, she instructs Boethius to focus on God, who sees all of human history from a standpoint outside of time, and to renounce the trust he places in temporal goods, which makes him vulnerable to Fortune and, thus, to inevitable, cyclical disappointments. The concept of Fortune’s Wheel is based on a moral pattern in which the sin of superbia precedes a fall, but the Consolation contrasts this cycle with another, superior paradigm: a transcendent circularity that is, according to Lee Patterson, ‘a revolutus in ortus, a return to the fons et origo from which all being descends’.10 For Boethius, the reassurance of this model lies in the soul’s return to its true heavenly home after death, rendering earthly existence a temporary exile. Mortal time is an opportunity to develop and exercise virtue in corporeal form before adopting the divine perspective in due course. Accordingly, the processes of engagement and learning in the Consolation are as important as the philosophical message; as Johnson writes, the Consolation ‘enacts ethical transformation as a spectacle, as a real-time performance of Boethius’s psychological renewal’, and thus, it is ‘not simply about ethics’ but also ‘promises to do ethics’.11

These views are central to the sense borne out in Chaucer’s works that time-perception determines one’s moral understanding of and approach to the world. In many of these works, Boethius’s discourse of mutability echoes throughout the speeches of characters who suffer because they struggle to cultivate self-possession amid tumult; Chaucer at times positions such characters in contrast to other characters who appear to possess enough distance to channel the divine-like perspective of Lady Philosophy, such as Theseus of the Knight’s Tale. Responding to the sudden death of the young knight Arcite and the staggering grief of his loved ones, Theseus’s remarks amid crisis reveal the extent to which ethical vision is determined by external frameworks of time and change. His consolatory aphorism, ‘Thanne is it wisdom, as it thynketh me, / to maken vertu of necessitee’, comes near to expressing Lady Philosophy’s sense of order and view that subjective perceptions of time can improve one’s ability to live well in the present (KnT 3041–2). Theseus conveys the idea that we must reconcile ourselves to the sorrowful consequences of time, rather than deny that they will occur, and seek stability by contemplating and pursuing eternal ends. A consideration of the word ‘vertu’ in his speech underscores the potential of the human mind to overcome the tragedies of time; it not only implies ‘virtue’ in the sense of a moral quality, such as appears in the B-Text of William Langland’s late fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman (‘suffraunce is a soverayn vertue’),12 but also refers to a particular mental capacity, as where, in the Parson’s Tale, ‘vertu natureel’ is categorised with ‘subtil engyn’ and ‘good memorie’ (ParsT 452). The multivalence of ‘vertu’ gives further credence to the premise that Theseus’s speech alludes to Lady Philosophy’s consolation and the understanding that, although it would be counterproductive to attempt to control the forces of time, an ethical and philosophical distance from mortal affairs can help to diminish the effects of vicissitude.

Chaucer’s works suggest a similar distinction between the characters who suffer over time and the reader, whose quasi-eternal perspective, which grasps the time of the story totum simul, facilitates insight into the characters’ moral failures or faulty wisdom. This contrast evokes perspectives of time and eternity that may be traced back to not only Boethius but also St Augustine, whose Confessions (397–400 CE) emphasises the limits of human vision in opposition to divine omniscience and provides a lens through which to read the subjectivity of time in Chaucer’s poems. In Confessions, as in Chaucer’s poems, time, memory and ethics are intertwined. According to Brian Stock, ‘Augustine’s view of the way we should live our lives [our ethics] and the way we should conceive the nature of time were … in harmony’.13 In one of the earliest attempts to grapple with the measurement of time in Western history, Augustine posited that time is experienced internally and gauged according to the impressions of the external world left by the mind. The perception of time in three distinct dimensions (praeteritum, praesens and futurum) is an illusion of human consciousness, as the past and the future are merely extensions of the present moment, implying that the mind considers at any given moment the present simultaneously with alternate times, reflecting a distinctly personal time. The temporal heterogeneity of subjective experience that Augustine mulls over would seem to suggest that the individual possesses a mental capacity to manage time, and indeed, memory – for both Augustine and Chaucer – is not merely an inactive storehouse of images of the past that the individual uses involuntarily, but a vital faculty able to recollect the world of the past to serve the ‘now’. Hence, in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s narrator advises the reader to remember past heartbreak to feel sympathy for the present love story. The oft-cited phrase from the Legend of Good Women, ‘if that olde bookes were awaye, / Yloren were of remembraunce the keye’, similarly evokes the Augustinian emphasis on how memory – in this case, the remembrance of books – mediates and even constructs present experience (25–6). According to Mary Carruthers, the medieval scholar memorised books through rumination, accompanied by murmuring, so that the memory was akin to the stomach and the stored texts, to the food that was chewed and digested.14

Augustine himself exemplifies this point when he describes the distentio animi, the ‘stretching out’ of the mind or the soul in the region of dissimilitude, through the example of the hymn Deus creator omnium. Having memorised this hymn, Augustine claims he can measure duration when he recites it (a rather painful act, as implied by the sense of distentio)15 because at any given moment during recitation, he knows how close to or far from the beginning or end of the psalm he is:

Before I start, my expectation extends to the hymn as a whole. But once I begin, whatever part of that expectation I have plucked away goes into the past and is retained in my memory: the life force of my performance is in tension between memory (because of what I have already spoken) and expectation (because of what I have yet to say). My awareness is in the present though; and through it what was future crosses over to come the past.

[antequam incipiam, in totum expectatio mea tenditur, cum autem coepero, quantum ex illa in praeteritum decerpsero, tenditur et memoria mea, atque distenditur vita huius actionis meae in memoriam propter quod dixi et in expectationem propter quod dicturus sum. praesens tamen adest attentio mea, per quam traicitur quod erat futurum ut fiat praetertium].16

Memory enables expectation in Augustine’s recitation of the psalm, layering onto his present consciousness so that he may grasp the entire lyric simultaneously even as he recounts the verses in sequence. Augustine appears to address the past, the present and the future in equal parts, but in fact, as Carruthers points out, ‘his example of the hymn verse is one that privileges recollection’, and thus, ‘the whole problem of tempora, ‘times’, becomes a problem of memory’.17 This theory is inseparable from Augustine’s treatment of the concepts of eternity and duration, and, like many philosophers, including Boethius, he seeks to address the obstacle time poses from a viewpoint outside of time.18 Accordingly, as Richard Sorabji remarks, Augustine’s ‘solution’ to time ‘has the paradoxical effect of making time more like eternity’, which, he argues, ‘cannot … be intended by Augustine: he wishes to contrast God’s eternity with our time.’19 Indeed, avoiding the desecration of God that might accompany the individual’s mistaking of time for eternity, Augustine clarifies a distinction between the eternal present and the temporal present: ‘As for the present, should it always be present and never pass into times past, verily it should not be time but eternity’ [Praesens autem si semper esset praesens nec in praeteritum transiret, non iam esset tempus, sed aeternitas].20 The passage of time, in which the event of the present becomes the past, leads Augustine to synthesise his awareness of divine timelessness with his prayer to God: ‘you are eternal … you alone have immortality, because you are not changed by any kind of shape or movement, and your will is not modified over time’ [tu aeternus es, solus habens immortalitatem, quoniam ex nulla specie motuve mutaris nec temporibus variatur voluntas tua, quia non est immortalis voluntas quae alia et alia est].21

Augustine’s meditations on time in Confessions carry implications for narrative time and narrative itself, which makes a sense of time and history more exact and discernible to the reader. Narrative was thus an invaluable resource for Augustine, who understood, as Stock writes, that ‘humans have nothing but verbal or imagistic narratives to work with when they want to talk about themselves’.22 In Confessions, Augustine’s account of reciting a psalm narrativises the model of human temporal understanding, lending credence to Frank Kermode’s idea that ‘the virtual time of books … is a kind of man-centred model of world-time’, and that Augustine’s model ‘anticipated all the modern critics who wonder how it can be that a book can simultaneously be present like a picture … and yet extended in time’.23 In another example of the correspondence