Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition.
Blamires, Alcuin
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ix + 278 pp. ISBN 0-19-818730-0. $65.00.
Characterized by meticulous and undogmatic scholarship, Hugh
White's book will be an indispensable guide to the
contradictoriness of Nature in medieval literature. In fulfilling its
aim to `demonstrate the complexity of the tradition of thought of which
Gower and Chaucer were heirs' (p. 7), it also scotches a
long-standing myth that medieval culture comfortably harmonized the
concept of the natural with the rational and moral. This is hardly a
minor matter.
The `tradition' is found to be haunted by an authoritative
`Ulpianic' definition of natural law as `what nature has taught all
animals', especially about sexual drive (p. 21). How was Nature to
be recuperated for morality and reason, if it was an ineluctable
instinct towards fornication or polygamy? White shows how the
scholastics resorted to a claim that fornication is natural to humans as
a genus but hot natural to them as a species. Alan of Lille sought to
shore up the reasonableness of Nature by shifting responsibility for
libido to Venus and Cupid. Further chapters go on to inspect more old
ground afresh (what kind of sub-rational force is Jean de Meun's
Nature?), and they spring surprises, too. Renart le Contrefait (begun
1319) defensively alleges that Nature's providential sexual design
is thwarted by `bad habits' (`male acoustumance') that humans
import into their nature (pp. 169-70).
Chapter vi builds on the author's previous publications to
make a classic statement on Gower's sense of Kinde as entrapment in
the Confessio. Maturely engaging with the poem's inability to
sustain a view of Nature as mediator between the instinctual and
rational, White refrains from invoking irony to remove the poet from the
problem. Instead he emphasizes how the poem's narratives of
same-sex and incest relations project Nature as an undifferentiating,
irrational sexual impulse. Moral Gower proves deeply susceptible to `a
current moral pessimism about nature in the sexual sphere' (p.
202). This is the best brief study of the Confessio I have read, with an
original reading of the ending as a bonus.
The book's final chapter on Chaucer is nearly as impressive.
Its hypothesis that Chaucer exposes the concept of an ordering,
beneficent Nature to erosive scepticism is exemplified from
Chaucer's habit of debasing Boethian Nature to the `lowest common
denominator' in humanity. The elaboration of this hypothesis in
discussions of The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls sets
new parameters for criticism of these two poems. Troilus then provides a
splendid finale, as White cogently argues that the poem outgrows its
early enthusiasm for a law of nature that binds humans into a
providential order. He suggests that, like Gower, Chaucer leaves us here
with a sense that humanity is let down, even victimized, by a Nature
that is pervasively destructive.
Nature, Sex, and Goodness is a thoughtful, widely informed,
open-minded book with a rare cohesion of purpose. Eschewing
new-historicist and other theoretical discouses, it moves tenaciously
and lucidly among primary sources in a way that C. S. Lewis would have
approved, while calculatedly shaking up the very medieval `world
view' Lewis helped to construct.
ALCUIN BLAMIRES
London
