The philosopher, the preacher, and the poet : sadness and suffering in late medieval English literature

Abstract

My objective in writing “The Philosopher, The Preacher, and the Poet” has been to setup a framework for properly understanding how some late medievals might have thought about literature and the emotions. If our aim is to better appreciate why artists and authors of late medieval England depicted sadness and suffering in the way that they did, it is important to understand the intellectual, as well as the social, contexts in which they were producing these texts. Section one aims to present an account of late medieval theory of mind and emotion in a way that a literary or art historian interested in the late Middle Ages will find informative and engaging. The aim of the section is to better understand how medievals might have thought about the capacity of a text or image to elicit an ‘affective response’ in a viewer or reader, and how they would have explained the relevant phenomena. The second section, “The Preacher,” focuses on the pastoral texts written by Robert Holcot, a philosopher-theologian who was not only intimately familiar with the theories of mind and emotion developed in the Scholastic context, but was also responsible for communicating about sadness and suffering through the development of literary techniques and narrative structures. As we shall see, these techniques were subsequently employed by Middle English poets for similar purposes. In the final part I concentrate on the discourse of poet and Privy Seal employee Thomas Hoccleve; my purpose in this section is to demonstate that an awareness of late medieval intellectual contexts can significantly enrich a modern scholar’s understanding of Middle English representations of sadness, madness, and pain.