Medieval Literary Ethics

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Special Session

Organizer Name

Emily Houlik-Ritchey

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of California-Santa Barbara

Presider Name

Emily Houlik-Ritchey

Paper Title 1

"Doctrine by ensample": Literature's Ethical Problem and Spenser's Aesthetic Solution

Presenter 1 Name

Maria Devlin

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Harvard Univ.

Paper Title 2

By Writing Amended: The Ethics of Interpretation in Hoccleve's Series

Presenter 2 Name

A. Arwen Taylor

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Indiana Univ.-Bloomington

Paper Title 3

The Virtues and the Will in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls

Presenter 3 Name

Sarah Powrie

Presenter 3 Affiliation

St. Thomas More College

Paper Title 4

Prosthetic Neighbors: Enabling Community in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle

Presenter 4 Name

Richard H. Godden

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Tulane Univ.

Start Date

11-5-2014 8:30 AM

Session Location

Schneider 1350

Description

This session explores the ethical poetics of the late middle ages and early modern period to help us better understand English literature’s ethical impulses, as well as those that guide our own critical practice as scholars today. The papers explore, from Chaucer to Spenser, and from Hoccleve to Arthurian romance, how early English texts diversely invest in complex ethical, philosophical, and moral discourses. What are the ethical questions that so motivate and drive late medieval English literature? How do these texts assess, adjudicate, and negotiate the "proper" boundaries of ethical action? And how do ethical theories (medieval and modern) inflect our own approaches to studying such writers in the 21^st century? This session assesses the complex ways literary texts engage the ethical issues of difference, community, interpretation, and aesthetics.

Emily Houlik-Ritchey