Gods Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

Gods Patients approaches some of Chaucers most challenging poems with two philosophical questions in mind: How does action relate to passion, to being-acted-on? And what does it mean to submit ones will to a law? Responding to critics (Jill Mann, Mark Miller) who have pointed out the subtlety of Chaucers approach to such fundamentals of ethics, John Bugbee seeks the source of the subtlety and argues that much of it is ready to hand in a tradition of religious (and what we would today call mystical) writing that shaped the poets thought. Bugbee considers the Clerks, Man of Laws, Knights, Franklins, Physicians, and Second Nuns Tales in juxtaposition with an excellent informant on a major stream of medieval religious culture, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose works lay out ethical ideas closely matching those detectable beneath the surface of the poems. While some of the positions that emergemost spectacularly the notion that the highest states of human being are ones in which activity and passivity cannot be disentangledare anathema to much modern ethical thought, Gods Patients provides evidence that they were relatively common in the Middle Ages. The book offers striking new readings of Chaucers poems; it proposes a nuanced hermeneutical approach that should prove fruitful in reading a number of other high- and late-medieval works; and, by showing how assumptions about its two fundamental questions have shifted since Chaucers time, it provides a powerful new way of thinking about the transition between the Middle Ages and modernity.