Philosophy in 14th Century Literature and Theology: Rethinking the Nominalist Controversy, Bradwardine, and Chaucer

Abstract

This study is concerned with the interdisciplinary analysis of representations of philosophy in 14thcentury England, particularly in works by Thomas Bradwardine and Geoffrey Chaucer, and the exploration of the intellectual and literary-aesthetic contexts in which these works have been placed. These contexts involve a conception of intellectual history that sees the 14th-century as dominated by a fierce polemic between the philosophical schools of nominalism and realism. Past scholarship has typically associated 14th-century nominalism with a progressive, humanist, and empiricist mind-set, and in this capacity has frequently portrayed nominalism as a precursor of the Renaissance and modernity. Realism, on the other hand, has been associated with a reactionary conservatism, and a clinging to increasingly outdated scholastic methods. Debates between nominalism and realism, also characterized as a ‘battle of the ways’ between a via moderna and via antiqua, were supposed to have resulted in a decisive nominalist victory. In this fashion, the ‘nominalist controversy’ has come to represent the symbolic enactment of a period shift from Middle Ages to Modernity. This conflict has been understood to have excited heated partisan debates not only amongst academics and theologians, but also in other cultural spheres, particularly that of literary production. While this model of intellectual history provides a clear and self-enclosed narrative of epochal transition, it has lately been subjected to withering critique: Not only has the ‘modernity’ of the canonical nominalists been called into question, even the notion that nominalism and realism can be said to represent distinct traditions of thought has now been largely abandoned by specialists. While these developments are increasingly absorbed in the field of the history of philosophy, they have had undeservedly little impact in other areas: In literary criticism, the methodology of the research paradigm of literary nominalism still dominates analyses on the role of philosophy in 14th century literary works. Literary nominalism perpetuates an obsolete model of intellectual history, which assumes nominalism to have embodied a proto-modern Zeitgeist. It heavily emphasizes analogic readings, and the ‘claiming’ of authors for either the nominalist or realist camp. It sees textual features like heteroglossia, play, openendedness, and irony as resulting from a nominalist mind-set, rather than inherent features of the literary text. Apart from its insistence on a nominalism / realism dichotomy, the way literary nominalism conceptualizes the interaction between philosophy and literature is also highly problematic, as it places literary works in a dependent hierarchical relationship to philosophy, allowing literature little generative force of its own. The central aims of this study are as follows: It contributes to the ongoing re-assessment of the 14th-century intellectual landscape through an analysis of Thomas Bradwardine’s De Causa Dei, and its place in the ‘nominalist controversy’. Bradwardine was frequently associated with a realist school and the via antiqua, and was placed in an antagonistic relationship to supposedly nominalist peers like William of Ockham. This study analyses the paradigm of literary nominalism, with the goal also of exposing the central flaws in its understanding of 14th century philosophy, its methodology, and in the relationship between philosophy and literature it proposes. It suggests potential methodological amendments, which are applied in a reading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, whose interpretation was also heavily warped by the problematic application of literary nominalist theories