Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian

In the opening scene of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, the marquis Walter is confronted by his subjects who beg him with meek prayers and “pitous chere [faces]” to marry and produce an heir. In this moment, they seek from Walter something he is reluctant to give. An avid hunter and a confirmed bachelor, Walter exclaims, “Ye wol...myn owene peple deere, / To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me [never before thought to constrain myself].” Despite his lack of desire to constrain himself in marriage, however, Chaucer writes that the meek prayers and piteous appearance of Walter’s people “made [his] herte han pitee.” He subsequently vows to marry. The force of “made” is key for it suggests that pity acts in such a way that it compels the pitier to act counter to his or her desires. In the moment of experiencing pity, traditional power structures such as those of social status are, temporarily, suspended. Walter, who typically wields power over his people, comes under their power as his pity transforms his desires and overcomes his will, persuading him to see the justice in his people's demands.

My monograph, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity, examines the development and transformation of the language of pity in medieval English literature and culture through a study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. It argues that Chaucer reformulated trans-European pity discourses for an English audience, and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. The fin’amor tradition, Passion meditations, hagiographies, political treatises on common profit—all examined the formation and effects pity had on those who felt it. Chaucer drew on these traditions to craft his poetry, and he was one of the earliest English vernacular poets to make extensive and critical use of the language of pity. In each chapter, Forms of Suffering locates Chaucer within the traditions of his English and European interlocutors including Dante Alighieri, Christine de Pizan, John Gower, and Giles of Rome.

Chaucer’s writing on pity was not only among the first in English—it was formative. In his explorations of these trans-European pity discourses, Chaucer brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity’s work in challenging or even overturning traditional power structures such as social status, gender, religion, and race. Critically, however, Chaucer's consideration of pity also explores the precarity of pity: the ways that it could easily slide from transformative justice into a weapon of unjust oppression. As the rest of the Clerk's Tale evidences, the transformational power of Walter's pity is both limited and precarious. Walter's pity for his people shapes his cruel and tyrannical testing of his wife Griselda. Having experienced pity's potential to challenge traditional power structures, Walter comes to use pity as a tool by which to control his wife and shape political narratives of his own just goodness. Forms of Suffering argues that Chaucer's writing was formative in shaping an English medieval discourse increasingly critical of the sociopolitical and theological capacity of pity to act as a tool for challenging injustice and reforming oppressive structures. Chaucer's writing makes clear both the incredible appeal of pity’s power to challenge power structures as well as the ways that pity itself could and was manipulated by the powerful for their own ends.

This will be the first book-length study to address the medieval period’s interest in pity including its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In its interest in the precarity of pity, and the ways that pity was used to justify uses and abuses of power, it also contributes to recent work in gender and critical race studies on the role of narrative and aesthetics in the strategic management of social marginalization as exemplified in the work of Anthony Bale, Geraldine Heng, and Jonathan Hsy. Moreover, this study elucidates how Geoffrey Chaucer’s insight into the function of power in medieval pity shaped affective and ethical discourses crucial to understanding the long history of gendered, racial, and religious violence.