Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature [Hardcover]

Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an ethics of the event. His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.Introduction: Conceptial Personae On Fortune, Philosophy and Fidelity to the Event Love and Ethics to come in Troilus and Criseyde Consolations of Pandarus: The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics Telling Fortunes in Lydgate's Fall of Princes Moral Luck and Malory's Morte d'arthur

Ethics and Eventfulness is a bold and learned attempt to rethink the influence of Boethius s Consolation of Philosophy on the English Middle Ages by re-positioning medieval thinking about Lady Fortune in terms appropriate to current philosophical and rhetorical discourses. Mitchell s analysis demonstrates both breadth and intimacy with medieval texts and their intellectual contexts, as he deals with Chaucer, Gower, Usk, Lydgate, Malory, and the little-known Chaunce of the Dyse. His fine grasp of contemporary thought allows him to ptopose some surprising congruences with more current idioms, including theories of eventfulness and moral luck. All of this is presented in a lucid and engaging style. - Peggy A. Knapp, Professor of English at , Carnegie Mellon University

J. Allan Mitchell aims to disrupt our usual understanding of ethics in late-ml#*