THE SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND POETICS OF EXPERIENCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Project Information

SPPELME

Grant agreement ID: 101023762

DOI

10.3030/101023762

Project closed

EC signature date 15 March 2021

Start date 1 October 2021

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 245 884,80

EU contribution

€ 245 884,80

Coordinated by

ECOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ETUDES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SPPELME (THE SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND POETICS OF EXPERIENCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project examines the rise of interest in the idea of 'experience' during the later Middle Ages (ca. 1360–1450), with particular attention to the role of poets writing in vernacular languages, primarily English and French. The growth of interest in the problematic definition of 'experience' needs to be seen the context of the wider developments in European intellectual and scientific culture, over a longer period stretching from about 1200 to 1450.
The relevance of specifically literary texts to the history of western attitudes to experience in this period is twofold. Firstly, poets tackle the problem of 'experience' in a language that is accessible to readers who are not members of the elite community of intellectuals in the later Middle Ages, and whose thought is generally recorded in Latin alone, and often in texts that remain inaccessible to readers outside medieval schools and Universities. The growth of public, vernacular interest in the idea of experience accordingly suggests that this period marks a fundamental paradigm shift in cultural history at large, beyond the "ivory tower" of academic speculation studied by intellectual historians. Secondly, the formal characteristics of poetic fiction lend themselves particularly well to explore the problem of experience, in ways that differ substantially from the analytical tools employed by 'professional' intellectuals in the schools and universities during this historical period. In particular, poets during this period turn to fictional first-person narratives in order to articulate their own, lived understanding of the nature of individual, subjective experience, and to analyse the mental and affective mechanics of experience 'from the inside'. Narrative fiction in this period is increasingly utilised to conduct what we could designate as 'thought experiments'.
The project ultimately reveals that the nature of 'experience' became a popular topic of debate in society at large during the period in question. Late medieval definitions of experience, however, cannot be seen as heralding the emergence of modern experimental science in any simple and direct fashion. The project aims to illustrate how medieval ideas of experience were shaped by contemporary science, interiority, and anthropology: rather than arguing for the emergence of modern ideas of subjectivity and interiority in this period, then, the project argues for the need to understand such evolving concepts in their specific cultural and historical context.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project started by defining the relevant corpus of vernacular texts for analysis, primarily in medieval French and Middle English (WP1/D.1). Next, the project has traced the evolution of medieval theories of mind and knowledge, throughout the extended period between 1250-1400, in the works of scholastic writers (WP2): in particular, this has involved in-depth study of the Neo-Aristotelian tradition of Faculty Psychology, theories of perception, and theories of the soul, the internal senses, and cognition, produced by writers in the Theology Faculty and Arts Faculty of the medieval University, with particular attention to the intellectual debates at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. The next phase concentrated on tracing the dissemination of such theories and debates beyond the walls of the medieval University, with attention to a range of influential French poets, particularly Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, and Guillaume de Machaut (WP3): within the multilingual environment of English (or 'insular') literary culture, dominated by the work of such francophone poets, English poets active in the period 1360-1450 drew very heavily on this French tradition, and particularly on the tradition of allegorical and didactic literature. These poems often took the shape of dream-vision narratives featuring a first-person narrator/dreamer/protagonist. English poets were thus able to engage both with scholastic developments directly, through the work of scholastic authors, but also indirectly, drawing inspiration form the work of earlier generations of French poets active between about 1270 and 1360. This work also made possible a more precise semantic analysis of the vocabulary of experience in the work of the most influential English poets of the period, in particular Chaucer and Langland (WP4). During a further phase (WP5), the project produced a number of case studies of the attitude towards experience found in some of the most influential texts of the English canon, including work by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, Thomas Usk, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as in number of (largely anonymous) texts from the fifteenth century, many of which are translations or adaptations of earlier poems written in French. Dissemination included the organisation of an International conference; the organisation of 2 research seminars/workshops at the EPHE over two academic years; 4 presentations in workshops; 6 conference presentations. A total of 10 peer-reviewed scientific articles were completed during the fellowship (3 published; 7 in press or under review), work was begun on 1 monograph and 2 further scientific articles.
No specific website has been developed for the project

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Thanks to the multilingual and interdisciplinary groundwork carried out during the project, it is now possible to produce a more complete, balanced, and nuanced picture of the cultural, literary, and intellectual dynamics that cause the 'experiential turn' of late medieval English poetry, particularly between c. 1360 and 1410. On the one hand, this allows us to explain the development of a distinctly 'philosophical ' character in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), the most important and most influential English poet of the period. On the other hand, further study of later developments has also yielded fertile results: while English poetry from the period 1360-1410 is often characterised by its genuinely speculative, intellectually exploratory character, poetry written after 1410 is often marked by a far more cautious approach to philosophical problems, and to the problem of experience in particular. This suggests important new directions for revising well-established narratives about the 'decline' of English literary culture in the post-Chaucerian period: this decline has traditionally been explained on aesthetic grounds, with reference to the derivative and often uninspired nature of much fifteenth-century writing, hampered by the desire to emulate the literary style Chaucer; the investigation carried out for SPPELME suggests that the picture is more complex. In particular, the cultural and intellectual environment of the XV century became more intellectually cautious and conservative, marked by a 'backlash' against the daringly open-ended speculative character of poetry produced by Chaucer and his contemporaries. While XV-century poets imitated the literary style of Chaucer and his contemporaries, and continued to explore questions of knowledge, experience, and interiority in their poetry, they did so in far less adventurous ways. Increasingly, poets avoid interrogating the nature of experience and subjectivity, preferring instead to appeal to experience as a means of validating well-established, traditional, and conservative doctrines and opinions, rather than tackling open philosophical questions in exploratory fashion.

Experience