Author: Ryan Buchanan Allen

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages:

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Over the past half-century literary critics have frequently depicted late fourteenth-century Middle English poetry, including dream-vision poetry, as endorsing nominalism. Scholars defending this claim have often started from a construal of nominalism now considered obsolete, yet it remains commonplace to find authors including Chaucer and Langland described as affirming nominalist views. This is unfortunate, for it is now known that late fourteenth-century English philosophers normally rejected nominalism. To the contrary, especially extreme forms of realism, the position opposed to nominalism, became preponderant. This thesis aims to restore late fourteenth-century English dream-vision poetry to its correct intellectual context. More fully, it contends that taking realism to underwrite the dream visions Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Chaucer's House of Fame unlocks insights foreclosed by the assumption that these poems presuppose nominalism. This thesis first clarifies the character of realism and nominalism in fourteenth-century England. Realism and nominalism have been mistaken for theological outlooks, and nominalism has been equated with skepticism. But medieval nominalists did not advocate skepticism, and realism and nominalism are fundamentally philosophical stances. I show that realism and nominalism centre on incompatible views about how language is related to reality and that, secondarily but not less importantly, realism and nominalism entail incompatible views about whether or not individuals are metaphysically interconnected by common properties. Another position, idealism, also enters the debate insofar as realists held that nominalism leads to idealism. I then turn directly to Pearl, Piers Plowman, and The House of Fame. My readings of Pearl and Piers Plowman propose that they present, respectively, heavenly delight and human nature in a realist light-i.e., as common properties. My reading of The House of Fame offers that this text casts nominalism as leading to idealism. All three interpretations further understand these works' authors, like contemporaneous realist philosophers, as deeming realism essential for ascent to the divine. Realism emerges as an important underpinning of poems which, by virtue of this realist basis, I consider visions of unity.