Poetry does theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-poet

Abstract

What happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland. Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution - a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the century progressed. What had previously been the exclusive prerogative of a Latinate and clerical elite became in the later Middle Ages a matter of concern within vernacular culture, particularly the emerging category of literature. This newly defined and self-conscious literature provided not simply an arena in which theological questions could be raised; it also privileged a secular, humanist outlook that granted to earthly life its own legitimacy and dignity. In Poetry Does Theology, Rhodes argues that one of the distinctive qualities of modernity - its secular and this-worldly orientation - is a phenomenon that took root in England in the fourteenth century and found its primary site of development not in theological or philosophical circles, but in a vernacular literature that opened for inquiry the theological and philosophical questions that dominated the era.