Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature

Abstract

Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature Jill Mann Girton College, Cambridge IN TIIE DEBATE between the Four Daughters ofGod in passus 18 of Piers Plowman, Peace, in the course of justifying the redemption ofman, describes the need for opposites to define each other. Without woe, we should not know the meaning of "weal"; without night, we should not be able to understand the meaning of "day." Just so, she concludes (lines 216-17): 1 1 All quotations ofPiers Plowman are from George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London: Athlone, 1975). Quotations ofChaucer are from F. N. Robinson, The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). John Livingston Lowes, "Chaucer's 'Etik,'" MLN 25(1910):87-88, claimed that Chaucer's reference below is not to the AristotelianEthics; he drew attention toJohn ofSalisbury's use of the term "ethicus" for writers of sententious tendency in general, and among them, for Horace, one of whose recommendations to moderation is cited byJohn with the preface "ut enim ait ethicus" (Policraticus 8.13). Interesting as this suggestion is, it is a perhaps un­ necessarily complicated way ofaccounting for the line in theLegend, particularly since Lowes does not discuss the evidence for Chaucer'sknowledge ofthePolicraticus, and other studies of this question have not been able to demonstrate more than a very limited indebtednessto this work; see W. W. Woollcombe, in Essays on Chaucer (London: N. Triibner, 1896), pp. 295-98; Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York: Mac­ millan, 1908), p. 93; and Thomas R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 3 vols. (London:James R. Osgood, Mcilvaine & C., 1892), 2:362-64. A further parallel with the Policraticus suggested more recently byJohn Fleming, in "Chaucer's Clerk andJohn of Salisbury," ELN 2(1964):5-6, is not, again, conclusive. As for the Ethics, on the other hand, although no complete translation into Latin was available before Grosseteste's version (produced in 1240-49), Latin versions ofbooks 2 and 3 (known as the Ethica vetus), and ofbook 1 (known as the Ethica nova), were already circulating widely in the thirteenth century (see Aristoteles latinus, pars prior, ed. Georges Lacombe, 2d ed. [Bruges and Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1957), pp. 67-71). I have, therefore, thought it worthwhile to quote some passages of the Ethics at relevant points in the following discussion. I quote from the edition of R.-A. Gauthier, Ethica Nichomachea, Anstoteles Latinus (Leiden and Brussels: E. J. Brill and Desclee de Brouwer, 1972) XXVI.1-3, 2. I have also used the four manuscripts ofthe Latin Ethics preserved in thelibraryofGonville and CaiusCollege,Cambridge, to whose Librarian I am grateful for permission to consult them. 17 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "...til modicum mete with vs, I may it wel auowe, Woot no wight, as I wene, what is ynogh to mene." It is the meaning of"enough"-more specifically, the meaning attached to the word in Middle English poetry- that I should like to explore in this paper. "Enough" is a simple, everyday word that is easily passed over, a prosaic word for a rather prosaic concept, we probably feel, thinking ofthe cautious, commonsense attitude expressed in proverbial phrases like "Moderation in all things," or "Enough is enough." But in late-medieval literature-in Chaucer, in the Pearl poet, in Julian of Norwich-it be­ comes a poetic word, a word that vibrates with emotional and intellectual connotations. A close examination oftwo texts in particular, Pearland The Clerk's Tale, will help show this. The term "enough," as the words of Peace have already reminded us, makes sense only in relation to other terms, and setting out some ofthem will provide an appropriate framework for the analysis ofthese texts and a guide to what is important in their own language. In the first place, "enough" is, by definition, the midpoint between "too much" and "too little," or between "more" and "less." To locate and to adhere to this midpoint is, according to the Nicomachean Ethics ofAristotle, to achieve virtue; "vertu is the mene, / As Etik seith," as Chaucer puts it in The Legend of Good Women (lines 165-66). Obvious enough in itself, this...