Scholastic Persuasion in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love

Abstract

Because Usk was executed as a self-serving traitor, his biography has encouraged readings that blame the Testament of Love’s textual vagaries on its author’s ulterior motives which seem incongruous with his choice of the Boethian Consolatio genre. Broadening “Boethian” to include Boethius’s logical works, however, reveals that Usk based his textual strategies on long-standing and respectable conventions of logical plausibility dating back to Aristotle and Cicero and widely used throughout scholastic disputation. Using these logical “Topics” to validate the discussion between Love and the narrator, Usk seeks to transfer validity from the text’s arguments to himself, the author, and recuperate his character. In doing so, he develops a pioneering English philosophical vocabulary, similar to that of Langland and the Lollards. Identification of Usk’s logical strategies provides insight into Usk’s audience, education, and milieu, and suggests that Usk may be fruitfully considered according to contemporary fourteenth-century discourses of truth, public service, and vernacular philosophy.