The Moral Status of the Natural in Middle English Vernacular Writings

Abstract

The natural was also a highly important concept for those who wrote less academically elevated devotional works, sermons, and moral treatises in the Middle English vernacular. This chapter reviews such writings, which may well have helped shape Chaucher's and Gower's thinking about the natural. It shows that the moral profile of the natural in these works looks very similar to that apparent in the academic writings. The vernacular writings of devotional and moral instruction also draw on an inheritance of academic clerical discourse. The overlap between the subsection headings in this chapter and those of the previous one points to this basic consonance between Middle English vernacular homiletics and Latin theology and law in the matter of the natural.