J. Allan Mitchell's first book was interested in the ethical choices that Chaucer and Gower open to readers; he demonstrated the contingent nature of each narrative decision and the unpredictability of readers' responses. Mitchell's second book is less interested in the dynamics of reading than in the textual depiction of "the hazards of experience" (1) and the problems of moral choice that arise from complex interplay among intention, circumstance, and action. Mitchell's analysis of medieval Fortune through modern philosophy of the event is timely and provocative, his range of late-medieval texts well-chosen, and his analysis attuned to the ethical complexity of those texts. The book resituates Fortune as a flexible concept rather than a mystification of events, and reframes Boethius in order to argue that medieval writers dealt seriously (that is, philosophically) with moral luck: the problem of how far events and accidents of birth and circumstance make ethical action possible.
An introduction entitled "Conceptual Personae" lays out the book's project: an exploration of Fortune's status as event, that is, as a figure for the contingent happenings that characterize human experience in the temporal world. To unpack the "banal commonplaces" of Fortune, Mitchell categorizes events as disparate as love, political violation, social contest, and even "the textual condition itself" as challenges to ethical living (2-3). Whereas Fortune has sometimes been reduced to a normative principle, Mitchell seeks its underlying relationship to the startling and the unexpected. In this he departs from "two identifiable prejudices" about Fortune, one in which Fortune merely mystifies "true" causes of events, and another in which Fortune typifies the Age of Faith as an age of passivity and fatalism (6-8). Instead, Fortune should be understood as a medieval expression of the struggle to respond ethically to accidental circumstances.
Chapter 1, "On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event," sketches a long view of the philosophy of eventfulness, in which modern theory of the event helps overcome ways in which "the old term 'fortune' threatens to foreclose debate... Anachronism, as this chapter will argue, indeed has its advantages" (11). Anachronism refers to the condition of the event, defined as it is by temporal discontinuity (what makes the event "startling"); anachronism also describes Mitchell's methodology, discovering surprising (dis)continuities between modern and medieval texts (25-26). If the argument for the relevance of theory to medieval texts reinscribes our field's resistance to theory in order to refute such resistance, nevertheless the refutation is elegant and the embrace of theory suggestive. Mitchell argues that Boethius responds to Augustine's articulation of human accident as "alienation from Providence" (12) by developing the possibility that Fortune can be providential--coherent from the perspective of divinity, even when to humans it appears unmotivated. But Mitchell productively insists that the Consolation foregrounds Boethius's situatedness, the accidents of education and politics that constitute his identity, and in fact the fortuitous nature of human identity and experience in general: "Calibrated to the needs of the moment, events are no less fortuitous for being divinely ordained" (18). Moral decisions thus entangle the individual in a complex web of intentions and circumstances, so that "individual identity and ethical values" are not defined by "the pure, immovable condition of the soul" but "ever contingent" (18). Mitchell connects Boethius's phenomenology of Fortune to later medieval neo- Aristotelian moral psychology, principally Duns Scotus, whose notion of haecceitas or indivisible "thisness" grounds events in the irreducible singularity of individuals (22). In a turn reminiscent of Bruce Holsinger's sustained examination of modern theorists' medievalisms, Mitchell turns to Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy of the event derives in part from a dissertation on Scotus. [1] "For Heidegger the event (das Ereignis) is existence conceived of as the vivid, pretheoretical involvement in the world as opposed to a detached theoreticism that stands over and against being and devivifies life" (24). By exploring the genealogy of the event from Scotus to Heidegger, Mitchell renders Boethian Fortune phenomenological. He is interested in the way events individuate humans, defining the idiosyncrasies of moral choice based not on theories (or general principles) but on unmediated life experience.
Chapter 2, "Love and Ethics to Come in Troilus and Criseyde," builds on the book's central question, now turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to explore the moral responsibilities of Troilus and of Criseyde. The transition from Heidegger to Levinas is unmarked, and this reader wondered what justification Mitchell might offer for choosing to glance at questions of haecceitas and Being instead of grounding the whole book in a fuller analysis of Levinas, whose thought seems to lie so much at the heart of Mitchell's approach. Levinas, he points out, views ethics as less a choice than a happening; in particular, "love is a 'supreme adventure' that 'is also a predestination, a choice that had not been chosen'" (32). Mitchell links this notion of ethical passion and passivity to Troilus. When he applies it to Criseyde, especially in the moment when she is traded for Antenor, he raises an interesting version of the conundrum of her responsibility: "Criseyde's experience in the political sphere may render Levinasian ethics inadequate, even repugnant: she may have no chance but to be 'passive,' but not in an ethical sense anyone is now willing to accept... What place is there for ethics as adventure when the causes of events are so overwhelmingly politically determined" (34-5)? Mitchell nonetheless argues that, in a sense, Criseyde's limited choices typify the constraints upon any ethical action, since ethics is not based on moral principles but on fundamentally asymmetrical, contingent relations that change according to context: "I am not simply restating the idea that moral agency is affected by time and change, but proposing that it is so constituted" (41). Far from a question of agency, then, the question of Criseyde's moral choice--and the attendant question that the chapter raises, the reader's ethical judgment of Criseyde--must rely on acknowledgement of both her political constraints and her irreducible singularity (44). Mitchell's analysis insists on the radical contingency of courtly love as depicted in the poem, neither defending nor blaming Criseyde for her betrayal but outlining instead the circumstantiality of all moral choice. Despite a somewhat thin engagement with the history of the critical conversation, this analysis sheds new light on the problem of moral agency that has always bedeviled the poem's readers.
Rather than develop the way Heidegger and Levinas illuminate medieval literature of courtly love, the chapters that ensue are grounded in medieval philosophy. Chapter 3, "Consolations of Pandarus" The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse," begins by returning briefly to Boethius and Chaucer, about whose relation one might have expected to see more in the previous chapter. The "consolations of Pandarus" refer to the way in which Chaucer and other medieval writers use Boethius to explore contingency: in response to the Consolation, Chaucer's Troilus is "alive to the way events are open-ended, contingent, futural" (52). Looking at Boethius's version of "Orpheus and Eurydice" through the lens of sexual love, Mitchell discovers that even Boethius does not entail "simple moralizing against beastly 'bodily jolyte'" (51). Usk responds to Boethius via neo-Aristotelian ethics, which privileges moral particularism. In Usk, Mitchell finds an openness to love as fortuitous event, since it depends upon the beloved's irreducible singularity in order to be reciprocated or satisfied: "In this conception the freedom of the will is radically constrained and exteriorized,...as the lover prostrate before the beloved awaits what has yet to come" (61). In the analysis of the Chaunce of the Dyse, a fifteenth-century game of chance in which a verse impersonation is associated with each different roll of the dice, Mitchell explores the way in which the game emphasizes the unpredictable aspects of amatory fortune.
Chapter 4, "Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics," extends the argument of Mitchell's first book, which emphasized the moral pragmatism of Gower's Confessio. The new argument moves away from the amatory realm altogether and emphasizes the event of translation. Mitchell explores Gower's treatment of kynde as a vernacularization of clerical discourse on natural law, suggesting that far from simply importing clerical authority, Gower expands its field of application to achieve something closer to the sense of community and affinity identified by Andrew Galloway. [2] Gower uses the notion of natural law, that is, to generate an idea of vernacular ethics (77). The Latin summary and English "Tale of Pope Boniface," along with a Latin political poem entitled "O deus immense," demonstrate ethical pragmatism and interrogate the clerical value of natural law (77-84). A brief coda on "moral murmur" is suggestive: here Mitchell floats the idea that Gower's career may show a gradually increasing openness to "dissident claims of wider social conscience" (86). Given Mitchell's deep knowledge of Gower's Confessio and the scholarship on it, this reader would be curious to hear more about the way in which Gower grapples with love as ethics. What ethical consequences for the event of translation are entailed in Gower's exposure as senex amans, a man finally excluded from love, the very basis of Levinasian ethics?
Chapters 5 and 6 concern Lydgate and Malory, respectively. "Telling Fortunes in Lydgate's Fall of Princes" once again demonstrates that Fortune embodies multiple events, and argues that Lydgate's poem is essentially conflicted about the moral consequences of tragic events. The chapter contains rich readings of the staged conflict between Fortune and Boccaccio in Book 6 of the Fall of Princes and of the way in which Lydgate, following his patron Duke Humphrey's command to append morals to each story of a prince's fall, nonetheless manages to show the radical contingencies of both Fortune--"Fortune stands for what is otherwise refractory to explanation" (95)--and language, which turns out to be "at least as difficult to stabilize" as historical events. Indeed, language (translation) was characterized in the previous chapter as event; here, Lydgate expresses a desire that his language (rhetoric) be eventful, "have effects in the world" (99), but ends up recognizing that his meaning is fortuitous, based on the experience of the reader. Such consciousness of the unpredictable fruits of rhetoric extends to Lydgate's "fantasy of patronage" in the face of Humphrey's political vicissitudes (109). The link between Fortune and occasion, and hence the rhetorical idea of decorum, underlies some of the chapter's insights.
The book's final and strongest chapter, "Moral Luck and Malory's Morte Darthur," finds in romance an abiding connection between fortune and "adventure-seeking knights undertaking brave forays into the unknown" (111). Here Mitchell articulates the fortuitous nature of events in terms of the philosophy of moral luck, a concept that underlies much of the rest of the book and could be more explicitly connected to Heideggerian philosophy of the event and Levinasian problems of ethics and otherness. The chapter's argument, grounded in readings of the young Gawain and Balin, is that Malory's book "is a study of ethics occasioned and conditioned by temporal events that confound class and category... exert[ing] pressure on the values, duties, and determinations of the noble knight" (115). Mitchell is interested in the nuances of ethical responsibility in charged or conflictual circumstances, like Gawain's inadvertent murder of a lady in the early days of King Arthur's court. It is impossible to judge Gawain, he insists, "apart from eventualities" (119): moral action is informed by luck, and it is this fact of fortuitous experience that Malory's text reveals. Similarly, the unfortunate Balin is destined both to a certain chivalric privilege (removing a sword meant for him) and misfortune (dealing the Dolorous Stroke). As with the final throes of Arthur's kingdom itself, the plurality of potential causes makes no one cause sufficient to explain Balin's doom or that of the Round Table in general. Although Mitchell links the problem of moral judgment to the individuation of the knight, ultimately he finds that Malory's book is an "analysis of events impinging on moral agency"--in essence, a philosophy of moral luck.
Mitchell frankly reads literary texts as philosophies: the ultimate goal and reference point of literature on Fortune is always the contingent, unpredictable nature of experience, that which lies outside or beyond the text per se. Texts destabilize moral absolutes: Fortune is by definition that which foils coherent causality. Formal efforts to recreate, order, or mystify experience are implicitly suspect. Of course, identifying the philosophical aims of literary texts need not come at the expense of formal analysis--and certainly Mitchell's book contains some excellent formal insights. But the book also registers the competing demands for concision and breadth that so often force scholars to short-circuit crucial links between theory and literary form. This reader would have welcomed more synthetic reflection on such issues in what is otherwise a provocative and ambitious project. Mitchell adds a wholly new dimension to ongoing conversation about ethics in late-medieval literature.
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Notes:
1. The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and The Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005).
2. "The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: from Gratitudo to 'Kyndenesse'," Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 365-83.