The ethics of courtly love: Narrative transformations in the later Middle Ages

My dissertation examines the evolving understanding of “the good” in late medieval English and French courtly poetry and moral philosophy. The sovereign good, understood as “enjoyment” in the Middle Ages, undergoes a radical change in the thirteenth century with the reception of the full Latin translation of Aristotle\u27s Nicomachean Ethics. I argue that the Ethics\u27 medieval commentators placed an emphasis on an imperfect good and that this emphasis helped to render ethics an earthly, practical science, and human life a narrative construct. Courtly poetry, I argue, also participates in constructions of enjoyment and addresses the issue of narrative identity from the standpoint of literary form. I frame my dissertation in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, specifically Lacan\u27s claim that courtly love is an ethical fraud that creates a falsely coherent narrative identity for the subject. I examine both the ways that, following Lacan, lyric and narrative modes gained an ethical weight in modern critical discourse, and the ways that the ethics of desire and enjoyment may be interrogated through a situating of Lacan\u27s critique in its historical context—specifically the context of medieval moral philosophy and courtly poetry. In tracing the medieval reception of the “new Aristotle”—in particular the reception of his ideas about human, contemplative happiness in Book X of the Ethics—one can trace the evolution of medieval ideas about pleasure, labor, joy, and the form of the good life. Examining the changes in the concept of enjoyment in both poetry and philosophy allows me to posit an ethical turn towards narrative in the late medieval period. This turn is reflected in an increasingly imperfect and mundane sovereign good, a good identified as a human labor of love that can be accomplished partly through an empathetic stance to literary narratives