Romance Logic: The Argument of Vernacular Verse in the Scholastic Middle Ages [PhD thesis]

Courtly literature is a surprising index of language’s changing theorization during an important period for developments in Western logic. This dissertation characterizes the changing functions of rhetoric and poesy vis-à-vis the arc of dialectic’s fortunes between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Romance Logic discusses not only how vernacular romance in the medieval tradition utilized and coincided with the logic of its contemporary moment, but also argues that romance helped shape logic’s transformation through the Middle Ages. Focusing largely on oddities of narrative construction, this project investigates the properties of reasoning that are evident in vernacular verse and rhetorical arrangement over the long period from dialectic’s reign as the principal logic of the early Middle Ages to the emergent new logic in later Scholasticism.
Part I, “The Idea of Logic,” deals with the implications of dialectic as the basis of early logic. Chapter 1 discusses the centrality of the Aristotelian syllogism in early medieval thought, while Chapter 2 accounts for rhetoric’s accommodation of aspects of signification that escaped dialectic. In Part II, “Logic and the Enchanting World,” the tradition of vernacular romance gives a shape to the flexibilities of reasoning that could not be categorically systematized under dialectic alone. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 center on Wace’s Roman de Rou, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and Yvain. Here, romance features as a realm for imagining and assuaging various problems incurred by metaphysics and language philosophy of the period, dramatizing and thereby actively preserving narrative complexity.
Seeing in rhetoric and poetry critical elements of rational thought, romance argues the need for a metaphysical logic that can also accept complex and circumstantial information. Part III, “Escaping Logic,” thus examines forms of narrative reasoning in later Scholasticism that coincided with the transition to the era of the New Logic. These chapters explore poetic composition vis-à-vis the emerging logic of consequences that absorbed narrative contingencies into its framework as dialectic’s ambivalent status in later Scholasticism led to dialectic’s identification with rhetoric. Chapter 6 pursues the alternately dialectical and rhetorical lives of transsumptio, and finds transsumptio to be an expression of both logical change and narrative reasoning in the poetic manuals of Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Chapter 7 recovers Chaucer’s attention to the propositional logic of the fourteenth century, showing how his ironic poesy recognized contemporary changes in logic in order to build upon the foundation of philosophical thought that had been prevalent in an earlier tradition of romance.