Abstract
This essay takes Langland’s personification of the ‘childische’ Charity as a model for negotiating critical and creative modes of knowing. Charity’s affective plasticity evokes the experience of immersive reading and demonstrates the aesthetic and ethical rewards of suspending critique. While Charity’s otherworldliness ultimately reinstates the necessity of critique, the process of reckoning with Langland’s figure adumbrates a charitable reading practice that this essay describes as a liberal art, an opening of the narrower concerns of self and present time to otherness and historical difference.
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Notes
‘Et dixit amen dico vobis nisi conversi fueritis et efficiamini sicut parvuli non intrabitis in regnum caelorum’ (Matthew 18:3). All citations of the Vulgate refer to Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem.
All Piers Plowman references are to the C-text in Langland (2011), indicated by passus and line number. Modern English translations are my own.
Although not a dedicated subject of study, charity was something of a guiding principle and goal in the study of the arts. See, for example, John of Salisbury’s defense of eloquence (the subject of rhetoric, and of the trivium more broadly) as the ‘means of brotherly charity’ (John of Salisbury, 1962, I.1). In Augustinian exegetics, the liberal arts prepare the student for the higher study of scripture, whose final aim is the revelation of charity. According to Augustine, every interpretive crux should be decided in such a way that it ‘build[s] the double love of God and of our neighbor’ and ‘contribut[es] to the reign of charity’ (Augustine, 1958, I.36.40, III.15.23). I discuss D.W. Robertson’s application of Augustinian charity to the study of medieval literature at the end of this essay.
Consider the conventional association of poverty and freedom and, conversely, wealth and care, as, for example, in Piers Plowman C.12.153–55a, and in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, which quotes Juvenal: ‘The povre man, whan he gooth by the weye,/Biforn the theves he may singe and pleye’ (Chaucer, 2005, III. 191–94).
‘Cum essem parvulus loquebar ut parvulus sapiebam ut parvulus cogitabam ut parvulus quando factus sum vir evacuavi quae erant parvuli’ (1 Corinthians 13:11).
The Vulgate differs slightly from Langland’s rendition of the line: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).
‘Omnia ero quaecumque vultis ut faciant vobis homines et vos facite eis’ (Matthew 7:12). See Piers Plowman C.16.306a. On the association of Christ’s command in Matthew 7:12 with the love of God and neighbor, see Wattles (1996, 56). On its association with natural law, see Pennington (2011).
Paul Ricoeur observes that Christ’s formulation of the golden rule in the Sermon on the Mount transforms the ‘logic of equivalence that governs everyday morality’ into a ‘logic of superabundance’ that operates according to an ‘economy of the gift’ rather than one of exchange or equity in the strict sense (see Ricoeur, 1995, 300).
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Davis, R. Childish things: Charity and the liberal arts. Postmedieval 6, 457–466 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2015.31