Edwards, Michael (Author)
Fourteenth-century theologians like Thomas Bradwardine and William of Ockham show increasing tendencies both to express their problems in terms of geometry and to reduce the role of logic in theology in favor of greater emphasis on the role of scriptural interpretation. Following suit, the Pearl Poems address a number of the central theological controversies of the fourteenth century, such as the power of God's grace, God's knowledge of future contingencies, and the role of free will in sin, through scriptural interpretation that in several places uses geometry as a pedagogical tool, as with Gawain's pentangular catalogue of virtues. Despite a fascination with mathematics, however, the poems address their issues in imaginative terms through reference to scriptural authority, explicitly rejecting logic. Beyond simply rejecting logic, the poet stays very close to the Merton School in his evocation of mathematics as a reflection of an order that transcends logic and mathematics. This dissertation begins by examining the role that mathematics was beginning to take in late medieval theologies and how the study of mathematics interacted and interfered with the study of revelation. The determinism implied by mathematical theories of natural order particularly problematized questions of free will, grace and prophecy, the issues that are central to the Pearl Poems. After placing the poems in the broader context of mathematical theology, the dissertation spends four chapters, one for each poem, examining the poet's concept of _clannesse_, or ``cleanness,'' as it relates to an Aristotelian ethic of harmony and balance that is also turned into aesthetic principle. Part of my argument entails demonstrating how the poet extends this concept of _clannesse_ into the very forms of the poems themselves in the elaborate proportional structures of the poet's verse forms. Several scholars have suggested that these numeric structures are related to the poems' thematic content, and the final chapter of this dissertation will show that, indeed, the poet's numerical formalism is intimately tied to his overall treatment of the problem of grace and free will.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/01 (2005): 186. UMI pub. no. 3161418.
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