The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England

Galloway is interested the importance of gratitude to late medieval notions of faith and particularly of social relations. For contrast, he begins with the early medieval concept of gift-giving as way for ruler to earn both loyalty and praise. With the thirteenth century, he detects shift from the benefit to the giver to the of gratitudo, itself scholastic coinage which for Aquinas embraces religious reverence, familial and social loyalty, and more casual obligations one continuum (p. 369). Aquinas' careful ranking of relationships of servility and lordship implies kind of idealization of the system of feudalism. Vincent of Beauvais defines duty to repay benefits with interest, a direct use of the ethic support of profit economy, and gives fuller description of the evils of ingratitude. The discussion of Gratitude is especially prominent 14th-century England. In his Summa praedicantium, Bromyard discusses Ingratitude as subspecies of Avarice, and describes it as violation of the natural order. The latter notion finds special resonance ME, which both kynde and unkynde carry double meaning linking the natural with the moral. By blending nature with reciprocation, Middle English 'kyndenesse' shifts and social bonds away from hierarchy and towards affinity, and the exploitation of these lexical possibilities may easily be aligned with the many distinctive late medieval forms of or corporate identity which reciprocation and close affinity or ideas of such affinity cohere (p. 374). Ricardian writers particular pass beyond aristocratic emphasis on real kinship and writers' emphasis on humans' debt to God to wider concept of reciprocal social duties. Gower, MO, treats Ingratitude the tradition of Bromyard. Unlike Bromyard, however, Gower is led to close consideration of the interaction of different social groups or levels rather than any obligation (p. 376). Galloway also notes that Gower's conclusion to the discussion of Ingratitude MO (6673-85) seems to be informed by the double meaning of Middle English 'unkynde,' even though the pun cannot directly emerge the French (p. 377). In CA, however, kyndeness does not provide a simple key to social unity and morality (p. 377). The tale of Adrian and Bardus the inevitability, the 'naturalness,' of social differences rather than any naturalness the workings of gratitude. . . . The principal of gratitude finally invoked is the only hope for harmony between the disparate social realms of country, city, and court that Gower contemplates, but this principle is imposed by imperial fiat (p. 378). Langland makes perhaps the most ambitious effort to stretch this idea to contain vast and diverse English community (p. 379). Galloway emphasizes the neglected implications of Gratitude Langland's use of Kynde, and concludes that in his willingness to pursue the 'natural' or 'given' bases of communities of exchange broadly considered, [Langland] manages to present 'kyndenesse' capacious notion of cultural identity that depends neither on authoritarianism (like that of Gower's Emperor) nor even on the unity of the institutional church (p. 381). Galloway's general conclusion notes the varying concepts of community implicit the different writers' discussions of Gratitude. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.2]

Sociology · Classics · History · Medieval Literature and History

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