Contours of reason: Dialectical habits of mind in medieval and Renaissance dialogue poetry

This dissertation charts major conceptual innovations in medieval and Renaissance dialectical theories as a context for interpreting the poetic dialogues in The Owl and the Nightingale, Piers Plowman, Pearl, The Faerie Queene, and in the poetry of Andrew Marvell. During this period, dialectic experienced subtle changes that can indicate significant transformations in intellectual and cultural milieux. Since oral discourse is traditionally the heart of dialectic, dialogue poems can serve as reliable gauges for measuring the novel concepts in dialectical theories introduced by scholastic and humanist dialecticians and for measuring the substantial changes in medieval and Renaissance beliefs about habits of mind. The flexible interplay between dialogue poetry and the art of dialectic can thus enlighten our historical understanding of the contours of reason during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.;The poetic dialogues analyzed in this thesis variously exemplify and modify the state of the dialectical art. The debate between the owl and the nightingale amusingly parodies the dialectical strategies outlined in John of Salisbury's widely influential Metalogicon. Later in the Middle Ages, Piers Plowman and Pearl assimilate principles of dialectical terminism, the dominant dialectical theory of the time, into dialogic passages that allegorically represent the powers and limitations of rationality in their dreamers' spiritual pilgrimages. Spenser's Faerie Queene similarly shows the mediative role reason plays in The Redcrosse Knight's spiritual revelation by criticizing aspects of the dialogue between the hero and Contemplation that incorporate Peter Ramus' reformed dialectical method. Andrew Marvell's dialogue poems afford a retrospective of medieval and Renaissance dialectical innovations and suggest a tension between our habits of mind and the rational language we use to express them. While none of the poets I study were practicing dialecticians, their active, often defiant, responses to their intellectual heritage represent the centrality of dialectical habits of mind in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.