Sir Gawain and Scholasticism

The following thesis makes a reading of the Middle English romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that contextualises the poem within the framework of Scholastic thought, focusing in particular on the influence of the Scholastic discussions of moral philosophy, in order to better understand the poem’s treatment of moral indeterminacy. My approach to the poem is one that focuses on a historical understanding of ethics that prevailed in the poet’s time, and so is historicist in a broad sense, but focused particularly on the history of ideas. Rather than trying to read the poem through the lens of later modern philosophical and critical understandings, I explore how the moral issues addressed within the poem would have been framed in the late fourteenth-century. My thesis centres on the argument that a familiarity with the Scholastic approach to moral philosophy is indispensable to an authentic reading of SGGK. The poem’s plot focuses clearly on the moral dilemmas that Gawain is faced with, and wraps these in a complex of moral quandaries, making an understanding of these in fourteenth-century terms imperative. From this premise, I argue that it is therefore of great importance to appreciate how these ethical issues were conceived of in the fourteenth-century. The suggestion that the moral hermeneutic of the poem emerges within a Scholastic frame is not new, nor is the suggestion that the poet is deeply interested in the tension between human weakness and Christian ideals. The following discussion of Scholastic thought includes a particular focus on the works of Thomas Aquinas, not because other medieval theologians deserve less attention, but because Aquinas’ pre-eminence and universal influence allows us to treat him as the most influential representative of that school of thought.