"Otium," "Negotium," and the Fear of "Acedia" in the Writings of England's Late Medieval Ricardian Poets.
- Author/Editor
- Sadlek, Gregory M.
- Title
- "Otium," "Negotium," and the Fear of "Acedia" in the Writings of England's Late Medieval Ricardian Poets.
- Published
- Sadlek, Gregory M. "'Otium,' 'Negotium,' and the Fear of 'Acedia' in the Writings of England's Late Medieval Ricardian Poets." In Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, eds. Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 17-39.
- Review
- In this lead essay to a collection of studies on the literary and cultural history of leisure in England, medieval to postmodern, Sadlek reprises the major concerns of his earlier studies "John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' Ideology, and the 'Labor' of 'Love's Labor'," (1993; see JGN 18.1) and its expansion in "Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower "(2004; see JGN 29.2). While work, busyness, and productivity anchor Sadlek's earlier studies, here he reorients, at least rhetorically, to their flipsides: leisure, idleness, and "acedia" or sloth, covering some of his previous territory (e.g., Chaucer's "Troilus" and Book IV of Gower's "Confessio"), but adding discussion of leisure and aristocratic love in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and leisure and sloth in "Piers Plowman." Relations among the classical/medieval notions of "otium," "negotium," and poetry as work also receive revised emphasis, the latter linked with Petrarchan humanism. Along the way, several claims about Gower are made forcefully: in CA Gower "is at his most creative in that he mixes aristocratic love with Christian morality and creates modalities of the Seven Deadly Sins within the context of the religion of love" (27), and CA is "made difficult because of the unorthodox blending of two different kinds of codes: the code of Courtly Love and the code of Christian morality" (29). Sadlek finds ironies in these tensions: though "otium" "was the foundational quality that made aristocratic love possible," Genius "systematically describes what it might mean for a lover to suffer from slackness, pusillanimity, forgetfulness, negligence, somnolence, depression, and even idleness" (27). On the productivity of poetic work, "we see [in CA, Book IV] a defence of the writer's 'otium negotiosum' that is not too different from that of Petrarch. Yet the emphasis is completely different. The writer here, unlike Petrarch, refuses to acknowledge the leisure that made his writing possible but tucks his defence of writing in the larger context of a celebration of legitimate work. He presents mental work as the clear equivalent of manual labour" (29). In his summary conclusion, Sadlek asserts that "the fundamental positions of Chaucer, Gower and Langland on 'otium' are not--in theory--so very different from that of Petrarch. The critical difference, however, is in emphasis. Chaucer, Langland and Gower, men from the middle to lower levels of medieval English society, had deeply imbibed the Christian distrust of 'acedia.' Whereas, a generation earlier, Petrarch felt free enough to celebrate his own 'otium' and that of monks, the Ricardian authors accepted 'otium negotiosum' uneasily, insisting that it be defended only within a broader and more urgent moral directive toward productive activity" (36). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations