The Second Nature: Habitus as Ideology in the Ars amatoria and Troilus and Criseyde

Author: Fewer, Colin

Source: Exemplaria, Volume 20, Number 3, Fall 2008 , pp. 314-339(26)

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Abstract:

Influenced by the work of K. B. McFarlane, New Historicist critics have characterized subjects in late-medieval English society as highly mobile and autonomous within complex networks of mutual dependence—a situation which is not represented in medieval social theory and for which no descriptive vocabulary existed. These critics have read Chaucer and other late-medieval writers as engaged with rendering visible these new social structures. However, little attention has been given to these writers' concern with the practices by which medieval subjects were prepared to participate as agents in new social structures. Accounts of the virtues, I argue, provided medieval thinkers with a vocabulary eminently adaptable to the representation of such practices. In the work of Ovid, medieval writers found a precedent, albeit an elusive and problematic one, for applying the classical and patristic concept of habitus to discover the operations of what we would today call ideology. This use of Ovid as a source for the concept of institutions and social identity as "habits of thought" is particularly clear in the character of Pandarus in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

Keywords: TROILUS AND CRISEYDE; HABITUS; CHAUCER; OVID; HABIT; ARS AMATORIA; REMEDIA AMORIS

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175330708X334556

Publication date: 2008-09-01

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