The Other Courtly Figure: Medieval Paradiastole

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In its original form, the morally problematising and category-bending figure of paradiastole – also in Latin called distinctio – hinges on the idea of the virtues and their ‘adjacent vices’: that is, vices that look like virtues, even though they are not the same. Examples would be the virtue of thriftiness and the vice of meanness, or the virtue of courage and the vice of foolhardiness: although they are they are crucially different, they look dangerously similar. Quentin Skinner is the great exponent of the satirical and philosophical work of paradiastole in the early modern period. Skinner believes that this figure, widely recognised in the Classical period, entirely disappeared in the Middle Ages; but in my recent work I have shown that this is emphatically not the case – it is pervasively present in medieval pastoral, devotional, satirical, philosophical and literary writings.  

I have also come to see that the ‘adjacencies’ of medieval paradiastole may not always involve the vices and virtues: although paradiastole compares categories that are like and yet unlike, these need not be moral categories.  In this lecture, I will explore how we find paradiastole and the language of ‘adjacency’ at work in a very different context – the medieval courtly literature of fin’amors, erotic desire or ‘love’. This is a literature characterised from its inception by the way that it combines and oscillates between contrasting or opposed, but also adjacent, views of ‘love’. Readers have long recognised the multiperspectivalism of this literature, analysing it in terms of paradox and wit, and more recently in terms of irony, play or contradiction. I suggest that viewing it through the lens of paradiastole allows us to see especially sharply how this literature acknowledges that in the writing of desire these different perspectives – however distinct they may seem – are disturbingly imbricated and inseparable from each other. I will discuss some passages from troubadour songs, then, at more length, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose; I will end up with some reflections on Troilus and Criseyde and Guillaume de Machaut’s Voirdit.