ABSTRACT

This article explores deeply unsettled aspects of medieval discourses on usury and neighbor love during the later Middle Ages. A comparative analysis of the anonymous fifteenth-century poem The Childe of Bristowe, and Chaucer’s well-known late fourteenth-century work, The Prioress’s Tale, uncovers differential medieval valuations of what is “owed” to the neighbor in ethical as well as monetary terms. I ask how ideas of neighborly obligation and sin stack up in these two very different meditations on ethical relationality, community, and spiritual debts, against a background of market-driven monetary practices. The usurious Christian father in The Child of Bristowe reveals the fault lines of Christian theological discourses on usury, as well as some possibilities for recompense and renewal in this theological system, in terms of the dual commandment enjoining both love of Father and love of neighbor. Where neighbor love fails, in The Prioress’s Tale, it is at the boundaries between and within communities, where ethical searching gives way to false certainties and the insistence that there is nothing more to know about who the neighbor is or what we might owe him.

摘要

本文探讨了中世纪后期关于高利贷和邻居之爱的中世纪话语中尚未解决的问题。比较分析十五世纪的匿名诗《布里斯托的柴尔德》和乔'十四世纪晚期的著名作品《修道院的故事》，揭示了中世纪在道德和金钱上对邻居的欠款的不同估值。 。我问，在市场驱动的货币实践背景下，关于道德关系，社区和精神债务的这两种截然不同的冥想中，关于邻居义务和犯罪的思想是如何堆积的。布里斯托韦儿童中的高利贷基督教父亲揭示了关于高利贷的基督教神学话语的断层线，以及在结合了父爱和邻居爱的双重诫命的情况下，在这种神学体系中进行补偿和更新的可能性。在邻居的爱情失败的地方，在《小修道院的故事》中，这是在社区之间和社区内部的界限，道德搜索让位于虚假的确定性，并坚持认为对邻居是谁或我们可能欠他的东西一无所知。