Jessica Hines's "Forms of Suffering"

Jessica Hines is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine where she specializes in Medieval literature and culture. She has a particular interest in the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race, as well as medieval and classical theories of ethics and the emotions.

Hines applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity, with the following results:

Page 99 is part of the introduction to my third chapter, "Pitous Need: Women's Thralldom and Christian Victorie in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." The page sets up a particular oddity in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales by the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The central conceit of the Canterbury Tales is that a group of travelers and pilgrims hold a storytelling competition to entertain themselves on their journey from London to Canterbury. The teller of this tale, a lawyer, opens by misrepresenting how a theological treatise that was hugely popular in the Middle Ages, Innocent III's On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), describes the pain of poverty. The Man of Law uses lines from Innocent to argue that it is terrible to be poor and wonderful to be a wealthy merchant; in contrast, Innocent argues that rich and poor alike suffer and that every person should feel compassion and anxiety for the suffering of others. The Man of Law then tells a strange story with little obvious connection to merchants or poverty: Custance, a Roman emperor's daughter, is married off to a Syrian sultan and then repeatedly set adrift at sea. Page 99 lays out this textual oddity and begins to explain it: Chaucer uses the tale to explore a medieval cultural anxiety about how to read accurately the signs of another person's need and then how best to respond to that need—emotionally, spiritually, and materially.

The Page 99 Test doesn't work particularly well for my book. If you looked only at page 99, you'd come away thinking the book is a dry account of everything Chaucer read, or of how scholars have historically tried to make sense of this strange tale and its seemingly mismatched teller. You wouldn't get a sense of the stakes of my argument—why anyone should care how the Man of Law talks about a (now obscure) medieval theological text.

What's interesting about looking at my page 99 is that it gives a sense of how I tend to tackle interpretative challenges: something odd is going on in one of Chaucer’s poems—why is it happening? Forms of Suffering contends that Chaucer reformulated a wide range of European discourses about pity and its practices for an English audience and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. For medieval readers, pity was closer to what we would call compassion, and it carried a sense of duty to care for those who suffer. And Chaucer brought to the fore pity's capacity to challenge—even overturn—unjust power structures such as those associated with class, gender, and race. Critically, however, he also explored pity's precarity: the ways it could easily slide from transformative justice into a weapon of oppression. Each chapter first identifies something strange in Chaucer's treatment of pity, then gives the historical context that helps explain that strangeness, and finally unpacks how Chaucer explores the ethical stakes of medieval ideas about pity. In this chapter, that context includes Innocent III and medieval debates over charitable aid to the poor, which worried about how to tell true need from feigned need. The stakes lie in how the tale's heroine, Custance, effectively uses rhetorical signs of pity to navigate her own experience of being rendered terribly needy and vulnerable. Page 99 sits at the transition from describing the oddity to unpacking the historical context.

Visit Jessica Hines's website.

--Marshal Zeringue