UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines experimentalist modes of inquiry in Middle English literature and natural philosophy. In the thirteenth century, natural philosophers at the universities proposed experimentalist procedures in which natural phenomena could be imagined and thus investigated. To do so, they relied on the concepts and methods of the Aristotelian corpus, as well as on an array of rhetorical and poetic techniques. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Middle English writers deployed and refined these procedures in their literary practice. A variety of vernacular works produced in this period—chiefly among them, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the York pageants of creation, devotional lyrics on the topic of the eucharist, Julian of Norwich’s Vision, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament—stage mental experiments that show how the material world might be perceived and probed for its imperceptible causes.