ABSTRACT
That shame and morality undergird virtually all medieval English culture is a commonplace that few would challenge and fewer find interesting, but “blame” merits attention as a critical key to the enduring political value of English language and literature circa 1400. This chapter defines literature narrowly as creative “literary art” and understands politics expansively as “dynamic and negotiated power”; it also defines “blame” as a rhetorical technique useful at their intersection. Reading blame in context discovers a distinctly political theory: “blame” is an interpretive rhetoric that conceptualizes responsibility, guilt, and authority as intimately related, negotiable elements of power. This chapter reads canonical literature across genres to demonstrate that while Middle English texts do engage with overt political mandates and promote particular political interests, they succeed as art precisely when they rupture their mandates and cast doubt on their own interests. When the Canterbury Tales’ unreliable narrators eschew blame to implicate readers in authorship, when Arthur’s perfect knight divulges that shame and blame are negotiable and inferior to shared responsibility, and when Jesus censors what Roman soldiers know about colonial terror to bury imperial blame for his crucifixion, the rhetoric of blame unlocks moralities of shame, authority, knowledge, torture, and more.
