The Ordre of Her Dom: Judgment and Hope in Chaucer’s “House of Fame”

Abstract

This essay argues for a revival of utopian thinking through a careful investigation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch and its application to medieval literature. Although the European middle ages have from time to time been used as a source of cultural fantasy throughout the modern age, we seem to have ignored the potential for hope that medieval texts provide. Bloch’s concept of a not-yet-consciousness, a space in the human imagination where the future is imagined and interrogated, is entirely appropriate for understanding how we might reinvigorate utopian thought. When we apply Bloch’s theories to the obscure dream vision House of Fame by Geoffrey Chaucer, a startling vision emerges: Chaucer’s poem becomes a vehicle through which a young poet imagined a world in which poetic fame could be understood, and, more importantly, controlled. This fourteenth-century fantasy of a science of fame gives modern readers a sense of hope that their world, too, might be more easily grasped and ordered.