Good Literature [bonae litterae] and the Good

Abstract The humanist project was inherently contradictory, yoking together two traditions, the classical and Christian, that did not always match easily or smoothly. Doubts about that project, the usefulness of classical texts for Christian readers, emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, after the initial bloom of confidence in humanism began to fade. John Phillip’s play, The Play of Patient Grissell, explores these inevitable contradictions through a medieval exemplum, famously adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer: the story of Patient Griselda. For Philip, the exemplum as a form, a short story with a moral, provides an older model of engaging with classical texts that had been superseded by humanism, with its emphasis on imitation, its embrace of classical texts on their own terms. Reimagining this exemplum allows Phillip to confront the ways in which humanism has altered Christian morality even as it has insisted upon it.