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Medieval Nonsense
Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2021
About this book
In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, Jordan Kirk reveals the way that writers across the fourteenth century reckoned with the word as mere sound. Medieval Nonsense rebuts the idea that single-minded devotion to the kernel of meaning within the word motivated these authors in their engagement with vox sola, the mere utterance. Rather, they recognized the possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity, and they transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of nonsignification.
Identifies a medieval throughline to modernist literature's engagement with nonsense, forming a case-in-point that modernist ways of reading are appropriate to medieval materials and that accounts of nonsense as a modernist innovation must be rethought.
Author / Editor information
Kirk Jordan :
Jordan Kirk is Associate Professor of English at Pomona College.Jordan Kirk is Associate Professor of English at Pomona College.
Reviews
Robert Sturges, Arizona State University:
Medieval Nonsense makes a historically informed, theoretically sophisticated case for the centrality—indeed the foundational necessity—of the concept of nonsignification for medieval writers working across many fields of study and literary traditions, including linguistics, philosophy, theology, devotional literature, and hagiography.
Medieval Nonsense makes a historically informed, theoretically sophisticated case for the centrality—indeed the foundational necessity—of the concept of nonsignification for medieval writers working across many fields of study and literary traditions, including linguistics, philosophy, theology, devotional literature, and hagiography.
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
ix -
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The Wind in the Shell: Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Nonsignification
1 -
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1 Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine on Vox Sola
27 -
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2 Walter Burley on Suppositio Materialis
52 -
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3 The Cloud of Unknowing on the Litil Worde of O Silable
76 -
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4 St. Erkenwald on the Caracter
98 -
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Acknowledgments
127 -
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Notes
129 -
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Bibliography
157 -
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Index
183
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 25, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780823294497
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
208
This book is in the series
eBook ISBN:
9780823294497
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
