Medieval Nonsense
Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England

Jordan Kirk (Author)

9780823294466

Hardback, published 4 May 2021

208 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.466 kg

Five hundred years before "Jabberwocky" and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period's theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter.
This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. 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, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.

The Wind in the Shell: Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Nonsignification 1
1 Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine on Vox Sola 27
2 Walter Burley on Suppositio Materialis 52
3 The Cloud of Unknowing on the Litil Worde of O Silable 76
4 St. Erkenwald on the Caracter 98
Acknowledgments 127
Notes 129
Bibliography 157
Index 183