Medieval nonsense : signifying nothing in fourteenth-century England /

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Kirk, Jordan, author.
Edition:First edition.
Imprint:New York : Fordham University Press, 2021.
©2021
Description:187 pages ; 23 cm.
Language:English
Series:Fordham series in medieval studies
Fordham series in medieval studies.
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12596394
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780823294466
0823294463
9780823294473
0823294471
9780823294480
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:"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"--
Description
Summary:

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.

Physical Description:187 pages ; 23 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780823294466
0823294463
9780823294473
0823294471
9780823294480