Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England

Medieval writers were preoccupied with the question of nonsense five hundred years before "Jabberwocky" and "Tender Buttons". This book shows that the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever. It investigates how 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 04 May 2021
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Before the advent of "Jabberwocky" and "Tender Buttons," writers had already delved into the realm of nonsense. However, despite the growing awareness of the prevalence of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice in medieval texts, there remains a prevailing notion that these phenomena are mere exceptions that defy the theological emphasis on the core of meaning over the mere letter. This book aims to challenge that notion by demonstrating that the central object of study in medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance that means nothing at all. Through a series of close and unconventional readings of works by figures such as Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it explores how a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized the potential within the accounts of language passed down from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. By reclaiming a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity, Medieval Nonsense offers valuable insights into the construction of medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems. It reveals how these texts were designed to hinder the faculty of interpretation and compel it to dwell on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the very encounter with language itself.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780823294466