The Wind in the Shell: Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Nonsignification

Abstract

This introductory section establishes that the question of linguistic nonsignification, apparently a modern concern, was already a matter of widespread and fundamental interest in the Middle Ages. Grounded in a close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, it gives an overview of nonsignifcation as it appears in the works of Anselm, William IX, Dante, and Marie de France, among many others. In light of these materials, and in that of what they share with the works of the modernist avant-garde, it points toward a properly medieval hermeneutics of obscurity and emphasizes three of the general implications of this book: that the subaltern status of medieval instances of nonsignification should not be overstated; that the English materials here studied emerge in a trans-continental context; and that the study of medieval nonsense consists in an archaeology of the category of the literary.