:Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEnlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Edited by Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 232.Ray SchrireRay SchrireTel-Aviv University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMorethe various tasks of the reeve written in Old-Englishan Anglo-Saxon poem about legendary kings and kingdomsthe names of God in Middle Englisha devotional mnemonic work based on the children of Jacobexegeses on the names of the rivers in paradisethe Middle English tradition of the Trojan War;the dream poetry of Chaucer and Douglascatalogs of trees among Elizabethan poetshumanist textbooks, administrative records, and Protestant playsPolemical, Reformation-era intrasentence inventoriesWhat all these texts have in common (hereafter, list 1) is that they are all discussed in the thought-provoking collection of essays Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. As the authors of this volume show (and as list 1 summarizes), lists—a literary form that has “not received much attention from scholars” (4)—were in fact found everywhere, from the most canonical to most obscure literary works of the Middle Ages and early modernity.What justifies bringing such diverse texts together in one volume is the intention to “offer answers to the question, ‘what are lists capable of doing in medieval and early modern literature?’” (8), as the editors of the volume write in the very helpful and generous introduction. Indeed, reading through the ten essays that comprise this volume, we learn that the lists recorded in list 1 can do quite a lot. They can raise questions of culture, history, and temporality (Andrew James Johnston); emphasize the ignorance of their writer (Alexis Kellner Becker); give the appearance of objective truth while at the same time undermine the notion of objective truth (Eva von Contzen); mark what is notable in each item (Ingo Berensmeyer); raise the soul to a state of ecstasy (Suzanne Conklin Akbari); dismantle the sacredness of the ancien régime (James Simpson); break and remake order like a kaleidoscope (Kathryn Mogk Wagner); serve as a mental map (Martha D. Rust); help identify paradoxes in intellectual movements and bureaucratic reforms (Alex Davis); relate a text to the genre of the epic (Eva von Contzen); bring order to the cognitive household (Wolfram R. Keller); help authors participate in a community of poets (Ingo Berensmeyer); destroy the flow of syntax (James Simpson); or lead to a sweet and eternal annihilation (Suzanne Conklin Akbari). As this list indicates (hereafter list 2), the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented in list 1.In sum, these essays demonstrate that we find lists in many literary texts (list 1) and that these lists can do outstanding things (list 2). But this volume does more. The introduction and the essays (naturally, some more than others) offer us helpful analytical categories to think about lists in general. We can thus come up with a third list that will offer scholars new ways to relate to any list according to criteria, such as—directionality or lack thereof (e.g., list 1 follows the order of the ten essays, while list 2 takes what I think to be a rhetorical order); exhaustiveness versus incompleteness, closedness versus open-endedness (e.g., list 1 aims to reflect each of the ten essays, while list 2 invites readers to add more uses as they read through the volume); shape (e.g., list 1 is vertical while list 2 is linear); attribution to an author or lack thereof; susceptibility to changes, mistakes, and reinterpretations; role in ordering or disordering knowledge; embeddedness within or independence from syntax; or degree of playfulness or seriousness. Some of these categories interact in interesting ways. For example, as Kathryn Mogk Wagner shows in her excellent essay, the fact that the lists of divine names were seen as lacking any clear author allowed them to be more easily edited and enlarged.The collection makes rewarding reading for literary critics and historians working on the periods discussed in this volume (and, frankly, scholars working on other literary traditions and periods will also benefit from diving into these essays). Its readers will become much more attuned to the lists found in their texts and discover sophisticated new ways of thinking about them. But by showing the richness of the subject matter and the abundant number of possibilities for approaching it, the collection also leaves important questions unanswered.For example, what is it in the list form that allows it to perform all the things that the authors of the essays show it does? At least some of the functions on list 2 could be achieved—and often are indeed achieved—by drawing on other poetic means, so why the list then? This question—the power of the list form qua list form—seems to be especially pressing considering that the editors invite the readers to think of lists “first and foremost as a form or way of thinking, a denkform” (8). And while some essays tackle this question directly, most do not, and there seems to be a very promising vein for future scholarship here, even in the cases already dealt with in list 1.More pressing questions follow. If the list is indeed a denkform, in what sense is it historical at all? Why was it, as the editors write in the introduction, that modern readers tend to skip lists, but that lists seemed to have a special power over premodern readers (2)? Put differently, what can we learn about the Middle Ages and early modernity by studying lists that were created in these periods? These questions are not easy to answer since lists can be found in most cultures and predate written literature to the extent that writing itself might have piggybacked on lists (most findings in cuneiform are lists of some sort and not fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh). If we actually want to historize the denkforms we encounter in our sources, we need to ask questions about oral versus visual transmission, or vertical versus linear presentation. The editors indeed raise such questions in the introduction by calling attention to the roots of narration found in cataloging (in fact, the Greek κᾰτᾰ´λογος still contains the notion of speech, λογος, moving downward, κᾰτᾰ) and reminding readers of the material foundations of listing (from list, a piece of paper or cloth) and enrolling (from roll, i.e., a vertical scroll). These issues, however, were not addressed in most of the essays in this volume (the essays of Akbari, Berensmeyer, and Davis stand out in their attention to the historicity of their lists or visual appearance). Without giving issues of materiality and sense modalities a more central place in the discussion, and perhaps also adopting a comparatist approach to the subject matter and broadening the discussion beyond literature, it is hard to understand the places lists occupy in our cognitive histories.These questions are a call to action. They suggest a few paths forward, following this timely volume and the important headway it has made into what is still barely charted territory. The handsomeness of the book, produced by the Ohio State University Press, and the bibliography that appears conveniently at the bottom of each page (and not at the end of the volume as is too common nowadays) make picking up this collection all the more inviting. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726022 Views: 47Total views on this site HistoryPublished online June 26, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.