This chapter re-examines a series of late antique works on grammar, logic, and rhetoric that were to become authoritative textbooks for the Middle Ages. It poses the question of what medieval readers of these textbooks would have found in them if they were inquiring into the nature, status, and implications of vox sola, the bare utterance. Taken together, Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine point toward an account of the matter of language as neither meaningful nor non-meaningful; as containing within itself, however, the possibility of a total and permanent nonsense; and as capable of producing certain psychical effects in those who encounter it.
{"title":"PRISCIAN, BOETHIUS, AND AUGUSTINE ON VOX SOLA","authors":"J. Kirk","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.4","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter re-examines a series of late antique works on grammar, logic, and rhetoric that were to become authoritative textbooks for the Middle Ages. It poses the question of what medieval readers of these textbooks would have found in them if they were inquiring into the nature, status, and implications of vox sola, the bare utterance. Taken together, Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine point toward an account of the matter of language as neither meaningful nor non-meaningful; as containing within itself, however, the possibility of a total and permanent nonsense; and as capable of producing certain psychical effects in those who encounter it.","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122925679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter suggests that the anonymous mystical treatise called the Cloud of Unknowing should be read in the light of the linguistic accounts of nonsignification examined in previous chapters. What emerges from such a reading is the central importance of the meditation technique that the treatise recommends, which can be seen to consist in the mantric repetition of an utterance to the point of nonsense. What the Cloud-author invents is a means of transforming one’s own voice into a glossolalic instrument so as to produce a state in which the mind will encounter, as in Burley’s material supposition, its own failure to cognize; but here this same “unknowing” becomes an apophatic knowledge of God.
{"title":"THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING ON THE LITIL WORDE OF O SILABLE","authors":"J. Kirk","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.6","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter suggests that the anonymous mystical treatise called the Cloud of Unknowing should be read in the light of the linguistic accounts of nonsignification examined in previous chapters. What emerges from such a reading is the central importance of the meditation technique that the treatise recommends, which can be seen to consist in the mantric repetition of an utterance to the point of nonsense. What the Cloud-author invents is a means of transforming one’s own voice into a glossolalic instrument so as to produce a state in which the mind will encounter, as in Burley’s material supposition, its own failure to cognize; but here this same “unknowing” becomes an apophatic knowledge of God.","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"223 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116040357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter proposes that the anonymous poem St. Erkenwald should be recognized as a riddle, generated from a withheld word that is everywhere recognizable within it. The poem is engineered so as to set up, by formal means, a thought experiment that represents an intervention into some permanently and essentially unresolvable problems in the theory of signification: those of the theurgical and baptismal “characters.” Eluding scholarly attempts to reduce it to its supposed historical, political, or aesthetic stakes, Erkenwald would attain to the status of a properly literary work insofar as it constitutes in this manner a trap for interpretation.
{"title":"ST. ERKENWALD ON THE CARACTER","authors":"J. Kirk","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter proposes that the anonymous poem St. Erkenwald should be recognized as a riddle, generated from a withheld word that is everywhere recognizable within it. The poem is engineered so as to set up, by formal means, a thought experiment that represents an intervention into some permanently and essentially unresolvable problems in the theory of signification: those of the theurgical and baptismal “characters.” Eluding scholarly attempts to reduce it to its supposed historical, political, or aesthetic stakes, Erkenwald would attain to the status of a properly literary work insofar as it constitutes in this manner a trap for interpretation.","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"06 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128925463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter examines the afterlife of late antique discussions of nonsignification among medieval Oxford logicians, focussing in particular on Walter Burley. It shows how, although their discipline was explicitly founded on a refusal to work with meaningless words, they ended up having to discuss them in connection with the phenomenon of material supposition, or the use of a word to refer to itself as a word (e.g., man is a monosyllable). Burley proposed a strange doctrine according to which the meaningless sound of the bare utterance can appear in a logical proposition; he insisted that the truth of such a proposition can be known and indicated that it provides a kind of mirror in which the mind can encounter itself in its very failure to cognize.
{"title":"WALTER BURLEY ON SUPPOSITIO MATERIALIS","authors":"J. Kirk","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xbk.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the afterlife of late antique discussions of nonsignification among medieval Oxford logicians, focussing in particular on Walter Burley. It shows how, although their discipline was explicitly founded on a refusal to work with meaningless words, they ended up having to discuss them in connection with the phenomenon of material supposition, or the use of a word to refer to itself as a word (e.g., man is a monosyllable). Burley proposed a strange doctrine according to which the meaningless sound of the bare utterance can appear in a logical proposition; he insisted that the truth of such a proposition can be known and indicated that it provides a kind of mirror in which the mind can encounter itself in its very failure to cognize.","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129701931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1515/9780823294497-001
J. Kirk
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.
{"title":"The Wind in the Shell: Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Nonsignification","authors":"J. Kirk","doi":"10.1515/9780823294497-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823294497-001","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126082002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1515/9780823294497-003
{"title":"2 Walter Burley on Suppositio Materialis","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780823294497-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823294497-003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178860,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Nonsense","volume":"149 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116731761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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