Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

The book encourages a closer reading of medieval literature in light of its modern, and especially its modern lyric, afterlives. It demonstrates that patience and attention, particularly to elements of touch, the body’s boundaries, illumination, and their intersections in poetry, can be transfigurative practices. It does so not only through the accustomed cadences of scholarly argumentation but through its own moments of poetic and meditative reflection. Augustine, Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante, Boccaccio, and the heroes of Old French narrative, as well as their modern lyric counterparts, come to light in new and newly complicated ways. They become, in a word, transfigured.