Medieval Nonsense - Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England

In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, Jordan Kirk reveals the way that writers across the fourteenth century reckoned with the word as mere sound. Medieval Nonsense rebuts the idea that single-minded devotion to the kernel of meaning within the word motivated these authors in their engagement with vox sola, the mere utterance. Rather, they recognized the possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity, and they transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of nonsignification.

List of contents

The Wind in the Shell: Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Nonsignification | 1

1 Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine on Vox Sola | 27

2 Walter Burley on Suppositio Materialis | 52

3 The Cloud of Unknowing on the Litil Worde of O Silable | 76

4 St. Erkenwald on the Caracter | 98

Acknowledgments | 127

Notes | 129

Bibliography | 157

Index | 183

About the author

Jordan Kirk is Associate Professor of English at Pomona College.

Product details

• Authors: Jordan Kirk
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2021
• EAN: 9780823294473
• ISBN: 978-0-8232-9447-3
• No. of pages: 208
• Series: Fordham Series in Medieval Studies; Fordham Medieval Studies
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies