Can I read Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) on EtoBox?

Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) by Jordan Kirk; Project Muse is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) about?

Five hundred years before "Jabberwocky" and Tender Buttons , writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period's theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa , the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. 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 , it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern

Who reads Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies)?

Author

Jordan Kirk; Project Muse

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published

2021

Language

EN

ISBN

9780823294466

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Humanities