Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk Kashaf Qureshi Jordan Kirk, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 187 pp. While the term “signification” lends itself to oversaturation in literary studies, it poses a unique problematic in the study of medieval literature, where critics too often treat texts as puzzles meant to be secured into predetermined, discernable fixtures. Jordan Kirk reminds us to remain open to the idea that the interpretive purchase of medieval texts is, in fact, their inchoateness, engaged in the play of not making meaning, or nonsense. Bringing together the grammatical arts of the Middle Ages, the discipline of medieval logic, and fourteenth-century contemplative literature, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England reorients us toward the ubiquity of nonsignification in medieval thought. Through the book’s structural organization, Kirk draws the mind’s ear into the world of nonsignification, each chapter divided by short subtitles such as “Bu, Ba, Buf,” emblematizing a verbal crux at the heart of each section. Kirk’s designs are intentional, and he describes the four main chapters of the book as a sequence of commentaries operating as “a set of mind engines” that “allow for awareness to encounter itself in the mirror of the past” (21). Because of this methodological commitment, some of the book’s innovations are understated. For instance, Kirk’s archive may seem odd at first—the first two chapters are an exhaustive linguistic history whereas the second two chapters each analyze a single work of experimental literature, respectively The Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald. However, these archival choices produce a cogent literary history that encompassed what I considered to be one of Kirk’s most compelling and salient [End Page 245] contributions: a call for the renovation of the category of the literary itself. For Kirk, the literary is a hermeneutic mode rooted in the emptiness of words, a topic most explicitly explored in the book’s introductory prolegomena. In the prolegomena, Kirk asks readers to think of Medieval Nonsense as an “archeology of the literary” (24), where literature encompasses any text that is “engineered in such a manner as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the nonsignificative event of language itself” (25). In the treasury of these first twenty-six pages, where Kirk constellates nonsignification in Chaucer’s House of Fame, modernist literature and theory, and Anslem of Canterbury’s ontological proof of God, readers will discover what might be shared between medieval texts and avant-garde poetics, opening an exciting avenue for transhistorical literary theorization. This book will largely appeal to medievalists working in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, religion, and literary studies; but its introduction should be thought-provoking to any scholars interested in the longue durée of semiotics and theories of literature. Kirk’s audience will find that his writing reflects the productively irresolute forms of his objects of inquiry: just as you’ve come to a point of understanding, the author’s subsequent step is to deconstruct that very point of arrival, unveiling how these theories of meaning-making contain the ignition for their own counter-theories. Kirk’s task in the first two chapters is to introduce readers to differing treatments of vox between the disciplines of grammar and logic: medieval grammarians often utilized nonsignifying words whereas logicians typically rejected non-signification from their project, whether that meant foreclosing their work from a study of nonsense or dismantling the possibility of meaningless language altogether. Beginning at the antique auctoritates, the first chapter is an itinerary through the philosophies and textbooks of language arts that would be transmitted to the later medieval schoolroom. Analyzing Priscian’s Institutiones gram-maticae, Boethius’s seminal commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, and Augustine’s semiotics, Kirk evinces a struggle over the idea that meaninglessness is an inextricable property and possibility of vox. Whereas Priscian and Boethius allow for classifications of vox where certain utterances, like syllables, may not signify anything, Augustine subsumes all sounds, words, and things into a sign system where they are always meaningful. Such debates constituted the experience of the...