Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature ed. by Eva Von Contzen and James Simpson (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature ed. by Eva Von Contzen and James Simpson
• Michael Van Dussen

eva von contzen and james simpson, eds., Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. 232. isbn: 978–0–8142–1522–7. $99.95.

Lists embedded in ancient, medieval, or early modern narratives are often regarded as the fly-over bits, artless filler, or unwelcome interruptions of narrative sequence. In other contexts—like indices or standalone groupings of disparate items—lists may be perused more for their practical function than for the logic of their arrangement or their hermeneutic possibilities. Enlistment takes up the practice of listing to regard lists as 'form[s] or way[s] of thinking' (p. 8). Lists can include or exclude; they can give the sense that a knowledge set is complete and circumscribed, or (on the contrary) limitless and expansive; they may suggest dispassionate transparency while at the same time obscuring the politics of the compiler's project. As the chapters in this volume show, scrutiny of enumerative or sequential patterns (which is how the term 'list' is regarded in its broadest sense in this collection) reveals how lists enlist readers in the process of making sense of them.

In the Introduction, the editors briefly survey prior scholarship on lists, with emphasis on medieval English literary contexts, and deploy theoretical models from other contexts to suggest how lists can be studied in terms of their 'affordances' and as Denkformen (forms or ways of thinking). The following chapters are then introduced according to how they participate in four conceptual (and not strictly binary) pairings: in/completeness, dis/ordering knowledge, un/familiarity, and boredom/play. [End Page 77]

Alexis Kellner Becker studies the extensive list of things a reeve should know in the Old English Gerefa, a guide for a reeve of an estate. Gerefa, 'a pre-Conquest text, imagining and preserving a pre-feudal reeve, redacted into and preserved in a post-Conquest legal manuscript' (p. 17), is self-consciously framed by an author who admits ignorance of the reeve's body of knowledge but who nevertheless presents it to his post-Conquest reader. Andrew James Johnston (Chapter Two) then discusses the presentation of the Old English Widsith as three consecutive lists of rulers and peoples. Johnston finds the concept of 'global modernism' to be a fruitful way to understand how the poet-narrator brings disparate temporalities, cultures, and 'antiquities' into conversation or even competition.

In Chapter Three, Kathryn Mogk Wagner examines Christian lists of God's names as responses to the impossibility of naming the unnameable. Such lists could be rhythmic and incantatory, and the words themselves, coming from several languages and traditions, could be distorted beyond understanding. Their ancient and convoluted transmission also gave rise to variance and accretion, and the list form conveyed a fitting sense of inexhaustibility. Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Chapter Four) treats the Middle English Benjamin Minor, a contemplative text that uses a diagrammatic structure to allegorize the list of Jacob's children in Gen. 35:23-26. The result is an elaborate genealogical list as well as a contemplative treatise that 'organize[s] knowledge and […] facilitate[s] the process of the reader's intellectual and spiritual growth' (p. 77).

Martha Rust turns to the history of listing the four rivers of Paradise (Chapter Five). In this highly associative study, the rivers may come to represent the virtues or serve as a heuristic for thinking about Christ's wounds. Epic catalogues in Middle English literature are next taken up by Eva von Contzen (Chapter Six). Her survey of lists of authorities on the Trojan War in Middle English poetry reveals a skepticism toward these authorities that appears to increase over time. In Chapter Seven, Wolfram R. Keller regards Gavin Douglas' Palice of Honour as a response to the disharmony of Chaucer's dream poetry, particularly in the House of Fame. Keller offers highly schematic readings of both The House of Fame and Palice of Honour, discussing both in terms of medieval cognitive theory and the management of courtly households. In constructing his Palice, Douglas enumerates a series of lists characterized by...