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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Western philosophy, c 500 to c 1600
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Medieval Nonsense - Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,478
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Medieval Nonsense - Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (Hardcover)
Series: Fordham Series in Medieval Studies
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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 hermeneutics of obscurity
in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of
the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic
textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a
way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to
focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter
with language itself.
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