The writings in this volume are bound by desire to refuse worry, to reject and throw it away the only way possible, by means that are themselves free from worry. If this is impossible-all the more reason to do so. I. The Sweetness (of the Law) II. Nunc Dimittis: Getting Anagogic III. Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia IV. Wormsign V. Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness VI. Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly VII. Labor, Language, Laughter: Aesop and the Apophatic Human VIII. This is Paradise: The Heresy of the Present IX. Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy X. Amor Fati: A Prosthetic Gloss XI. Following the Sigh

Proceedings from two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at King's College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O'Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of speculatio, present-minded premodern studies, and contemporary speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its medieval formulation, speculatio signifies the essentially reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula (mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to what lies beyond it. "To know is to bend over a mirror where the world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own imagination" (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas). Correlatively, speculative realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think beyond itself - a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world correlation, speculative realism "depart s] from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage s] in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself" (The Speculative Turn). Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding, the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of philosophers and premodernists into prismatic relation. Contents: Kathleen Biddick, "Toy Stories: Vita Nuda Then and Now?" - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Sublunary" - Graham Harman, "Aristotle With a Twist" - Anna Klosowska, "Transmission by Sponge: Aristotle's Poetics" - J. Allan Mitchell, "Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Everything" - Kellie Robertson, "Abusing Aristotle" - Anthony Paul Smith, "The Speculative Angel" - Nick Srnicek, "Abstraction and Value: The Medieval Origins of Financial Quantification" - Eugene Thacker, "Divine Darkness" - Scott Wilson, "Neroplatonism" - Julian Yates, "Shakespeare's Kitchen Archives." With response and post-script essays by: Liza Blake, Patricia Clough, Drew Daniel, Eileen A. Joy and Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O'Rourke, and Ben Woodard.

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others . . . an assortment, if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark. Contents: Candace Barrington, "Dark Whiteness: Benjanim Brawley and Chaucer" -- Brantley L. Bryant & Alia, "Saturn's Darkness" -- Ruth Evans, "A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter" -- Gaelan Gilbert, "Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology" -- Leigh Harrison, "Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age" -- Nicola Masciandaro, "Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia" -- J. Allan Mitchell, "In the Event of the Franklin's Tale" -- Travis Neel & Andrew Richmond, "Black as the Crow" -- Hannah Priest, "Unravelling Constance" -- Lisa Schamess, "L'O de V: A Palimpsest" -- Myra Seaman, "Disconsolate Art" -- Karl Steel, "Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye" -- Elaine Treharne, "The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm" -- Bob Valasek, "The Light has Lifted: Pandare Trickster" -- Lisa Weston, "Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies" -- Thomas White, "The Dark Is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas." This assortment of dark morsels also features a prose-poem Preface by Gary Shipley.

Volume 5 of the journal Glossator. Contents: What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece's Addresses - Eileen A. Joy Plato's Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Gary J. Shipley On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'amour en eclats Shattered Love]" - Mathew Abbott The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore Tearsong: Valentine Visconti's Inverted Stoicism - Anna K osowska

52 ghazals. "Around the abyss of your radical event / Angels in bliss sing hymns to abnormality."

Shaped by the increasing commercialization of economic relations, the social agitation of the agricultural and artisan classes, and the growing formalization of status consciousness, the cultural landscape of late medieval England was fertile territory for the representation of work. In The Voice of the Hammer, Nicola Masciandaro examines the Middle English lexicon, accounts of the history of work, and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer to reveal that late medieval society understood work as a distinct and problematical field of experience, and that concerns over the relation of work to life were as pressing then as now.   "This book deals with questions that historians of late medieval labour scarcely dare to ask—what is the meaning of the words werk, swink, and craft? How did people in the fourteenth century conceptualize and value work? Much superficial speculation about whether people regarded work as punishing or virtuous can be set aside, as Nicola Masciandaro has applied his formidable learning to supply a nuanced and authoritative analysis of the thinking of such writers as Chaucer and Gower. Anyone enquiring into late medieval attitudes to labour must now take account of this important book."—Christopher Dyer, University of Leicester   "In The Voice of the Hammer, Nicola Masciandaro engagingly presents a large issue with elegance and capaciousness. His subtle and significant readings of all of the works he addresses support the ingenious topics and important ideas he has highlighted in the broad field of late medieval ideas of labor, at once so central to the concerns of later Middle English poetry and so widely disseminated in the culture from which that arose."—Andrew Galloway, Cornell University   "Nicola Masciandaro shows us a contested and complex Middle English set of attitudes towards work, incorporating ideas about nature, humanity's place in the world, and the relation of the present to a simpler past. He gives an intriguing account of the multiple meanings of work in English and shows that texts often regarded as denunciations of workers or of technical progress are more interesting statements about the ambiguity of humanity's control over the world and subjugation to its laws. The result is an important and perceptive contribution to the history of medieval social thought."—Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University