Cristina Maria Cervone Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of LovePoetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love. Cristina Maria Cervone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 312.

Abstract

The issue of Incarnational “agency” provides the focus for chapter 3, particularly the representations of Christ as both “doer” and “love deed,” as both subject and object. Taking as its main text the common Charter of Christ, this chapter returns to the issue of the Word-made-flesh and this genre’s exploitation of the associations between “deed” as physical act and “deed” as a land-grant document. Within this type of text, in the same way as the “deed” is written on vellum to be recorded in perpetuity, so Christ’s own Incarnational “deed” is written on his own skin in blood after the sacrifice of the crucifixion. Tracing the poem’s charter metaphor, followed by its côte armure manifestations, the chapter successfully uncovers the poetics of both lordship and agency as imbricated in late medieval Incarnational theology.