Figuring with Knots

Abstract

This article examines the affordances of late medieval knots. Although knots are mentioned, both literally and figuratively, in a wide range of medieval writings in a western Christian context, they are rarely discussed, described, or explained in detail. As a result, while they are an enduring aesthetic and practical feature of medieval life and thought, they remain mysterious. This essay considers knots both as material and symbolic densities and as ligatures, looking at their role in religious thought and practice and in relation to cognitive processes. Drawing on recent theories of materiality and metaphor and focusing primarily on Middle English sources, it examines how knots offered medieval writers and practitioners distinct yet interrelated ways of being and communicating. Both divine and mundane, enabling and resistant, knots are powerfully associated with memory, writing, and relationships. Medieval knots shaped spiritual, mental, and religious habits; devotional objects; and certain letters of the alphabet. They articulated the confluence of mind and body that resulted in disposition and composition and became ornamental, formal, and stylistic features of texts. This conjunction of discursive and material properties makes them an example of what Sophia Roosth calls figuring. Binding fleshly as well as verbal “matere,” knots’ versatility made them useful even as their complexity often posed a challenge. Knots situated the human subject in particular and revealing ways, meeting minds in unpredictable encounters.