Matthew Boyd Goldie, Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019, xi, 293 pp., 11 b/w ill.

Abstract

In his highly stimulating study on space in Middle English literature and science, Matthew Boyd Goldie offers fascinating insights and observations about how the various poets and scientific writers saw their world and outlined strategies to convey spatial components through their writing. Intriguingly, Goldie combines this approach by studying also the way of how scientific writers at that time kind of measured their world and tried to comprehend the meaning of space in mathematical and geometric terms. This has significant implications for the reading of the literary protagonists’ movement through space.