Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk Paul Megna Jordan Kirk. Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 187. $105.00 cloth; $30.00 paper; $29.99 e-book. Evidence of Jordan Kirk’s love of words is apparent everywhere in his engaging and enjoyable book, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. Readers would do well to keep on hand a notepad in which to jot down words such as recrudescence (n., a revival or rediscovery), sermocinal (adj., relating to speech), or tregetry (n., juggling, deception, trickery). However wonderful, these words are not the most interesting Kirk has to offer. That title must be given to a subset of words—including blottybus, blityri, coax, cra, garalus, hereceddy, kuboa, and skindapsos (to name a few)—that do not mean anything, at least not in any obvious way. Medieval Nonsense is about these words. More specifically, it is about how the inhabitants of fourteenth-century England inherited and developed the concept of non-signifying language, and how they brought it to bear [End Page 307] on their scholarly, ascetic, and aesthetic endeavors. It illustrates how far flung throughout late medieval England was interest in minute nuances, aporias, and argumentative cruces in the philosophy of language. Kirk, however, is quite adamant that he is not marshaling his texts to be illustrative. “The texts examined here,” he writes in his prolegomena, “have been selected not as expressions, symptoms, exhibits, evidence, or artifacts of some posited phenomenon, but rather insofar as they offer themselves as textual apparatuses that might still allow for thought, or indeed the suspension of thought, to arise in the moment of their being read” (20). Throughout Medieval Nonsense, Kirk remains true to this admirable approach to his textual objects. The results are consistently illuminating and occasionally dazzling. The book begins with a masterful reading of a brief passage in Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which “Colle tregetour” somehow fits a windmill underneath a walnut shell. Kirk initially establishes this moment as an allegory of signification and convincingly argues that Chaucer—surely aware of the common metaphor according to which a text is a nut whose shell (the mere letter) must be cracked to reveal the “meat” of meaning—intended it as such. Many critics would find this argument satisfying enough, but this is only the beginning of Kirk’s magic trick. He proceeds to lay down an increasingly speculative line of interpretation, positing, first, that operational windmills with grinding millstones are noisy; next, that the racket pervading the House of Fame is precisely that produced by the grinding of Colle’s millstone; and, further, that the mill (insofar as it grinds grains) constitutes “an apparatus to pulverize signification” (7). (While I won’t dwell on the possibility that wind circulates in Colle’s walnut shell, Kirk does.) Just as Colle elicits wonder by fitting a windmill under a walnut shell, Kirk amazes us by transforming an allegory of signification into one of the non-signifying word. As it progresses, the chances of Kirk’s reading’s mapping onto Chaucer’s intentions all but vanish, but this ought not hinder our appreciation of Kirk’s critical tregetry, which, after all, seeks not to diagnose texts, but to employ them as engines for provoking (or suspending) thought. The remainder of Kirk’s introduction includes a foray into modernist Europe, featuring an anecdote in which Walter Benjamin induces a hashish trance in order to coin new words (only coming up with Haupelzwerg, a mysterious species of dwarf). Kirk turns to modernism to dismantle gradually the stereotype that modernity is “the epoch of nonsense.” He does so by surveying how modernist purveyors of nonsense language and [End Page 308] philosophy shared a common interest in the Middle Ages. He then turns to Anselm of Canterbury (“the first scholastic”) and William IX, duke of Aquitaine (“the first troubadour”), to establish a foundational engagement with non-signifying language at the roots of the fourteenth-century English culture on which his study focuses. In Kirk’s long-view of meta-linguistic history, a fascination with non-signifying language is...