Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie J. Allan Mitchell Matthew Boyd Goldie. Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 293. $55.00. A surge of turn-of-the-century publications on the medieval geographical imagination has enriched scholarly understandings of the historical production of space and place. Matthew Boyd Goldie's Scribes of Space contributes to the field by arguing for a more concrete and empirical apprehension of spatial awareness than tends to be addressed in previous studies that incline towards the metaphorical or metaphysical. Presented as something of a corrective, Goldie's book is admirably restrained in this way, attending to local, proximate, human-scale geographies in which physical bodies are liable to move, touch, and jostle together. In energetic pursuit of quotidian spatial dimensions, available to ordinarily restricted earthbound observers, he carefully delimits a series of domains in which people could be expected to amble, survey their environs, draw up diagrams, and generally interact. For all that, Scribes of Space is an exceptionally spacious study of bounded areas precisely to the extent that it focuses, with acute particularism, on premodern mentalities and material conditions in place, yielding insights into several literary landscapes. Scribes of Space presents four sets of paired chapters, each duo consisting of one more-or-less expository chapter on a scientific concept or controversy followed by another elaborating on its importance to vernacular literature. Goldie's main informants in the first instance range from Ptolemy and Aristotle to Hugh of St. Victor, Nicole Oresme, Thomas Bradwardine, and other Oxford Calculators. As for literary examples, Geoffrey Chaucer's writings are an abiding concern alongside several other familiar works in Middle English, i.e., Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (Chapter 2), The Book of Margery Kempe and Mandeville's Travels (Chapter 4), Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice (Chapter 6), and [End Page 369] The Testament of Cresseid (Chapter 8). This way of proceeding, intercalating compact entries in the history of science and technology with literary case studies, has its advantages: Goldie packs in detailed scientific tutorials for those who may not be familiar with specialist terminology and techniques (including chorography; measuring heights, depths, and breadths; and theories of impetus and propinquity), helpfully contextualizing the matters that follow in the literary-critical parts. A particular strength of Scribes of Space, however, lies in refusing to relegate nonliterary elements to "background material." Goldie shows how innovative and imaginative technical, pragmatic, and philosophical modes of expression often could be. Equally, he demonstrates that poetry conducts its own quasi-scientific investigations adjacent to—if not always directly influenced by—the latest theories of the schoolmen. "Middle English literature," Goldie contends, "explores philosophical ideas, but it also supplements the science with its own insights and developments" (151). The initial two chapters are about what Goldie calls local or estral spaces, as figured in a fascinating series of administrative maps in which areas are "bounded, defined, and emplaced" (55). Here, edges are conspicuous in the depictions of walls, ditches, and roads, among other modest effects. Goldie argues for the primacy of everyday apprehensions of small-scale spaces, and finds support in drawings of Canterbury Cathedral's precincts and surviving maps of Cliffe, Sherwood Forest, Inclesmoor, and Thanet. None of this is very much like the esteemed mappaemundi or cosmological diagrams, and that is the point. Goldie's interest is rather in how localities express themselves to themselves, which, because they did not depend on fossilized conventions (and so are "less subject to repetition and a long list of authorities" [25]), disclose more useful, workaday senses of space. The scale and visual coherence of the local map depends, for example, on the veracity and utility of the things it depicts within a given locality. Goldie takes care to distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous projections of space, the latter finely evinced in maps that lack symmetry or consistent symbolism but that do convey practical information about how, say, lands or buildings function. But the contrast is subtle and shifting, and Scribes of Space is also at pains...