Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

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Reviewed by: Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Alfred Kentigern Siewers jeffrey jerome cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. 376. isbn: 0–8166–9257–6. $91 (cloth); $25.95 (paperback). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in the introduction to his poetic and breathtakingly sweeping book (winner of the 2017 René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association) describes how his love affair with the lithic began in childhood playing at a glacial erratic known as Big Rock: 'For friends and siblings I wove an elaborate mythology around Big Rock, tales of how its enduring solidity entangled distant pasts with far futures' (p. 17). Years later as a Harvard-trained medievalist, from his professorship at George Washington University inspiring an insurgent movement in medieval studies that follows the 'material turn' of theoretical approaches, Cohen has continued his fascinated weaving of story and stone in a scholarly yet lyrical volume that is a must-read for both medieval and environmental humanities scholars alike. Andy Bittner, a renowned docent at the Gothic-style National Cathedral in Washington, DC, describes to visitors the way stone medieval cathedrals functioned as a kind of 'time machine.' Ranging from medievalisms in art to landscapes of the first millennium CE and beyond, Cohen's book expands the elemental sense of stone as a geophilic Tardis. Whether at Stonehenge or Canterbury Cathedral, Brittany's Carnac or the saga-laden crags of Iceland, and even in the texts of Chaucer, Thomas Aquinas, or Hildegard of Bingen, this book unpacks a symphonic love letter to the links between ecology and story. As he writes of Stonehenge, despite its twenty-first-century tourism distractions, still the stones draw the eye . . . Something happens in that encounter, something perceived by Geoffrey [of Monmouth] as well as the Romans and the Normans and the peoples who became the British and the English, something known to those prehistoric groups whose presence we realize only from the changes they crafted to the architecture during its five-thousand-year flourishing: The rocks begin to move (p. 252). And rocks move throughout the book, both as physical presences related to the Middle Ages and as related figures in medieval literature, linking cosmic contexts into what the environmental phenomenologist Erazim Kohák has called the 'intersection of time and eternity' (The Embers and the Stars, 1984) in which authentic personalism arises. Paradoxically, the very humanistic endeavor of this exploration of stone as a kind of physical narrative draws deeply from inorganically inhuman realms. Yet, as Cohen observes, 'Geophilia is a middle region of creation and innovation, a space of convivial wayfaring—experimenting, working, and living together, a place of differences and disorienting danger, a forging of alliance and embrace that gathers a world so vast that even stones become fellow travelers along epochal, uncertain, but never uncompanioned ways' (252). The book is a great primer on the material turn in literary studies, full of engaging exempla. Yet its contemporary approach relates substantively to the complexities of mystical cosmology and anthropology woven into medieval cultures in a way that raises its discourse above merely posthuman brutalism or atomizing materialism. We [End Page 87] see in it a glimpse of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel's search for a non-theistic intelligent design, despite its eschewal of holistic and transcendent ecologies. So too is the deistic cosmology of a God with no face welcome in the volume's erudite reflections and connections, along with the first-millennium Christian 'hidden God.' The poetic beauty of the writing forms a type of ecological iconography in words. A medieval apophatic emphasis on unknowable essence and participatory uncreated energies can fit, too, the vibrancy of stones that Cohen's work so engagingly describes, with nuance that rightly eludes any simple formula. Pericopes such as 'Cast not the first stone' and 'the stones shall cry out' both take new meanings here amid the time machine of geological presence and human accompaniment. Alfred Kentigern Siewers Bucknell University Copyright © 2017 Scriptorium Press