The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation by Patricia Claire Ingham

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation by Patricia Claire Ingham Jordan Kirk Patricia Claire Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 288. $65.00. That the title of Patricia Claire Ingham’s new book should produce a slight shock is sufficient proof of the need for such a work. The Medieval New is a wide-ranging account of the nature and status of novelty in Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Its six chapters consider, in turn: scholastic debates over creation ex nihilo; the vexed case of Roger Bacon, both claimed and disclaimed as the earliest experimental scientist; Christian–Islamic intellectual transmissions in the Floris and Blauncheflour romance tradition; the economics of newfangled gadgetry in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale; alchemical anticipations of intellectual property in Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale; and finally, turning to Columbus, the complications involved in fixing 1492 as the date of an epochal shift. From this overview of the volume’s contents Ingham’s interdisciplinary ambition and invigorating learning will already be evident. With the expertise and interests particular to a scholar of literature, she synthesizes and revitalizes key debates in the interpretation of Scholasticism, medieval and early modern history of science, and literary studies. She does so with the evident purpose not only of accounting for her many archives but also of offering her findings as an intervention into the discussions of periodization; “disruptive innovation”; and the apparently waning fortunes of the humanities with which contemporary opinion, both within academia and without, is preoccupied. Ingham is, in some sense, working in the vein of important recent scholarship in medieval studies that has explored the ways that what seems most distinctively modern or indeed postmodern is, in fact, unthinkable apart from its medieval anticipations and influences—e.g., Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition, Amy Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy, the essays in Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith’s The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. But rather than examining how modernity is still or again medieval, or how the Middle Ages are already modern—that is, how our own understanding of the “new” pertains to the Middle Ages— she focuses on accounts of the new that originate in the Middle Ages themselves. This inversion is salutary. Taking aim at the notion that medieval culture was conservative, cautious, reactionary, and so forth, Ingham [End Page 327] shows that “widespread caution about the new during the long medieval period was generated not by the blind appeal of tradition in a religiously conservative age, but as a response to radical expansions of possibility in realms of art and science” (27). As its subtitle suggests, what is emphasized throughout the book is that “ambivalence,” rather than straightforward rejection, is characteristic of medieval attitudes toward novelty. A person might wonder whether anyone with a more than passing knowledge of the Middle Ages could imagine them to have been strictly backward-looking—or whether anyone with a more than passing knowledge of human existence in the world could imagine any attitude whatsoever to be other than ambivalent. Ingham’s careful readings of the scholarship in the multiple fields she is working in show that the answer to both of these questions is, in fact, yes. The book’s first chapter demonstrates the importance of the question of novelty in the context of early university culture. In distinguishing divine from human creation, according to their various schemas, Scholastics did not so much foreclose the possibility that anything new might emerge under the sun as attempt to think through the “problems of meaning, motive, ethics, and truth” (36) attending the new things appearing in their midst. The second chapter turns to Roger Bacon in particular, and to the various shifts his reputation has undergone over the centuries—with particular attention paid his sometime association with the Voynich manuscript. Ingham proposes that the enumeration, in Bacon’s Opus maius, of technologies that had yet to be invented should be understood in the context of his theory of signification, which places emphasis on linguistic equivocation, for example when “[r]ecognizable terms take on new meanings” (58...