Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie Katharine Jager Cary Howie. Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 190 pp. $130.00. Cary Howie's Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body is a series of comparative readings, or what he calls "an especially concentrated set of turns and returns" (53), that range across a wide selection of texts including contemporary American lyric poetry, Italian and French medieval poetry, medieval theology and hagiography, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In a delicate, beautiful mash-up, Howie presses together seemingly disparate texts to marshal claims about meditation, theology, desire, and the bounds of the embodied self. Comprising nine brief chapters, the book is also framed by a series of Howie's original free-verse poems or "interludes" that reflect concerns with lyric [End Page 405] questions of praise, deixis, prayer, and belief, expressed in a diction that is simultaneously casual ("face down / ass up, that's the way we like"; xi) and theological (as expressed in the title on Interlude 2: "Puking Prayer"; 125). As he notes, "the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking," and poetry itself "takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer" (9). Howie begins with an analysis of American poet Mary Szybist's poem "The Troubadours, Etc.," which he uses to ground his notion of "transfiguration," or an embodied, spiritual "light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear" (1). "Transfiguration" guides Howie's concept of "lyric medievalism," or the ways that the contemporary poets he reads "have started to sound like medieval theologians, or, in fact, like certain holistic modern readers of medieval theology, especially in their accounts of the human body in its limitations and at its limits" (147), and he presses twentieth-century anglophone poetry against medieval theological texts. For instance, Howie's first chapter, "Toward Transfiguration," reads Laura Kasischke, Matt Donovan, the account in Matthew's Gospel of the hemorrhaging woman reaching for Christ's hem, Linda Hull, Aquinas, Augustine, Marie Howe, and Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, to argue that "to be transfigured is to undergo, at the surface of the body, an intensification of this body that does not leave it intact, if by 'intact' we understand all too literally, 'untouched'" (24). His second chapter, "Saints, Poets, and Other Crossover Artists," extends this concern for the body's edges and apertures. Using Barbara Newman's concept of the medieval crossover artist to weave readings of sci-fi; mid-century American fiction; Boccaccio; philosophy; theology; medieval studies; and the lyrics of Mary Karr, Kasischke, and Mary Oliver, Howie argues that these writers are able to express "something so fundamentally accommodating of the world—its ugliness, its beauty—that it challenges the very discursive and categorical prejudices of our critical language" (44). Chapter 3, "Monastic Poetics," is Howie's strongest chapter. In it, he considers discretio across and through readings of Jane Hirshfield, Foucault, the Conferences of John Cassian, Benedict's Rule, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Thomas Merton on Mark Van Doren, Guigo II the Carthusian's Ladder of Monks, Melissa Range's "Shell White," and Marilyn Hacker's "Annunciation, 8 A.M." Howie argues here that monastic poetics, in its use of discernment and discipline, is "not afraid to find occasions for prayer in situations of impurity" (68). His fourth chapter, "Waiting for the Middle Ages," considers Catherine Brown, Carla Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw's [End Page 406] recent claims about temporality and medievalism to wonder "how we, singularly and in common, are taken by the objects and the persons we attend to and how they, more often than not, if we wait for and with them, take us by surprise" (74–75). Howie reads Beroul's Tristan; Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion; Dante's Inferno, XVI; Bernard of Clairvaux; Caroline Bynum; Marie Howe's "The Gate"; theology; literary criticism; and philosophy; as well as Paul's letter to the Romans; to...