For medieval literary studies, critical theory and semiotics have been defined largely by anxieties of anachronism. Historical and historicist critics of medieval literature, including feminist ones, frame their textual reading with the “medieval” viewpoint (whatever that might be). That goes for most cultural studies and reception approaches too. Except for Hans Robert Jauss and a few others, most critics situate medieval literature in relation to its contemporaneous, anterior (ancient), or posterior (early modern) readers--that is, within a horizon of reception rotating around the presumed boundary of the “medieval” period. The temporality of Biblical exegesis provides the model for these approaches.

But what if sign theory and linguistic semiotics are not anachronisms? Exploring the richness and complexity of medieval linguistics and sign theory might reveal more about how they have shaped some of our modern notions of what is literature (‘literariness’), how language means, and relations between literary and intellectual work. Medieval intellectuals, writers, teachers, and everyday actors adopted several approaches to semiotics and language and not only in support of Biblical exegesis or theology. Conventionalist theories of linguistic meaning dominated medieval semiotics and continue to the present. So how might modern sign theory, language theory, and semiotic practices help us better understand medieval semiotics and linguistics? Less anxious about anachronism, Vance, Zumthor, Colish, Eco, and Arthur are some of the theorists and critics who have read semiotics and language theory comparatively, not transcendentally, over time, especially with respect to signification and voice. Peirce’s reading of Duns Scotus suggests other relations between medieval logic and modern semiotics.

In his new book, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England, Jordan Kirk takes up medieval language theory, logic, and semiotics from the point of view of utterance, signification and nonsignification (vox). In the prolegomenon and chapter 1 Kirk discusses the contributions of Augustine, Boethius, and Priscian on grammar, signification, and logic to later medieval semiotics and language theory. Chapter 2 addresses fourteenth-century philosophy and grammar with a reading of selected passages from Walter Burley’s commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. Aristotle’s text was central to the medieval logic canon, and its first chapter was a core text of medieval grammatica. The last chapters discuss the English vernacular texts Cloud of Unknowing and St Erkenwald in terms of sign theory and nonsignification.

Kirk introduces his study by working out the implications of the logical distinction between signification and nonsignification (significativa, non-significativa) as found in late antique grammar and logic. This is not the usual approach to grammatica. By “nonsignifying element”Kirk means a “residue,” vocalization which “defies all efforts to make sense of it,” “the bare voice” (1). This nonsignifying element does not exist outside language but is logically part of every signifying expression, the possibility of sound without meaning. The nonsignifying element is what “survives” when utterance is reduced to its barest material existence, that is, language as sound alone (vox sola).

Kirk elaborates on vox sola with Benjamin’s notion of “reine Sprache” (pure language) and Agamben’s reworking of Augustine’s verbum ignotum (unknown word). I read Derrida’s theory of hiatus behind Kirk’s description of “language as such,” the holding in abeyance of the conventional instrumentalizing of language as communicating intended meaning. Free-floating signifiers. Vox sola recognizes the gap between vocalization and signifying which separates being and meaning. Kirk then reads passages from Anselm’s Proslogion and Chaucer’s Hous of Fame to explore how the possibility of bare language opens a space for experiencing language’s materiality, the voice or gram to which meanings are assigned by convention.

In chapter 1 Kirk takes these ideas further by reading the logical distinction significativa/non-significativa as it informs language theory in Augustine, Boethius, and Priscian, whose texts were central to the medieval canon of grammar and logic. Boethius’s Latin versions of Aristotle provided much of the vocabulary and concepts for medieval grammatical theory, while Priscian’s grammar became the core text for linguistic discourse after 1050. Kirk connects them via vox sola. Boethius, for instance, in his second commentary on De interpretatione distinguished among a vox which signifies something by convention (homo) or signifies nothing at all (blityri) or exists as possible sound and then is imposed to name some-thing or signifies nothing in itself but does so when combined with other words (e.g., conjunctions). The last two reveal the temporality of signification in Boethius’s account. Kirk plays up the incoherence of Priscian’s discussion of voces which can’t be written (articulata) and which don’t have any assigned meaning but which nonetheless can be mentioned in a grammatical or logical text--a syllable, groan, or laugh.

In chapter 2 Kirk extends the contexts of nonsignification, that which Priscian had excluded from logic and grammar because it is “meaningless,” to explore the implications of Walter Burley’s (c. 1275-1344/45) semantics and language theory in his Middle Commentary on De interpretatione. Following the trail of logicians’ and grammarians’ examples of “nonsense” words (e.g., blictrix, buba), Kirk shows how such words were cited as examples of pure material suppositio, when the utterance stands for its own materiality as sound (‘Verbum’ est verbum).Medieval grammarians and semioticians said significatio (sound + meaning) precedes suppositio (how a word is used, e.g., to refer to a thing, concept, itself, another word by reference, analogy, or metaphor). Supposition theory is crucial to both Kirk’s analysis and Burley’s semantics. Burley teases out the signifying possibilities of spoken sound. For example, blictrix or buba exist materially as bare sound, but they exemplify the limit of language when used to refer meaningfully to themselves as terms in a statement. Linguistically, they are possible utterances even if the actual form has not yet been assigned a separate meaning. Burley’s semantics, founded on his hardcore realism of singularities, also suggests the concept of autonomous language, whose forms and possible significations exist independently of speakers and intended meaning.

Whether or not Burley makes it explicit in his theory, the paradox of iterability (vox communis) across a range of voces singularis replaces logical distinction (genus/species) as the central structural relation of language. Considered in terms of its materialis suppositio, Kirk says, the individual utterance “...appears to break off its dependence on its signification and enter a realm in which it only supposits, and might as well be meaningless” (59). Why meaningless? Kirk seems to think linguistic ‘meaning’ is primarily what a term signifies (significatio) rather than also including how that term might supposit (suppositio) or be used in context. Burley’s semantic theory admits both.

Chapters 3 and 4 uses this analysis of suppositio materialis and nonsignification as the repressed elements within grammatical and logical theories of signification to read two fourteenth-century English texts, Cloud of Unknowing and St Erkenwald. Kirk claims (perhaps too glibly) that Burley’s semantics was a dead end in late medieval logic. Instead, he argues that the force of vox nonsignificativa continued in the English contemplative Cloud and, in a different way, in St Erkenwald. These chapters concretize Kirk’s earlier statement that he is writing an “archeology of the literary” (24). Theypick up where his earlier reading of the materiality of sound and linguistic meaning in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame left off.

The Cloud, Kirk says, “is about nothing else than the de-imposition of words, about the opening of a minimal duration, in the time it takes the bare utterance to sound, of a mental failure that attains to truth” (75). That is, the text ‘werkes’ with a kind of deconstructive logic whereby efficient prayer undoes what grammarians and logicians took to be the foundational act of language. Kirk focuses on the Cloud’s phrase “litil worde of o silable” and how medieval grammar’s articulation of vox nonsignificativa stages the text’s account of prayer as not meaning but being, language as such. According to grammarians, a syllable does not signify in itself. Repeating a syllable to the point of “nonsense,” mantra-like, retains the economy of “holenes” and allows the soul to wander to the place of un-knowing. Repeating a monosyllabic word accomplishes the same thing. Kirk characterizes this holy procedure as the “opening of a minimal duration,” which resonates with existential phenomenology and deconstruction’s theory of the hiatus, gap, or hole which allows the negative (nonbeing) within being to emerge. At the same time, such a syllable or monosyllabic word (the Cloud writer offers God, love, and sin as vernacular examples) uttered to the point of nonsignification is a catachresis, the trope for what cannot be named or denoted directly. The syllable supposits without signifying. If a monosyllabic word, not a sentence or phrase, is repeated to the point of nonsignification by a soul stirred to God, the English vocalization ceases to be a word (dictio) or to communicate anything. The syllable-word’s conventional meaning slips away from the material vox. The existential remainder, the physical sound, whether pronounced internally or externally, allows the speaker to access the dark space of un-knowing unfolding before and anticipating God. Hence, the failure (not reaching God fully) which “attains to truth” through brevity and repetition if the soul is stirred by God.

Kirk’s final chapter reads St Erkenwald as a thought experiment to understand the efficacy of speech, writing, and ritual language. The mysterious “bryʒt golde lettres” inscribed on the marble tomb at the beginning of the poem are set against the baptismal formula and ritual spoken at the end of the poem which releases the corpse’s soul to salvation. Kirk relates the tomb writing to medieval ideas of caracteres, inscriptions (not alphabetic letters) which do not represent or correspond to spoken sounds but rather are “indeterminately foreign or ancient signs that operate without signifying” (106). Caracteres as part of magic and sacramental theology supplemented medieval linguistic sign theory. Like grammarians’ buba and other nonsense words, caracteres posit the limit case of signs, signifiers without signification but nonetheless producing effects in practice.

Kirk briefly relates caracteres with the more general medieval debate about virtus sermonis or virtus verborum (power/force of words)(105, 109) before moving to the poem’s climax, the baptism of the dead man. For medieval semioticians (e.g., Bacon), baptism was the exemplar of a performative speech act, although Kirk doesn’t elaborate that point. Performing baptism’s gestures while pronouncing the ritual formula brings into being what the words and gestures stand for (id efficit quod figurat). In St Erkenwald the performative is successfully enacted (‘felicitous’) but not altogether intentional. As the bishop stands over the corpse, his tear coupled with his mentioning rather than using the baptismal formula launches the performative speech act and thus completes the baptism. Through grace, the words have an autonomous power to bring about a change in the world.

Kirk’s situates his reading of the poem in a broader question about medieval sign theory: “Given that sacramental theology is inextricable from linguistic theory throughout the Middle Ages, in addressing itself to the question of baptism St Erkenwald also opens itself to reflection on the sign more generally” (112). Baptism was another limit case in medieval semiotics, language theory, and sacramental theology: It works, but we do not quite know how. As a performative speech act, what counts as a “real” baptism? An intended or purposeful action? A dramatization on stage? An accidental one, as in St Erkenwald? The performative’s iterability risks dissemination without end, undecidability. Kirk frames his readings of the Cloud and St Erkenwald as a series of thought experiments about the limits of language or signification.

Medieval Nonsense is a provocative, targeted, and well-researched inquiry into language and the limits of meaning in medieval sign theory, literature, and sacramental theology. Kirk reads a small set of texts closely. Showing vox to be more complicated than we sometimes think, he links late antique grammar and semiotics with a few key texts in fourteenth-century English philosophy and religion. Medieval Nonsense is a significant contribution to the history of medieval linguistics and semiotics. Kirk interrogates something which has been present in standard texts all along, namely, a subtle and troubling distinction between significativa and nonsignificativa in the very foundation of grammar. Drawing our attention to this opening, tarrying over the gap, Kirk brings to the fore complex notions of the sign which resonate strongly with some poststructural and deconstructive provocations, especially the undecidability of signification and meaning perpetrated by Literature’s iterable language and performative reflexivity.

At times, Kirk overstates his historical contexts; for example, Burley’s realist philosophy did not disappear in the mid-fourteenth century but rather continued to be influential in schools well into the fifteenth century. And his analysis of Burley’s semantics might profit from fuller comparison with Bacon’s semiotics and William of Sherwood’s logic and sign theory. Other times, he underplays the broader context for sign theory, for example by not addressing how sign theory nested within later medieval realisms or nominalisms. Kirk only briefly mentions the concept of virtus sermonis (virtus verborum), when in fact the autonomous force or power of words was a question throughout later medieval philosophy and theology.

A more conceptual gap is Kirk’s avoidance of any reference to the pragmatic interrelations of language meaning and language use. As his reading of St Erkenwald and as his discussions of linguistic reflexivity in Augustine, Boethius, and Burley suggest, medieval discourses on grammar and meaning regularly distinguished between using and mentioning, between denoting and self-referencing, between constative and performative utterances. Given Kirk’s description of his work as an “archeology of the literary”--not the same as a sources-and-influence study or a set of readings of literary texts--he might have given more attention to the semantic-pragmatic interface implicated in medieval language theory.

That said, Kirk’s Medieval Nonsense is a skilful, informed, and provocative take on key aspects of medieval language and sign theory. Setting aside Dantean allegoresis, Kirk’s book admirably brings together theory, history of linguistics, and textual criticism of both medieval literary and intellectual works to show us something new and more subtle which was in front of us all along. Says Kirk,Medieval Nonsense reveals the “formation of the category of literature as it emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and remains perhaps in effect today” (25) and aspects of a “medieval theory of language far stranger and more capacious than has been understood” (22). Well, more capacious but maybe not so strange when we read medieval grammar and literature through Stein and Breton.