Scribes of Space. Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie (review)

Reviewed by: Scribes of Space. Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie Jenna Mead Goldie, Matthew Boyd, Scribes of Space. Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 312; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$58.95; ISBN 9781501734045. As reviewers have noted, Matthew Boyd Goldie’s Scribes in Space contributes to the growing discourse of critical readings of medieval scientific and literary texts, not as two separate discursive domains, but in dialogue with one another: a dialogue that is suggestive, allusive, reminiscent as often as it is directly marked in terminology and figure. This book stands alongside the work of Kellie Robinson, Alexander Grabovsky, and Allan Mitchell that has challenged and educated readers to ‘think philosophy’ when we ‘read literature’. Scribes of Space works on macro- and micro-levels, and part of its allure derives from Goldie’s drawing out of trajectories from larger to smaller scales. Chapter 1, for example, conducts us through the homogeneous/heterogeneous local spaces of the Eadwine Psalter’s diagram of Canterbury Cathedral; and then provides a revealing comparison between the labels identifying features on a small map of Incelmoor, West Riding, and a larger map of the same area while drawing our attention to the impact of the rationale behind such maps. Chapter 5 gives a very crisp account of thinking about motion, and how it was conceived, and the transition, via critiques of Aristotle (Thomas Bradwardine and the Merton School), to conceptualising impetus (Francis de Marchia and Jean Buridan) with its concomitant effects on the stability of locus naturalis and, thus, enabling the measurement and representation of speed (Nicole Oresme). Since this book wants us to think about how medieval scribes (in the broadest sense) and their readers thought about space, Goldie offers us a pathway mainly through contemporary phenomenology and the history of cartography to support readers’ own thinking about space. Not everyone will be sympathetic to such [End Page 259] a move, but it speaks to Goldie’s determination to draw ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ texts into dialogue and his alertness to what is needed to do so. In effect, Scribes of Space sets out with two interrelated projects. First, to synthesise a theory of medieval space through medieval and contemporaneous theoretical and applied texts, chiefly philosophical and mechanical. Second, to reorient readings of medieval narrative away from a reliance on methodologies of the visual (such as cinematic metaphors) and narratology (such as proleptic and analeptic structure) and, instead, to spatialise narrative through a reading of rhetoric as spatial. Either one of these two would be ambitious: to combine them draws on the impressive reach of Goldie’s scholarship—far more capacious than this review can attest—and the agility of his argument. The results, for the reader, are exhilarating and absorbing. Goldie structures his book into pairs of chapters that work as informative, stand-alone accounts of texts, both natural philosophy and poetry/prose, but also offer compelling readings in conversation. Chapter 3, for instance, begins with psychologist James J. Gibson’s study of ‘the underlying physical and mental principles of how people see physical space’, in order to focus on ‘horizontal space’ as abstracted in local maps, portolan charts, mappae mundi, zonal diagrams and granticular or grid maps. Horizontal space is measured by mechanical instruments, such as the astrolabe, that translate geometry into physical or empirical reality, defined by Ptolemy in his Geographia as chōrographia and topographia. It is Quintilian, in Institutio oratoria, who ‘associates topographia with representation itself’, and it is this trajectory that leads, in Chapter 4, to Goldie’s readings of The Book of Margery Kempe and The Book of Sir John Mandeville, identifying ‘a spatial overview’ of horizontal and abstracted space. What emerges is a ‘spatial hermeneutics’ capturing ‘exceptional moments’ of charged meaning, however evanescent as this overview ‘everts’ or undoes itself (p. 75). Chapter 6 takes up Nicole Oresme’s theorising of motion (discussed in the preceding chapter) to scrutinise place and movement in the notoriously vague House of Fame through a focus on ‘aspects of unmotivated motion and directionless movement’ (p. 143). Where and what...