Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

It is the privilege of the reviewer to read an exceptional edited volume about lists in its entirety rather than to mine specific chapters for utilitarian and narrow research purposes. In so doing, I have had the pleasure to viscerally experience the list's tendency, as Eva von Contzen and James Simpson argue in their introduction, towards simultaneous completeness/incompleteness, accumulation/dispersal, familiarity/unfamiliarity, and organization/disorder. As a set of carefully conversing chapters that investigate multiple genres and periods—Old English estate management texts, late medieval affective mysticism, Middle Scots poetry in the Chaucerian tradition, and Early Modern bureaucratic and political texts, to name only some of those addressed in the book—Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature gestures to thematic coverage as well as (as lists themselves do) to incompleteness: what theories about the list might not be contemplated in this thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking book, purely because of the incompleteness of the edited collection as itself a type of list? I am thinking here, for instance, of medieval modal logic as a prefiguration of set theory, astronomical and astrological lists, numerical lists and tables in algorithmic treatises, and more. To be clear, these questions are not meant as a negative critique of the book, but rather as indication of how generative I found even this book's quite necessary material limitations.As is, I think, proper for a book of such universally high quality, I will summarize its chapters below so that interested readers might get a sense for its specific, targeted interventions within the scope of the book as a whole.Chapters one and two address lists in the context of Old English. In chapter one, Alexis Kellner Becker interrogates the Gerefa, a guide for reeves from circa 1100 CE. The text uses lists to manage both objects and words, as its technical vocabulary highlights the "confusion that can arise when knowledge of words is not supported by experiential and material knowledge" (p. 25). In an exploration of the relationship between technical language, technical expertise, and the work of translation, Kellner Becker considers how lists "invite projects of cognitive organization" (p. 28) while evading the unfolding logics of narrative and allegory. In chapter two, Andrew James Johnston considers the thulas, or poetic name-lists, of Widsith, which modern scholars have generally found puzzling or monotonous. Johnston argues that the poem's three thulas have the effect of unravelling and flattening historical time, making historiography visible and, in Johnston's words, paradoxically demonstrating "the multiplicity or competing temporalities that are hidden beneath its temporally flattened surface, and that are potentially involved in history as it is written" (pp. 53–54), therefore creating space for postcolonial and global critiques of Old English literature.Chapters three through five investigate the list as an affective force in medieval religious contexts. In chapter three, Kathryn Mogk Wagner argues that listing the names of God in mystical, devotional, and liturgical contexts produces alienation from language's significatory properties. As the names of God are repeated, they express and perform his ineffability. Mogk Wagner's careful philological and formal analysis was, for me, both philosophically and poetically compelling. In chapter four, Suzanne Conklin Akbari considers the list's relationship to the graphing and connective properties of the visual tables found in Richard St. Victor's Benjamin Minor. For Conklin Akbari, while linear forms are usually, "like number . . . abstract, rational, and cold," the Benjamin Minor makes them part of a "practice of contemplation that seeks to raise the devout soul to a state of ecstasy" (p. 76). What, Conklin Akbari asks, are the limits of the list? If one can draw lines of pedigree or filiation across a list, is it still a list? These same questions appeared again in chapter five, as Martha Rust argues that the lists of the rivers that surround Eden "delineate a cognitive topography in which lists serve a flow of thought by collecting its products, thereby producing those products as the objects of further thinking" (p. 99). Conklin Akbari's and Rust's chapters gently nod towards further work that might be done in a field of medieval network theory where modular connections between ever-shifting nodes of influence and connection bring Carruthers's Art of Memory into conversation with modern data science.Chapters six, seven, and eight consider the catalog in the late medieval Chaucerian tradition and the work of Sidney and Spenser. These chapters also consider the list as a container for epistemological unfixedness. In chapter six, Eva von Contzen looks at poems of the Troy war—The Seege or Batayle of Troy, John Clerk of Whalley's Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, the Laud Troy Book, and John Lydgate's Troy Book—noting that lists are used as indicators of the brutality of war. For von Contzen, the credulity of the epic list becomes, in romance, part of a hermeneutics of suspicion. In chapter seven, Wolfram R. Keller considers lists in Gavin Douglas's Palice of Honour and Chaucer's House of Fame from the perspective of chrematistiks—the study of the accumulation of wealth—showing how lists economize through "misevaluation and excess" (p. 139) and representational exhaustion. Ingo Berensmeyer's chapter eight analyzes the epic tree catalog across the work of Chaucer, Sidney, and Spenser, noting the entrenchment of the tree catalog as an indispensable marker of genre. The epic catalog, becomes "an item in a longer list or series of epic catalogues. Among the 'affordances' of such catalogs, then, is a metareferential and metapoetic act of insertion into the tradition of (narrative or epic) poetry" (p. 156).Chapters nine and ten, the final chapters in the book, consider Early Modern lists and the functioning of the state during the English Reformation. In chapter nine, Alex Davis traces lists in the work of Erasmus, Cromwell, and Bale, noting that both Catholic Humanists and Protestant reformers used lists as part of the "exertion of state power" (p. 174) and that Cromwell's grasp on the procedural work of information technology in particular is fundamental for the foundation of the modern nation-state. In chapter ten, James Simpson also thinks about how the list was used by competing factions in the English Reformation, arguing that lists are a form of "syntactic junk" (p. 196) that threaten the forward movement of normal syntax. Reformers, he claims, deployed these characters of the list to make a mockery of the institutional forms of Catholicism, ultimately, engaging them as particularly powerful political satire. "The revolutionary, who offers simplicity, will always win the battle of lists against the defender of the highly complex, divided, multiple structures of the ancien régime" (p. 208).In its universally strong contributions, Enlistment is a welcome addition to the growing field of Medieval Informatics and Information Studies. Naturally, due to its wide temporal and generic range, the immediate value of specific chapters will be largely dependent on the scholarly interests of individual readers. However, I encourage these readers to push further, and to engage with Enlistment as a coherent work of aesthetic and epistemological theory.