ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts––evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed.

Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eva von Contzen is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She is also the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration.

James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University and author of several books, including Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.

REVIEWS

“Thought-provoking . . . the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented . . . The collection makes rewarding reading for literary critics and historians working on the periods discussed in this volume (and, frankly, scholars working on other literary traditions and periods will also benefit from diving into these essays).” —Ray Schrire, Modern Philology

“Enlistment asks the question of what lists can ‘do’ as a kind of speech act as well as what poetic and cultural issues they indicate, all with a rigor and range that have not previously been attempted. With impressive scope and clarity, this volume makes an important contribution to medieval and early modern literary studies.” —Andrew Galloway, author of The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 1

“This fine collection of essays … offers an informative and engaging examination of the list across a range of textual genres and literary contexts from Old English to Edmund Spenser. The introduction provides a critical history and theoretical overview of textual enlistment, which, in its thoroughness and breadth, will be invaluable to future studies of this subject.” —John Joseph Gallagher, Forum for Modern Language Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Enlistment as Poetic Stratagem

Chapter 1 “He should not overlook anything that could ever be of significance”: Knowledge and Vocabulary in Gerefa

Chapter 2 In the Space of a List—Widsith’s Global Modernism

Chapter 3 Listing Divine Names: A Study in Liturgical Form

Chapter 4 Naming the Children of Jacob: The Shape of Negative Theology in the Benjamin Minor

Chapter 5 Out of Eden and Back Again: Following the Flow of Concepts, Categories, and Lists in the Four Rivers of Paradise

Chapter 6 Epic Lists: The Matter of Troy and the Catalogue Form in Middle English Literature

Chapter 7 Performing Generic Exhaustion: Implosive Households in Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honour

Chapter 8 The Epic Tree Catalogue from Chaucer to Spenser

Chapter 9 What’s in a List? Erasmus, Cromwell, Bale

Chapter 10 Reformation Lists: Syntax, the Sacred, and the Production of Junk