Ever since Henri Lefebvre's groundbreaking arguments about the social production of space revolutionized cultural geography, critics across the humanities have often looked to spatiality as a means of exploring the cultural construction of reality. Right alongside such ideological investigation into socially determined notions of space, scholars more influenced by physical geography have increasingly enriched inquiry by applying the insights of the ever advancing material sciences to humanist objects of inquiry.
Matthew Boyd Goldie's Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science compellingly bridges these sometimes separate worlds of cultural and physical geography. Focusing on distinctly local understandings of space, Goldie's book offers a number of incisive studies of the way particularly Western medieval understandings of space shaped literary texts. Even as Goldie provides nuanced readings of the spatial self-understanding of works by such literary luminaries as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe, Scribes of Space offers equally eye-opening analysis of medieval scientific spatiality. By looking systematically at late-medieval understandings of space in philosophy, mechanics, and cartography, Goldie offers a sustained inquiry into the manifold ways in which spatial perspectives circulating in medieval scientific texts are both reflected within, and themselves re-theorized, in literary texts.
A signal strength of Scribes of Space lies in its organization. By dividing the book into paired chapters tied to key innovations in late-medieval spatial perception, Goldie allows readers to proceed expeditiously from sustained analyses of late-medieval scientific texts to exemplary engagement with such spatialities in literary works. After a general introduction to his research that clarifies his interest in local space, Goldie pairs chapters focused, respectively, on chorography, horizontal space, motion, and intensities, with literary surveys showing the influence of such spatial understandings on a range of literary works.
Goldie also creates a strong foundation for the monograph by thoughtfully including a variety of fields under the general rubric of medieval "science." Linking late-medieval innovations in spatiality with a decisive move away from Aristotelian teleology, Goldie unsurprisingly devotes significant attention to philosophical speculation about what can be readily understood as scientific questions. However, in his effort to provide a thorough understanding of how medieval mechanics influenced the wider culture, Goldie also explores spatial ideas as they were explored in more practical environments and applications, such as in cartography, architecture, and navigation.
Goldie's opening chapter, "Local Space, Edges, and Contents: Chorography and Late Medieval English Maps," turns to a number of local medieval maps, in order to elucidate the range of Western medieval approaches to "local space" (18). Goldie's focus on the local results in a usefully restricted set of maps through which he can introduce medieval spatiality, as well as an investigative focus that illuminates everyday medieval perceptual life. Countering the common misconception that Ptolemy's Geography was only available to "modern" understandings of space (22), Goldie dwells on the significance for medieval spatiality of the ancient Greek geographer's second mode--"chorography" (23), or the representation of regional spaces (lesser in scale than Ptolemy's "geography," which is focused on global representation, yet greater in scale than "topography," which focuses on intra-regional landscapes). Presenting the fundamental differentiation between "homogeneous" space (in which all is systematized and objective) and "heterogeneous" spaces (in which anything emerges relative to a particular viewer), Goldie insists that we need to suspend our notion of "homogenous" space as a "post-Cartesian, post-Newtonian" advance, and instead realize that each of these modes plays a role in medieval spatiality (28).
Pairing Ptolemaic ideas of chorography with a number of local maps, Goldie compellingly shows how "heterogenous" modes of space dominate in late-medieval spatiality, with the "local edges" (30) of individualized objects often standing out to modern eyes used to seeing largely systematized and objectively rendered maps. Goldie shows that systematic elements suggestive of "homogeneous" space begin to enter into the spaces of late-medieval local maps (39), with the tension between absolute and relative modes often existing in the same maps. Studying two maps, made by Richard Gascoigne and Robert Waterton, that were each linked to a legal land dispute (42), Goldie offers a particularly fascinating analysis of medieval mapping: although one map is dominated by homogeneous understandings of space that allow for perception of a systematized whole from any angle (43), while the other map has a more heterogeneous approach with individualized land spaces that invite the reader's eye to immerse itself in particular areas (44), each of the two late-medieval maps nevertheless shows that absolute and relative modes of space were entangled in late-medieval spatiality.
Goldie's second chapter, "Local Literature: Vernacular Local Space and John Lydgate'sSiege of Thebes," explores the implications of locality as a dominant mode of spatiality in late-medieval literature. Goldie links Chaucer with late-medieval chorographical complexity, both by showing his careful rhetorical narrowing from "universal" (58) to "continental" (59) scales, and finally to intense locality in the Prioress's Prologue andTale, and then by exploring how Chaucer's playful poetic pairing of "place" and "space" (65) registers his awareness of Scholastic differentiation between the Greek "topos" figuring place as a "container," and the later Latin "ubi" understanding space as a "fixed" location (64). Presenting the Middle English term "estre" as usefully conveying the complex locality of late-medieval spatiality (65-66), Goldie turns to the illumination of John Lydgate apparently joining the Canterbury pilgrims in British Library MS Royal 18.D.2, which contains a copy of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes. Goldie shows the "estral complexities" of medieval spatiality (66) by showing how such homogeneous elements as the universalized pilgrims existing in a timeless space where the aficionado Lydgate might join them are in fundamental tension with intensely local details that pull the viewer's eye "unevenly toward distinct items" (71).
In chapter 3, "Horizonal Space: Measuring Local Area with Astrolabes, Quadrants, andTopgraphia," Goldie makes a fascinating case that the "dominant mode of medieval spatial hermeneutics" was "horizontal"--namely, perceiving things as in an "area" that is "parallel to the earth in a zone or band near the ground or sea" (77). Turning to the mode of "topographia" (78) to argue that late-medieval spatiality sees places, events, objects, and times as intimately related, Goldie focuses much of the chapter on practical devices that enable us to see the "everyday" application of medieval mechanics (79). After discussing Bertrand Westphal's argument that the late-medieval era saw the replacement of a "vertical" mode of spatiality with a "horizontal projection" aimed at looking beyond the edges of perception (79), Goldie moves to a stimulating study of astrolabes and quadrants. After explaining the practical use of such devices in measuring local objects (86-88), Goldie provides a gripping reading of Hugh of St. Victor's elevation of the "mechanical arts" to a key university discipline, through both his Didascalicon and his Practica geometriae (89). Goldie asserts that the existence of these precise measuring instruments and theoretically advanced practical geometries demonstrates the wide dissemination of a horizontal view of space as a "set of relations between objects and viewers" that is "measurable" (96). Using the language of James J. Gibson about how space "affords" us various possibilities, Goldie argues that "horizonal" spatiality offers, through its insertion of a limit, the potential of abstract views of totalizable space, even as its horizontal directionality impels viewers to see "individuated variations" of relatively perceived entities from the ground (100)--in other words, homogeneous and heterogeneous potentialities create an intensely complex sense of space.
In chapter 4, "Horizonal and Abstracted Spaces: The Book of Margery Kempe and The Book of Sir John Mandeville," Goldie asserts that space tends to be heterogeneous in both the Book of Margery Kempe, which regularly features her familiarity with individuals and the circulation of her own reputation, and in the Book of Sir John Mandeville, in which the narrator is regularly, but episodically present, thereby relativizing his encounters with variously individuated objects and scenes (102). Goldie asserts these narrators occasionally "achieve" homogeneous spatiality (102)--but ultimately move away from such abstraction into the dominant mode of heterogeneous space. Whereas Margery Kempe experiments with homogenizing space in her visionary encounters, theMandeville-narrator flirts with abstraction through "anthologizing tendencies" that link this aspect of his work with medieval "encyclopedias" (102-103). Goldie offers a very intriguing analysis of five modes of this "homogeneous hermeneutics" in Mandeville--namely, the emphasis on a "diversity of locations," systematic comparison of locations, deployment of "lists," the use of "spatial synechdoches," and a tendency towards parallelism of episodes (118).
Goldie provides especially engrossing analysis of medieval science in chapter 5, "The Science of Motion: New Ideas of Impetus and Measurement." Asserting that the late-medieval era witnessed a diminishment in the importance of the Aristotelian "locus naturalis," Goldie argues that a key innovation in medieval mechanics was the understanding of objects being potentially themselves the cause of their motion (124). Goldie explores a move away from the dominant thirteenth-century Aristotelian view authorized by Aquinas that all objects must be understood as moving towards their "natural place" (126-130). As scholars began questioning whether motion must always be a separate force from an object, Goldie argues, Francis de Marchia produced a key shift in perspective when he held that force is "impressed" into objects themselves (133). After Jean Buridan named this impressed force the "impetus" (133), scholars such as Thomas Bradwardine and his Merton School successors worked out methods of measuring motion, including such a "quality" as speed in time, or "velocity" (135). Such advanced mechanics result in such remarkable intellectual endeavors as Nicole Oresme's efforts to graph motion (137-139).
Chapter 6, "Motion and Literature: Place and Movement in the House of Fame," applies these innovative scientific ideas to literary works. After exploring Orpheus's untamed, but also largely directionless movements in Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice as indicative of a fascination with what movement looks like without the anchor of a single destination (144-148), Goldie analyzes Chaucer's House of Fame as a poem that is fundamentally about a disoriented narrator "questioning where he is"--and never orienting himself in the process (152). Showing how the often erratic, illogical movements of the narrator give us a sense of "abstract" space, even as the shifting locales keep everything localized and disoriented (157), Goldie makes the intriguing suggestion that the lack of clarity in the poem's motion shows the "impetus" of the "new physics" that can make even Chaucer himself into an object moving "without clear motive" (167).
Chapter 7, "Intense Proximate Affect: Nicole Oresme's Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum," pairs its study of spatial proximity with an interest in affect. Goldie argues that not only did the "new mechanics" innovate in seeing, through the impetus, the integration of objects and forces, but it also broke new scientific ground by seeing all phenomena as consisting of quantifiable, and hence measurable, intensities (171). According to Goldie, Oresme hints at strikingly modern modes of analysis by seeing all phenomena, whether it be feelings or objects or ideas, as "qualities" subject to measurement by the principles of "mechanics" (172). Particularly fascinating is Oresme's concept of the "configuration," which is the "quantity of the quality" measured over time (or some other overarching criterion) (174): once various configurations become relatively proximate to one another, they can be studied in their various interrelations, allowing the new mechanics to explore a variety of "complex" interactions in the phenomenal world (182).
Goldie investigates the application of such views of configured intensities in chapter 8, "Proximal Literature: Nearness and Distinction in the Legend of Good Women." Exploring the complex application of optics and the new mechanics in the initial scene where the eponymous lovers fall in love in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Goldie argues that the decisive factor in this bonding is precisely the "latent" effect of proximity proposed by Oresme (194). Goldie goes on to examine the intense role of proximity within the Legend of Good Women. Goldie's argument that Chaucer's narrowing of the "cleft" in the wall separating Thisbe and Pyramus is particularly interesting, for we see here that proximity is constitutive: by literally "making" the "two entities" of Pyramus and Thisbe (henceforth forever paired in legend), Chaucer highlights the constructive role of the proximate in medieval mechanics (202).
Goldie closes Scribes of Space with an afterword on "Ubiquitous Being in the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale." Goldie argues that the Pardoner presents, on the one hand, two negative figures associated with a sense of "vast space" (firstly, the ever active and grandiose Pardoner, who portrays himself as preaching in multiple locales and dining in numerous towns; and secondly, the universalized "glutton" of his sermon), and, on the other, a relatively positive portrayal of an Old Man whose "ubiquity" is poignantly portrayed both by his timeless allegorization of aging and by his horizontal movement along an earth that denies him his desired rest (214-215). Noting that this ethically heterogeneous mixture of figures of ubiquity strangely inhabit a tale primarily focused on such highly individualized spaces as the "alestake" where the Pardoner situates his tale or the Flanders where he sets his sermon (213), Goldie reveals a complex work whose richness includes precisely the entangled homogeneous and heterogeneous spatialities that are explored throughout the rich and rewarding Scribes of Space.