The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (review)

Although literary criticism has for some time focused upon the multiplicity or indeterminacy of texts, voices have recently been raised in opposition to this tendency. In this intriguing study, Sarah Kay responds to such critiques by arguing that didactic poems from the "long fourteenth century" (extending from Jean de Meun to Christine de Pizan) posit a oneness of meaning that they use to create philosophical consensus. Because oneness is not self-evident, these poets must work to achieve a complex unity that Kay is careful to distinguish from the simple truth that a more dogmatic current in medieval literary criticism finds in texts. At the heart of Kay's argument is the idea that "multiplicity is not inherently more radical than oneness" (xi). This allows her to recuperate Bakhtin's "monologism" as a valuable discursive mode.

Central to Kay's interpretive paradigm is the intersection between the two elements of her title, place and thought. The former must be wrested away from the rhetorical analysis of place that has dominated in recent years. A "common place," Kay argues, is not only the repetition of a literary theme or a mnemonic, but also a philosophical construct that orders and circumscribes thought. This second element of the paradigm is described by scholastic debates about intellection, the process that transforms sensory perception into knowledge. Place and thought are linked by an "analogy between intellection and physical circumscription" (7), and yet thought's relation to place is conflicted. It is not tied to place, but authors nevertheless localize its performance for literary and didactic purposes. This creates paradoxes that render the common places of didactic poetry difficult to visualize. Kay's readings of the use of place by a series of didactic writers (among them Guillaume de Machaut, Jehan Froissart, and Christine de Pizan) are sensitive to the intricacies and potential contradictions of these texts and demonstrate the relationship between their description of place and their engagement with larger literary traditions and philosophical or psychological questions (allegory and melancholia, for example).

The interpretations are compelling and the texts well chosen. A study of the "complexity of one" is particularly well suited to didactic poetry, and this book is likely to become required reading for anyone working on late medieval literature. The question of how much more broadly the paradigm may be applied remains open, however. Kay's final and necessary gesture, a discussion of Genius' "park of the lamb" in the Roman de la Rose (the text that inspired much of later didactic literature, including the writers that Kay has discussed) seems to reach an impasse. While she argues convincingly that this portion of the romance reads like a "parody" (184) of oneness in the didactic texts that will follow it, Kay also acknowledges (as she has demonstrated in other studies) that the romance as a whole is "dialogic" and "infinitely slippery" (179). This suggests that the "complexity of one" is a powerful theoretical paradigm that must nevertheless be applied to a corpus carefully circumscribed, like the "common places" of fourteenth-century didacticism.