Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love by Cristina Maria Cervone (review)

Cristina Maria Cervone’s Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love constitutes an impressively original intervention within medieval literary and religious studies, poetics, and the nature of interdisciplinarity. Drawing on critical discourses from cognitive theory and psycholinguistics to theology, poetics, and new formalism, Cervone argues for the presence of what she terms an “Incarnational Poetics” in Middle English Literature. In meticulous and original close readings she shows how the poetic functions linguistically and metaphorically through referential clusters of concepts and images tied to Christ’s body (and thus incarnation): she terms these clusters botanical imagery/the life force, language/writing, and clothing/enwrapment. She argues that these image-concepts elicit a mode of ‘emanative reading’—a recursive hermeneutic that functions through a theme-and-variation accretion of meaning generated by the linguistic representation of Christ’s interlinked “leaps of love”—that simultaneously and momentarily evokes, reveals, and demonstrates both the human (teleological) and divine (simultaneous) perception of the Incarnate Christ. The systemic nature of incarnational poetics, which Cervone phrases “a pervasive underlying form informed by the theological and linguistic implication of ‘the word made flesh,’” functions as a formal instantiation of incarnational thought in Middle English literature, capable of revealing not only what we think about the nature of Christ, but how we think about him, and of encouraging vernacular reading habits that cultivate continuous and conscious reflection upon these questions (4).

The book’s five chapters each focus on a different facet, function, and result of incarnational poetics, each drawing from at least two texts common to all. For example, while chapter one considers Augustine’s patristic theology (and semiotics) alongside Langland’s Piers Plowman and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, chapter 5 places visual images of the crucifixion found in stained glass and sculpture alongside Julian of Norwich, Augustine, and lyric poetry. Especially notable is the first chapter, “The ‘Enigma’ of Signification in ‘Figurative’ Language,” which offers a rigorous explication of incarnational poetics and reveals the book’s larger investments in poetics and metaphor studies. Chapter 1 interweaves contemporary cognitive theory with Augustinian sign theory to argue for the formally generative function of metaphor at the heart of incarnational poetics. Cervone then brings this multidisciplinary lens to bear on the figurative language of divine representation in Langland, Julian, and Walter Hilton, demonstrating how incarnational poetics both encodes and evokes the extra-literal senses of metaphor in a fleeting yet profoundly insightful way. She demonstrates how the multiplicity of meaning generated by metaphor results in cognitive ‘leaps’ that produce insights into the paradoxical nature of Christ’s incarnate humanity, acknowledging “figural language as a key component in the search for a clear view of God” (54). This theoretical lens, while initially formidable due to the technical vocabulary of cognitive theory, allows Cervone to sharply define fresh terms of analysis in service of a larger goal: interrogating the polysemic nature of metaphor and its function, not only within incarnational poetics, but within contemporary metaphor studies and our own understanding of the embodied and experiential qualities of metaphor as a fundamental component of language.

Chapters 2 through 4 focus mainly on the literary texts central to Cervone’s argument: Julian’s Revelation of Love, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and lyric poetry, such as the Charters of Christ, focus specifically on Christ’s incarnation and humanity. The second chapter turns to the “linguistic dilation” generated by “the interplay of concrete and abstract maintained in a state of tension” common to literary representations of the Incarnate Christ (57). Focusing on Christ’s figurative representation through botanical imagery/the life force and clothing/enwrapment, Cervone shows how these image-concepts simultaneously function through both personification and reification, thus allowing multiple meanings to remain in play within the representation of both Christ’s humanity and humanity more generally. Chapter 3 turns to questions of agency and the elision of actor and...