Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas D. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (review)

The thirteen essays in this excellent volume consider a range of medieval texts in which what is at stake, explicitly or implicitly, is some variety of epistemological “uncertainty”: skepticism, relativism, or doubt, as the subtitle indicates; but also opinion, error, or bêtise. What emerges from the collection as a whole is a strong sense that these “varieties of uncertainty” played a crucial role in medieval intellectual and imaginative life, and indeed that it might not be inaccurate to speak of a “sceptical undercurrent that runs throughout the Middle Ages” (9). That the suggestion is a surprising one is a testament to the strength of the grip that the notion of the period as an “age of faith” maintains, rightly or wrongly, on the imagination not only of the public but also of medievalists themselves. The contributors to the volume complicate and disturb this notion, although (or perhaps because) the uncertainties in which they are interested are not religious but philosophical, or, more to the point, not pistological but epistemological. Rather than focusing on devotional or theological works, the authors dwell for the most part on “philosophical … historical, political, polemical, and literary texts” (1)—perhaps an arbitrary distinction, but one that acts as a generative constraint, allowing new patterns and contiguities to become visible.

One of the virtues of the collection is its spirit of interdisciplinarity, apparent not only in the fact that it is the record of a collaboration among scholars of varying methodological allegiances but also in the way that these scholars consider medieval texts that are themselves of quite different kinds and provenances. Indeed, what the editors identify as the ultimate goal of their project is “to understand more about how institutionally produced philosophy in Latin, itself polyvocal and conflict-ridden, might have interacted with the wider range of discourse produced outside these institutions” (2). In pursuing this goal, which the volume certainly achieves, the contributors thankfully make no recourse to “the tired binaries whereby the institutions of scholasticism are imagined to be a site of hegemony and the monologic, in contrast to a version of ‘popular’ culture constructed as diverse, critical, and iconoclastic” (5). Instead, what attracts their attention are the ways that different institutional, generic, and linguistic zones “situate” modes of uncertainty, and thereby situate themselves with respect to each other.

Another of the collection’s virtues is that it will suggest, no doubt differently to each reader, additional lines of inquiry to be pursued. This particular reader found himself wondering about the place of madness and stupidity, literary or otherwise, in the constellation identified here; about the possibility of understanding apophaticism generally, and the Cloud of Unknowing particularly, along the lines provided by this project: the work of unknowing being “religious,” to be sure, but not for that pistological; and, most of all, about what would happen if the question of the interimplication of literature and philosophy, one of the most frequently posed here, were formulated in less strictly medievalist terms: that is, whether there would be anything to be gained by consultation with certain works of continental philosophy, of which there would be worse definitions than that it is that tradition of philosophizing in the West that has proposed just such an interimplication.

The essays can be roughly sorted into three groups. Those in the first group address instances in which medieval academic institutions made room for, or were forced to confront, varieties of uncertainty. Those in the second consider texts in which the porosity of discourses to each other, and to broader social and political developments, comes into view. Those in the third treat literary works as fields across which academic ideas can migrate, and tend to suggest that the space of literature itself destabilizes whatever epistemological categories enter into it.

It remains to summarize the essays individually, following...