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

Recent interest in the emotions among scholars of Middle English has tended to put medieval and modern modes of thought side by side. At the cutting edge of interdisciplinarity and indeed often specifically scientifically driven investigations into the function and style of premodern literary texts, such studies are interested in the ways in which historically and disciplinarily distinct fields of inquiry can inform linguistic and discourse analysis.

‘Both cognitive scientists and medieval writers’, Cristina Maria Cervone declares in her study of language and form in fourteenth-century religious verse, ‘share an interest in the relationship of cognition to embodiment’ (p. 21). Cervone attempts to convince us of the veracity of this claim, and of the usefulness of her approach. The book anticipates much very recent work theorising emotions in literature, emphasising the importance of the literary archive in exploring questions of language’s expressive force. This is not, however, a book about the affective significance of religious writing on the Incarnation, but instead its intellectual power. Cervone’s study, rather than focusing on how various Middle English authors represented affective or empathetic identification with scenes of Christ’s Passion, investigates how they used poetic form to explore the scriptural metaphor of the Incarnation – the ‘Word made flesh’ – a figurative expression which holds both literal and symbolic meanings in suspense.

The ‘Incarnational poetics’ that Cervone’s study proposes is a ‘vernacular poetics of metaphor triggered by the issue of Incarnation’ (p. 7). Cervone’s literary samples range from William Langland and Julian of Norwich, to the Middle English ‘trewelove’ (‘four-leaf clover’) poems, and other poetic works incorporating botanical motifs (lilies, roses, trees, and so forth). Driven by an exploration of ‘how language conveys complex abstract thought, especially (but not exclusively) in metaphor’ (p. 22) in Chapter 1, and bolstered by her readings of recent studies in linguistics and the cognitive sciences, in Chapters 2 through 5, Cervone explores the metaphorical uses of language in a number of Middle English works. For medievalists, her examples are wide enough to be convincing, while her analysis is far-reaching enough to be of interest to literary scholars working on issues of language, affect, embodiment, and cognition in both earlier and later periods of history. The study is, in some senses, specific to the English vernacular – a section on ‘pleyn’ English speaking in Cervone’s Introduction emphasises the specificity of her thesis’s application to Middle English poetic texts – but it speaks more openly to much larger questions about the nature of language and thought and the cognitive function of poetry; the ‘fundamental’ work of metaphor (as opposed to its often ‘ornamental’ status) in poetic form, and, by extension, all forms of discourse, medieval or modern.