The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form ed. by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (review)

Ever since Kant, an object can only be judged beautiful insofar as it answers to no preconceived concept or interest, insofar as it embodies purposiveness but not a purpose. We might find the smooth surface of a marble statue agreeable to our senses, we might fancy it because it reminds us of a beloved pet, we might value its political message—but it would only be beautiful if, in addition to all these things, we also judged its form to be beautiful. As G. K. Chesterton quipped, the modern artist may use any symbols he wants as long as he doesn't mean anything by them. This modern beauty standard places medievalists in a difficult position. If we are to be competent moderns, we must talk about medieval aesthetic objects as purposeless. But we cannot truly represent those objects without talking about them as having a purpose, such as fostering individual and collective salvation or legitimating the ruling monarch. Indeed, medieval objects may have been considered beautiful insofar as they seemed likely to achieve such purposes. Clearly, it is incumbent upon us to develop ways of talking about medieval aesthetic forms neither as failed attempts to meet modern beauty standards nor as vehicles for transmitting religious or political doctrine.

Robert Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok's collection of essays valuably answers this call. They see their project as part of the recent return to formalist approaches within the broader field of literary studies, which in turn seeks to define and justify literary scholarship in the face of increasing institutional and public skepticism. They also make a special claim for the value of studying the deep past, where the inevitable anachronism of modern aesthetic categories becomes not a problem but, borrowing Caroline Levine's term, an "affordance" that encourages medievalists to interrogate both their own historical situatedness and that of their objects of study. Specifically, the postmedieval origin of the category of the literary encourages consideration of the ways it does and does not fit medieval texts. Did medieval readers and writers recognize texts we now think of as literary as belonging to a distinct category of discourse? If so, how did they define that category? What were its boundaries?

While all of the essays in the collection grapple with these fundamental questions, their approaches are otherwise wide-ranging, extending from a traditional concern with poetic form to an interest in the spatialized form of the manuscript page to explorations of the way aestheticized writing informs or is performed by its readers. This eclecticism represents both a strength and a weakness. Given the overall high quality of the essays, it gives readers a valuable sense of the range and dynamism of New Formalism within medieval studies. Cumulatively, the studies cultivate an attention to form and formal possibilities that will likely sharpen readers' close-reading skills across a variety of genres and media. This same intellectual range means, however, that the essays define "form" in so many divergent (and sometimes flatly contradictory) ways that the category risks being emptied of meaning. Relatively few of the essays engage with theoretical conversations about form, either modern or medieval, that would help to establish a common set of coordinates for the collection as a whole. One need not agree with Kant in order to find him helpful as a point of reference; indeed, for medievalists he is likely to be most helpful in revealing, by way of contrast, how medieval objects frustrate or challenge modern aesthetic expectations. The same can be said of medieval discussions of form. For medieval Neoplatonists, a crafted object is beautiful insofar as it participates in the transcendent form of Beauty, understood either as an aspect of God or as contained within the divine mind. In this paradigm, an object's form is located both beyond itself and beyond the material world. Even the most committed medieval Aristotelians followed the Neoplatonists...