Etymology and Wordplay in Medieval Literature ed. by Mikael Males (review)

To the modern reader, the relationship between etymology and wordplay may appear neither necessary nor natural, but for medieval textual analysis and exegesis, this book reveals these two seemingly divergent literary and cultural activities are closely related. Mikael Males explains that the aim of the volume is ‘to investigate […] how the functions of etymology and wordplay may contribute to our understanding of medieval textual culture and cognitive perceptions’ (p. 2). The book achieves this through an examination of a range of medieval examples of wordplay and etymologies, exploring what these might reveal about the cultural practices from which they originate. Moreover, wordplay is shown to have been an important intellectual and scholastic pursuit, not just a witty activity for its own sake. As Males notes, ‘the nexus of wordplay and etymology, and the flexibility inherent to it, has resulted in a staggering array of strategies for producing and retrieving meaning in texts’ (p. 7).

The book contains nine contributions, starting with Males’s broad genealogy of the Latinate origins of the field, in which he notes tensions between the phonological and semantic arbitrariness of philosophical discourse on the one hand, and the non-arbitrary nature of medieval textual practice, particularly biblical exegeses. Wim Verbaal’s erudite analysis of the writings of Alan of Lille follows next, and he takes particular interest in the learning needed for reading Alan’s ‘deliberately difficult’ (p. 79) texts and the relevance of wordplay for Alan’s works. Next comes Keith Busby’s analysis of moral and ethical medieval paranomasia (wordplay derived from phonetic similarity) in the thirteenth-century Old French works of Gautier de Coinci, and this is followed by Stephen Michael Carey’s analysis of soteriological macaronic texts, in which heteroglossic paranomasia is used for emphasizing semantic ambiguities, where debased and highly sexualized readings sit alongside the moral reading. Paolo Borsa’s contribution is next, looking at wordplay in both the metrics and the materiality of thirteenth-century Italian poetic manuscripts, and he explores ways in which the mise en page underpins playful options for the reader, and identifies the influence of vernacularity in the wordplay itself. The sixth chapter, from Jan Erik Rekdal, turns to the medieval Irish textual tradition, and the use of polysemy, etymology, and wordplay in cognitive and exegetical writings, whether glosses, legal texts, or tales. Eric Weiskott’s contribution in the following chapter focuses on one particular text, the Old English poetic Exodus. He explores the extensive (and difficult) wordplay as an index of the tastes and aims of a long-lost interpretive community, with exegesis facilitated through layering of puns, kennings, and poetic variations. The editor, Mikael Males, then contributes a chapter on wordplay, etymology, and poetry in the interpretation of dreams in Icelandic literature. He finds that Icelandic dream interpretation developed into a native activity that diverged from the Latin tradition, likely due to the strong poetic tradition in wordplay that was already in place in Iceland. The final chapter, by Julia Verkholantsev, turns to the use of etymologies in medieval origin narratives of the Slavic peoples, discussing the ways in which etymologia is used as a multivalenced interpretive tool, contrary to etymology’s modern scientific use as a tool of logic. More broadly, Verkholantsev argues that, taken in the context of historical narrative, etymologia is more than linguistics, and must be ‘taken seriously as a medieval historiographical structure and epistemological method’ (p. 264).

Throughout the book, the value of medieval etymologies is shown to be both in the clues they hold to modes of medieval reading and thought, and clues to medieval views on interpretation and the acquisition of knowledge. Likewise, for wordplay: all the contributions in this volume emphasize the importance of recognizing wordplay in all its forms as a serious method for moral, ethical, and intellectual pursuits, far from the place that wordplay occupies in modern culture. Indeed, as this volume reveals, the very...