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

In the introduction to Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love, Cristina M. Cervone defines an “Incarnational poetic” as “a way in which writers sought to understand the relationship of God to humanity by encoding the concept of the Incarnation within linguistic and rhetorical forms that point to Christian truths” (3). Deftly situating itself both within and beyond the critical matrix of “the ‘new formalism’” (12), Cervone’s study revolves around the theological affordances of figurative language in a wide variety of Middle English texts, including well-known works such as Langland’s Piers Plowman and Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love as well as anonymous devotional lyrics and even visual art. She outlines three metaphorical “image groups”—“Christ’s body as book, text, or language; as cloth, clothing, or enwrapment; and as plant, growth, or life force” (5)—through which medieval poetry “yokes language’s active fluidity to both the divine and the human” (6). Because of its paradoxical signifier—wholly God and wholly man—every act of figuration within an Incarnational poetic is best characterized as “a momentary stretching out (dilatatio) of language” (6; cf. 42), which not only intimates a “superabundance of sense latent in language” (14) but also nurtures “an understanding of sacred fullness enacted through form,” which Cervone names “supereffability” (5). It is in this light that “individuals can experience mystical union with God as metaphorical language” (33).

In chapter 1, Cervone constructs a theoretical model for her exploration of Middle English writing, moving between concepts from modern cognitive linguistics—root metaphors (39), underspecification, cognitive priming, and polysemy (51–53)—and medieval themes of sensory perception—the Augustinian emphasis on the act of speaking (22–24), Julian’s spatial-conceptual paradox in which God is “in a point” (37), and the “ghostly/bodily” hermeneutic distinction from the Cloud-author (39–41). This first chapter constitutes an important alignment of contemporary metaphor theorists and medieval religious writers, and Cervone’s critical attention to the mechanics—or rather, the organics—of figuration culminates in a fruitful emphasis on the conceptual “deep structure” of language that she will return to near the book’s end.

The chapters that follow build on this theoretical foundation. Chapter 2 begins with the provocative claim that in selected lyric poems the interplay between abstract and concrete senses “is central to not perceiving ‘the Word made flesh’ as a [mere] metaphor” (57). As an example, Cervone explores the motif of the “trewelove” flower in several lyrics, contending that “the reification of Christ as the true-love plant” (62) gets variably repeated with reference to various other tropes—wounds, charters, breastfeeding—in order to provide “an emotive entrance toward an understanding of the complex nature of God’s humanity and of God’s love” (64). After treating resonant passages in Langland and Julian with documentary and coronal topoi, Cervone segues into chapter 3 by revisiting the figurative phenomenon of linguistic dilation, or “quasi-personification,” in which “a fragment of language momentarily takes on a sort of life of its own within a narrative” (80), such as in the phrase “Your love sustains me” (82). While this bestowal of agency upon an abstraction aligns linguistic dilation with the “verb-centered focus of conceptual metaphor theorists” (82), Trinitarian and Christological resonances enrich her authors’ exploration of “personhood” toward the contours of a properly Incarnational poetic.

The elision of agent and act in linguistic dilation receives extended treatment in chapter 3, initially with reference to the Charters of Christ poems, which “exploit both senses of the word ‘deed’: an act, a land-grant” (86). Figuring Christ as both divine author of and enfleshed parchment for the metaphorical grant of salvation, these poems meditate on the inherence of agency in material entities—coats of arms, blood (cf. 117–21), wax, roses, the Eucharist—that become near-personifications in themselves...