Introduction

et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

—John 1:14

THE GOSPEL OF John’s description of the Incarnation—of God taking on human form—proposes not only a conceptual conundrum (in the well-known words of Luke’s Gospel [1:34], “how shall this be done?”) but also a language-focused one: “The Word was made flesh” sounds like a metaphor that links God and humanity by figurative signification of the word “word,” yet in Catholic tradition, John 1:14 is not to be understood as metaphorical. Moreover, John 1:14 immediately raises an important interpretative question: what is the relationship of the Logos (here, “Verbum” or “the Word”) to language? While this phrasing puts a focus on language and its sometimes challenging signification, the conceptual difficulties raised by John 1:14 are not themselves a result of phrasing. The mystery of the Incarnation has sparked the interest of writers since the time of Christ. Some of them, like those who are the subject of this study, have elected to think through their puzzlement over the “how” of the Incarnation in poetical or rhetorical forms rather than, for example, theological or philosophical treatises.

As is well known, the latter half of the fourteenth century saw Passion devotion increasingly spurring people’s desire for intense affective and personal identification with Christ’s suffering. At the same time, however, certain writers were engaged in less emotional, more intellectual investigations of Christ’s humanity, investigations that intriguingly focus on the language through which writers speak their thought and on the written form such thought takes. Among them were individuals as widely recognized by medievalists today as William Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Walter Hilton, and as obscure as the unknown authors of the Charters of Christ and of a few lyric poems with botanical imagery. Such writers turned to the hypostatic union—the conjoining of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ—as a lens through which to examine the nature of God and, conversely, to explore God’s relationship to humanity. In their mode of thought, the Second Person of the Trinity becoming incarnate is of special interest as God’s active, willed enabling of salvation: an overflowing of his love. In William Langland’s memorable image, God’s love eagerly leaps from heaven into the “earth” of the Virgin in bountiful zeal:

Langland’s source for such emanative imagery, the topos of the “leaps of Christ,” portrays events of Christ’s life as a series of ardent leaps, wherein the Incarnation is the first eager leap that sets the rest of salvation history into motion. In the dreamscape of Langland’s narrative, love’s leap enacts the Incarnation even as it epitomizes its mystery in evocative, lyrical metaphor, within the imaginative faculty of the mind.²

The Incarnation itself is not, for the most part, these writers’ main topic. Nevertheless, they repeatedly reveal their interest in how God intentionally expresses his very substance in unstinting generosity. Their considerations of the “how” of Incarnational emanation come to be deeply centered in the material imagery by which they articulate their thought, in the structural forms that give their writing shape, even in their ideas about language itself. Provocatively, their writing both engages and generates a mode of thought grounded in a working-through of philosophical and theological implications of language. It does so at a point in history when vernacular English was emerging as a legitimate, if contested, medium for theological expression. This book examines medieval linguistic explorations that have ambitious claims to make, then, and that do so in aesthetic terms as well as intellectual ones.

While the importance of the Incarnation in late medieval English writing is often acknowledged by scholars, the extent of its influence has not yet been considered.³ This book begins to fill that gap by sketching the outlines of a sophisticated area of late medieval thought that has been too little studied, and by pondering ways in which aspects of what today are diverse disciplines (literary studies, theology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science) meet in the mode of understanding these medieval writers seek to achieve. From short lyrics to complex narratives, the works I bring together here were composed in England during the second half of the fourteenth century. They are the relatively brief poems “Mary the Rose-Bush,” “The Four Leaves of the Truelove” (or “The Quatrefoil of Love,” hereafter “Truelove”), the Vernon refrain lyric “Maiden Mary and her Fleur-de-lys” (hereafter “Flourdelys”), and the A-text of the “Long Charter of Christ”; longer works in verse and prose, the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love,⁴ and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection; and a topos in the visual arts, the lily crucifixion. This visual trope occurs only in England and Wales from the mid-fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries, suggesting that in late medieval England, Incarnational investigations were not limited to written works.

An Incarnational poetic, this book argues, epitomizes 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. Such poetics not only touch on philosophical and theological topics, as they assuredly do, but also are deeply invested, at a foundational level, in Christian theologies of the Incarnation of Christ. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly, these writers do not turn to established modes of philosophical or theological investigation, modes with traditions, a history, (Latin) vocabulary, and means of expression all their own. Instead, their thought experiments are grounded in strategies of the sort studied by literary scholars, strategies best elucidated by close readings of texts. To come to an understanding of these strategies at work, this book, too, is engaged in close readings of texts, sometimes minutely so, scrutinizing even what may seem minor variants that track or suggest the progress of thought over time, because it is in the particularity of such details that foundational aspects of larger conceptual leaps may be discerned. The details make the bigger picture stand out with a clarity our initial, intuitive grasp may only partially apprehend.

Not an organized movement or specific school, nor even a single mode adhered to by its proponents, this flourishing of Incarnational thought was simultaneously articulated in independent but related ways. With regard to the Incarnation, the writers I have singled out do not demonstrably draw on or respond to the thought of one another, although in some instances they might have known each other’s work (Hilton and Julian, for instance). Their work is aimed at diverse audiences, not at a single or unified group. Because they speak only infrequently about their methods and seldom didactically about their message, their thought must be inferred from the form that both encodes it and reveals its essence. As Nicolette Zeeman has recently argued, such structural theory remains theory even when its mode of expression is indirect:

the full extent of literary self-theorization—whether Latin or vernacular—only becomes apparent when we recognize that much of it is expressed in figured and even metaphorical form. Scholarship in Middle English literature should pay more attention to “imaginative” articulations of literary theory.⁵

As Zeeman points out, “imaginative” or “literary” theorization is not only understudied but generally overlooked in favor of the more directly treatise-like scholastic texts, even though the “other speaking” quality of “imaginative theory” is implicitly acknowledged and authorized by those very texts.⁶

By an Incarnational poetic I mean a particular type of a structural frame within a work, as well as a kind of writing that advances for both writers and readers a way of endeavoring to know by means of that structural form. An Incarnational poetic repeatedly returns to theological issues raised by the hypostatic union, most particularly the implications of Christ’s humanity, and does so in “figurative” language, with conspicuous attention to the “other-speaking” quality of imagistic expression. The term poetics has broadened so much in scope in the wake of poststructural theory that it has become something of a catch-all. It frequently denotes a literary system, although not necessarily one in verse; that is the sense I intend here. By “structural frame” or “form” I do not wish to imply didacticism or stasis—some mode of thought worked out in advance and then applied rigorously and deliberately throughout a work; rather, my focus is on process, on a thoroughgoing, organic, and flexible mode of thought that pursues comprehension over time, evolving as it matures. I want to emphasize the systemic (existing throughout), not systematic (inflexible), implications of the term. In the examples I advance in this book, the actual structure itself differs from work to work but the fact that there is such a structure—a pervasive underlying form informed by the theological and linguistic implications of “the Word made flesh”—is common to all. Medieval writers found in their diverse Incarnational thought experiments a way of seeking a way of knowing, if I might put it in such a roundabout fashion, and roundabout is an appropriate notion here, in that the work of an Incarnational poetic has a circling or spiral feel. Meaning does not transcend or supplant the form through which it is expressed, but abides within poetic and linguistic form even as it exists ideationally and abstractly in a “hypostatic union” of linguistic form and metaphorical thought. Here the specificity of words—their very quiddity—thickens abstraction. Surprising junctures of the material intangibly confect the immaterial, deliberately calling attention to language’s capacity to express more than it says, and to do so in pleasurable ways. These works entice readers to notice, ruminate over, delight in, and wonder at the capaciousness of metaphor, at how a figure may express more than the sum of its parts. While the specifics differ, in each case theology (even if expressed impressionistically) is tied to poetics, with form and language receiving special attention.

One characteristic aspect of these works is the recurrent strategy of reifying Christ’s body at moments when writers have every reason to focus on that body’s humanness—often its fleshly vulnerability (the suffering, crucified body). Each of the works that are the subject of this study draws two, and occasionally three, particular image groups into conjunction with one another in strikingly inventive and illuminating ways: Christ’s body as book, text, or language; as cloth, clothing, or enwrapment; and as plant, growth, or life force. Moreover, each of the three image groups comprises an array of reifications from the firmly concrete to the highly abstract, as my triple descriptions suggest (“book” being the most concrete and “language” the most abstract of the first image group’s range, for example). Writers momentarily reverse “the Word made flesh” to render Christ’s body in figure as something other than a human body, such as a plant, for instance, or words on a page. The fleeting, transitory nature of the reversal calls attention to the cognitive shift involved in understanding the metaphor. In wrestling with the problem of ineffability, medieval writers paradoxically engage a sort of supereffability, which I define as an understanding of sacred fullness enacted through form. A scriptural model for such supereffability may be found precisely in that Johannine expression of metaphor-that-is-more-than-metaphor, “the Word made flesh.”

The interest of these fourteenth-century writers is not in enfleshment as such, then, so much as it is in the hypostatic union, the point of connection between the human and the divine.⁷ For them, the hypostatic union points up the human need for mediation with God; they perceive Christ as a mediator in whom humanity and divinity are conjoined. He is the “mene,” as Julian of Norwich calls him (56.15): the intermediary, the mid-point, the means, and the way, with several theological concepts of note here conjoined in the Middle English word mene in a way that no single-word Present Day English translation can match.⁸ It is worth noting that while these writers desire to make sense of the divine nature in part by investigating what it means to be human, their mode of thought actively engages both sides of the union, not just the human side, as affective poetry tends to do. For them, thinking about embodied experience correlates with contemplating unembodied divinity. By portraying Christ in figure as something without a human body—the true-love plant, for instance, or a charter—medieval writers deliberate over Christ’s humanity in a way that draws attention to the paradox underlying the connection between God and man, while de-emphasizing Christ’s bodily suffering at the Passion.⁹ Their focus is not primarily on the “flesh” side of the metaphor; rather, they work from the middle term—the verb—that yokes language’s active fluidity to both the divine and the human.

It is no coincidence, then, that these writers incline toward thought experiments that portray emanative activity or organic growth rather than stasis or passivity. Their strategies for puzzling over the Incarnation encourage readings based in rhetorical or poetic schemes but more often in tropes such as metaphor, reification, personification, and the near-personification I will call linguistic dilation, which is a momentary stretching out (dilatatio) of language such that words nearly take on agency as they fleetingly almost act within their localized context.¹⁰ Such imagining complements the activity, as these writers see it, of the Incarnation— the willed, kenotic leaping of love—so that if we hear only “static” in “hypostatic,” we have missed their point, theologically, linguistically, and even poetically, because the two-way pull of Incarnational thought is expressed by means of form.¹¹ In the ways they engage tropes, the thought experiments of such writers invite interrogation of the nature of language itself, but especially of figurative language, and of how such language may carry social or cultural significance.¹² The trope of personification, for instance, suggests a focus on the nature of personhood: setting aside theological precision for a moment to think in literary critical terms, the Incarnation could be envisioned as the epitome of personification, as God’s personification of his language of love, Jesus as the person of the Trinity whose bodily presence materially expresses and performs that love and that language.

Embodiment and personhood together form a natural locus of attention for an Incarnational poetic, because from early Christianity, personal and community identity were linked through the Incarnational notion, found in Paul’s epistles, of the Church as the body of Christ, wherein Christ is envisioned as the head and individual Christians as the members of the body.¹³ For fourteenth-century writers, notions of lordship were also important. Implicit in the Pauline model are two socially significant aspects of embodiment: the nature of personhood itself and membership in a (corporate) community. The Pauline analogy is grounded in the gestalt of embodied experience: a wholeness (body) is distinct from its individualized parts (head, foot, hand, etc.) but cannot exist without those parts.¹⁴ The Pauline body links distinctions of persons (each individual within the corporate body) with communal or corporate identity (one collective body made up of multiple individual members).¹⁵ In taking on humanity, Christ through the Incarnation is incorporated into the community of Christians as the head of a body of followers. Drawing on the Pauline model, late fourteenth-century Incarnational investigations consider social responsibilities and hierarchies, often by recourse to language of lordship or ideas about the nature of the Church.

The thoroughgoing systemic of a gestalt similarly pervades an Incarnational poetic. In poetical writing, through their use of literary forms, medieval writers think deeply about the nature of language, of the vernacular, of humanity, society, God, comprehension—all this in ways that suggest these topics are fundamentally interconnected, not discrete. In this book, then, I wish to discuss a vernacular poetics of metaphor triggered by the issue of Incarnation; for brevity’s sake, Incarnational poetics.

* * *

A broad range of philosophical, theological, linguistic, and literary issues would be raised by the sort of writing I have described, regardless of historical or cultural circumstances. The theological potential of tropes was not newly discovered in the fourteenth century, for example. Writing in the first decade of the third century, Tertullian pointedly made the case that the hypostatic union was not metaphorical in nature: “For it was not figuratively [non figurate] that the Virgin conceived in her womb; and not by a metaphor [non figurate] that she gave birth to Emmanuel, God with us, Christ Jesus.”¹⁶ Like Tertullian, fourteenth-century writers recognized that the Logos is substantive, not linguistic.¹⁷ While God can speak the Logos, people cannot. Furthermore, how can one even speak about what one can neither say nor quite understand? Human language is time-bound and contingent; God’s speech is capacious and efficacious. Given the problem of ineffability, what is a writer interested in comprehending the Incarnation to do?

The works I bring together here, however, are of consequence not just because they engage timeless theological and philosophical issues, as they assuredly do. Their historical moment renders them of special note: they were written at a time in English history when the status of the vernacular in theological discourse was in question. The point is demonstrated well by a few lines from the Life of St. Katherine, written by John Capgrave, an Augustinian canon, in the middle part of the fifteenth century, when strictures against both preaching and instruction on religious matters had narrowed some of the poetical options available to his near-contemporaries, Langland, Julian, Hilton, and the others. Much scholarly work on this time period, particularly in literary studies, has focused on Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, legislation that was aimed at countering Lollardy and other forms of heresy. In his important Speculum article that sparked ongoing scholarly debate over the concept of “vernacular theology,” Nicholas Watson argued that the Constitutions was “one of the most draconian pieces of censorship in English history, going far beyond its ostensible aim of destroying the Lollard heresy and effectively attempting to curtail all sorts of theological thinking and writing in the vernacular that did not belong within the pragmatic bounds set by earlier legislation like Pecham’s Syllabus of 1281.”¹⁸ While, as Watson acknowledged, A. I. Doyle and Bernard McGinn both spoke about “vernacular theology” before he himself did, it was Watson’s article that became a recurring touchstone in critical debate, and his further work on the topic ensured that his argument became the defining vision against which other scholars have situated their own thought.¹⁹ The volume of English Language Notes edited by Bruce Holsinger in 2006 (44.1) gathered a group of succinct papers that looked backward to Watson’s original sharply focused thesis, which excluded preaching texts and drama, for instance. At the same time, these articles looked forward to expanding critical uses to which “vernacular theology” was being put. In his own contribution to ELN, Watson slightly adjusted his view of the shift that he had previously argued occurred in religious writing in the vernacular after implementation of the legislation. He nevertheless reiterated two points he found more relevant than ever: “that writing about religion in the vernacular is a political act (in a more specific sense than that in which writing in general is political); and that, because this is so, all vernacular writing about religion is connected, part of a single field or arena of discourse.”²⁰ The first of those points is particularly important to understanding Capgrave; the second is equally true of my notion of Incarnational poetics, wherein authors writing for varied audiences in diverse genres, some in verse and some in prose, and not specifically influencing one another, are nevertheless connected in their manner of working. In a companion article in ELN, David Benson suggests that “treating Langland as a theologian risks undervaluing him as a poet” and that “we should pay more (or at least equal) attention to the poetic form in which these opinions are expressed,” a caution much in sympathy with my project.²¹ Even more than the writers I consider in this study, because of his historical moment Capgrave had to be especially careful about what he said and how he said it; they, on the other hand, were opening up possibilities for vernacular discourse even as the moment rapidly approached when an important segment of that discourse would be vastly complicated or, possibly, shut down.²²

Capgrave articulates with dry humor some of the aims of his fourteenth-century predecessors, aims to which he evidently aspires but ones that had been rendered problematic by Arundel’s edict. At the moment when the divinely inspired Katherine must expound on the doctrine of the Incarnation to the assembled scholars in Parliament, he ruefully notes:

By “langage of oure nacion,” Capgrave specifies the vernacular in which he writes, English, as opposed to the aristocratic vernacular of the court (French) or the learned language of theologians (Latin). Through this wry aside, he identifies a triple difficulty in his poetic task: the conceptual challenge of working through a theology of the Incarnation (a timeless problem), the linguistic problem of expressing abstract thought in material terms (also timeless), and the potential social or political ramifications of disputing complex theological issues in the vernacular (an issue contemporary to him). While Capgrave himself was an Augustinian canon, Arundel’s Constitutions prohibited debate over theological matters even among clerics, except at universities.²⁴ Beyond the ordinary conceptual problems associated with “such difficult questions [straunge doutes] as pertain to the Incarnation,” Middle English was “plain” in another, more prosaic way: it lacked the clarity of Latin technical vocabulary. Further, writing theology in the vernacular could lead to potentially deadly charges of heresy, or even sedition. So the problem of writing about the Incarnation, as Capgrave saw it, was evidently both diachronic and synchronic, in part a conceptual one that had engaged others throughout Christian history and in part tied to strictures situated in his time. Capgrave’s “most ambitious use of the vernacular to convey religious information,” as Karen Winstead has called it, was ambitious in more than one way.²⁵

At first glance, it would seem that Capgrave’s primary purpose here is to cagily evade the restrictions on vernacular writing on doctrinal issues by acknowledging the difficulty inherent to translation. The problem of translation was specifically mentioned in the Constitutions as one of the reasons for Arundel’s restraints; perhaps Capgrave hoped that his comment about the vernacular would make him appear sympathetic to the legislation. Even more interestingly, however, Capgrave suggests one particular way in which linguistic utterance might express more than it says directly. He wants to be able to “uttir” Katherine’s theological arguments not only clearly but also fully, a concept he links both to versification and to the Incarnation. In Middle English, a “pleyn” utterance is a full utterance, an utterance pregnant with meaning, whose plenitude (from the same Latin root) is replete with abundance.²⁶ In the context of the Incarnation, this capacity of language to be full, to suffuse, evokes emanation, a flowing forth from God—even specifically the generation of the (uncreated) Son from the Father. Capgrave deliberately touches on a sensitive area of doctrine—the Incarnation—by choosing this moment in the narrative to call attention to Katherine’s (and his) use of the vernacular.²⁷ Faced with the ineffable, Capgrave turns to the supereffable: a “full word,” “pleyn” vernacular English verse.

By indicating that he will supplement his source for Katherine’s vita by “enforc[ing]” (supporting) it with others “whech spoke more pregnantly as in this matere” (4.2199–200), Capgrave calls attention to the doubled nature of “pleyn,” and it is this doubled nature that provides an important connection to the work of his predecessors. The reference to pregnancy is partly playful, since the topic at hand is “His concepcion” (4.2202). However, he also pairs pregnancy deliberately with the notion that vernacular English could be unclear (whether ambiguous or indecipherable). Although he does not say so directly, he implies that he is thinking of dialect. Supplemental accounts of Katherine’s theological argument are necessary, he says, because he can scarcely understand his vernacular source—a source whose vernacularity he stresses.²⁸ He has previously noted the strain he experiences when reading his source’s English, which he describes as “his derk langage” (Prol.62). Because his source did not speak pregnantly enough, Capgrave did not understand fully, or so he says:

The difficulty he has in reading the “derk” vernacular prompts him “To translate this story and set it more pleyne” (Prol.233). Indeed, he not only writes it out in his own up-to-date English (implying that “more pleyne” means “clearly”) but also in verse; moreover, he composes in a conspicuously ambitious verse form, rime royal, and at considerable length (implying that “more pleyne” means “fully”)—his version of the vita comprises a prologue and five books of no fewer than 8,624 lines, an effort comparable to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The desire “to uttir pleynly” replicates, in its dual meanings of clarity and plenitude, language’s capacity for fullness that offers the opportunity to move beyond inexpressibility. That Capgrave specifies he will seek such fullness in verse implies that, as he sees it, form might offer an enhanced means of expressing what perhaps could not otherwise be said. In brief, he argues for “imaginative theory” of precisely the sort Zeeman urges us to notice, and he does so by means of poetic form.

While Capgrave does not go on to write in the form of an Incarnational poetic (the quoted moment in the text is not part of a systemic form that yokes poetics to theology by thinking through the hypostatic union repeatedly, over time), his dilemma over language and poetic structure in theological discourse epitomizes the interest in poetic and linguistic form demonstrated by his English predecessors. When they turn to the Incarnation as a means of understanding Christ’s humanity, they similarly rely on the notion that meaning may be borne by formal features of the writing, that “to uttir pleynly” about the Incarnation might require verse, or metaphor, or some other form of patterning. While patterning is obviously an important feature of literature more generally, especially of poetry, the form-based paradox of “the Word made flesh” is accentuated by how an Incarnational poetic plays out through the structural framework of a given work: in repetition that introduces variation. Once a pattern is established, readers expect some link among its elements, some common foundation, and authors build on such expectations. Patterns, and their fulfillments, and their alterations are there for alert readers to find. In that process, it helps to know that a pattern, or a form, is being sought. The layering of reified variations that subtly structures an Incarnational poetic parallels the cognitive response, over time, of a reader who might think “the Word made flesh” must be a metaphor for God’s presence but then adjusts that understanding to think simultaneously of the historical Jesus as a man dwelling among humankind and as Logos. In every way imaginable, the phrase “the Word made flesh” resists simplistic interpretation. This thinking through of “what could that mean?” is deliberately encoded in “the Word made flesh,” this form in which John’s Gospel presents the Second Person of the Trinity, the historical Jesus, God among men, the Logos—whatever term a reader substitutes for the puzzling phrase. As these writers engage it, language’s potential for what I have called the supereffable, in its intellectually challenging fullness, may offer a means toward approaching the ineffable.

* * *

Like Capgrave, I am intrigued by both diachronic and synchronic aspects of Incarnational poetics. Incarnational poetics, as I have outlined it, ties in with issues of urgent contemporary interest in medieval studies and in literary studies more broadly. The religious turn in literary studies, and even in contemporary thought beyond the academy, has called attention to spirituality in a way that gives historical religious thought more relevance than ever. Yet, more could be done to encourage scholars of vernacular religious thought away from taxonomies that tend to fossilize our thinking about medieval writing. Terms such as “mysticism” (must Hilton always be paired with Julian or the Cloud-author?) and even “vernacular theology,” so provocative when newly introduced, risk becoming a form of shorthand that reduces the vibrant and sometimes mystifying complexity of medieval religious texts, making them more manageable, if ultimately less intriguing. The ELN issue I noted earlier and the After Arundel volume both revisited the topic of “vernacular theology” to investigate what sort of work remains to be done, and where current thinking about “vernacular theology” may be falling short.²⁹ As Benson noted with respect to Piers Plowman, oftentimes we lose sight of the poet in tracing the theology.³⁰ What is the place of poetry and poetics within the study of religious thought? The works that are the focus of my study in this book repeatedly call attention to the fact that form matters, not just theologically but poetically, and sometimes theologically because poetically.

With the rise of the “new formalism,” poetic form is receiving more attention than ever. One difference between the argument of this book and many new formalist investigations is that in medieval studies, the focus has generally been on secular texts, with a few exceptions.³¹ I noted earlier that in my view, close reading is especially useful when we look for what that “other speaking” of “figurative” language might say, that reading with careful attention to minute details can help us to figure out how that “other” sense happens. However, two panels on close reading organized by Christopher Cannon for the New Chaucer Society’s meeting in New York City in 2006, which were extremely well attended, brought out an intense disagreement over the merits of close reading in literary scholarship. From that discussion, it emerged that while most people in the room agreed that it is valuable to teach close reading to students, not everyone felt a need for close reading in literary scholarship. To call the debate lively would be an understatement; depth of feeling on both sides was palpable.³² In an essay on form from about the same time, Cannon himself advocated a broader than usual definition of literary form, one that would require careful scrutiny of more than the typical details:

the form of a text not only consists of all the structural levels we traditionally anatomize when we refer to “literary form” (as we look, almost always by turns, at its metre, rhyme scheme, or style; at its metaphors or patterns of imagery; at its generic affiliations or plot), but of the integration of all those levels, along with any other aspect of a particular text which may be seen to structure it. In assuming that every attribute of text is either the elaboration or entailment of some originating “thought,” this method necessarily recruits a very great part of that structure to any account of a text’s meaning.³³

Like Zeeman, Cannon notes that in “discussions of form in the Middle Ages (if not in all periods) . . . governing theories are more usually embedded than stated.”³⁴ Maura Nolan similarly calls for “severe scrutiny” of texts, to move beyond readings that “fail to read the text closely enough” and therefore produce a plausible, yet ultimately shortsighted, view. Speaking of some lines from Chaucer’s portrait of Alisoun in the Miller’s Tale, Nolan suggests that the closest of close readings offer “an appreciation for the degree to which [the portrait] produces and then sustains an aesthetic tension between the natural and the artificial as a way of preserving its own vision of the beautiful.”³⁵ Such pleas for intensive scrutiny of textual details in the service of understanding larger issues of form are well worth heeding, in my view, and my own project takes a similar stance.

Yet beyond topics of interest in literary and medieval studies, questions raised by how these writers treat the Incarnation at this point in time intriguingly align with more than one issue inherent to writing (on any topic at any time) in a formalized and structured mode, issues such as when, why, and how poets offer a concrete metaphorical image in place of naming an abstract concept, for instance. They are matters of import to modern writers or readers of poetry—even to users of language more generally. To give one brief example, consider the title of a key early symposium for metaphor studies, “Metaphor: the Conceptual Leap,” which punningly expands the sort of link Capgrave drew between pregnancy and language’s capacity to signify, but in a secular context. Sheldon Sacks explains the play on words by quoting the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer:

“But if this is indeed the case—if metaphor, taken in this general sense, is not just a certain development of speech, but must be regarded as one of its essential conditions—then any effort to understand its function leads us back, once more, to the fundamental form of verbal conceiving” (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth).

Cassirer’s sense that metaphor leads us back “to the fundamental form of verbal conceiving” is reflected in the continuing life of the essays in this volume.³⁶

As Sacks sees it, metaphor is essential to expression of thought, and the begetting of thought generates further thought as readers “conceive” it: thought takes on a “life” of its own as essays are bound together in a volume and sent forth into the world. Sacks was certainly right about “the continuing life of the essays”: the collection was an early bellwether in the burgeoning field of metaphor studies and has continued to sound a strong guiding note as the field is grazed and flourishes.

Was my playful evocation of a sheep’s bell sounding the way in the midst of thriving vegetation a constituent part of my point about metaphor or mere ornamentation to add to the pleasure (one can hope) of reading my words? Such questions are well worth considering, and tie in with the long-contested issue of whether metaphor and other “figurative” language is fundamental to thought, as Augustine came close to suggesting, or an ornamental add-on to language, as Aristotle claimed. It is important to note, too, that once one focuses on the slipperiness of signification, it is hard not to be hyperaware of the polysemous potential implicit in the words one chooses (was “whether” itself a sound pun, when I drew attention to the bellwether of my sheep example?). “Conceive” illustrates the dangers and benefits of such sensitivity particularly well: what does “conceive” offer that “grasp,” “strive for,” or “think of” do not? Now that I have drawn your attention to it, will you hear resonances of “the Word” in “conception,” “conceit,” and “conceive” when used in the context of thought, even outside the bounds of this discourse? What concord in the shared root word enables the permutations of “inform,” “conform,” “formulate”? There is an inherent figurative nature to all language. That metaphoricity can take different forms and stress different associations at various cultural moments. In late medieval England, religious poets and thinkers embraced metaphor for its theological, philosophical, and poetical potential. The sort of writing that considers the implications of “the Word made flesh” has a heightened capacity to make meaning from polysemy, and the fourteenth-century writers I discuss here were, for this and other reasons, strongly interested in the superabundance of sense latent in language. It is therefore especially useful to be attuned to the particulars of how they draw language and theology together—useful for understanding both their cultural moment and ours, and for thinking through problems surrounding the status of metaphor, the nature of which is a highly contested area of study today in several academic disciplines. While the argument of this book is itself fundamentally both literary and historical, its overtones resonate with larger questions about the nature of perception and expression.

As will become apparent, this study is ultimately more interested in qualities medieval works share than where they differ. While there is important work to be done on distinctions among the thoughts of these writers, that is not the focus of this book. Rather, I want to sketch the outlines of a questing sort of thought, a thought that seeks to understand rather than one that gives a static, didactic answer. In these works, the activity of that seeking parallels the activity of love’s kenotic leap, although unlike the Incarnation itself, the seeking these writers do never fully realizes its potential. The working-through of thought is central to the mode of understanding in an Incarnational poetic; time, and the development of thought over time, are therefore also key concerns. Perhaps most prominent in this body of work, however, are the gestures that both defer and bring to the fore in the same move. Incarnational thought suffuses a work in a backgrounding sort of way that stands out when you know to look for it. This suffusion is a crucial part of what makes an Incarnational poetic so effective. The principle applies in the reifications of Christ’s body, where the cognitive shift to a metaphor makes the nature of Christ as God and man together both the main focus and also the background. It applies, too, in Capgrave’s strategy of speaking about something other than, and in addition to, what he said.

These issues have given shape to my own thought about the medieval texts I discuss. For that reason, this book follows an issue-oriented structure, with chapters that explore abstract theoretical concepts rather than historical topics. These issues are interrelated, not discrete; they are facets of a larger whole, not separate modes of thought or hermeneutics. They offer different vantage points from which to consider what writers are doing when they engage evocative imagery, such as love’s leap. Chapter 1 addresses how language signifies, taking up the challenge offered both by medieval writers’ understanding of sensory perception as a model for linguistic signification and the body-centered focus of present-day cognitive linguists; here I address implications of considering figurative language to be conceptual rather than linguistic in nature. Augustine’s use of the trope he calls “enigma” stands as a useful headnote for the issues at stake in this chapter. Like fourteenth-century writers influenced by his thought, he treats abstract ideas through bodily and linguistic reference points, where language and form are key, and he locates the core of truth in God’s language of love as expressed in and through the Incarnation. For Chapter 2, I move to the interplay between abstract and concrete. In the “Long Charter of Christ” and other poems, the plant enigmatically known in medieval England as the true-love, sometimes used as a sort of shorthand for Christ himself, Christ’s body, or salvation, usefully highlights how these authors routinely compress the concrete and the abstract, a compression central to the paradox of not perceiving “the Word made Flesh” as metaphorical. Key imagery here includes other plants with established religious symbolism, such as the lily and the rose; clothing-based topoi, such as bodily wounds as a côte armure or livery; and document-focused tropes, the body as charter or Eucharist as indenture. Chapter 3 addresses the elision of actor and act inherent, for instance, to the conceit of the Incarnation as “love deed,” simultaneously an act and a deed of gift, which in the “Long Charter of Christ” coincide in the body of Christ written on and written out as a land grant, spoken by Christ in the flesh. Because such elision of actor and act also highlights the hypostatic union of God and man in the person of Christ, I turn to the linguistic concept of deixis (proximity to or distance from the speaker, as encoded in linguistic expression, such as “I,” “here,” “now,” or “you,” “there,” “then”) to elucidate power relationships that touch on lordship and kingship in this and other poems. Building on the interplay of abstract and concrete from Chapter 2, here language takes on the ability to act, “the Word” dwelling among humankind. Actor and act coincide in the capacity of “the Word” to enact power, where bodily form (or lack thereof) is often of as much interest as is linguistic form. A major topic for this chapter is the topos of the leaps of Christ, centering on Langland’s use of the leaps for his image of love’s leap, the source of this book’s title.

The deictic centering discussed in Chapter 3 leads naturally to the fourth chapter’s topic: intersections of historical and poetic time, drawing from the enigmatic property of the Incarnation as God’s physical entrance into human time, both a historical and a timeless moment. The paradox of the Incarnation as existing within time but outside of time is highlighted in Langland’s brilliantly puzzling description of the Incarnation coming as “plenitudo temporis time.” Borrowing from the visual arts the notion of simultaneous narration (multiple narrative moments depicted in one narrative plane), I build on the foundation laid by Chapter 3 to examine how an action does useful work when thought of as simultaneously historical and timeless. For these writers, the moment of the Incarnation becomes a lens through which to perceive other actions, both human and divine, even as it becomes a structural background for understanding. The lily crucifixion offers a parallel case from the visual arts. This trope makes use of simultaneous narration and offers a counterpoint, in a static image, for the teleology of narrative time, of progress in understanding in and through time. The fifth and final chapter takes on the largest-scale aspect of Incarnational poetics: the form-based systems through which late medieval writers approach God’s language of love. I borrow the term “deep structure” from transformational grammar to investigate how the layering of understandings over and through poetic time enables language’s capacity for fullness, through structural form. This “eddying back of sense” by means of deliberate repetition with variation is typical of poetry in general, of course. Here, though, poetic deep structure intensifies a way of knowing, a way of representing ineffability that becomes particularly helpful when considering the form in which God manifests his divinity to humanity. I offer readings of the Incarnational poetics of the “Long Charter of Christ,” The Scale of Perfection, “Truelove,” and “Flourdelys.”

Because deep structure is difficult to envision in the abstract, I advance a brief visual correlative by way of the lily crucifixion, a topos that appears to have developed in the last half or quarter of the fourteenth century (see Figure 4 below, p. 199). Here Gabriel is on the left, Mary on the right, with a sort of potted-plant Jesus receding into the background between them. Just as art historians may use the terms “foreground” and “background” to clarify visual processing of an image, cognitive scientists also speak of a conceptual foreground/background dichotomy, where the subject of one’s attention in any cognitive framework—whether art object, literary work, or life situation—stands out to the perceiving subject as the salient “figure” against a less prominent “ground.” Only a shifting of context is required to reverse “figure” and “ground.” This shifting is fundamental to the visual trope of the lily crucifixion. Because the visual presentation of the scene sets the Annunciation in the foreground, it could be easy on quick glance to miss seeing the crucified Christ on that lily plant. The Christological context of salvation history suffuses the background, however, by way of the lily crucifixion, offering theologically meaningful resonance to that foregrounded action by situating the moment of Incarnation within the framework of Christ’s life as humanly begun, his human death, and his bodily resurrection (through the Easter connotation of the lily). Simultaneous narration of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection encourages a Bonaventurean understanding of salvation: one event flows from another. Similarly, an Incarnational poetic suffuses a work by manifesting itself in underlying structures, grounding the work as a whole in Incarnation theology while not focusing attention directly or primarily on the Incarnation itself. The foreground/background focus shift encourages complex reading: if we focus on the Annunciation, we isolate one moment in time; if we focus on the lily crucifixion, we overlay three moments in time, and that overlaying offers a way to conceptualize God as existing simultaneously outside of time and within human history, and Christ as being fully human and fully divine. We can choose to switch between these modes of perception, a mental equivalent of the visual diagram in which one chooses to see either two human faces or a single vase.

This book, then, takes on modes of thought—both fourteenth-century and present-day—that jointly engage language, form, history, divinity, ineffability, and cognition. That shared focus mirrors the holistic sort of thinking to which late medieval writers were accustomed, where disciplinary conventions had not yet split philosophy from theology, and literary studies as such did not yet exist. The scope of Incarnational poetics in late medieval England would indeed seem to warrant Capgrave’s “straunge doutes.” For these writers, complexity, perhaps even multiplicity, offers an opportunity to take up the “fullness” latent in “pleynly” when one engages, in linguistic form, a mystery that is—on the face of it—an enigma.