Medieval History
I've just closed the pages of Stone, an Ecology of the Inhuman, a book written (given, it feels) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. And so this isn't a review of the book, with measured time and thinking and synoptic thought. This is the desire to stay in the book, to remain readerly and to not quite re-emerge from the "lithic coil" (87) wherein Albertus Magnus finds himself when thinking about the tiny fossilized shellfish he sees in the limestone of medieval (and modern (see image!) in the persistence of stone) Paris; to keep walking on the beach with Augustine as he makes temporal and theological sense of a fossilized tooth he finds in Utica (93); to think of Merlin as "an artist of estranged materialities" (176); to consider how many of the works of art I study I might conceive of now as "deracinated souvenirs," (204) objects wrenched from one world and triumphed into another; to never stop reveling in the "petric pregnancy" (240) of the stone paenita as described by Marbod of Rennes. The gifts of words rapt of stone gleam throughout the book. Within its entanglements and enmeshments, language and the lithic are both immemorial to the human perception of time - and yet both immediate to our perception. To make stone present through words, to make words as present as stone: this is one of the many wonders of the book.
Of "Lithic Coils" and "Petric Pregnancies" - _Stone; an Ecology of the Inhuman_ by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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| Fossils in Viollet-le-Duc's gargoyles of N-D Paris |
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| Caillois's collection at the Galerie de Min - Viollet-le-duc Wanted To Restore A Mountain Towards the end of his life, Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) wrote an architectural study of the Mont-Blanc, a high peak of a massive mountain range that rears up to grip the borders of France, Switzerland, and Italy. He gathered the measurements and... - Re Portlandiabus Scholar stone at the Chinese GardensWhen I became stranded in Chicago and found myself spending the night in a hotel with a woman from Portland I'd just met who is a Paleolithic baker who un-schools her children, I knew that I would love the city. ... - Everything And More Annunciation, 1400s.The meeting with Jim the geologist and Dan the chemist was terrific. This vivid (look at the breath of God!) alabaster Annunciation from the Philadelphia Museum of Art will help here. What is this profound thrill of newly gained knowledge?... - So Excited I can hardly sleep for how excited I am about tomorrow. It's not the student presentations on Jerusalem (although I'm sure those will be swell), and no, it's not the grading. Rather, I'm having lunch with two really nice colleagues, a... - Postmedieval: Congratulations Eileen, Myra, Et Al! Announcing content for postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies postmedieval has published four short essays from the first issue, due to publish in April 2010. These articles are available free online: · Stories of stone, by Jeffrey Jerome... . |