Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts

Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts edited by Emily Steiner and Lynn Ransom. Lawrence J. Schoenberg Studies in Manuscript Culture 2. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. This timely collection of learned and well-written essays arose from papers presented at the Fifth Annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, held in 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania (which houses the Schoenberg Center). essays published here cohere around the conferences two main questions, which coeditor Emily Steiner articulates in her Introduction: first, medieval manuscripts transmit knowledge through genealogies, diagrams, commentary, rubrics, finding aids, book lists, maps, and so on; and, second, medieval manuscripts themselves function taxonomically, that is, as systems through which knowledge can be organized, classified, and used (2). Six chapters follow Steiners Introduction. In the first chapter, The Poems of 'Ch': Taxonomizing Literary Tradition, Elizaveta Strakhov turns to the famous Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902, well-known to Chaucerians as the manuscript containing host of poems in French which, if James Wimsatt is to be believed, may have been composed by Geoffrey Chaucer. Fifteen of the manuscripts 310 lyrics bear the initials Ch at their head, and, as Strakhov is skeptical about the purported Chaucerian connections, she wisely redirects the discussion away from celebrity authorship towards the more vexed question of what sorts of interpretive paradigms the manuscript itself foregrounds. As she shows, the manuscript seems more interested in questions of genre and lyric form than it does in authorship, exhibiting what she calls a profound intentionality vis-a-vis literary form (23). Strakhov analyzes, in meticulous detail that is nevertheless rendered in clear prose, the generic patternings the manuscript's compiler employed. Ultimately, the Ch lyrics stand at the end of series of intercalated lyrics, series that tracks the evolution of formes fixes lyric away from music to longer literary forms in the final decades of the fourteenth century (31). Thus, Strakhov shows, the Ch lyrics are more profitably read as occupying particular formal niche within the manuscript, one that tells us much more about the reception of the lyric form than it does about the canon of Chaucer's works. Following Strakhovs essay, Alfred Hiatt's Worlds in Books tackles the intriguing question of how medieval chronicles and encyclopedias tried to organize spatial knowledge. Hiatt traces out the slow adoption of alphabetization as the main way that authors organized knowledge about the natural world, suggesting that Bartholomeus Anglicus was the first author to alphabetize elements in discussion of geography. Next, Mary Franklin-Brown, in Poetry's Place in Taxonomies of Knowledge, offers fascinating account of the role that poetry played in scholastic discussions of knowledge. She concedes that most often when scholastics bothered to discuss poetry at all, they placed it among the lower, less-advanced orders of knowledge, often among grammar or rhetoric. It formed, that is, the stuff of beginners in many medieval pedagogical taxonomies. Yet, Franklin-Brown simultaneously shows that poetry was one of the most ill-defined terms in the late Middle Ages, and that such lack of definition allowed knowledge taxonomizers the freedom to invoke poetry in various orders of knowledge without naming it as such. To make this case, Franklin-Brown gives close attention to the place of poetry within the organization of books in Richard de Fournival's library, and within the taxonomy of knowledge in Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum maius and the vernacular encyclopedic writings of Ramon Llull. In all three cases, in spite of the fact that the authors (or bookshelf organizers, in de Fournival's case) have little truck with poetry per se, Franklin-Brown shows that poetry fundamentally structures the thinking of each one. …