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Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come increasingly into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning as over against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the traditional accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.

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This chapter proposes that the anonymous poem St. Erkenwald should be recognized as a riddle, generated from a withheld word that is everywhere recognizable within it. The poem is engineered so as to set up, by formal means, a thought experiment that represents an intervention into some permanently and essentially unresolvable problems in the theory of signification: those of the theurgical and baptismal “characters.” Eluding scholarly attempts to reduce it to its supposed historical, political, or aesthetic stakes, Erkenwald would attain to the status of a properly literary work insofar as it constitutes in this manner a trap for interpretation.