Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Middle English Culture
Regular price
€76.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Martha Rust
Author_Martha Rust
categorization
Category=DCC
Category=DSA
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781433167270
- Weight: 544g
- Publication Date: 06 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this book, Martha Rust advances a new theory of what written lists are and how they work, arguing that they signify not only as collections of words but also as series of images and things. As a consequence, lists call upon mental skills associated not only with literacy but also with numeracy, competencies that verge upon each other in the semantic field of the word “reckoning”: tallying, telling, counting, ordering, categorizing, and rendering account—whether with respect to affairs of the world or to the soul. Rust develops this theory of the list form in the context of late medieval English lists of sevens, lists of relics, lists of times (in the form of schedules), and lists of place names (in the form of itineraries). When taken as the material for poems or diagrams, these lists engage readers and viewers in interactive reckonings with the multi-modal potentials of the list form. Inevitably, Middle English examples of this poetics of reckoning open onto matters that are beyond reckoning. Although it focuses on medieval lists, this book will appeal to readers interested in the cognitive turn in literary criticism as well as to lovers of lists more generally.
Martha Rust is a member of New York University’s English Department, where she specializes in late medieval English literature and manuscript culture. She is the author of Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (2007) and co-editor of The Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West (2018).
