Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child.

Author/Editor
Mitchell, J. Allan.

Title
Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child.

Published
Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 249 pp.; 11 color illus.

Review
Mitchell's volume is a study of the physical, social, and ethical issues of parturition and early development in medieval England, showing how these issues can be seen to underlie and inform modern concerns. Attentive to philosophical, psychological, and sociological formulations, with recurrent attention to differences between "ontogenesis" and "ontology" (and cosmogony and cosmology; see below), Mitchell contemplates the messiness involved in the culturally complex, never-quite-completed processes that produce what he calls "emergent creatureliness" (xxvi)--becoming human--as they are evident in, contiguous with, analogous to, or complicated by cross-species coexistence, environmental interactions, and cosmological speculations. The goal of his book, he tells us, is "to identify residual and emergent ideas of becoming where humanity is and remains at risk" (xxx). This is heady stuff. Mitchell connects modern theorizing about materialism, ethics, subject-object relations, tool-using, actor networks, and speculative realism with discussion of medieval philosophical texts, comportment books, and material objects, along with analyses of various literary works--Usk's "Testament of Love" and Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe," "Sir Thopas," and the Franklin's table "dormant"; portions of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Piers Plowman"; selections from Lydgate, John Russell's "Boke of Nurture," and more. Generally, Mitchell cites Gower to clarify medieval ideas, quoting, for example, the "Confessio Amantis" IV.2487-90 for its connection of alchemy and embryology (77), and briefly commenting on "Mirour de l'Omme" 107-19 in passing (140 and 145) when discussing gluttony and culinary transformation as concerns underlying medieval dining practice and etiquette, and as factors--even actors--in human acculturation. More expansively--and more crucial to Mitchell's entire enterprise--when explaining medieval human-as-micro, universe-as-macro analogies, Mitchell reads portions of CA as adumbration of modern ecological and cosmogenic concerns. In his section called "Little Worlds," Mitchell disrupts oversimplified notions of medieval analogical thinking, and uses portions of the Prologue to CA (913-44, 954-58, 970-90) to argue that, for Gower, universal disorder is a "postlapsarian one of human becoming" (41) but less anthropocentric than "egocentric and epigenetic, where creatures of all kinds are deeply enmeshed." This is an example, Mitchell tells us, of what "Timothy Morton calls ecological thought" (42), "owing to the strength of the contingent bonds between upper and lower elements" that Gower describes. Indeed, Gower "highlights the ligatures, joints, and connective tissues of the organized whole" and thereby exposes a "transhuman 'condicioun'" (43) that both echoes Macrobius and (mentioning Bruno Latour) anticipates modern philosophical analyses that seek "to compose commonalities without a pregiven harmony." The "embryological" cosmogony of Book VII of the CA is even more clearly "prescient" than the cosmology of the Prologue, Mitchell argues, insofar as it emphasizes elemental germination as "the world comes into being" (44). Mitchell surveys the world as egg in the classical and medieval imaginary from Aristotle and Lucretius to Bernardus Silvestris (with a nifty sidelight on Ovid as, etymologically, a cracker of eggs, "ova"), emphasizing ways in which the image depicts a "total picture of the universe that is never a finished totality but is rather composed of fluctuating intensities and heterogeneous extensities" (52). He follows this survey with close explication of Gower's brief, powerful discussion of "Ylem" (7.214-22)--the poet's English neologism for Greek "hyle"--as a "significant sequence of thought" insofar as it "posits a [kind of] matter that antecedes and exceeds formal causation" and is "tantamount to assuming something like a two-seed theory" of the universe coming into being "against Aristotle's single seed." Playing on "form" and "enform," Mitchell explains, Gower is "at once informed by his studies and formed from the same material substrate he is studying," and aided by Kellie Robertson's exploration of form/matter distinctions in medieval poetic metaphors ("Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto," 2010), Mitchell concludes that "All of this is surely meant to suggest that poetic matter, like the primordial matter of which [Gower] is speaking, is as polysemous as it is pluripotent" (53). As if this weren't enough, Mitchell goes on to explain that mid-twentieth century physicists, George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, "poached" Gower's term"—'ylem'--"to describe the volatile nucleogenesis immediately following the big bang," and, in commemoration, used it to relabel a celebratory bottle of Cointreau as Ylem, "Now on display in the Smithsonian National and Space Museum" (54; and see full-color plate 4 and its caption). For Mitchell, Gower's cosmogony, primordial causation, cosmic eggs, poaching, a bottle of spirits, and modern theoretical physics come together in rich ways to encourage us to wonder "is it not worth putting the medieval sciences in dialogue with modern physics and philosophy more generally?" (54). His implied answer is, of course, yes--in many ways a powerful justification for reading his provocative volume. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]

Date
2014

Gower Subjects
Backgrounds and General Criticism
Mirour de l'Omme
Confessio Amantis
Influence and Later Allusion
Language and Word Studies