In the 125 pages of text of Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England, Jordan Kirk makes several original and bold claims about the understanding and use of language in the Middle Ages. Characterizing “linguistic nonsignification” as a “preoccupation of the modern era” (11), Kirk explores how an interest in the non-semantic that motivated modernist writers as diverse as Joyce and Stein likewise offered a kind of master trope for medieval writers: “linguistic nonsignification was evidently a matter of basic importance both in the first philosophy and in the literature of the Middle Ages—and indeed in other fields as well” (18). Kirk “underscores . . . first of all that medieval linguistic thought was not, despite everything, grounded in a hierarchical arrangement by which the rational articulations of human, non-foreign, learned, male discourse would be privileged over their alterities. To the contrary, it was grounded in a theory of meaningless; it never ceased to concern itself with nonsignification; and its most creative inheritors did not fail to elaborate the materials they received into new modes of thinking and practicing nonsense” (21).

To readers familiar with medieval grammatical traditions and the history of linguistics, these are indeed original and bold claims. Kirk teases them out over four chapters with topics chosen not to provide some kind of a comprehensive survey or etiology but to present “a series of medieval linguistic, logical, and contemplative works in which the emptiness of the word is explicitly theorized” (24). In a chapter on Priscian, Boethius, and St Augustine, Kirk stresses that nonsignification stood at the center of the antique grammatical traditions that the Middle Ages translated, transmitted, and expanded. Kirks says that a “doctrine of the fundamental meaningless of vox” (37) characterizes Boethius's linguistic thought, for example, even as, “in a logocentric privileging of transcendental signification, Augustine forecloses the possibility of words that do not signify” (45). The next chapter focuses on De interpretatione of the early fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley. Here, Kirk argues that “the meaningless utterance had been an irritant in the field of logic since its inception, the grain of sand around which it opalesced” (75). In the subsequent chapter he turns to the fourteenth-century mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing in order “to describe as accurately as possible the procedure of prayer taught in the Cloud and to suggest that this procedure can best be understood in the terms provided by the medieval linguistic sciences. For the prayer . . . consists in the production of an utterance that is both a syllable and a word—and thus neither” (76). Kirk opens the final chapter of Medieval Nonsense with the warning that there “are texts that set traps for their readers” (98). One such text is the late fourteenth-century romance St Erkenwald, here treated as a riddle that both invites and thwarts interpretation: “To follow the gesture of the poem is to fail to read it, and such a failure is unavoidable” (125).

The format of Medieval Nonsense perhaps prevented Kirk from situating his literary ideas in larger critical and practical frameworks of language theory and use. He thus makes much of early grammars’ references to syllables as meaningless, which they sometimes certainly can be. But grammars (medieval and modern) also stress that syllables turn out to have rather a lot of signification. For example, consonant clusters like <sl> function as phonesthemes (as J. R. Firth called them) with nuanced and manipulatable structures, even as the bound morphemes that pervade English are by definition meaningful monosyllabic words. From another angle, the structure of grammatical handbooks—from Donatus's fourth-century Ars maior through early modern works like William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar (1586) to Noah Webster's ubiquitous Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783–1785) and the modern program “Hooked on Phonics”—characteristically proceeds from individual sounds to syllables, to words, and only in later cases, to syntax. They do so, to frame the matter in Saussurian terms, because syllables have meaning dependent on their structural functions. And it is the transference of semantic and social meaning, of course, that motivated the first language-using hominids and continues to motivate everyone after them who hopes to buy lunch, sell a car, or tell a joke. As discourse analysis shows, this transference, rather than the counterproductive cultivation of its opposite, defines what most speakers do most of the time with most of their language. In strictly grammatical terms, this primacy of meaning is writ large in the redundancy that characterizes natural languages: things like subject-object relations are encoded in several ways precisely because (evidently) they are important to speakers and listeners alike. Perhaps Kirk's literary focus, even with his avowed interest in language, excluded these crucial issues, but there certainly is room to raise some of them, especially for an audience unversed in linguistics and the larger story of linguistic history.