Has the “spatial turn” returned? If, as Michel Foucault claims in “The Language of Space” (1964), space had become “the most obsessive of metaphors” (Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, 2007, 163) in the twentieth century, the spate of studies addressing the production of space and place in medieval culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s suggests that the Middle Ages, and medievalists, were equally obsessed. Matthew Boyd Goldie's Scribes of Space, while seemingly belated to such a field, adds a welcome and timely dimension to these works. “Scribes of Space examines the direct historical evidence for the circulation of mechanical ideas and their explicit influence on literature” (4). The book relates a range of literary texts—Chaucer's House of Fame, Legend of Good Women, Treatise on the Astrolabe and “Pardoner's Prologue and Tale,” Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, the Books of Margery Kempe and John Mandeville, Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and Testament of Criseyde—to an array of scientific texts from classical and medieval culture, including those by Aristotle and Ptolemy, Hugh of St. Victor, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Thomas Bradwardine, among others; mechanical technologies for assessing space; and modes of spatial representation. Of particular interest is Goldie's use of seemingly crude bureaucratic or otherwise administrative maps, of places such as Sherwood Forest, the Kentish town of Thanet or the environs of Canterbury Cathedral, to outline a theory of space located firmly in Middle English vocabulary and therefore cultural consciousness: “though I use local to denote the common sense of space, Middle English did not use the word with a geographical meaning. Instead, writings often turn to the borrowed French word estre or ester to specify a smaller geographical area, which ranged from a space within a building to a hundred or a shire” (9).

It is fitting in a book on space that Goldie's chapters should themselves embody textual and thematic mobility. In eight chapters and an afterword, Goldie moves contrapunctually from discussions of scientific ideas to literary texts. Chapter 1 considers chorography and mapping, allowing Goldie to elaborate a notion of estral, or highly localized, space later assessed in chapter 2's discussion of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (the chapter includes a fresh reading of the famous representation of the Canterbury pilgrims from British Library, MS Royal 18 D.II). Chapter 3, the most fascinating for this reader, considers the technologies and mechanical ideas used to measure space, such as astrolabes and quadrants, linking their scopic politics to the Topographia of Giraldus Cambrensis. Chapter 4 “focuses on the varieties of physical areas presented in The Book of Margery Kempe and The Book of Sir John Mandeville” (102). The discussion of travel in this chapter leads Goldie to assess medieval theories of motion in chapter 5: “Where thirteenth-century natural philosophy addressed the origins and especially the destination of objects in motion, fourteenth-century philosophy largely put aside the question of destination and instead addressed motion in terms of internal motivation” (124). Chapter 6 then explores how Chaucer's House of Fame imagines motion, demonstrating overlapping but also distinctive treatments of mobility in literary texts. Chapter 7's focus on Nicholas Oresme's Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum allows Goldie to explore “discussions in late medieval science on proximity, the distance between objects” (168) through the late medieval concept of “propinquitas, the quality of nearness that expresses the relationship between one place and another, one entity and another” (169). Proximity provides the interpretative frame for Chapter 8's account of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. Goldie concludes with a fascinating afterword comprised of a reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, a virtuoso outworking of the book's themes and ideas in terms of “ubiquity.” “In bringing spaces that are opposite in scale together, Chaucer explores human ubiquity in such a way that he critiques a limited understanding of space and offers instead ubiquity as a model for living. … Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale present a challenge to those ideas because ubiquity suggests no attachment to a place” (209–10).

In just over two hundred pages, Goldie offers a richly capacious and wide-ranging account of late medieval ideas of space. While the alternating chapters on literature and science risked shoehorning hermeneutically one into the other, Goldie is careful to demonstrate how literary texts and scientific ideas, while often crossing one another's paths, first and foremost worked within their own conceptual precincts. The book is a study in the history of concepts, but it occasionally does not fulfil what it promises will be its focus on “the more everyday and earthbound areas that people encounter, sense, and apprehend, and through which they move” (1). In his discussion of Kempe's Book, for example, Goldie misses the extent to which Kempe's imaginary is deeply interwoven with her home town of Bishop's Lynn. “Two of the most distinctive features of her impressions of King's Lynn, or Bishop’s Lynn as it was then known, are that she records only the buildings and hardly mentions any other physical features of the town. She also rarely details the relationships among buildings, locations, or other items in terms of time, distance, steps, or any other measure” (111). While Goldie is right to note the significance of St. Margaret's to Kempe, he misses the opportunity afforded by an assessment of the fabric of Lynn to Kempe's situated being. “Thow schalt ben etyn and knawyn of the pepul of the world as any raton knawyth the stockfysch,” Christ tells Kempe in book one of the Book. Directly opposite the east wall of the Chapel of Saint John, where Kempe prayed in St. Margaret's was a shop and celda known as “Le Fysshehous,” reminding us that during the winter months, stockfish was the main foodstuff being imported into Lynn. Here, then, is another form of “estral” spatial imagining, in which Kempe's spiritual biography discovers its vocabularies in the very streets of her hometown.

Regardless, Scribes of Space is a rich and fascinating study; if we have indeed returned to the “spatial turn,” on the evidence of Goldie's excellent book, there is much that remains to be learned.