Reviewed by:

• Scribes of Space. Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science by Matthew Boyd Goldie
• Jenna Mead

As reviewers have noted, Matthew Boyd Goldie’s Scribes in Space contributes to the growing discourse of critical readings of medieval scientific and literary texts, not as two separate discursive domains, but in dialogue with one another: a dialogue that is suggestive, allusive, reminiscent as often as it is directly marked in terminology and figure. This book stands alongside the work of Kellie Robinson, Alexander Grabovsky, and Allan Mitchell that has challenged and educated readers to ‘think philosophy’ when we ‘read literature’.

Scribes of Space works on macro- and micro-levels, and part of its allure derives from Goldie’s drawing out of trajectories from larger to smaller scales. Chapter 1, for example, conducts us through the homogeneous/heterogeneous local spaces of the Eadwine Psalter’s diagram of Canterbury Cathedral; and then provides a revealing comparison between the labels identifying features on a small map of Incelmoor, West Riding, and a larger map of the same area while drawing our attention to the impact of the rationale behind such maps. Chapter 5 gives a very crisp account of thinking about motion, and how it was conceived, and the transition, via critiques of Aristotle (Thomas Bradwardine and the Merton School), to conceptualising impetus (Francis de Marchia and Jean Buridan) with its concomitant effects on the stability of locus naturalis and, thus, enabling the measurement and representation of speed (Nicole Oresme).

Since this book wants us to think about how medieval scribes (in the broadest sense) and their readers thought about space, Goldie offers us a pathway mainly through contemporary phenomenology and the history of cartography to support readers’ own thinking about space. Not everyone will be sympathetic to such [End Page 259] a move, but it speaks to Goldie’s determination to draw ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ texts into dialogue and his alertness to what is needed to do so. In effect, Scribes of Space sets out with two interrelated projects. First, to synthesise a theory of medieval space through medieval and contemporaneous theoretical and applied texts, chiefly philosophical and mechanical. Second, to reorient readings of medieval narrative away from a reliance on methodologies of the visual (such as cinematic metaphors) and narratology (such as proleptic and analeptic structure) and, instead, to spatialise narrative through a reading of rhetoric as spatial. Either one of these two would be ambitious: to combine them draws on the impressive reach of Goldie’s scholarship—far more capacious than this review can attest—and the agility of his argument. The results, for the reader, are exhilarating and absorbing.

Goldie structures his book into pairs of chapters that work as informative, stand-alone accounts of texts, both natural philosophy and poetry/prose, but also offer compelling readings in conversation. Chapter 3, for instance, begins with psychologist James J. Gibson’s study of ‘the underlying physical and mental principles of how people see physical space’, in order to focus on ‘horizontal space’ as abstracted in local maps, portolan charts, mappae mundi, zonal diagrams and granticular or grid maps. Horizontal space is measured by mechanical instruments, such as the astrolabe, that translate geometry into physical or empirical reality, defined by Ptolemy in his Geographia as chōrographia and topographia. It is Quintilian, in Institutio oratoria, who ‘associates topographia with representation itself’, and it is this trajectory that leads, in Chapter 4, to Goldie’s readings of The Book of Margery Kempe and The Book of Sir John Mandeville, identifying ‘a spatial overview’ of horizontal and abstracted space. What emerges is a ‘spatial hermeneutics’ capturing ‘exceptional moments’ of charged meaning, however evanescent as this overview ‘everts’ or undoes itself (p. 75).

Chapter 6 takes up Nicole Oresme’s theorising of motion (discussed in the preceding chapter) to scrutinise place and movement in the notoriously vague House of Fame through a focus on ‘aspects of unmotivated motion and directionless movement’ (p. 143). Where and what...

审阅者：

• 空间抄写员。马修·博伊德·戈尔迪在中古英国文学和中世纪晚期科学中的地位
• 珍娜·米德

正如评论家所指出的，马修·博伊德·戈尔迪的《太空抄写员》促进了对中世纪科学和文学文本的批判性阅读的不断增长的话语，不是作为两个独立的话语领域，而是相互对话：一种暗示性的、暗示性的、令人回忆的对话通常直接用术语和图形标记。这本书与凯莉·罗宾逊、亚历山大·格拉博夫斯基和艾伦·米切尔的作品齐名，挑战并教育读者在“阅读文学”时“思考哲学”。

《空间抄写员》在宏观和微观层面上进行创作，其吸引力部分来自于戈尔迪从较大尺度到较小尺度绘制的轨迹。例如，第一章引导我们了解埃德温诗篇中坎特伯雷大教堂图的同质/异质局部空间；然后对识别西瑞丁因塞莫尔小地图和同一地区较大地图上的特征的标签进行了揭示性的比较，同时提请我们注意这些地图背后的基本原理的影响。第五章非常清晰地阐述了对运动的思考，以及它是如何被构思的，以及通过对亚里士多德（托马斯·布拉德沃丁和默顿学派）的批评，到概念化动力（弗朗西斯·德·马尔基亚和让·布里丹）及其伴随效果的转变关于稳定性自然轨迹，从而能够测量和表示速度（Nicole Oresme）。

由于本书希望我们思考中世纪的抄写员（最广泛的意义上）及其读者如何思考空间，戈尔迪为我们提供了一条主要通过当代现象学和制图史来支持读者自己对空间的思考的途径。并不是每个人都会同情这样的[完第259页]这一举动，但这表明了戈尔迪将“科学”和“非科学”文本纳入对话的决心，以及他对这样做所需要做的事情的警惕。实际上，空间抄写员着手两个相互关联的项目。首先，通过中世纪和同时代的理论和应用文本（主要是哲学和机械文本）综合中世纪空间理论。其次，重新调整对中世纪叙事的解读，摆脱对视觉方法论（例如电影隐喻）和叙事学（例如预言和预言结构）的依赖，而是通过将修辞解读为空间来将叙事空间化。这两者中的任何一个都将是雄心勃勃的：将它们结合起来需要戈尔迪令人印象深刻的学术影响力——比这篇评论所能证明的更广阔——以及他的论点的敏捷性。对于读者来说，结果是令人兴奋和吸引人的。

戈尔迪将他的书分成几对章节，这些章节作为文本的信息丰富、独立的说明，包括自然哲学和诗歌/散文，但也提供了引人入胜的对话阅读。例如，第 3 章以心理学家詹姆斯·J·吉布森 (James J. Gibson) 对“人们如何看待物理空间的基本生理和心理原理”的研究开始，目的是关注当地地图、波多兰海图、世界地图中抽象的“水平空间” 、分区图和轴状图或网格图。水平空间是通过星盘等机械仪器来测量的，它们将几何学转化为物理或经验现实，托勒密在他的地理学中将其定义为chōrographia和topographia。这是昆体良，在Institutio oratoria，他“将地形与表征本身联系起来”，正是这种轨迹在第四章中引出了戈尔迪对《马杰里·肯普之书》和《约翰·曼德维尔爵士之书》的阅读，确定了水平和空间的“空间概述”。抽象的空间。出现的是一种捕捉充满意义的“特殊时刻”的“空间解释学”，无论这种概述如何“翻转”或自行消解，它都会转瞬即逝（第75页）。

第 6 章采用 Nicole Oresme 的运动理论（在前一章中讨论过），通过关注“无动机的运动和无方向的运动的各个方面”（第 143 页）来仔细审视以模糊着称的名人堂中的位置和运动。地点和内容...