Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative

Abstract

A. Burrow's book on the representation of non-verbal communication in medieval English, French, and Italian literature is an important interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of medieval culture.Burrow deploys a substantial (though presumably lay) understanding of recent discoveries from the dis- ciplines of biology, sociology, and psychology about the ways human beings in var- ious cultures communicate.He brings that understanding to bear on the details of medieval narratives, linking communication theories and medieval studies in novel ways.This combination will be helpful to scholars of^all of the medieval European literatures, for it provides a guide to specific kinds of non-verbal communication while also establishing the groundwork for further investigation of textual representation of non-verbal communication.Throughout, Burrow wisely narrows his focus to signs made to convey a spe- cific meaning-those, that is, with "voluntas significandi," as Burrow terms it, fol- lowing Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana.This still leaves him with a wide range of gestures and looks to discuss-from arms akimbo to looking askance, pointing, and smiling, to name only a few of the fifty or so signs listed in the index.In his first three chapters Burrow seeks to decode medieval references to these signs.Basing his interpretation on modern understanding of non-verbal communication and careful philological investigation, he explains how medieval readers might have pictured the gestures and looks they found described in writ- ing and how they might have interpreted their meanings.

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