Cristina Maria Cervone

2007-2008 Mellon Fellow in the Medieval Institute

Cristina Maria Cervone is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. A former Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow, she received her undergraduate degree from Williams College and has an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where she was a student of A. C. Spearing.

Her research centers on language and form in late medieval English writing, particularly the interplay of concrete-made-abstract and abstract-made-concrete that drives our ability to model concepts in and through language. During her fellowship year, she will be working on a book-length project derived from her dissertation, "Love's Leap: Incarnational Poetics in Late Medieval England," focusing on the intersection between Incarnation theology and figurative language in 14th-century English writing. While scholars have long acknowledged the importance of affective Passion devotion in late medieval devotional thought, the significance of the Incarnation has been relatively neglected. Writers such as William Langland and Julian of Norwich, among others, pursue links among language, perception, and embodiment, centering their investigations of Christ's humanity on the paradox of "the Word made Flesh" (John 1:14), this metaphor that is not to be understood as a metaphor. To illuminate the mystery of the Incarnation, they, surprisingly, reify Christ's body. Cervone's book tracks three primary image groups used in medieval thought experiments that momentarily reverse what we might think of as the person-ification of God's language of love (the Logos): Christ's body as book, text, or language; as cloth, clothing, or wrapping; or as plant, growth, or life force (examples within each group range from concrete to abstract). Rather than structuring her study directly around these image schema, she follows the method of her authors by pulling these strands concurrently through the larger fabric of her argument, which applies a variety of theoretical approaches to literary interpretation (Augustinian language theory, cognitive linguistics, deixis, transformational grammar) while not neglecting the cultural and historical embeddedness of intellectual issues at stake in these works.

Concurrent projects span a broad range of theoretical and historical problems, from how we read material evidence (in John de Cobham's expensive and aesthetically sophisticated presentation of Cooling Castle's charter poem, for instance, which has implications for our understanding of elite self-fashioning, literacy and the Rising of 1381), to historically defined questions of intellectual history (in the visual arts, how did the lily crucifixion come to spread so quickly and broadly in a variety of media but only, evidently, in the British Isles? And what does this pattern tell us about elite or craft-oriented networks of influence?), to theorizing useful to literary scholars more generally (applying deictic theory and the work of cognitive linguists to medieval texts that demonstrate a particular interest in language and literary form, for instance, or by tracking uses of certain words that have ranges of meaning where their status as markers of time, place, and subjectivity interestingly coalesce into one timeless, placeless, selfless concept, or into an all-encompassing time, place, self [usually God's]).

In spring 2008, she will hold a seminar presenting her work-in-progress and seeking critical responses to it from three senior scholars.