Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature

374 Pages·2021·3.931 MB·English

by  Katharine Breen

Machines of the Mind

Machines of the Mind
Personifi cation in Medieval Literature
Katharine Breen
The University of Chicago Press
chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chi-
cago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 77645- 3 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 77659- 0 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 77662- 0 (e-b ook)
DOI: https://d oi. org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226776620 .001 .0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support
of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and Northwestern University
toward the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Breen, Katharine, 1973– author.
Title: Machines of the mind : personifi cation in medieval literature / Katharine
Breen.
Other titles: Personifi cation in medieval literature
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2020051233 | ISBN 9780226776453 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226776590
(paperback) | ISBN 9780226776620 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. | Personifi cation in
literature. | Literature—Philosophy.
Classifi cation: LCC PN682.P475 B74 2021 | DDC 809/.02—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051233
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I: Prudentian Personifi cation
1. Consecratus Manu: Men Forming Gods Forming Men 35
2. How to Fight like a Girl: Christianizing Personifi cation
in the Psychomachia 69
Part II: Neoplatonic Personifi cation
3. Ex Uno Omnia: Plato’s Forms and Daemons 111
4. Hello, Nurse! The Boethian Daemon 150
Part III: Aristotelian Personifi cation
5. E Pluribus Unum: Abstracting Universals from Particulars 203
6. Dreaming of Aristotle in the Songe d’Enfer and Winner
and Waster 234
7. A Good Body Is Hard to Find: Putting Personifi cation
through Its Paces in Piers Plowman 274
Notes 317
Index 357

Acknowledgments
It is a great pleasure to thank those who have given generously of their
time and treasure to help make this book a reality. I am especially grate-
ful to my colleagues at Northwestern University. Barbara Newman, Laurie
Shannon, and Susan Manning have been wonderful mentors, guiding me
along the sometimes ill- mapped path of associate professorship. Susie Phil-
lips has been the best “big sister” a medievalist could hope for, while Nick
Davis, John Alba Cutler, Kelly Wisecup, Harris Feinsod, Rebecca Johnson,
Helen Thompson, and Viv Soni have been indispensable comrades in arms.
Richard Kieckhefer has been cheerful and generous in consulting on tricky
passages of medieval Latin. I would not have been able to fi nish this book
without their collective support. I also owe a debt to the many Northwest-
ern students who have challenged me to clarify key ideas, especially in my
graduate seminars and in two undergraduate iterations of “Allegory from
Rome to Star Trek.” My advisee Sarah Wilson was a model of intellectual
companionship as we worked on our projects together.
Like much of my academic work, this project began and ended with
Piers Plowman, and I’m grateful to the many Langlandians who have
taught me to think deeply about how the poem works, beginning in Anne
Middleton’s spring 1997 graduate seminar at the University of California,
Berkeley. Since then, Masha Raskolnikov, Liz Schirmer, Katie Vulic´, Kath-
erine Zieman, and I have traveled a long way with the poem, and with each
other. More recently, I have learned a great deal from Alastair Bennett and
Eric Weiskott, my coeditors at the Yearbook of Langland Studies, as well
as from the journal’s contributors, peer reviewers, and past editors, espe-
cially Andrew Galloway, Fiona Somerset, Emily Steiner, Rebecca Davis,
and Frank Grady. I’ve enjoyed intense conversations at the intersection of
Piers and personifi cation with Fiona, Nicolette Zeeman, Bruce Holsinger,
vii
viii Acknowledgments
and Tekla Bude, and about person making more broadly with Kellie Rob-
ertson, Cathy Sanok, Claire Waters, and Julie Orlemanski, often extending
from one conference venue to the next over the course of years. Julie helped
make many of these conversations possible by organizing an unbeatable
sequence of panels and events, and she, Claire, and Alastair kindly com-
mented on sections of this book in progress. So, too, did members of the
Midwest Middle English Reading Group, including Mike J ohnston, Lee
Manion, Shannon Gayk, Lisa Cooper, Robyn Malo, and Jessica Rosenfeld,
who intervened at a key juncture to keep the project from turning into
something much less interesting (at least to me!). Nicholas Watson offered
support at an early stage, and Rebecca Krug has been a consistent voice of
sanity, which I appreciate enormously.
I am likewise appreciative of institutional support, beginning with a
Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of
Learned Societies that gave me the time and space to conceive of such a
wide- ranging project, and continuing with Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan
Institute for the Humanities, which offered a year of fellowship to keep me
going and stepped up with last-minute publication funding in the midst
of the pandemic. Portions of chapters 6 and 7 have been published pre-
viously as, respectively, “The Need for Allegory: Wynnere and Wastoure
as an Ars Poetica,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 26 (2012): 187– 229, and
“Langland’s Literary Syntax, or Anima as an Alternative to Latin Gram-
mar,” in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England,
edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus: Ohio State Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 95– 120, and I am grateful for permission to republish
them here in revised form. The manuscript draft I sent to the University of
Chicago Press has been greatly improved by the incisive and detailed com-
mentary of two anonymous press readers. I am especially grateful to the
reader who invented the character of Milly the Medievalist as an imagined
interlocutor and to my editor, Randy Petilos, for shepherding the project so
carefully along its way.
I owe the most profound thanks to my family. Elizabeth and Samantha
O’Hara have patiently supplied me with bike rides and homemade bread.
Douglas O’Hara has been my most generous and my most hostile reader. To
answer his most frequently asked question of the last ten years: yes, I am
done with the book! I dedicate it to him, and to our daughters, with love.
Introduction
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE
In the early twenty- fi rst century, the tech world rediscovered personifi ca-
tion. A popular product- design textbook credits software engineer Alan
Cooper with creating “personas” by “put[ting] a face on the user.” That is
to say, it credits him with inventing the rhetorical trope of personifi cation,
or prosopopoeia, a Greek compound derived from prosopon (face, mask,
person) + poiein (to make). Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt’s The Essential
Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas promises
that “personas play an essential role in the development of successful
products. Without creating profi les of target customers and studying them
throughout your product development lifecycle, it’s impossible to truly
understand user need, context, and pain points.”1 Cooper himself argues
that “personas are the single most powerful design tool that we use.”2 Fol-
lowing their advice, corporations in recent years turned to personas to de-
sign software, websites, and control panels; to renovate showrooms; and
even to build cars. In other words, after years of using a self- consciously
scientifi c vocabulary to describe their work, they began to recognize the
commercial and even ethical value of a popular premodern literary device.
According to Adlin and Pruitt, personas allow engineers to design
products that people actually want to use. Although product- design teams
were accustomed to conducting polls and interviews to gather data about
potential customers, they had difficulty translating that information into
an intuitive user interface. When engineers at Ford Motor Company began
turning their statistical profi les into personifi cations, however, they were
enthusiastic about the results. As Moray Callum, then executive direc-
tor of Ford Americas design, explained to the New York Times in 2009,
“Invented characters get everyone on the same page. . . . Sometimes the
1