Transfiguring medievalism explores the ways in which bodies, including literary bodies, reveal themselves to the attentive and desiring eye as more than they at first appear. It uses transfiguration, traditionally understood as the revelation of divinity in community, to indicate all those splendors that await within the read, lived, and loved world. The book encourages a closer reading of medieval literature in light of its modern, and especially its modern lyric, afterlives. It demonstrates that patience and attention, particularly to elements of touch, the body s boundaries, illumination, and their intersections in poetry, can be transfigurative practices. It does so not only through the accustomed cadences of scholarly argumentation but through its own moments of poetic and meditative reflection. Augustine, Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante, Boccaccio, and the heroes of Old French narrative, as well as their modern lyric counterparts, come to light in new and newly complicated ways. They become, in a word, transfigured. This book is for students of medieval literature and theology, lovers of modern poetry, and anyone interested in the body and its enduring mysteries.
