Claustrophilia (1403971978) HOWIE

If ours is a cultural moment intensely fascinated with enclosed space—the cubicles of our workplaces, the confessionals of our churches, the bedrooms of reality television, and all the various closets we come out of and retreat into—our fascination isn’t entirely new. This book argues that the religious literature of the late Middle Ages articulates with great subtlety and vividness the extent to which all being is to some extent enclosed being. In other words, we’re all in the closet, and that might be a good thing. Through extended readings of English, French, and Italian writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Claustrophilia shows that medieval enclosures actually make room for desires and communities that a poetics of pure openness would exclude. When God holds and confines, revelation is in the boundaries and not beyond them. Accordingly, this book says, love your closet; it is only through what holds and defines us that we can know and love the world.

Cary Howie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.

“This philosophical meditation on presence and defense of the delights of enclosure comes closer to the essence of sanctity, to touching, and being touched by, (saintly) bodies than any I have ever read. Bodies at thresholds, emerging through metonymy, from spaces they never leave, and into which they never really fit---this is theoretical magic---unique, queer, and, in every sense, touching. Howie questions the possibility of ever really coming out, of ever owning what one touches, of seeing surfaces as invitations rather than barriers. In his hands, prose becomes poetry and academic prose takes flight.”--Bill Burgwinkle, King's College, University of Cambridge

“Claustrophilia is about the relation of enclosure and proximity to scholarship, medieval devotional practices, philosophy, literary history, and love. Howie explores the poetics of permeable contiguities--ancient and modern, subject and object, text and touch--with a powerfully lyrical resonance that performs, even as it advocates, an ethics and erotics of literary critical practice.”--Carla Freccero, UCSC