Productive Barriers to Communication in the Literature of the High- and Late Middle Ages

The project addresses three topics related to forms of communication that encounter obstacles. The objects of study are: (1) the rhetoric of Late Medieval mystical texts that discuss the plants of the hereafter, examined within a theoretical background asserting the ineffability of the transcendent; (2) solitude as both a barrier to and a stimulus for communication, analyzed from a cultural-historical perspective; and (3) censorship, with the aim of showing that enforced silence and oblivion are ultimately ineffective in written tradition.