The lack of affection and loyalty towards the dukes was also noticeable at the heart of the court. This chapter offers an original analysis of those courtiers who fled to Louis XI, king of France, and concludes that the reign of Charles the Bold witnessed important political disagreements, especially about questions of sovereignty and of loyalty to the French Crown.

This chapter shows how several modern poets engage with the Middle Ages. For B. H. Fairchild and Rynn Williams, in particular, the medieval evokes desire, as well as the vulnerability of the desiring body. Through their poems, as well as those of Dante, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Marie Howe, the question of the body’s materiality is inseparable from the question of its fraught and fragile time. The chapter suggests that modern lyric might benefit from medievalist readers as much as medieval objects might benefit from the languages of lyricism.

This chapter offers a phenomenology of the waiting body, which is also the body we are waiting for. Through an attentiveness to the body’s extremities, particularly its hands, the chapter finds a way, with Dante’s pilgrim, out of hell and into a new, if fragile, tactile resilience. Philosophers Martin Heidegger, Karmen MacKendrick and Jean-Luc Nancy add their voices, and hands, to a handful of lyric poets, including Antonia Pozzi, for whom the body is never something to be grasped, though it cannot fail to touch.

This chapter argues, after Samuel Delany and Boccaccio, among others, for a poetics of precarious reconciliation, in which sanctity may take place in suspense and the body’s breaks may be honoured though they are never overcome. Poets such as Mary Karr and Mary Oliver come to take their place alongside philosophers and literary critics, as well as saints real and fake, in their embodiment of how the complications of life and language make crossover artists of us all.

This chapter gets its title from the word spoken by the angel to Mary at the Annunciation, a greeting that at once surprises and recognizes its addressee. So, too, is transfiguration, for this book, a practice that surprises, that calls something new out of the world, even as it bears witness to what, in the world, has never not been there. Through Francis of Assisi no less than poets Donna Masini and Mary Szybist, the world we share with the Middle Ages is one that calls us out, takes us by surprise and restores us to ourselves.

This chapter expounds and lingers with the poetics of monasticism, specifically the poetics of monastic discretion or discernment, especially as it appears in the Conferences of John Cassian. In dialogue with Michel Foucault and Thomas Merton, as well as modern poets Marilyn Hacker, Jane Hirshfield and Melissa Range, this chapter suggests that monastic speech and monastic bodies take materiality seriously, as something seriously mysterious and seriously inchoate, even and especially when that materiality proves to be a limitation. To be monastic, in life and in language, is to be always beginning.

This chapter argues for and attempts to embody a critical poetics of waiting—not just for the Middle Ages but with them. Through medieval sources (Béroul, Dante) as well as modern ones (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Martin Seel, Simone Weil), it becomes apparent that to experience the world most fully might be also to wait for it. Practicing a kind of critical and existential attentiveness, we are able to be taken by surprise precisely where we thought surprise was no longer possible, as poet Marie Howe demonstrates in her lyric meditation on embodiment, death, and sandwiches.