This chapter explores the mystery of togetherness, as variously embodied in Cassian’s monasticism, a medieval version of the Narcissus myth, and the thinking of philosopher Martin Buber. Even when one plus one fails to add up, these texts suggest, some broken community may nonetheless persist; even when it looks like we’re getting nowhere, something in us may in fact be moved. Love may, in this way, not reduce to a subject or an object; it may be neither of one nor of two.

This chapter reads the account of Jesus’ transfiguration in Matthew’s Gospel alongside its medieval interpreters, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as poets Matt Donovan, Marie Howe, Lynda Hull and Laura Kasischke. To be transfigured, in these accounts, is to have one’s boundaries at once contested and reinforced; it is to experience the body as newly bounded and newly luminous, precisely inasmuch as it is bound to the bodies of others.

This chapter offers an invitation in the form of an imperative. “Make me” is, after all, both a gesture of resistance and a summons to creation. Through readings of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Simone Weil, the chapter meditates upon the erotics of making and remaking. Finally, it turns to the praise of creation in the work of poets Wendell Berry and Kimberly Johnson, as praise of the world allows the world to become newly, differently visible. A praised world is, at least potentially, a remade world: it is a world transfigured.

This chapter addresses what theology might become when it is lyrically articulated: less dogmatic, more material; less sure of what it knows, more frank about what it desires. Through a sustained meditation on the work of poets Elizabeth Bradfield, Marie Howe, and Suzanne Paola, as well as that of theologians Josef Pieper and Herbert McCabe, it becomes possible to speak of the body and God, of sex and the sacred, as mutually disclosive. Theology has, for this chapter as for many of its sources, no proper language; the improprieties of lyric may, therefore, provide a particularly appropriate and attentive way of speaking the divine, no more or less than the human.

The introduction briefly outlines the literary culture of fifteenth-century Scotland and the contexts in which Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar were writing. Each text is described and some pertinent critical discourses regarding the works are discussed. Next, the narrative grotesque is situated within a broader critical history related to the critical term ‘grotesque’, which arose in reference to architectural decorations in the late fifteenth century before being adopted into other intellectual discourses. The narrative grotesque is defined as a distinct variety of the grotesque, since it is not limited to visual images and, rather, extends to textual corruptions, hybridisations, and ruptures that are paired with the dissonant affective reactions of horror and humour. The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo are shown to be exemplary starting points for the wider application of the narrative grotesque, since both exhibit numerous and varied ‘grotesqueries’.

In the final chapter on The Palyce of Honour the narrative strands are brought together by examining the ways in which Gavin Douglas weaves together pagan allegory with Christianity. The poem is demonstrated to create multiple intersecting hierarchies that highlight Douglas’s humanist-complected understanding of poetics as a mode of divine illumination. The figure of Venus in medieval cosmology and astrology is especially important to this phase of the discussion. Meanwhile, the motifs of are developed from their introduction in the previous chapter. Lastly, Douglas the poet is integrated as contributing yet another subjectivity through his dedication to James IV of Scotland which brings the Scottish king into the hierarchies discovered by the dreamer-narrator.

The book concludes by considering the interpretive influence of the images throughout MS Ashmole 61, repeated pictures of fish and flowers. Through this, the book argues that such patterns across the manuscript offer an additional prod to interpretation that requires recognition of agential objects from across the medieval household.

This chapter introduces household affect ecologies and household object ecologies, tracing them from the different theoretical perspectives used throughout MS Ashmole 61. It offers a deep description of Objects of affection’s central object, Ashmole 61, through a consideration of the book’s full materiality. This it considers in relation to other books of its sort – in the process establishing an alternative taxonomy for books produced in the late Middle Ages for, within, and by gentry and merchant households. The chapter surveys current theoretical developments in literary manuscript study and demonstrates what Ashmole 61 has to offer to a book history rooted in new materialist concerns. This it does through investigating features of Ashmole 61’s distinctive materiality, which includes an exceptional and extended campaign of iconic scribal signatures in the form of recurring fish and flower graffiti. The introduction also considers how our cultures of editing have transformed medieval books and ponders what they are currently becoming in the process of mass digitisation of medieval manuscripts – and how this development both challenges and enables ecologically grounded manuscript study.

This chapter attends to a series of narratives in the second quarter of MS Ashmole 61 whose affective purpose is fulfilled by an object, or array of objects, affirming the mercy offered through Christ and appropriately honoured through human forgiveness. In Knight Who Forgave his Father’s Slayer, the crucifix responds to a human kiss of forgiveness by physically embracing the generous party and thereby revealing the reunited community it has produced. Two other exempla (Jealous Wife and Incestuous Daughter) materialise the effects of spiritual filth in the fiends and chains, and the triumphant power of divine mercy in the form of human tears, with the sinful female protagonists spared their deserved eternal exile through human devotion and dedication. Two romances in this section of the manuscript address forgiveness from a less narrowly religious perspective: the hero of Lybeaus Desconus is confirmed in his knightly identity, and thus confirmed as a member of the community, by various non-human members of that community; The Erle of Tolous reveals the agency of non-human members through objects bearing and producing dedication where it did not previously exist, modelling an ethics supporting the whole community.