ANCRENE WISSE: A BORDERLANDS TEXT

IN HER ACCOUNT of mapped views of the world, Irit Rogoff asserts that such views are in fact, ‘meditations on issues of boundaries and definitions and the interactions between the two’. Drawing on the work of J. Wreford Watson, she demonstrates how geographical narratives regarding the apparent specificity of place help to shape our own concepts of representation and meaning. For Rogoff, the geography of the land is ultimately the geography of spatial construction, which in turn becomes a geography of the mind itself. This is a concept which has been explored in the context of medieval literature by Christopher Cannon, who, drawing upon the Hegelian notion of thinking as mediated through objective materialities, themselves part of an ‘inward pulse’ always already beating within the ‘outward appearances’ of things, suggests that ‘the unique object assembles a singular combination of ideas’. Such ideas, which are formulated out of material realities surrounding the thinker within any given culture, therefore find their way from the landscape and the material world around us into our cognitive processes themselves, rematerializing in the ways in which we envisage our world, its societies, its bodies and what they signify.