Maney Publishing

Modern Humanities Research Association

Review
Author(s): John Took
Review by: John Took
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), p. 967
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3729617
Accessed: 20-10-2015 07:59 UTC

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 Reviews 967
expected from disciples of Derrida, but then Christopher Norris somehow manages
to deconstruct with sweetness and light.
RAMAN SELDEN
UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER

Numerology: Theory and Outline History of a Literary Mode. By JOHN MACQUEEN.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. I985. viii + I63 pp. ?7.50.
A very respectable critic of Italian Renaissance art, reviewing a very great book on
the subject, began: 'I have frankly to confess that I find discussions on iconography
rather dry . . . not so, however, on this occasion.' Mutatismutandis,much the same
may be said of John MacQueen's book on literary numerology, where an in-built
tendency towards reductionism is for the most part offset by tact and geniality of
approach. 'For the most part' because, in addition to an occasional forcing of the
issue, there is a slightly worrying tendency to '-ologize', to wish to vindicate on the
basis of otherwise sound intuition a critical method:
No one today queriesthe existenceor the importanceof numericallybasedsymmetriesin
architecture,in the visualand plasticarts,and in music.Only in literatureis the situation
different.The concepthas beenresisted,and the hybridtermnumerology,or numerological
analysis,coinedforit, has not yet fullyachievedits placein the Englishcriticalvocabulary.
(pp. 2-3)
As Gilson (a shade tetchily) demonstrated for the Vitanuova- the numerologist on
that occasion was Father Mandonnet- numerical '-isms' and '-ologies' quickly get
out of hand. Number can be made to signify anything, with possibly serious injury to
the text. But this, in Professor MacQueen's case, is by the by. His book is an
introduction, and as such works well. After a preliminary chapter on biblical
numerism and its popularity in the Middle Ages, we come in Chapter 2 to Plato, the
Timaeus,and Calcidius, and to Cicero, the SomniumScipionis,and Macrobius, key
figures and texts for what follows. Chapter3 begins with Augustine - whose
preoccupation with number was dismissed by Knowles as the 'strange aberration of
a great genius' (p. 48) - and moves on to consider the Celtic development of
Hebraic biblical, as distinct from Greek ontological, numerism. Texts here include
the sixth-century Altusprosatorof Columba, the Liberhymnorum and Antiphonary of
Bangor,and the late Carolingian Voyage ofSt Brendan,all of which demonstrate the use
of number for literary-structural as well as for symbolic purposes. Chapter4
concerns the transition from Latin to the vernacular, and focuses on the ViedeSaint
Alexis (c. 1040), the QuestedelSaintGraal,and (again) the Vitanuova,together with, on
the English side, the ParlementofFoules (less than serious in its use of number), the
Pearl, and the Kingis Quairattributed to James I of Scotland. Finally, there is the
'Renaissance and its Aftermath', at first Platonist in its number-symbolism, but
later, after the intervention of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, less certain. An
appendix on Welsh and Scottish numerology - its point of view is perhaps the
book's most novel feature - from the eleventh century to the eighteenth has some
interesting remarks on the magical and mnemonic properties of number.
BIRKBECK COLLEGE, LONDON JOHN TOOK

Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Edited by MORTONW. BLOOMFIELD.(Harvard English

Studies, 9) Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University
Press. 1982. x+ 390pp. ?2 I.00 (paperbound ?7.oo).
In the 'Preface' to this collection of essays Morton Bloomfield articulates the
perception that the time is ripe for re-evaluating allegory as form and as literary

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