At the heart of Clothed in Language lies a journal, but the writing, while personal, has been given a thematic structure. Seeing language as a vital medium through which the divine is made present to us, scholar and poet Pauline Matarasso explores the ways in which this God-given language, with its overcoat of metaphor and undertow of rhythm, serves to reflect the truth and, on occasion, mask it. This book also includes an essay that looks at certain features common to myth, fairy tale, lore, and Scripture.
Pauline Matarasso is a scholar, translator, and poet with a particular interest in medieval history and literature focused on the Benedictine tradition, though her subjects are wide-ranging and embrace the French prose poet Christian Bobin and the modernist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has spent most of her life in rural settings in England and France, much of it on working farms. She is an oblate of Howton Grove Priory, near Hereford. Among other books she has written and edited, she is the translator and editor of The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century and translator of John of Forde's The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite.
