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Twelve medieval scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including law, literature, and religion address the question: What did it mean to possess a voice - or to be without one - during the Middle Ages? This collection reveals how the philosophy, theology, and aesthetics of the voice inhabit some of the most canonical texts of the Middle Ages.
Twelve medieval scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including law, literature, and religion address the question: What did it mean to possess a voice - or to be without one - during the Middle Ages? This collection reveals how the philosophy, theology, and aesthetics of the voice inhabit some of the most canonical texts of the Middle Ages.
Essays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts.
Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.
In Monumental Sounds, Matthew G. Shoaf examines interactions between sight and hearing in spectacular church decoration in Italy between 1260 and 1320. In this "age of vision," authorities' concerns about whether and how worshipers listened to sacred speech spurred Giotto and other artists to reconfigure sacred stories to activate listening and ultimately bypass phenomenal experience for attitudes of inner receptivity. New naturalistic styles served that work, prompting viewers to give voice to depicted speech and guiding them toward spiritually fruitful auditory discipline. This study reimagines narrative pictures as site-specific extensions of a cultural system that made listening a meaningful practice. Close reading of religious texts, poetry, and art historiography augments Shoaf's novel approach to pictorial naturalism and art's multisensorial dimensions. This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies.
Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As Lears shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity—including lay women—to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. World of Echo offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.
We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.
Arguing that women’s "silencing" is in part the result of women’s voices being treated as the white noise of history, Avid Ears: Medieval Gossips, Sound, and the Art of Listening explores the historical representation of female voices as actual acoustic phenomena. The volume focuses on English antifeminist satire during the linguistically dynamic late Middle Ages to argue that the resonant gossips’ circle offers a cultural poetics of listening for those attentive to medieval auditory regimes. Understanding what it means to listen from both medieval and modern perspectives can challenge, so this book argues, the specular logic informing a long satirical tradition that casts the noisy speaking woman as the nemesis who confirms the social authority of the erudite man. Discerning the acoustic preoccupations of the gossips’ circle inevitably hovering behind the shrew, Avid Ears explains why the threat posed by a woman talking back to a man is only exceeded by that of a woman speaking to other women. The first book-length study to use sound studies to explore how gender registers in the medieval literary soundscape, Avid Ears attunes critics to how and what we hear when women speak in literature.
Frontcover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Words and Other Fragments -- 1 Speaking Up and Shutting Up: Expression and Suppression in the Old English Mary of Egypt and Ancrene Wisse -- 2 What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts -- 3 Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer -- 4 Taking the Words Out of Her Mouth: Glossing Glossectomy in Tales of Philomela -- Conclusion: After Words -- Bibliography -- Index
This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern literature, offers cutting edge research into the textual and cultural legacy of the Middle Ages: a significant and growing area of scholarship. At the juncture of literary, cultural and gender studies, and capitalizing on a renewed interest in popular western representations of the Islamic east, this book proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.