Introduction

This chapter focuses on texts pointing to a preoccupation with noise and unsignified vocalization, which shows how the denouncement of a corrupt and embodied form of expression associated with the laity. It looks at religious and literate authorities around Margery Kempe, wherein her crying and roaring was the confused expression of a woman who was too literal-minded in her focus on the bodily and the material. It also identifies a range of ways that the expression of laypeople was linked to noise and unsignified sound in late medieval England. The chapter discusses how medieval thinkers made use of a productive slippage between noise and literary making, even as they worried about its cognitive and social effects. It explains how the poem depends on medieval noise for its own existence and aural innovation despite the fact that the “Complaint” targets disruptive and nonsensical noise of a class of “brutish” laymen.

Epilogue

This chapter argues that an attunement to extrasemantic experiences of language that is understood in terms of noise lays epistemologies and literacies that effloresced in myriad forms in late medieval England. It reviews impulses to experience and express language as noise, which were a means of cultivating direct access to knowledge through affective and sensory experience. It also reviews the ideas of John Wyclif and his followers that overlapped with the avenues of thought, feeling, and sensation. The chapter investigates how Wyclif and his followers are known for their desire to limit clerical authority by encouraging a deep personal relationship to the biblical word in a way that scholars have suggested was a precursor to the Reformation. It examines the world of echo that emphasized the material qualities of the voice in opposition to the Wycliffite ideal of bodily transcendence.

“Nota de Clamore”

This chapter recounts how a fifteenth-century annotator has added “nota de clamor[e]” in the margin at the moment of Margery Kempe's “fyrst cry pat euyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon.” It mentions Hope Emily Allen, one of the earliest editors of Kempe's book, who observes that the marginal comment recalls Richard Rolle's description of his own tumultuous expression of divine love: “clamor iste canor est.” It also examines Allen's view that misunderstands Rolle and reads in Margery Kempe's tears and wails the possibility that Rolle's clamor is literal and physical. The chapter explores how Allen sets Kempe's spiritual understanding against other medieval mystics, such as the author of the late fourteenth-century treatise The Cloud of Unknowing. It shows how the Cloud-author advances a familiar distinction between bodily and spiritual sensation, which aligns the misunderstanding of the novice contemplative or would-be mystic with a desperate excess of labor.

“A Verray Jangleresse”

This chapter examines Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a study in voice that is structured by what David Lawton calls an unprecedented display of multiple tellers. It explains how “The Wife of Bath” is among the loudest of the voices in multiple senses of the word. It also analyses the multivalent loudness, which shows how Chaucer adapts the trope from antimarriage authors like Walter Map and uses it to govern two of the Wife's most fundamental characteristics: her deafness and her “jangling” voice. The chapter looks at deafness as the first defining characteristic of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. It elaborates how the Wife's deafness is closely related to her relationship to texts.

“Clamor Iste Canor Est”

This chapter begins with fourteenth-century hermit Richard Rolle's final chapter of the Incendium Amoris or “fire of love,” which recalls his early religious fervor. It analyses that Rolle's characteristic love-language demonstrates an impulse to describe his relationship with God in terms of the emotional bonds and bodily feeling of a melancholic lover. It also describes Rolle's choice of the nightingale as a persona for his youthful longing as drawing on a long literary tradition that linked the song of the nightingale to passionate devotion and lament. The chapter sketches how and why Rolle presents his experience on sensations of canor or mystical song as an extrasemantic experience of sound. It discusses extrasemantic experience that amplifies how Rolle's theology theorizes voice and establishes his place as a foundational figure in a vernacular devotional tradition grounded in sound and noise.

“Wondres to Here”

This chapter explores several versions of Piers Plowman, wherein the poem's opening lines stress hearing before vision. It talks about Will, the Dreamer, who sets out on his spiritual quest in early summer, dressed in the rough woolen garments of a hermit. It also mentions how hearing receives emphasis at the close of the Prologue, wherein the last lines devolve into a cacophony of street songs sung by the urban tradesmen and professionals that populate the end of Will's dream. The chapter describes how Piers Plowman draws on and reworks the dreamvision topos of birds lulling a dreamer to sleep in any number of places, including in the first dream, when Will falls asleep at the sound of rushing water. It elaborates on hearing as it is inextricably tied to feeling, both as sensation and as emotion.

“Litel Sercles” of Sound

This chapter discusses the Dreamer's journey to Fame's house as a reward for years of diligent service to the god of Love through an explanation by the eagle and visionary guide of Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame. It analyses Chaucer's semi-self-deprecating characterization that engages the key problem of authorship and authority that has driven study of the poem over the past few decades. It also explores the idea of experience that has been important to readings of The House of Fame, which located the poem in a larger intellectual context particular to late medieval philosophy. The chapter discusses Sheila Delaney's reading, in which Chaucer-the-Dreamer must navigate toward truth according to a principle of “skeptical fideism.” It determines where and how Chaucer locates an alternate model of literary authority that often stresses the importance of vernacular language and voices.