Conclusion

The Conclusion looks forward to future cross-disciplinary work on the physical voice. It reflects on why a literary scholar might be interested in the physical voice, recalling that literary texts are full of voices that make reference to the real voice off the page. It also suggests why a Renaissance literary historian might have something distinctive to offer future work on the voice, recalling the inter-relationship in this period between voice and printed books. It recognizes that a new technological revolution is well underway that is changing our relationship with print. It briefly considers how the digital medium uses or ignores voice, and asks whether a new history of oral reading can enable us to imagine different ways of interacting with—and immersing ourselves in—the print/digital books of the future.

Thomas Nashe On and Off the Page

This chapter shifts attention from the literariness of Thomas Nashe’s style to its performability. It recalls the role performance played in his education, and his links to the theatre. It considers what was so meaningful about live performance that he tried to recreate its effect in printed prose. It explores the theatricality of his prose: his use of the rhetorical sentence to represent live thinking; his use of direct address in Summers last will and testament and The Unfortunate Traveller; and his imitation of the university play Pedantius in Have with you to Saffron Walden. Nashe’s attempt to bring the flat page to life with thought, wit, and emotion explains his criticism of Gabriel Harvey, whose pamphlets he represents as material objects that can be reduced to their constituent parts with no loss.

Talking Books

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.

The Voice in the Schoolroom

This chapter explores the centrality of voice to a Latinate, grammar-school education in the sixteenth century. It focuses on the part of rhetoric that has long been missed out of our histories of Renaissance rhetoric and reading: pronuntiatio (delivery). It considers the types of textual evidence we might use to recover training in vocal modulation. It explores the importance of pairing elocutio with pronuntiatio, focusing especially on Omer Talon’s Rhetorica; and it considers how attention to the performance of sentences from collections might help us to ‘listen’ to the historical schoolroom. It asks what happened to women’s voices when they were impersonated in the male-only schoolroom, and whether ‘real’ women were ever trained in pronuntiatio. Finally, it considers why Desiderius Erasmus chose the voice of a woman, Folly, to defend the importance of delivery to establish a relationship with God.

The Voice on the Page

The history of reading has privileged particular kinds of evidence: the marks that readers left behind in books (annotation), and the layout of a printed page/book (paratext). This chapter explores whether other marks—not just layout but also punctuation and spelling—can be understood as vocal cues for oral readers. It does this by examining the contents and layout of Edmund Coote’s schoolbook used to teach boys and girls to read English (aloud). It argues that the eye and tongue were brought into alignment in the printed books of the sixteenth century, and gives this claim a context: debates on English spelling and punctuation. It makes a case for seeing ‘marks’ as prompts that need to be interpreted creatively rather than strictly followed, exploring Matthew Parker’s advice on reading psalms.

Introduction

The Introduction argues that the history of Renaissance reading has privileged the silent reader, even though it is acknowledged that oral reading in this period was ubiquitous. It makes a case for the ubiquity of oral reading—and of voice-aware silent reading—in a unique way, by shifting attentiovn from orality to vocality, moving our attention away from the oral/literacy debate introduced by Walter J. Ong in the mid-twentieth century. Making this shift enables us to re-focus on the question of how the physical voice brings meaning to a text. This chapter explores the patchy engagement with the voice in critical work in different disciplines, including music and post-medieval literary studies. It explains this book’s interest in voice qualities like tone and timbre. Finally, it introduces what will become a key argument: that a printed book needs to be understood as an experience as well as an object.

The Voice in the Church

This chapter shifts attention from the private reading of the Bible to its public reading in church. It explores complaints about the ‘bare reading’ of the liturgy from the 1570s, and its defence by defenders of the established church. It explores the guides that promoted rhetorical delivery, and which explained the Bible as a series of affecting stories that congregants could relate to. It recognizes that complaints about bare reading in the 1570s had a second phase in the late 1580s and 1590s when a style of oral reading as protest was launched to defend preaching by a group of puritans writing as ‘Martin Marprelate’. It explores an unusual riposte from an unexpected quarter, Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Jerusalem, arguing he set out to give readers the experience of live preaching in book-form. And it invites us to think differently about how books in this period were experienced.