Book ID: CBB394368465

World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England (2020)

unapi

Adin E. Lears (Author)


Cornell University Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 232
Language: English

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.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB394368465/

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Authors & Contributors
Orlemanski, Julie
Hyer, Maren Clegg
Owen-Crocker, Gale R.
Sizer, Michael
Supper, Alexandra
Savy, Pierre
Concepts
Human body
Sound
Senses and sensation; perception
Auditory perception
Noise and noise abatement
Public understanding of science
Time Periods
Medieval
18th century
15th century
14th century
21st century
20th century
Places
England
France
South Korea
Flanders
Netherlands
Greece
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