Medieval Gossips And The Art Of Listening

Download or read book Avid Ears written by Christine M Neufeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that women’s "silencing" is in part the result of women’s voices being treated as the white noise of history, Medieval Gossips and the Art of Listening: Avid Ears 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. This book challenges the specular logic informing a long satirical tradition that casts the unruly 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. As the first monograph to use sound studies to explore how gender registers in the medieval soundscape, Avid Ears attunes critics to how and what we hear when women speak in literature.