Auralities: Sound Cultures and the Experience of Hearing in Late Medieval England

This dissertation pursues two goals: first, the elaboration of an arsenal of critical tools that allow literary critics to listen to historical sound cultures, and second, the application of these tools to a range of late medieval English texts to recover their sounded dimension and reveal the sounding and hearing practices that structure their meanings. I insist that a shift in critical attention towards the underexplored field of aurality discovers a powerful region of late medieval lived experience and cultural influence whose traces the material text embeds. Each chapter of the dissertation centers on one text or group of texts that collectively range in genre, audience, and performance context: Chaucer's Prioresses Tale, the mystical Latin treatises of Richard Rolle, the Corpus Christi shepherd's plays, and John Skelton's early poem "Phyllyp Sparowe." Through attentive and often unconventional readings, I uncover how these texts register the dynamics of late medieval sound experience and examine how aurality contributes to the design, diffusion, contest, and revision of late medieval identities and communities. I rehear a complex array of culturally located voices that shaped not only the meanings ascribed to aural experience---the audition of music, of poetry, of the Latin mass, of the vernacular play, and so on---but that also shaped the material, felt sensations that sound experience produced in specific and differently constructed bodies.