Out of the mouths of babes : infant voices in medieval French literature / Julie Singer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Singer, Julie, 1978- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--To 1500--History and criticism.

French literature.

Infants in literature.

Physical Description:

317 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Summary:

"In this book, Julie Singer explores rich and strange moments in medieval literary texts where toddlers and infants-even fetuses-speak, and the important cultural work these texts perform. Through comparative readings of a wide array of literary, scientific, and encyclopedic sources-including treatises, practical manuals, miracle tales and devotional texts, and lyric and epic poetry-Singer shows how literary representations of infants, those who are ostensibly mute but are suddenly endowed with speech, can offer alternative ways to understand what it means to be human. Marshaling a wide array of critical tools borrowed from sound/voice studies and disability studies, from children's to religious studies, and from the medical humanities and the history of medicine, Singer shows that these moments of imagined speech from children too young to talk are far from trivial or whimsical episodes in imaginative literature. On the contrary, these texts allowed medieval writers to ask important philosophical questions about our notions of ability versus disability and the origins and symbolic logic of human language. In these tales from the speculative realms of fiction, Singer shows, medieval writers discovered a potent ethical tool. Infants offer what other human subjects cannot: a way of bypassing experientially-acquired knowledge, proceeding directly to universal truths. This study will be useful to a broad range of scholars beyond literary studies"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: The universal alterity of the infant

Voices from the womb

Signs of life

Nurture, the domestic, and the foreign

Interrogating innocence

Mute children in the time of miracle

Conclusion: Knowing infancy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226838014

0226838013

9780226838021

0226838021

OCLC:

1442968201