World of Echo

This study of the role of extra-semantic sound is primarily literary in scope and methodology, but will be of great interest to historians of the senses, the emotions, religious mysticism and the public political sphere. The subject of the book is neither language nor music, but the sounds which exist beyond these: ‘This immersive experience in sound unmoored from exact signification and the rebounding of ideas and associations that such experience produces is the world of echo I have in mind’ (p. 4). Adin E. Lears makes a powerful case that these sounds and echoes resonate particularly strongly in the later Middle Ages between around 1350 and 1440, and that they generated a rich texture of reflection and discussion. Sound and echo were seen both positively and negatively: this was both meaningless cacophony and the means to a deeper experiential truth precisely because it was untethered. Lears begins with a helpful summary of the history of noise and echo. This history has classical origins, most obviously with the story of Narcissus and Echo, whose pathetic cry continued to ring in medieval ears. However, it is also a richly Christianised history, and Lears elaborates Augustine’s framing of the role of extra-semantic sound. Lears shows that sound, in existing beyond language, could readily be associated with the uneducated or the disempowered. On the one hand, this was what she terms ‘an animacy hierarchy’ (p. 11), a means by which the laity generally, or popular dissent, could be dismissed as noise. On the other hand, it opened up a space for forms both of experiential and mystical knowledge and of radicalism

Art · Echo (communications protocol · Linguistics · Literature · Computer Science · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies