Voice is a fleeting physical phenomenon that leaves behind traces of its existence. Medieval literary voices offers a wide-reaching approach to the concept of literary voices, both the vanished authorial ones and the implicit textual ones. Its impressive lineup deepens our understanding of how literary voices evoke the elusive voices lurking beyond the text, capturing the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the soundscape of the uttered text. It explores multiple dimensions of medieval voice and vocalisations, and the interactions between literary voices and their authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It contends that through the theorizing of literary voices we can begin to understand the ways in which medieval voices mediate or proclaim an embodied selfhood or material presence, how they dictate or contest moral conventions, and how they create and sustain narrative soundscapes.

Introduction - Louise D'Arcens and Sif Rikhardsdottir1 Articulate voices - Ruth EvansPart I: Narrative embodiment and voicing2 Voice of authority: Free indirect discourse in Chaucer's General Prologue - Helen Fulton3 Speaking in person - Fiona SomersetPart II: Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices4 The body speaks in The Franklin's Tale - Mishtooni Bose5 The sensology of the moral conscience: William Peraldus's ethical voices - Richard Newhauser6 Langland parrhesiastes - Ian CorneliusPart III: Materiality and textual voices7 Margery Kempe, the leprous woman and the voice of St Paul - Lawrence Warner8 Listening for the scribe: punctuation and the voicing of late medieval devotional literature - Sarah Noonan9 Parrot poet: Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66 - Wendy ScasePart IV: Performative voices and medieval aurality10 Voice, materiality and history in St Erkenwald and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar - Sif Ríkharðsdóttir11 Embodying the Mandevillean voice - Sarah Salih12 Reconstructing Christine de Pizan's musical voice in the twenty-first century - Louise D'ArcensAfterword: medieval voice: a tribute to David Lawton - John M. GanimBibliographyIndex