A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature. Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes, Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.
Julie Singer is professor of French at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of two books, including Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor.
List of IllustrationsIntroduction: The Universal Alterity of the InfantChapter One: Voices from the WombChapter Two: Signs of LifeChapter Three: Nurture, the Domestic, and the ForeignChapter Four: Interrogating InnocenceChapter Five: Mute Children in the Time of MiracleConclusion: Knowing InfancyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
"Historical records about the lives of children are sparse, relegated as they often were to the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, as [Singer] shows, literary and religious texts offer glimpses of how young people were imagined. Her perceptive analysis reveals what these depictions say about medieval ideas of disability, personhood and truth. . . A pleasure to read, full of insights where one least expects them."
