Out of the Mouths of Babes

"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"--