The voice of ‘Sir John Mandeville’, author and protagonist of Mandeville’s Travels, is an illusory textual effect: Mandeville, as we all know, was not Mandeville, and probably did not travel. Mandeville’s first-person experiences are plagiarised from those of genuine travellers; yet the text forges a distinctive voice that unites its disparate sources and the positions, in Michel de Certeau’s terms, of ‘voyeur’ and ‘walker’. This voice constitutes what David Lawton names ‘a public interiority’: generations of Mandeville’s readers occupied his position. Hence, for someone who did not exist, Mandeville generated significant material traces, including two grave sites, at Liège and St Albans. Mandeville’s English readers added additional biography to flesh out the character, emphasising, variously, his Englishness, his knightliness and his scholarship. Two manuscripts of the Travels visualise him both as author and as traveller: in BL, MS Harley 3954, he is a humble guide and pilgrim; and in the luxurious BL, MS Additional 24189, he is an elegant aristocrat.

This chapter pays tribute to David Lawton, a pioneer and leading scholar in the field of voice studies in Middle English. Over the course of the past 40 years David Lawton has produced scholarship of continued relevance. From his earliest work on alliterative poetry to his recent edition of Chaucer, he has pioneered editorial innovations. At the same time, his work on narratology has both deployed and questioned the structuralist turn. His attention to otherness and empire engaged the postcolonial condition before it had a name. His work on theology and religious history prefigured a critical religious studies.

The racialisation of voice precedes the invention of race in the fifteenth century. Its most salient form within late medieval, Christian Europe is the comparison of the voices of non-Christian peoples to those of nonhuman animals, and the characterisation of their voices as inarticulata (unintelligible), drawing on the influential, fourfold categorisation of vox (voice) made by the late antique grammarians Donatus and Priscian. The hierarchical sorting of voices into the human and the bestial, the human and the barbaric, the intelligible and the unintelligible still shapes the way that we hear a supposed ‘essence’ of race in voices today. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Canacee’s ability to understand birdsong connects the human and the nonhuman by figuring a nonhuman voice as vox articulata (articulate, intelligible). Giorgio Agamben names this point of conjunction and separation between the human and the animal a ‘caesura’, and urges that we must seek to understand the historical construction of the conflict between the animality and the humanity of man in order to address the violent political and social consequences of that separation. Poetry’s origins in in-spiration , breath, invites us to put race and poetics together at a moment in US and global history when Black people are struggling to breathe.

Margery Kempe’s meeting with the leprous woman has, for the past generation, been read as an instance of ‘the touch of the queer’, a reading recently bolstered by the assumption that the Red Ink Annotator’s comment on the episode is ‘Be strange and bold’. That comment is in fact ‘Be stronge and bold’, and Margery’s encounter with the leprous woman, so this chapter argues, is better understood as an instance of what David Lawton identifies as ‘public interiorities’, which ‘exist as a text before they are inhabited, often in a shared first-person, by a particular speaker or group’. In this case, Margery is speaking the voice of St Paul (Ephesians 6.11), a public interiority that pervades The Book of Margery Kempe. Other elements of the Book that have been read as ‘queer’, too, such as the mayor of Leicester’s accusations regarding Margery – read as implying that she had sex with the wives of that city – might more accurately be understood as conventional and normative. There are certainly elements of the Book that can productively be taken as ‘queer’, but the voice of St Paul at work here points to more complicated realities than ones suggested by such readings.

One of the many strands of commentary relating to Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales concerns the relation of the narrator of the Prologue to Chaucer himself. Although few critics would now argue that there is a complete identification between the Prologue’s narrator and Chaucer as author, the precise nature of the gap between them throws up a number of conceptual difficulties about narrative and authorial personae. In this chapter I take a linguistic view of how narrative voice is constructed in the General Prologue, drawing on theories of focalisation developed by Mieke Bal, Gérard Genette and Michael Toolan, among others. The chapter argues that, although the narrator of the Prologue appears to be its main voice, there are in fact clear echoes of a number of the pilgrims, whose voices are ventriloquised through the narrator. This is achieved in part by means of the narrative strategy of ‘free indirect discourse’, and its effect, in the General Prologue, is to draw attention to that gap which has so often been commented on: the gap between the narrator’s perception and our own sense of an authorial (and authoritative) guiding spirit directing us to a more critically nuanced reading of events.

The sole surviving musical setting of Christine de Pizan’s work is the 1402 ballade ‘Dueil angoisseus, rage desmesurée’, (‘Anguished grief, rage beyond measure’), which was turned into a chanson in the 1420s or 1430s by her younger contemporary, the renowned Franco-Flemish composer Gilles Binchois. This plaintive chanson has had a successful afterlife through the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, being treated to numerous interpretations that diverge, sometimes significantly, both from Binchois’s setting and from one another. This chapter examines two radically different recent recordings of the chanson, one by a polyphonic early music ensemble and one by a black metal group, in order to explore how, despite musicological obstacles and anxieties around authenticity, virtually all modern renditions claim to have captured something of Christine’s voice. It argues that the act of reconstructing Christine’s ‘musical voice’ rests on the belief that this song is an essential expression of her femaleness, her Frenchness and her ‘medievalness’. The chapter identifies the combination of sounds (including vocalisations) and values that are deemed to converge in Christine’s musical voice, in order to shed light on modern perceptions of medieval voices today.

This chapter considers what voice has to do with the ways medieval people thought about personhood. Personification allows medieval authors to round out an abstract quality or thing (whether fitfully or at length) so that it acquires human characteristics and a body, an imagined ‘other mind’ subject to emotions and sensations, or a role in a narrative, whether very briefly or at more length. As if those rich and complex features of personification were not enough, however, medieval people seem to have found it most necessary to comment on personhood in texts when the person they are imagining has a voice. They populate the moments when someone speaks in the first person, especially if what they say is emotionally difficult or hard to explain, with comments that X is ‘speaking in the person of’ someone else. Here I consider the interpretative act of disidentification involved in any claim that an ‘I’ voice speaks in the person of someone else. Why did medieval writers and readers feel the impulse to make up people such as this, sometimes in the most evanescent or fungible way, in order to explain the ‘I’ voices they fashioned or encountered in texts?

This chapter explores the ways in which medieval authors imagined their own pasts as voiced and embodied artefacts through a comparative analysis of two very dissimilar works, the alliterative Middle English St Erkenwald and the Old Norse saga Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Although the two works stem from different cultural contexts and represent very different literary conventions, both display similar means of repurposing their pagan past as foundational myths, suggesting that medieval authors may have struggled with the inherent contradictions of the pagan past and its foundational historicity and actively sought to reaffirm or reformulate those memorials. Moreover, they do so through the positioning of voice as a medium of the past and through its materialisation into text, staging the reappropriation of those pasts as the material (and immaterial) foundation for a Christianised modernity. The chapter thus suggests that both these works utilise voice as a metaphorical tool to rearticulate the past – affirming its existence and its reconfigured function through the materialisation of that voice as poetry and, ultimately, as the text we hold in our hands today.

This chapter examines scribal alterations to systems of punctuation employed in several medieval works of devotional literature, including Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive Meditationes and William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchés. Within such works, scribes modify marks of punctuation with striking frequency. Such modifications reveal that scribes considered themselves as having a degree of interpretive licence when punctuating a work; even if they otherwise took pains to reproduce the text of a work faithfully, scribes could provide an original ‘voicing’ or ‘performance’ of that text through their adaptations of its punctuation system. The regularity with which scribes modified the punctuation of the works they copied out, I suggest, provides valuable evidence of medieval delimitations of acceptable forms of scribal agency and reaffirms the complex multivocality of medieval works. To alter the punctuation of a work was to reshape the parameters of its textual form through the manipulation of its pauses and changes to its syntactic rhythm, thus influencing the potential voicings and interpretations of a work as it circulated in multiple copies over time.

Concentrating on v.1479–80, the point at which the knight Arveragus ‘brast anon to wepe’, this chapter offers a reading of The Franklin’s Tale that foregrounds the disruptive presence in that tale of the body as a conduit for truths about the self that challenge those that can be consciously tolerated and intelligibly uttered. When we weep, the body is speaking. Here, as it forces a sudden disruption and decline in Arveragus’s speech register and ethical focus, the voice of the body erupts in such a way as to crystallise one of the tale’s most urgent concerns with what might really constitute truth, unravelling what has gone before, putting the reader’s experience on a different footing and forcing a reappraisal of the characters’ self-concepts. And this, in turn, raises questions about the relationship between, on the one hand, the rhetoric and ideals explicitly at work within the world of the tale and, on the other, the felt presence not only of its teller, the Franklin, but also of its author, Chaucer.