A01=Julie Singer
answers
Author_Julie Singer
authority
Category=DSBB
criticism
depictions.
devotional
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fetuses
hopes
infants
insights
life
manuals
personhood
poetry
power
questions
significance
speaking
speech
treatises
truth
universal
unsettling
works
Product details
- ISBN 9780226838014
- Weight: 481g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 10 Mar 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
