World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England

Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses.

With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the po...