Subtheme:
‘Gan to Jangle’: Rumor, Gossip,
and the Power of Speech

Jangling clearly has a bad reputation in medieval literature. In Master of Game, Edward of Norwich deems the practice unseemly for medieval children. In the Confessio Amantis, Gower associates it with “fals Envie” (4.1474) and asks god to “schilde” him from its wiles. Even when it is well meaning, gossip is treated with hostility. The Manciple’s Tale features a raven whose good-intentioned warning is punished as misbegotten speech. For so-called idle speech, jangling had a grip on medieval thought. Religious writers denounce it; secular authors roll their eyes at it, and whether it is innocuous and annoying or purposeful and sinister, most consider it a locale of scandal. 

 

Yapping, then, can have transformative power. Susan E. Phillips’ Transforming Talk (2007) argues for jangling’s social power as an influence on both secular and religious works, and we can point to several figures—fictional and otherwise—notable for both their verbosity as well as wisdom—Margery Kempe and the Wife of Bath, for example. Some refuse to be silenced. The “litel clergon” of Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale sings out from beyond the grave.But such an emphasis on the overspoken stands in contrast to that which is unsaid, to which Karma Lochrie’s Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (1999) draws attention. Omission of speech or withholding of the ‘correct’ speech until the ‘right moment’ is another verbal means of seizing power. Meanwhile, some texts rob characters of their power to speak, as we see with some Arthurian knights. The tension between gossip and secrecy—between what can or should not be said—is particularly relevant in more unassuming texts such as the Distaff Gospels, a fifteenth-century text concerned with womens’ production knowledge within domestic circles. It would seem, then, that the medieval world had a lot to say about—but perhaps no consensus on—speech. 

 

This panel is interested in the scandalous potential of unsanctioned speech, be they words spoken out of turn, information passed in secret, or performative conversations held in public. It scrutinizes the dichotomies between speech and silence, between public and private, and between idle and transformative. It asks who gets to speak and in what venues. It invites papers that address topics including but not limited to:

 

• Gossip as knowledge production, power seeking, or community building

• Children and unsanctioned speech

• Inappropriate utterances/ugly speech

• Unheroic or unchivalric speech

• Insubordinate or disrespectful speech/hierarchies and speech

• Hearsay and narrative provenance 

• Jokes, puns, and japes

• The problematics of speech

• Spoken versus unspoken/public versus private speech