•  
  •  
 

Publication Date

2025

Keywords

French literature, infant, medieval

Abstract

Voicing a stirring call for readers to reconsider the silence and lacunae that are traditionally attributed to infancy, in her latest monograph, Julie Singer situates infancy as both an essential critical framework and an instructive, illuminative methodology through which a gaping archival silence can be rectified-that silence being literary representations of the medieval child, and specifically, the spoken life of the medieval child. As Singer argues, infancy and childhood entwine rather indiscernibly with each other in accordance with the medieval attribution of a longue duree to infancy (Isidore of Seville, for instance, posited infancy as a stage lasting for about seven years past the moment of birth, Singer explains [2]). Tied as they are to the early stages of life and thus to a transitional, liminal phase of development, infancy and childhood typically connote transience, ephemerality, immaturity, unpredictability, irrationality, and even animality. As such, the coos, cries, murmurs, and wails that they yield are frequently understood to be little more than babble, in the true sense of the word, and consequently taken as unimportant or completely lacking in sincerity, regulation, seriousness, and importance. Or, since the inchoate sounds babes gurgle forth are presumed to signify nothing, they are often even more reductively taken as tantamount to a certain silence, since they do not transmit coherent verbal messages. Further challenging any percipience of productive, communicatively impactful infant speech, even notionally, '"child speech' or 'infant speech' is a contradiction in terms," reflected in part by the very etymological significance of "infant," from the Latin infans, "meaning 'unable to speak'" (2), which has traditionally abetted the categorization of "child speech" as inconsequential.

Download

Share

COinS