Publisher's Synopsis
Within medieval studies, the senses are turning into a booming field of research, raising highly stimulating and hardly researched questions. The thirteen essays in this anthology focus on the broad field of medieval acoustics. The authors explore contemporary attitudes to noise and silence; they examine the use of sound as an instrument of representation and social order; and they analyse how the production and perception of sounds were discussed, described, depicted and interpreted in the Middle Ages. The contributions provide insights into distant spaces - from Byzantium in the East to the Iberian Peninsula in the West, from Central Europe to the Middle East ? from the perspective of different historical sub-disciplines: historiography and legal history, literary studies, art history and music history.
