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.

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.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Universal Alterity of the Infant
Chapter One: Voices from the Womb
Chapter Two: Signs of Life
Chapter Three: Nurture, the Domestic, and the Foreign
Chapter Four: Interrogating Innocence
Chapter Five: Mute Children in the Time of Miracle
Conclusion: Knowing Infancy

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index