Rumor and noise: notes for a political soundscape in mester de clerecía

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the status of rumor in two works of the mester de clerecía, the Libro de Apolonio and the Libro de Alexandre, as it ties together questions of language, sovereignty, politics, and literature. Considering different views of rumor, from noise to harmony, from lying to eloquence, this article contextualizes different views on rumor in the medieval period to interpret its varied use in these poems. The article investigates first the role of rumor in legal discourse, related to fama and secrecy; it then looks into the bodily metaphors of the multiple meanings of language as sins of the tongue, and finally into notions of harmony and volume to provide a complex picture of rumor as register. It then analyzes different moments in the Alexandre and the Apolonio that exploit these different meanings, often setting them against each other, to produce hermeneutical processes. Rumor serves in these works to plot the story, to characterize figures, to highlight moments of cognition, of politics, and to present the idea of the control of language as one attractive to both clerics and kings.