The Sounds of Sin: Episcopal Noise Regulation in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Starting in the thirteenth century, at dozens of diocesan synods and provincial councils throughout western Europe, clerics turned their attention to the problem of noise. Wielding their power as lawmakers, bishops promulgated new canons and statutes that penalized certain acoustic behaviors in their jurisdictions. In these ecclesiastical noise regulations, we find noise defined in various ways and with many different sources: chatty parishioners, barking dogs, street-performing priests, raucous hunters, urban protestors, and even non-Christian subjects. Existing traditions (biblical, patristic, monastic) had much to say about the virtues of silence, but they cannot entirely explain this new interest in legally suppressing certain sorts of sound. We can only understand the appearance of ecclesiastical noise regulations by considering two related phenomena: new duties for local priests and a clerical push to sacralize the public sphere. Scattered across a variety of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, mostly issued entirely in isolation from each other, and owing little of their substance to anything in the higher juristic tradition, episcopal noise regulations are a case study in legal innovation and convergent evolution. So too they show that the later medieval church’s on-the-ground authority sometimes demanded the silencing-literally-of local rivals.