Virtual Listening in Lyric Space: First-Person Voice Effects in Late Medieval English Lyric

Abstract

This article explores a form of sensory stimulation in late medieval English devotional lyric, referred to here as textual sensing, with a specific focus on deictic ambiguities surrounding the first-person pronoun I. Drawing on concepts from virtuality studies, and focusing on examples of religious lyrics from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, I argue that these lyrics' uses of first-person voice activate their audiences' bodily instincts, thereby generating sensations of recognizing voices in the flesh. These appeals to sensory perception do not simply represent physical sensing as a conceptual act; they also strikingly simulate sensory experience. Furthermore, the first-person voice effects inhere in the texts' verbal and syntactic arrangements and are therefore at work regardless of the circumstances under which the poems are encountered: whether on the page or sung; read aloud or in silence; in company or in solitude. I argue that Middle English devotional lyrics can be understood as a form of virtual environment, allowing their audiences to experience the imagined voices of poetic personas as somatic objects generated by virtual bodies. By exploring how the subject I in Middle English lyric can catalyze vivid sensory experiences of textual voices, this article expands our understanding of the ways in which verbal media forms can imagine—and transcend—textual bodies.