Abstract

Scholars of the Middle Ages are reflecting productively on the sound not only of the text, but of the book.1 Formed from the skins of dead animals, parchment pages have a positive and intimate bond with silence in a way that paper does not. And yet the same or similar animal membranes are used for drum skins, tambourines, or the bellows of bagpipes, while the body of the human reader, enveloped in a skin that closely resembles parchment and is near kin to it, is notable for its own resonating surfaces. Hearing ranges over and within these membranes where silence oscillates with sound and pleasure with discomfort, their reverberations alternately welcomed or shunned.In grappling with the question of how to read...