Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature

Silence, like speech, is a mode of communication that can be used strategically. In Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature, Edwin D. Craun investigates the silences in public life that punctuate talk in late Middle English literature.

Centering his study on readings of canonical texts, including the works of Thomas Hoccleve, the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Lydgate’s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage de vie humaine, The Testimony of William Thorpe, a selection of the York cycle of passion plays, and The Book of Margery Kempes, Craun recovers the widespread moral discourse on silence developed by late medieval secular and clerical writers, who compiled materials from Roman popular morality and Stoic texts as well as Jewish wisdom books and Christian texts. These texts model how silence could play a role in effective government, respond to violent and angry antagonists, or in some cases to entirely obviate a good outcome. Through this nuanced exploration of the ethics of communication in medieval moral, narrative, and dramatic literature, Craun shows us that public silences, then as now, have strategies and consequences, dimensions that medieval imaginative writers explore subtly yet analytically in order to provoke ethical reflection and pragmatic action.

Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature offers original thematical and rhetorical insights into the written history of silence. It will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in Middle English literature, history, and political thought.

With a PhD from Princeton, Edwin Craun taught English, Latin, and Medieval Studies at Washington and Lee University. Yearlong fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center enabled him to do research on the ethics of speech in manuscript collections in England and France. He is the author of Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature and Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing, both published by Cambridge University Press, as well as several dozen articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries.