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Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. This book traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, the book examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations.

English literature --- Noise in literature. --- Themes, motives. --- Rolle, Richard, --- Kempe, Margery, --- Langland, William, --- Chaucer, Geoffrey, --- England --- Intellectual life --- Epistemology, Medieval thinking, sound and sense, Chaucer, Langland, Richard Rolle, and Margery Kempe.