Echoes "Multiplyinge Ever Moo": Acousmatization and Dissemination in the House of Fame

            The echo is an exemplary acousmatic object. A sonic apparition, it lingers in the air even as its source recedes into obscurity. In this way, the echo embodies the paradox of the trace: it gestures toward its source even as it reveals the impossibility of its full recovery. In the House of Fame, Geoffrey Chaucer foregrounds this paradox, rendering every form of vocal utterance— "be hyt rouned [whispered], red, or songe" (722) — as an echo, disentangled from its embodied origin and manifested as an aerial presence. As these echoes ascend to Fame's palace, they undergo a process of "multiplicacioun" (784)— a form of dissemination that disperses and reshapes each utterance, sending it outward like ripples radiating from a stone dropped into a pool of water. Through this iterative process, Chaucer's House of Fame demonstrates that fame—and, more specifically, literary auctoritas— endures not through mimetic fidelity to an original source or authorial presence, but through its poetic capacity for circulation, transformation, and reinterpretation.

            This chapter argues that the House of Fame deploys acousmatic echoes “multiplyinge ever moo” (801) to expose the instability of interpretive authority and the contingency of literary fame. Chaucer’s engagement with acousmatization does not merely register the disjunction between voice and origin but actively interrogates the conditions under which meaning accrues authority. By foregrounding the dissemination and transformation of utterance, the House of Fame suggests that meaning is not an inherent property of speech but a consequence of its transmission, shaped by the mechanisms of circulation and reception. Chaucer thus reveals a deep skepticism toward the permanence of authorial intent, demonstrating how texts— like echoes— persist not by preserving their original articulation but through their capacity for iteration, distortion, and reinterpretation. In doing so, the House of Fame underscores the fluid nature of textual reception in the late medieval literary tradition, illustrating how auctoritas itself is not a fixed inheritance but an ongoing process of renewal and reconfiguration.

The Ventriloquized Vox: The Acousmatic Vox Clamantis

            John Gower’s Vox Clamantis constructs a layered vocality that resists singular attribution, deploying a rhetorical mode of ventriloquism to mediate prophetic authority. Throughout the poem, Gower positions himself as a prophetic voice— one that does not originate from a singular, authoritative subject but is instead mediated through a complex chain of biblical, political, and textual personas. Drawing upon the biblical ethos of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, Gower fashions his poetic identity as both preacher and visionary. Yet this self-fashioning is not an act of direct imitation; rather, Gower ventriloquizes these authoritative voices, amplifying them while simultaneously effacing his own presence. His vox clamantis is thus not the stable cry of a prophet but an acousmatic utterance that circulates through layers of mediation, its authority at once invoked and displaced.

            This chapter explores how the Vox Clamantis enacts a hermeneutics of ventriloquism, wherein Gower’s narrator does not claim direct access to divine revelation but channels it through a series of textual and historical voices. The poem’s prophetic mode relies on rhetorical displacement: Gower insists that he is merely relaying what he has seen and heard, speaking not from his own authority but as a conduit for a greater, disembodied vox populi— a voice of the people that itself exists in an unstable, mediated form. This doubleness complicates the poem’s claim to moral and political critique, as it resists the clarity of a singular speaker. By positioning himself as a vessel for received authority rather than its definitive source, Gower problematizes the relationship between voice and authorship, foregrounding the instability of interpretation when a voice is detached from its originary subject. Drawing on medieval rhetorical theory and recent scholarship on literary ventriloquism, this chapter argues that Gower’s vox is an acousmatic cry in the wilderness— one that oscillates between the authoritative and the elusive, the embodied and the spectral. In doing so, Vox Clamantis interrogates the very mechanisms by which literary and prophetic authority are performed, received, and, ultimately, transformed.

"A Voyce All Ane": Haunting Hermeneutics in the Gast of Gy

            The Gast of Gy is a late medieval English narrative that portrays the haunting of a widow by the disembodied voice of her deceased husband, Gy. The tale unfolds as Gy's restless spirit returns from Purgatory to torment his widow due to unresolved sins that were inadequately confessed during his lifetime. Unable to see the source of the voice, the widow struggles to determine whether the voice belongs to her deceased husband or a demonic impostor, underscoring the interpretive instability that arises when sound is severed from its visible origin. Gy’s own claim that he speaks without a tongue or body articulates a medieval theory of voice that detaches vocality from corporeality, foregrounding the spectral, performative nature of sound. This paradox is central to medieval conceptions of acousmatic speech: although Gy’s voice carries authority and serves a didactic purpose, it remains suspect, requiring clerical mediation through ritual, prayer, and interrogation.

            This chapter argues that the Gast of Gy constructs an auditory soundscape in which acousmatization is not merely an eerie effect but a mode of epistemological uncertainty— one that compels interpretation and theological reflection. The prior’s attempt to engage with the voice reveals the tension between sonic presence and visual absence, dramatizing the theological and epistemological challenges posed by acousmatic speech. Situating the text within medieval theories of sound and liturgical performance, this chapter argues that Gy’s spectral presence— manifested through voice rather than body— destabilizes the boundaries between sound and sight, presence and absence, and the living and the dead.

The Unseen Cantor: Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris and the Acousmatic Resonance of Unio Mystica

            Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris offers one of the most striking medieval articulations of divine voice as an acousmatic phenomenon. Throughout this alliterative, rhythmic prose meditation, Rolle describes the experience of divine love not as a visual revelation but as an auditory rapture— a melos or melody that resounds without a visible source, enveloping the mystic in an ineffable harmony. Unlike visionary accounts that privilege sight as the primary mode of divine apprehension, the Melos Amoris inverts this hierarchy by foregrounding the authority of a disembodied, celestial resonance. By framing Rolle’s Melos Amoris through the lens of acousmatization, this chapter demonstrates how the text resists a videocentric epistemology by privileging sound, rhythm, and resonance as the primary modes of divine communion. Drawing on medieval theories of music, affect, and spiritual sensation, this study reveals how Rolle’s text reconfigures mystical experience as an acousmatic event— one that compels an interpretive search for meaning within an ever-resounding absence. By foregrounding divine authority as an unseen vocal presence rather than a visible spectacle, the Melos Amoris offers a theological poetics of acousmatization, wherein the absence of a visible God paradoxically becomes the condition of mystical union.