ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to investigate the aural aspects of medieval antifeminism’s deliberate depictions of women’s “orality”—their imagined participation in a social world defined primarily by speech and audition—to refine our understanding of what it means to listen in the late medieval imagination. It also aims to investigate how the Middle Ages helped to construct what it is we hear when we listen to female voices, using Middle English literature as our point of entry. The book presents an important ideological formula, the topos of the Philosopher and the Shrew, which lays the foundation for an understanding of how the female voice becomes aligned with vocality. It explores the relationship between the shrew and the gossip by examining the threat posed by the Uxor Noah character of the mystery plays.
