Chaucer’s Rhetoric of Sound

ABSTRACT Chaucer’s rhetoric extended to devices that not only evoked sound but captured it, as if his verse were a kind of recording device and his poetry a form of playback. These devices isolated what Aristotle identified as the inarticulate “sound” (psophos), as distinct from language and what is often called “voice,” and represented it by overlaying more traditional methods for evoking an imagined sound with that sound itself. Three such devices are identified here—a uniquely inventive onomatopoeia, the materialization of sound, and collective speech—for three reasons: to describe this rhetoric; to explain how it might be used as a heuristic for identifying other such devices; and to show, in general terms, the role each device played as an element of Chaucer’s style. All have some precedent in Chaucer’s sources and other Middle English writers, but, as is so often the case with techniques Chaucer inherited, he makes each one his own.