Hearing an Urban Plague Soundscape: Gilles li Muisis in Tournai, 1349–50

This article proposes a new mode of sensory literary history, illustrated through an attentive reading of the sonic world the chronicler Gilles li Muisis creates in his account of the plague in Tournai in 1349. It shows that the blind chronicler presents sound as operating according to a plague-like logic of contagion, as he records songs, sermons, bells, and popular speech from within the walls of his quiet Benedictine monastery. A fuller consideration of this writer’s sonic environs, as well as the sound dynamics of his own compositional process, sheds new light on the auditory implications of his alternate choices of prose and verse, Latin and vernacular; and beyond the conclusions it draws about this one relatively little-known writer, it shows how more concentrated efforts at listening for medieval sonic cues can reveal significant sensory echoes in our own time.