Quiet Riot: A Politics of Noise in the Cook's Tale

The politics of sound have been largely understudied in Chaucer's works, but Chaucer's urban stories have much to tell us about medieval soundscapes. This article thinks through the dilemmas posed by sound to political milieus in a Foucaultian vein, noting premodern examples of the ways that power worked to manipulate and regulate sound and language in its territory and how sound worked to resist authority's control. This article argues that the Cook's Tale illustrates how the sensory experience of sound was managed, regulated, and controlled, gesturing toward a larger biopolitical strain in the Canterbury Tales that intimates Chaucer's own anxieties about popular noise in his lifetime.