Conclusion

Abstract

This study, indebted to a generation of scholars engaged in publishing accurate representations of medieval and early modern English women, and their voices (in texts), has been concerned with investigating women’s voices, particularly their speech, as a site of revolt. In order to discover some of the reasons why this period’s civic and religious authorities were so obsessed with speech, I set out to examine certain of the period’s basic assumptions about speech in general. Tracing perspectives well documented in Medieval and Early Modern England on the nature of speech—its unreliability, its mystique, its uncontainable or uncontrollable nature—brought me face to face with the unease of writers, theorists, rhetoricians, and theologians about the extremes of speech.