When Fetuses Laugh

While fetal vocalization might seem fanciful or even marvelous, according to medieval medical discourses it is a mundane occurrence; every human fetus laughs while in the womb. Building on the Aristotelian tradition according to which “laughter is proper to man, marking the minimal threshold between the human and the animal” (Parvulescu 4), the fetal laugh signals the acquisition of humanness. So, although fetal vocalization audible outside the womb is extraordinary, the acquisition of a theorizable if not audible voice in utero is a fundamental marker of emergent personhood. Medieval embryology, as Romana Martorelli Vico demonstrates, is situated at the intersection of theological, metaphysical, and medical discourses. More specifically, the metaphysical question—When does a human become a subject, or a person?—is resolved by placing biological conclusions (a determination of when the fetus develops the anatomical structures necessary to reason and self-expression) in dialogue with theological ones (when the fetus acquires a rational soul). Medieval writers generally describe fetuses as having a soul from the moment of conception, but the widely accepted medieval theory of “delayed hominization” holds that this is a staged process: fetuses possess first a vegetal, then an animal, then a rational soul, each emerging in tandem with (and as a function of) physical development.Footnote ⁴ A fetus can only receive its rational soul when its brain and its sense organs are sufficiently developed for it to be capable of perception and thought; and when it is capable of these, its first action is a vocal expression: the ensouled fetus laughs.

As Giles of Rome writes in Chapter 17 of De formatione humani corporis in utero (1285–90; On the Formation of the Human Body in the Womb), the most important embryological treatise produced in medieval Europe:

This is a close paraphrase of Avicenna, who had considered at greater length the intellectual activities of fetuses:

Avicenna's description of fetal sensation is noteworthy for its emphasis on sense perception and on continuity of experience, as well as its affirmation of human exceptionalism. Laughter is a sign of a specifically human intellect. Reading Avicenna's account of fetal laughter in the light of Aristotle's use of masks (personae) as the “paradigmatic example” of that which provokes laughter (Parvulescu 4) confirms the fetus's first rational human act as a sign of self-awareness, a reaction to its own person and persona. From this point on the fetus can sense and imagine: it has volition, rationality, a point of view—though the softness of the developing brain prevents its thoughts from sticking. The expression of such ideas is not limited to arcane scientific discourses; it also occurs in widely diffused encyclopedic texts. In the Livre des propriétés des choses (Book of the Properties of Things), a late-fourteenth-century French translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's thirteenth-century encyclopedia, Jean Corbechon writes, “Quant l'ame entre ou corps de l'enfant il a vie et sent par nature qu'est avironnée d'une pel et se muet pour la rompre” (“When the soul enters the body of the child he comes alive and senses naturally that he is surrounded by a membrane and he moves in an effort to break it”; Corbechon, folio 75v).Footnote ⁵ In other words, as constructed by learned texts as well as by vulgarizations such as Corbechon's encyclopedia and Evrart de Conty's Livre des échecs amoureux moralisés (Book of Moralized Love Chess), ensoulment marks the moment when the human fetus attains both reason and subjectivity.

At the moment when it is endowed with a rational soul, the fetus becomes an enfant—the soul being an entity that, in Western art, itself comes to be represented in the form of an enfant (Le Goff and Baschet 812–13).Footnote ⁶ Yet Avicenna has also to acknowledge the unknowability of fetal intellectual activity: its perceptions, the impressions that result from them, and the oblivion that subsequently erases them are all acknowledged to be only putative.Footnote ⁷ The postulated oblivion allows for a reconciliation between different notions of the beginnings of life, bridging the gap between, on the one hand, theological and scientific models that would situate the origins of personhood or “vie” (as Corbechon calls it) at forty days’ gestation, and, on the other, the competing popular belief that life begins later, when fetal movements are first perceptible to the mother (Buklijas and Hopwood). But the unknowability and imperceptibility of the fetal laugh also mark this vocalization as nonspeech. Speech cannot exist in a nonsocial vacuum; unlike the “first invoking cry of the [newborn] infant,” which according to Adriana Cavarero establishes the essential “relationality of the vocalic” (169), the fetal laugh is imperceptible, nonrelational, vocalic but unspoken. If a fetus laughs in the womb and no one else is able to hear it, has anything been communicated at all?

The idea that fetuses laugh at the moment of their ensoulment is not universally accepted in medieval Europe,Footnote ⁸ but it is one piece of evidence for a more general association of sound and the soul. A similar set of ideas is explored in Placides et Timéo, a late-thirteenth-century prose dialogue in which a student queries a master about a broad array of natural-scientific topics. The teacher, Timéo, explains to his student, Placides, that a fetus is molded and formed like a cast metal bell:

The analogy between the soul and the sound of a bell establishes a connection between that which can reason and that which can make a sound—and be heard (Laurent 92). It reflects, albeit indirectly, a view similar to that expressed by Avicenna and Giles of Rome: that gestation is a period during which the developing human goes from having a potential to an actual voice. Though Timéo declares the soul present from the moment of casting (conception), the bell-founding analogy reminds us of the gap between casting and ringing, or between conception and a capacity for reason and speech. Just as a bell's metal must cool and solidify, a fetus must gestate, and its voice can only ring out once that process is complete.

It is against this backdrop, in a world where fetal vocalization is a scientifically and logically plausible phenomenon (albeit an inaudible and thus unprovable one), that we must read our literary examples. Even when they argue that the unborn are able to laugh or cry, scientific texts and their vulgarizations present fetal experience as an enigma. It is to nonscientific, literary narratives that we must turn to find creative approaches to its resolution—for these are the texts that attempt both the visualization of the fetus and the representation (or even the adoption) of its perspective and its voice. The fetuses they represent are the outliers, the ones that, unlike ordinary humans, are able to represent themselves in language, vocalizing their claim to personhood.

Vocal communication is commonly described by voice theorists as an “interior to interior” phenomenon. Produced in the utterer's mouth and larynx and perceived within the listener's ears, speech sounds offer intimate access to the “interior ‘real’ body” (Dolar 71) or even the person, “the most interior of interiors” (Ong 163). Fetal voices emanating from the maternal body compound and magnify the usual dynamics by which any voice “comes from the inside of a body and radiates through a space which is exterior to and extends beyond that body,” thereby rendering perceptible “the co-operation of bodies and the environments in which they have their being” (Connor 6): these voices’ trajectory from interior to exterior takes them through a first exterior that is actually the inside of another person's body. The acousmatic fetal voice “encourages imaginative supplementation” through its very underdetermination, a deliberately created underdetermination that these texts then supplement (Kane 9). And they supplement it by recasting the maternal body such that it no longer conceals the voice's source from the auditor's view. Through imagined fetal discourse, the “interior to interior” phenomenon of vocal communication can transform a mother's womb into different kinds of space, and can open it to new modes of observation.

“La Demeure de l'Enfant ou Ventre de Sa Mere”

In examining how medieval writers imagine fetal subjectivity, I am struck, first of all, by their approaches to the womb as a setting in which speech occurs: How to observe a fetus within an utterly inaccessible and “secret” place?Footnote ⁹ One evident possibility might be to open the female body and expose its secrets—and this strategy is indeed employed across multiple medieval media, from the Shrine Madonnas (unfolding statues) most recently studied by Elina Gertsman to writers’ and illuminators’ portrayals of Nero directing the dissection of his mother Agrippina (Raimondi 71–77). However, a number of writers instead attempt a less intrusive and more radically experimental approach, adopting language that configures the womb less as a female organ than as the object of the fetus's (putative) subjective experience. These poetic slippages into a quasi-fetal perspective enable what Jonathan Morton has recently (and stimulatingly) called “medieval thought experiments”: “a range of imaginative procedures that allow for a kind of thinking not limited to the strictly empirical, the strictly possible, or even the strictly logical” (5). The pregnant woman's womb becomes, in this sense, an experimental space: one that is constituted through both fetal perception and fetal voice. Experimental though it might be, the womb space is decidedly not an “indifferent prepersonal materiality,” as J. Allan Mitchell calls it (xiii) in an otherwise perceptive study of medieval gestation that somehow neglects to acknowledge that fetuses have mothers at all. Quite the contrary: in the medieval French texts I have encountered, the fetal environment is still, even when described or accessed metaphorically, conceived of as a part of a woman's body.

Because scientific accounts of the fetus's laugh describe it as inaudible, this sound is insufficient to let us “see” through the womb and into the developing person. Unlike the unheard laughter described by Avicenna and Giles of Rome, some fetal voices in literary narratives are audible to outside listeners. This means that the fetuses and their listeners—who may include human characters, supernatural entities, and the reading and listening public—must “inhabit” a shared “acoustic space,” to adopt Ong's terms (164). The fetus dwells in a space from which it can speak, and the listener, though not occupying that same womb, inhabits an adjacent space where the vox clamantis in utero (“voice crying in the womb”) is audible. I echo Ong's vocabulary of “inhabiting” deliberately, since medieval writers frequently imagine the gravid uterus as an inhabited, domestic space. In the words of the late-fourteenth-century physician Evrart de Conty, gestation is “la demeure de l'enfant ou ventre de sa mere” (“the child's dwelling in its mother's womb” [81]). The equivocal pun “demeure de l'enfant”—demeure means both “extended stay” and “dwelling place”—stages the maternal body as a setting for fetal action. Such domestic spatialization of the inside of the mother's body is even more overt in other texts, discussed below, wherein the womb is replete with its own architecture and even furnishings.Footnote ¹⁰ Fetal speech can render these domestic and anatomical interiors perceptible from the outside, and when the opaque maternal body becomes transparent, it opens itself to inspection.

When an ordinary woman becomes pregnant, her fetus, thought to be nourished by diverted menstrual blood, is typically described as dwelling in a dirty place. The common discourse on uterine filth is popularized through a number of sources, especially De miseria condicionis humane (On the Misery of the Human Condition), which was written in 1195 by Lotario dei Segni (the future pope Innocent III) and whose multiple French translations and adaptations attest to its continued influence through the end of the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹¹ Lotario's trope of the “detestable” gestational environment (100) is projected into a uterine home space in the second book of the Roman de Fauvel (1314), a satirical allegory by Gervais Du Bus and Chaillou de Pesstain whose title character is part-horse, part-man, and embodies hypocrisy. The goddess Fortune describes Fauvel's mother's womb as a dirty room in order to demonstrate that Fauvel's inferiority is not just innate but antenatal.

The passage is noteworthy for its emphasis on Fauvel's lived experience, as a fetus, within his mother's body. Dwelling in this soiled domestic space, Fauvel is a parasite in Michel Serres's sense of the term: a disruptor, both biological and sonic: “tantosts coummanças a braire” (“right away you began to bray”; 3839). The reader is reminded that fetal Fauvel's “outside is an inside” (Serres 195)—and, conversely, that the inside of the mother's body is exterior to someone else. The domestic interior is a private space, but one that can be opened to the outside. Indeed, Fauvel's onetime “chamber” is more accessible from the perspective of the outside observer (Fortune) than that of its former inhabitant, who, like Avicenna's sleeping fetuses, has forgotten all about his prenatal inner life: “tretout ce as omblié” (“you have forgotten all of this”; Du Bus and de Pesstain, line 3843). The expression of embryological discourse in the second person underlines the counterintuitive idea that while fetal experience and personhood can be expressed only from within, they can be known only from without.

This knowability from without places the mother in an ambiguous position: she is “with” child but is generally excluded from the fetal vocalic space that emanates outward from her body. And so, though the satirical misadventures of Fauvel might seem a far cry from sacred fictions recounting the life of Christ, the snapshot of Fauvel in utero and the accounts of the Visitation I will discuss below both lead to a similar set of observations about the way personhood unfolds within a vocalic space. A person is a composite of body and soul that signals its own existence by making its voice heard; when that person exists in utero, its voice presents a potential bug in another person's system (to adopt Serres's language).

Fetal speech and the meanings it produces emanate from a woman's body without being of that body. The mismatch between the fetal voice and the maternal body from which it emerges, a gap in which questions about personhood can flourish, manifests itself with particular clarity in marvelous tales of holy fetuses. For medieval thinkers, as Jacqueline Tasioulas has shown, the perceived realities of the human fetal experience prove particularly difficult to reconcile with the divinity of holy figures—such as John the Baptist and, especially, Christ—whose prenatal existence becomes a frequent object of artistic and literary representation. The difficulty is often overcome through representation of the human mother's womb as an architectural, rather than an anatomical, space. A number of vernacular narratives based on the Gospels present Saint Elizabeth's and the Holy Virgin's wombs as domestic interiors, but these, unlike that of Fauvel's mother, are sparklingly clean. The writers of these popular texts generate a remarkable vision of fetal subjectivity by altering, rendering transparent, the matrix in which the holy person develops. The contents of these wombs then become available for observation, perceptible to the reader both through sight and especially—when the holy fetuses speak, as they often do—through sound. In other words, these ventres thereby become the sort of “public space” that only “language creates” (Taylor 273). I will discuss two texts in which these mechanisms are especially remarkable: the thirteenth-century Histoire de Marie et de Jésus (Story of Mary and Jesus) and Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de Jhesucrist (1358; Pilgrimage of Jesus Christ).

The Visitation, the meeting of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth during both women's miraculous pregnancies (Luke 1:39–56), is probably the most widely known story of fetal expression in the medieval West: the unborn John the Baptist, hearing Mary's voice and sensing the presence of the unborn Christ, is filled with the Holy Spirit and dances for joy. Though the Feast of the Visitation was not established until 1389 (Polc)—and even later in France—long before that date the Visitation is a popular theme in the visual arts across medieval Europe (Velu). In standard accounts of the Visitation, John reacts to his unborn cousin's presence only through movement. The Golden Legend states explicitly, for instance, that the fetus jumps for joy because he cannot yet speak. But in a widely popular “novelization” of the life and lineage of Christ, the Histoire de Marie et de Jésus,Footnote ¹² John expresses his rejoicing through both movement and speech. John's reaction literalizes Augustine's reading of John as the voice that spreads the Word (logos), of which Christ is the embodiment (Dolar 15). This literalizing vocalization occurs within a womb space that is defined above all by the fetal activity it can accommodate.

His mother's womb, to which he rather casually refers as “ceeins” (“in here”), is defined by his presence within it (“le ventre ou il estoit”). The passage's focus on John's full capacities of sensory perception,Footnote ¹³ verbal expression, and, a bit comically, his desire for physical comfort (“aiesier”) promotes a view of the “ventre” primarily as the unborn saint's home environment. The reader sees it this way because the fetus himself states that this is how he experiences his surroundings.

This effect, by which the reporting of fetal speech offers an inside perspective on the fetus's surroundings, is even more pronounced in Deguileville's Pelerinage de Jhesucrist. This final book of the hugely popular “Pilgrimage” trilogy presents the life of Christ as the culmination of the trilogy's overarching narrative of human salvation. The portion recounting the Incarnation and the Visitation includes multiple prenatal vignettes, speeches, and dialogues, including a “[d]ialogue contemplatif de iesucrist et sainct iehan estans es ventres de leurs meres” (“contemplative dialogue of Jesus Christ and Saint John, standing in their mothers’ wombs” [51]).Footnote ¹⁴ Before the Incarnation, Christ is addressed by the angel Gabriel, who offers a series of architectural and domestic metaphors to describe the womb that Jesus is about to inhabit; He is then conceived, and the narrator has a vision of Him within His mother's transparent, glass-like body; the fetal Christ then addresses the assembled angels; during the Visitation He and His cousin undertake a lengthy dialogue from within their respective mothers’ wombs; and finally, Christ inspires His mother to sing to Him, giving rise to the Magnificat. The notion of Mary's “transparency,” made literal in the narrator's vision of the Incarnation, is key to all of these episodes. The holy mother's body is represented as a vessel, but the mother neither disappears nor loses her voice: she is now a transcorporeal self distributed over multiple, overlapping social spaces—operating as a speaking or singing subject in one, and as a “more-than-human” environmental object (Alaimo 2) in the other. Within such an environment fetal personhood can be voiced.

The image of the womb as a demeure is developed more thoroughly in the Pelerinage than in the other texts I have discussed. It is first presented as such in speech addressed to the not-yet-incarnated Christ: when the angel Gabriel speaks, in the second person, to the second person of the Trinity. Gabriel describes Mary's womb as, in turn, a house, a bed, a pilgrimage station—in short, as a dwelling place defined by the ways in which Christ will inhabit it. In this annunciation to Jesus Mary becomes a lieu (“place”), a lit (“bed”), part of the furniture of the Savior's life. And while she is Christ's “hostel” (1575), she is also His host.

Mary's womb will be an inhabited domestic space; and this space becomes visible to mortal humans, the narrator and by extension his reader, precisely at the moment when it is first inhabited by a being that is not only already capable of speech but is the embodied Word. At the moment of Incarnation, the narrator sees Christ glow: “par mi la Virge luisoit / Et comme cristal la moustroit / Tresparant” (“He shone within the Virgin / And showed her to be like crystal, / Transparent” [1439–41]). This phenomenon allows the narrator to witness the Incarnation, directly, through Mary's crystalline body:

This language picks up on the famous trope of the virgin conception as analogous to the penetration of glass by a ray of light—but directs our attention not to the glass itself but to the “form of a human body” on which it offers a window. It allows the narrator to examine Christ's fetal body without disrupting Mary's intact body, and thereby to confirm the doctrine of Christ's immediate hominization. The narrator demonstrates quite plainly that Christ is fully formed (and thus, already in possession of a rational soul) at the moment of conception. Though “petit,” he is already “com enfant”—with one notable exception, that he is already endowed with the power of speech and has the ability to address the angels. This he does, making it clear that he is speaking from within “ma mere où je fas sejour” (“my mother where I am staying for a while”; 1474).

The Incarnation, the act by which the embodied Word is implanted in the Virgin's womb, seems to establish divine presence among men as a form of ventriloquism, as it places the logos in the ventre. Indeed, Mary Hayes has argued that “Christ's Incarnation is itself, strictly speaking, a ventriloquial act, as he emanates as the Word from the body of the Virgin Mary” (90). The language of ventriloquism is helpful in recentering the Incarnation as an aural phenomenon, and the key role of the witness.Footnote ¹⁵ However, such vocabulary also obscures some of the particular ways in which Deguileville's text offers its reader a “view” of Mary's womb. The transparency of the crystalline Virgin body obviates the “disruption of seen space” that elsewhere stands as a hallmark of ventriloquism (Connor 15). With all visual obstructions out of the way, the author attends more to aural stimuli: in the Pelerinage, this manifests itself in a careful attention to who can hear which voices at which times. During the Visitation Christ hears John speaking out loud: “parler oui / L'enfant . . . / Qui tex paroles haut disoit” (“he heard / The child . . . / Who was speaking those words aloud”; 1487–89). Meanwhile Mary and Elizabeth carry on their own conversations—“autres pluseurs / Que les meres dirent entr'euz” (“many other [discourses] / That the mothers spoke among themselves”; 1569–70)—apparently oblivious to the concurrent conversation taking place between “ces .ii. enfants qui pas né / N'estoient” (“these two children who were not born”; 1568–69). The latter is a very different sort of “interior to interior” communication, one that bypasses the exterior entirely: the fetal words are audible at their points of enunciation and reception, within their respective mothers’ bodies, without creating any vocalic space in between. But later, Christ does make Himself heard to His mother, expressing His own desire to hear her voice and referring to Himself as her waiting “audience” (1594). The fully formed but unborn Christ has the ability to transmit His voice across different vocal channels: not only tailoring His speech to different audiences but using it to configure relationships within their own, distinct vocalic spaces.

The Negative Grammar of the Fetal Personne

My final example is drawn from the epic poem Tristan de Nanteuil, in which a key character is saved (and many less-important characters are lost) through the speech of a demonic fetus. Like the holy fetuses at the Visitation, Tristan de Nanteuil's unborn speaker addresses an external audience, reinforcing Maaike van der Lugt's observations about incubus lore as a “perverted analogy” to the Incarnation of Christ (Le ver 195–208). Indeed, the epic's multiple echoes of earlier theological debates and literary tropes point to the pervasiveness of these ideas across time, media, and audiences and evoke a dynamic construct of personhood tested and contested among different areas of authority. Tristan de Nanteuil's nonhuman fetal voice does more than tell a titillating story; it positions itself between life and death, doing and undoing, in a way that highlights some of the contradictions inherent to personhood in general and to fetal personhood in particular. Above all, this text foregrounds the acts of speaking and listening as key to the constitution of personhood as well as to its dissolution.

Tristan de Nanteuil is a confoundingly complicated fourteenth-century chanson de geste of more than 23,000 lines. The instance of fetal speech comes at the dramatic climax of a longer episode taking place during the youth of the future Saint Gilles (laisses 415–24). Marie, the niece of the bishop who is educating the orphaned Gilles, falls in love with the youth and tries in vain to seduce him. Frustrated, she sleeps with an incubus who impregnates her; when her uncle discovers the pregnancy, she maliciously accuses Gilles of rape. Gilles is condemned to death. As the future saint is about to be burned Marie renews her accusation, but the fetus cries out that it is in fact the devil's child. Marie throws herself on the fire and dies, and her diabolical offspring flies out of her body, causing a roof to collapse and kill forty-two onlookers. The bishop and Gilles become hermits. The holy man is thus saved from the slanderous accusations of a spurned admirer—an unmarried pregnant “anti-Virgin” (Georges 630)—through the truthful speech of a demonic fetus.

The vocal dynamics in this episode are especially complex. Like other representations of fetuses in utero, this story calls forth a set of nested images, a body within a body. Here the externally audible fetal voice is both ventriloquistic and acousmatic. Such apparently disembodied voices tend to bear “a communicated meaning of considerable import” that can be experienced by the listener as “a subjection to overmastering power” (Connor 24); “the hidden voice structurally produces ‘divine effects’” (Dolar 62). Such is evidently the case in Tristan de Nanteuil, and, yet, this episode also presents several reversals of the more typical ways in which acousmatic voices are produced and received. This acousmatic voice is one that, instead of having no apparent source, has altogether too many. By virtue of emanating from a fetus, the voice emanates from Marie's ventre as well, contradicting and ultimately occluding the maternal voice; and the divine origin of the fetal voice (endowed by God) mismatches the diabolical origin of the body (engendered by an incubus) from which it projects. All of this occurs within a text that self-consciously presents itself as an oral performance, such that the fetal voice emanates from within one adult body even as it is embodied, in performance, by another.

Brief narratorial interventions, especially those marking a transition from one interlaced subplot to another, are a hallmark of the chanson de geste—but Tristan de Nanteuil takes this tendency to the extreme, with an abundant metadiscourse suggestive of oral performance.Footnote ¹⁶ The demonic fetus, in particular, becomes a disruptive vocal presence even before its speech, as the narrator repeatedly interrupts his storytelling in order to hype the novel episode to come. The talking fetus is announced, for example, at the end of laisse 417:

It is announced again at the beginning of laisse 418:

This second time, the listeners are urged to silence so that their own voices might give way to that of the fetus. The preternatural voice preempts adult, human speech—and also, as the anticipatory buildup is inserted at earlier points in the story, it disrupts linear narrative time.

When the fetus does at last speak, it projects a strange vocalic space that it traverses from exterior to interior and back again:

The voice is localized within the maternal body (“en son corps”) even as it is assigned an external origin (“que Dieu y envoya”): the divinely ordained voice has penetrated Marie's body from without, only to traverse her body again on its way back to the external space where it will be heard “tout en haut” (“out loud”). The devil has lain with this body (literally “inhabited” it, “a lui abita”) in order to create the inhabited, vocalic womb space from which the fetal voice will call out. Neither the speaker nor the addressee is who he seems to be, however. The narrator had previously hyped this episode by promising a talking devil-fetus, but here he takes great pains to specify that what the onlookers actually hear is “la voix d'enffant que Dieu y ottroya” (“the child's voice that God provided”), a voice without a person; yet, when the direct reported speech begins, the fetus announces, “Filz suy de l'ennemi” (“I am the son of the devil”). The spectator is faced with an act of double or triple ventriloquism, as God speaks through the devil that speaks through Marie's body (as reported by the narrator). As for the addressee, the narrator tells us the voice spoke “a la dame,” but the voice itself calls out to “Sire evesque.” The shift is small but perhaps significant. The unworldly voice speaks not to the mother but across her—to the bishop, and also to the rest of the assembled crowd. This group of diegetic listeners includes the forty-two “persones” who will be killed in the building collapse, at the moment when “the introduction of a parasite in [the] system” produces its inevitable result, that “the system crumbles and everything dies” (Serres 185). These are, incidentally, the only characters in this section explicitly called “persons” at all—until this point the teenaged Gilles has consistently been called an “enffes,” the word meaning “child” that is also used to refer to the fetus—and the doomed listeners are only identified as “persons” at the moment of their undoing, at the separation of body from soul. These persones are killed at the very moment when Marie, the fleshly mask across which the fetal voice has resounded, silences the voice by destroying herself. Cutting off a voice has explicitly brought about a loss of personhood.

Also noteworthy is the density of negations in the fetus's speech, especially in lines 20124–27. On its face, this is hardly surprising, as the fetus's purpose is to refute its mother's public testimony. But the focus in this speech on that which did not happen and that which will not happen also highlights the peculiar position of this unborn speaker. All fetuses are, in a sense, suspended between the past moments of conception and ensoulment and the future moment of birth, in a present that is inaccessible to the rest of the world and bound for oblivion. Marie's fetus is suspended between a contrafactual past and an impossible future: a misrepresented conception, an unconventional ensoulment, and a birth that will never occur. And this is just one of many instances in Tristan de Nanteuil in which a constellation of negating structures is deployed to communicate the curious status of this unborn and not-fully-human entity: an entity whose voice makes it (to adopt Steven Connor's terms) “a less-than-presence which is also a more-than-presence” (25), or (in Serres's formulation) “being and nonbeing at the same time” (79). This same contradiction is bound up in language itself, for in medieval as in modern French, personne designates both a person and a negation of human presence, all the while echoing the sound of the mask (the Latin persona) that bridges the personne's presence and absence.

Tristan de Nanteuil, however, uses other negations to render the fetus's humanity even more precarious. The initial confrontation between Gilles and the bishop (laisse 420), for instance, includes some clever wordplay on the idiomatic negation rien nee, which means “nothing” or “no one” but derives literally from birth imagery (“nothing born”). The bishop tells Gilles his denials are worthless: “tout ce n'y vault rien nee” (“all of that is worth nothing” [20008]). Not only are Gilles's words without value—they are outweighed by the “rien nee,” the corporeal evidence of the not-yet-born entity known to be growing inside Marie. Gilles reiterates his denial, this time asserting himself more strongly, and in the bishop's own terms: “oncques n'en fis rien nee” (“I never did anything” or “I never made an unborn thing” [20019]). And as the denouement of this episode reveals, the “rien nee” never will be born.Footnote ¹⁷ Speaking from a perspective beyond human time, but having adopted the human form that is most associated with rapid and consistent development over time (that of a fetus), the incubus is a rien that plays with the limits of the personne through a consistent disruption of linearities: those of epic genealogies (Stahuljak 13), narrative strategies, and the continuous progress of fetal development.

It is with the notion of continuous change as the hallmark of fetal experience that I conclude this essay, for that notion is key to understanding why voice plays such an important role in the constitution of medieval personhood. Simply put, sound is—even before the advent of ultrasound technology—the sensory stimulus best suited to conveying a fetal perspective. Just as medieval embryology “create[s] vital distinctions over time and space,” as Mitchell has shown (14), sound creates an ever-changing social space contingent on time. Unlike the objects of the other senses, sound progresses through time. Angela Leighton points out in her recent study of sound in literature that “the sound we hear is already in medias res, a passenger through time, cut off from its cause and quickly lost as it fades” (5). In this regard it is not unlike the fetus as understood in medieval Europe: an indeterminate being suspended between a point of origin and a future emergence in a new form, a future in which its present subjectivity will have been forgotten. Nor is such a notion of sound inconsistent with medieval perspectives; Isidore of Seville opens his Etymologies, after all, with the famous declaration that writing is necessary to preserve speech sounds that otherwise would “slip away into oblivion” (bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 39). Writing freezes discourse in time; when medieval writers transcribe imagined fetal vocalizations, then, they pin down an entity that, from an embryological point of view, cannot be “identified as one identifiable thing” (Tasioulas 35). The conceptus has remained inaccessible and unidentifiable as a person until shaped into words. The new identifiability that the voice affords is key to the establishment of human social relationships—marking the development of the ensouled body into a full-fledged person.

Medieval fictions of fetal speech enact a form of personhood that is manifestly synthetic and collaborative, forged when a conjoined body and soul express themselves to another. One is a person when one can be heard voicing one's own reason: that is, when an audience has confirmed (and thus conferred) that identity. Reading fictions of fetal speech in the light of sound studies has revealed medieval personhood to be, to a degree not previously recognized, a sensory phenomenon: personhood is a matter of perception and of perceptibility, and is thus not a quality that can always be understood as originating at a fixed point in fetal development. It is my hope that the insights offered here may prompt broader inquiries into medieval sound worlds and the roles they played in shaping fundamental notions of identity and even humanity. But the sounds of these imagined fetal voices also resonate far beyond the medieval world, voicing a question we still grapple with today: Who can say when personhood has begun?