Speechless Infants’ Voices in Early Modern England
This paper considers the bodily and emotional character of early modern infants’ preverbal voices. Due to their physiological speechlessness, and an underlying privileging of reason over emotion, historians have traditionally assumed infants to be silent historical figures, in both the sense that we cannot know their perspectives and, even more implicitly, that they had no real ability to affect history. In seventeenth-century England, it was understood that the infant was bequeathed its rational soul in the womb, but at birth its body was so drowned with wet humours that it was too weak and
incapacitated for articulate, rational speech until at least around the age of two. Yet it is clear in early modern religious, medical, and popular literature, as well as parents’ life writings and physicians’ casenotes, that infants were understood to be capable of experiencing and expressing a range of emotions well before the development of speech. These were conveyed by the infant’s voice, which included non-verbal sounds as well as physical gestures and signs, to which physicians, parents, and carers attuned their senses. It will show that individual voices could convey vital and particular information about the state of an infant’s body-soul. This paper will argue that infants’ voices communicated meaning and agency to others, and that sensing these voices was itself an affective experience.
Olivia Formby is a Research Fellow in Early Modern History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is interested in the intersections of religion, medicine, and the emotions in the history of childhood.
- this seminars is free to attend but registration is required.
This page was last updated on 25 April 2025
