Listening to Early Modern Travel Writing - Emilie K.M. Murphy (University of York)

This talk introduces the short monograph I am working on: Listening to Travel Writing: Sound, Bodies and Samuel Purchas' His Pilgrimes. Its central argument is that the epistemic value of hearing (both real and imagined) was vital to early modern travel literature. It builds on the recent work of musicologists and literary scholars, such as Olivia Bloechl and Jennifer Linhart Wood, who have considered acoustemologies 'in contact' and approached past embodied experiences and contact zones through their auditory effects. Listening to Travel Writing argues that travel writers and their editors intentionally stimulated the entirety of the aural imaginations of their readers, and focuses particularly on the four volumes of travel writing edited by Purchas in His Pilgrimes who, as I will explain, was well-aware of the acoustic power of his narratives. After tracing the broad parameters of the project, I will focus particularly on the role of 'earwitnessing' - the 'sifting and distilling of information that comes to the ear' (Botelho, 2009) - in the authentication of experience. Despite travel writing having been described as the 'domain of the eyewitness' (Netzloff, 2020), I will demonstrate how the authorisation of knowledge in the rhetorical construction of truth was sonic and embodied as much as it was visual. Travellers were highly preoccupied with what they heard; they regularly drew attention to their credible earwitness testimony in order to fashion themselves as reliable and often, I will argue, they do so to underline the religious truth of Christianity in the presence of radical difference.

 

Emilie K. M. Murphy is Lecturer in Early Modern History, and Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Her research interests lie in the cultural and religious history of England, and the anglophone world. Her scholarship to date has focused on the experiences of post-Reformation English Catholics, and she has written widely on ballad culture, music, memory and martyrdom. Emilie’s more recent work has focused on Catholic women and mobility, and she has previous and forthcoming publications on exile, multilingualism and linguistic encounter. She is currently writing a short monograph, Listening to Travel Writing, for Cambridge University Press which is a product of her longstanding interests in acoustic culture together with her work on mobility and encounter. She is co-director of the international research network (previously funded by the AHRC) ‘Soundscapes in the Early Modern World’.