Blog written by Emilie K. M. Murphy. Dr Murphy is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and was pleased to be elected to the committee of the EHS in the summer of 2023.
I work on the religious and cultural history of early modern England. My PhD looked at the role of music in the lives of post-Reformation English Catholics, for those remaining in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, and for those who left and joined the exiled English Colleges and Convents in Europe.
My post-doctoral work focused particularly on English nuns in enclosed convents in Catholic Europe, and it was then that I became preoccupied with the significance of linguistic encounter within these communities. Building on this interest in travel and mobility, and returning to my earlier work on sound and music, I am now attempting to write something I have dubbed Listening to Travel Writing, which focuses on the English Protestant cleric Samuel Purchas’s four volume edition of travel texts, Purchas His Pilgrimes.
This project was prompted by the pandemic, and I hope you’ll indulge me in this blog by letting me introduce it to you. In March 2020 I returned to work after parental leave just a fortnight before we were all plunged into the first national lockdown. Without access to the archives that I had hoped to visit in the coming months I logged onto EEBO and started reading travel narratives. In part of my PhD thesis (which became this publication) I had argued that the sounds made and heard by English Catholic exiles in Continental Europe demarcated their distinctive place within the landscape, but also marked their assimilation. I argued that this allowed English Catholics to articulate a sense of place in a foreign land, and feel both spiritually and physically located amongst their co-religionists at home and abroad. Sound played a vital role in fostering forms of religious and national identity, and my starting point with these (predominantly Protestant) narratives was to consider whether sound had a similar function for these mobile individuals as well.
The questions I had in mind included whether sounds in foreign lands were ever markers of stability or security, or if they were always alien to these English ears; what function did describing the sounds of foreignness and/or familiarity have for the readers of travel narratives; and could looking at any of this tell us anything more about religious identities and the negotiation of religious difference in, what was for western Europe, the post-Reformation world? In beginning to form answers to these questions I realised quickly that travellers kept detailed records of their acoustic encounters. It was clear that this was part of the range of rhetorical strategies travellers used to enhance their credibility, and that travellers fashioned themselves as ‘earwitnesses’, as well as eyewitnesses, to offer aural proof of their claims. In particular, it seemed to me that it was with a distinctive call to the ear that travellers’ disseminated knowledge of other cultures and faiths, and this was often intended to underline the religious truth of Christianity, which in the majority of my source material was English Protestantism (and therefore the travellers’ role as a pious member of that church, which in turn enhanced their credibility).
In preserving these acoustic encounters in His Pilgrimes, Samuel Purchas also intended to offer his readers all of the divine and didactic benefits of travel without any of the spiritual or physical risks (Purchas himself had never travelled more than 200 miles from his home in Essex), and he drew attention in prefatory material to the power of the written word for achieving this outcome by emphasising its power to stimulate both eyes and ears together:
And whereas speech pierceth the Eare (pierceth indeede and passeth often, in at the one, and out at the other) Writing also entertaineth the Eyes; and so long, by our owne or others reading, speakes to either of those nobler Senses, as wee will, and whereof wee will our selues; husht and silent at our pleasure; alway free from feare, flattery, and other humane passions.
For Purchas, as he had explained in his Microcosmus, the ears were the Learning Sense:
Man is a learned Man by his EARE; Man is a religious and holy Man from hence: For the EYE usually is an impediment… but Faith… comes by hearing; and Christ, which dwells in the heart by faith, enters at the EARE. Moses begins the Law with Heare Israel; God promulgates the Gospell with, This is my beloved Sonne, heare him… [Whereas the eye] seeth onely things present; the EARE, by Tradition of Fathers to their children, receives the wisedome of our Fore-fathers, and of those that are furthest remote both in time and place from us: and by Speech, and Writing (a visible Speech) the Learning of the World is continued, from the first Man to the last; and this short age of Man is by the Eare, in manner, made immortall.
Purchas was well-aware, then, of the power of his narratives. The written word, visible speech, stimulated both the ear and aural imagination as a means of perpetuating religious and natural knowledge. In Listening to Travel Writing I hope to explain, then, how the epistemic value of hearing was vital, in myriad ways, to early modern travel texts.
Ecclesiastical History Society 