Out loud: Combining Rhetorical and Medical Representations of the Voice in the Renaissance
In the Renaissance, the oral transmission of texts was not only justified by a tradition that would persist in parallel with the rise of printing: it actually found a point of support in the rediscovery of the medical treatises of the Ancients interested in reading out loud. Able to better allow for the circulation or release of moods, vociferation or reading aloud are among the therapeutic programs at work in Antiquity. Rabelais, a doctor himself, Latin translator and publisher of Hippocrates and Galian, was no doubt aware of this link between voice and health, as Gargantua’s way of life seems to show: the humanist combines in his stories a representation of the voice borrowed from the rhetoric of the actio, an anatomical representation of the path of the voice to the ear, and a therapeutic vision of the vocal exercises. These different representations all contribute to the humanist development of the giant. Clément Marot goes even further by giving an echo of these medical treatises in the “Royal Chant of the Conception of Our Lady,” thereby renewing the image of the divine “Word” and that of the Virgin Mary.