Material Aurality: Sound Milieu(s) in the Guthlac Roll

Scholarship on representations of sonic events in the medieval world has often focused on literary productions, analysing the ways in which texts describe sounds and their effects with words. What has not been thoroughly examined is the relationship between such literary representations and their manifestations in material culture, most prominently in the form of manuscript images. Employing a combined approach drawing from neurobiological predictive processing and Liam Lewis’s framework of the ‘sound milieu’, this article examines representations of sonic events in British Library, Harley MS Y.6, which pictorially depicts the life of St Guthlac in 18 roundels, in conversation with textual depictions in various vitae of the saint. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that early medieval images were encountered multimodally, with sound milieus created from the sonic information in illustrations allowing an immersive interaction with subjects like St Guthlac.