Berceo’s Sound Garden: Aurality in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora

ABSTRACT: In dialogue with sensorial studies, and with sound studies in particular, in this article I build on scholarship that has highlighted the musical elements and the calls for the audience in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora . Remarking on questions of voice and speech, on words as sound, and on different acoustic elements, I explore acoustic references, allusions, and structures to ascertain how sound in general works both in the introduction and in the miracles. I propose that the introduction’s soundscape works as an interpretive key that echoes across the collection, demanding that the audience perform different aural operations to engage with the text, among them aural supplementation and, especially, identifying with the listening characters, activating what I call deictic listening, a rhetorical role for sound that Berceo uses to structure his text.