Child resuscitation miracles and the living past

Abstract This article attends to miraculously resuscitated children’s voices as interventions in time, showing that the very notion of ‘recovery’ creates and depends on a disjunction between developmental time and lived time. The article begins with an introduction to child resuscitation miracles and the role that voice plays in them, before taking a deeper look at Gautier de Coinci’s tale of the little boy who sang Gaude Maria . Inspired by recent concepts in Sound Studies and placing them in conversation with the Disability Studies notions of ‘crip time’ and ‘curative time,’ it posits that the voice of the resuscitated child, during and after the interval between life and death, becomes productively asynchronized from the body from which it emanates. Modern readers can tap into this same productive asynchrony, it argues, to hear the Middle Ages with fresh ears.