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3 - Speech, silence and the recovery of rebel voices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
Summary
In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.
(H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: selected writings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2003), IV, 390.)It is high time for a social history of language, a social history of speech, a social history of communication.
(P. Burke, ‘Introduction’, in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds.), The social history of language (Cambridge, 1987), 1.)SPEAKING FOR THE COMMONS IN TUDOR ENGLAND
The voice of Robert Kett seems both angrily eloquent and irretrievably silent within the documentary traces left by the Norfolk insurrection. In the main narratives of the rebellion, Kett speaks almost constantly; yet rarely for, or on behalf of, himself. Instead, his speech provides a conduit for other voices in two important respects: at the same time as he articulated the rebel politics of 1549, he was ventriloquised by the hostile authors of the narratives. Throughout their accounts of the rising, Holinshed, Sotherton, Neville and Woods placed long, impassioned speeches into Robert's mouth. Confronted, for example, by the Wymondham rebels at the beginning of the insurrection, Neville and Woods have Kett say
That hee was ready … to subdue the power of Great men, and that he hoped to bring to passe, that … those of their pride should repent ere long … And promise[d] moreover, to revenge the hurts don unto the Weale publike, and common Pasture by the importunate Lords …
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- The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England , pp. 91 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007