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Taciturnity, the inclination to keep silent, comes to matter for Will in the final episode of the third dream when his ‘out of mesure’ rebuke of Reason, whom Will deems responsible for reckless human conduct, results in losing his revelatory inner dream. Late medieval discourse on taciturnity in moral texts, rooted in a Roman ethic of cautionary self-interest, is employed, especially in C-text revisions and additions, to develop the destructive consequences of Will’s reckless speech. Then Imaginatif uses this discourse, as he interprets Will’s experience of loss, to open up the promise of longed-for knowledge to Will, who practices taciturnity during Imaginatif’s extended speech.
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