Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer

Notes, Sept, 2002 by Leah Morrison

Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. By Bruce W. Holsinger. (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. [xviii, 469 p. ISBN 0-8047-3201-9. $65. (hdbk.); ISBN 0-8047-4058-5. $25.95. (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

What do Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine), Mechtild of Hackeborn, Leonin, Hieronymous Bosch, and Augusta Savage all have in common? According to Bruce Holsinger's Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer they each viewed musical sonority as a practice of the physical body. Winner of the American Musicological Society's 2001 Philip Brett Award, this book is one of extraordinary scope; it analyzes the corpo-reality of musical culture across a dozen centuries. Though its primary focus is the assessment of the inseparability of musical performance and the body in premodern Europe, it includes an epilogue which highlights the modernist creations of two African American women of the 1930s, Augusta Savage and Zora Neale Hurston.

The book is divided into four large sections: "Backgrounds: Musical Embodiments in Late Christian Antiquity," "Liturgies of Desire," "Sounds of Suffering," anti "Resoundings." Each section is further subdivided into two chapters which present a particular theme, such as embodiment, somatics, or violence. These chapters in turn are subdivided further, highlighting specific musical works, artworks, personages, or practices. Beginning with Clement of Alexandria and subsequently traveling through the worlds of Hildegard, Leonin, Dante, Chaucer, and the fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate, the author presents various types of physical representations of and physical responses to music. In chapter I, "Resonance of the Flesh," we encounter Clement's retelling of the legend of the Pythian grasshopper whose body replaces the broken string of the bard Eunomos's lyre, the biblical comparisons of the human body as the instruments of God, and the legend of Apollo and Marsyas wherein the latter is skinned alive as punishm ent for losing a musical duel. Holsinger presents images of the torture which convey the body of the flayed Marsyas as a corporeal mirroring of Apollo's instrument. Part 2 deals with the "homosocial" (p. 88) musical cultures of Hildegard and Leonin. The author draws upon Craig Wright's 1986 study of Leonin ("Leoninus, Poet and Musician," Journal of the American Musicological Society 39 [1986]:1-35), arguing further that "the histories of music and sexuality are in many ways inseparable" (p. 88). Chapters 5 and 6 focus on pain and violence. Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" is the work discussed in chapter 6; the little scholar who sang the Virgin's praise after having his throat cut is presented as an example of musical and pedagogical violence. "Resoundings" discusses premodern interpretations of the Orpheus legend and also includes the epilogue.

Considering the enormity of the scope and subject matter of the entire book, there is remarkable continuity within each of the larger sections, although the transitions between the subjects of the chapter subdivisions are often quite sudden. For the most part, the author lays out his goals clearly at the start of each section, then amasses evidence in the form of texts and images to support his ideas. One might wish for more consistency in the manner in which he handles translations of primary texts: sometimes he uses his own, but at other times published translations by others; sometimes he alters those translations, but sometimes does not; the translations are sometimes cited in the text, but at other times in the notes (and sometimes, as in the case of the excerpts from Chaucer, they are not provided at all). Though Holsinger explains his idiosyncratic protocol in an opening note, medievalists who are used to stricter handling of critical apparatus may wonder at both the variety of presentation and the un documented extent of his "silent alteration" of published translations, especially when it seems that he is certainly capable of doing his own.

Notes and bibliography for the work are extensive, comprising more than 20 percent of the monograph. The reference matter reads like a "Who's Who" of medieval and postmodern studies; in addition to a lengthy list of printed editions of primary sources, secondary studies by leading scholars in virtually every discipline in the humanities--especially the important work of Carolyn Walker Bynum--are cited at some point in text, notes, and bibliography. Many of these scholars are listed in the index; thus, finding the discussion of Anna Maria Busse Berger's article "Mnemotechnics and Notre Dame Polyphony" (Journal of Musicology 14 [1996]:263-98), for example, involves simply looking up her name in the index. The bibliography alone provides a substantial overview of the interdisciplinary literature in medieval studies having an important impact on the study and performance of premodern music.