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

Comparative Literature, Winter 2003 by Ginsberg, Warren

Hildegard flourished in the era of Cistercian reform, when Christianity "humanized its deity in new ways while sponsoring horrific violence against those who refused to accept a particular version of [his] teachings" (p. 88). For Holsinger, Hildegard's musical and poetic images construct a female body that is at once complementary, in that its sufferings and desires are in tune with those of her times, and revolutionary, not only because that body is invested with its own erotic agency but also because in performance it is bound by symphonia to other female bodies. Holsinger draws on discussions of women's sexuality in the medical treatises and letters Hildegard wrote to buttress his reading, which seems to me irrefutable, of the homoerotics of her Marian adoration; it is impossible to separate the spirituality of the devotional sequences and melodies from the same-sex culture for which they were created. Yet I do wonder whether Holsinger is right about the manner in which he claims Hildegard represents the "incarnational" nature of her desires and ecstasies. If the virga (stem) of "O viridissima virga ave" in fact "interpolates an explicit description of male arousal into the ... fabric of the poem:' does Hildegard then replace (p. 118) this evocation of masculinity with the female body and female fertility when she portrays Mary, "suavis virgo," as the source from whom all things in the world appear "in viriditate plena?" Rather than replacement, the play of divergence amid similarity suggests something much closer to Augustine's notion of coaptation ("viridissima" and "in viriditate plena exactly translate one another even though their registers differ -Holsinger renders the latter phrase, quite justifiably, as "in pregnant greenness") .Just as Hildegard believed the incarnate Jesus was God and man, so she believed Mary was mother and maiden; instead of displacing the masculine, the homoeroticism of her sexuality stands alongside it. As a consequence, her works seem impossible to interpret without invoking categories of sexuality even as they call their explanatory power into question.

Nicely balancing this chapter is Holsinger's investigation of twelfth-century polemics that condemned the coupling of male voices in polyphony by seeing it as a musical form of sodomy. The discussion is propelled by detailed readings of the unpublished Latin verse-epistles of Leoninus, who has been identified as one of the primary movers of Notre Dame polyphony. By setting his poetic work, which explores intimate relations between men, within the context of contemporaneous interest in Ovid, Holsinger is able to illuminate the more "general cultural anxiety over the performing male body as a site of musical and sexual deviance" (p. 140). The chapter ends with a coda on Chaucer's Pardoner that convincingly correlates his musical to his rhetorical perversity.

In the third section of his book, Holsinger focuses on "the role of bodily pain and violence in medieval musical cultures" These "Sounds of Suffering" emanate from ascetic practice, from meditations on the passion, and most especially from the disciplinary practice of liturgical pedagogy. Holsinger begins by modifying Elaine Scarry's thesis that pain resists representation; he points out that while none of the terms in our lexicon of anguish can express its immediacy, our cries are audible and pain often throbs, beats in rhythm. For anyone who would glorify the body's mortification as a way to share Jesus's agonies on the cross, music could serve as an alternative to language; indeed, music has the capacity to provide access to devotional experience beyond the reach of textuality. Medieval exegetes certainly capitalized on this dimension of musicality; they constantly associated the invention of instruments by Jubal and Tubalcain with the crucifixion. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries their accounts of the sonorities of affliction grew increasingly graphic and violent, and visual representations of the passion, which, like music, were meant to elicit the emotive participation of the viewer, increasingly emphasized the euphony of Jesus's torments. Holsinger grounds these arguments in wonderfully suggestive readings of the life of Marie of Oigenes,John Pecham's "Philomena praevia," and the liturgical lives of the nuns of St. Mary's at Helfta in Thuringia; he includes as well an excursus on the musical tortures of hell in Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights"