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

MUSIC, BODY, AND DESIRE IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE: HILDEGARD OF BINGEN TO CHAUCER. By Bruce W. Holsinger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xviii, 472 p.

The subject of Bruce Holsinger's Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture is the "corporeality of musical culture and musical experience in the European Middle Ages" (p. 2). "Corporeality" is the key word in this opening announcement: for Holsinger, medieval sonority is emphatically a practice of the flesh. Unlike Pythagoreans and Platonists, who strove to mute the clang of hammer on anvil so that they might hear the inaudible proportions that make sounds companionable, Christian ascetics, hagiographers, theologians, artists, and poets insisted on the musicality of the human frame; skin, tendons, throat, torso could be beaten, stretched, plucked, blown through, and strummed to produce resonances that were in accord with the pitch and timbre of the crucified Jesus, whose exposed ribs and extended sinews turned him into the harp of salvation in countless medieval allegories. Because music inheres in and is part of human physicality, it has played a central role in the constitution and representation of carnal and transcendent desire; because the sonorous body often generated its harmonies in pain, music can unveil the violence that often was occluded in the discourses, spiritual or otherwise, that appropriated it. Music is thus not only an art but also a mode of performance for Holsinger, through which the material cultures of the Middle Ages enacted their sustaining ideologies; anyone who seeks to recover its full range and consequence must discuss its place in poetic theory, theology and devotional practice, liturgical performance, pedagogical transmission, and the production and reception of the visual arts. Holsinger does all this and more: he has written a sweeping, ear and eye opening book that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and breaks much new ground.

If only for its scope, Holsinger's work is bound to be controversial. Although Hildegard of Bingen and Chaucer are the figures who stand at either end of the period Holsinger studies most intensively, his purview extends far beyond the two and a half centuries that separate them. In the first two chapters of his volume, he discusses the ways in which early Church fathers stressed "the resonances of the flesh" and "the rhythms of embodiment' to make classical musical theory consonant with their belief in an incarnate God. In his last chapter, he follows Orpheus's fate well into the Renaissance. Holsinger's reach is clearly encyclopedic; at the same time, he is very aware that had he addressed his book to one or another professional audience, musicologists, as well as philosophers, theologians, and literary scholars might claim he does not treat one or another subject with the detail it requires. The real audacity of Music, Body, and Desire, though, does not reside in its reach but in the challenges it poses to the idea that it is a history of medieval musical thought. For Holsinger, music is cultural critique; his thesis is that the materiality of vocal and instrumental expression during the Middle Ages necessarily disturbed and revised the assumptions that shaped perceptions of music then and our reconstructions of those perceptions today. If Hildegard recognized that the holy chants she composed opened an avenue for women to express their sexuality, the fact that they were sung by nuns suggests that we ought to read their performance, in Judith Bennett's phrase, as a "lesbian-like" experience. If Chaucer assures us his Prioress is all "conscience and tendre herte," the tale she tells reveals how her devotion relies on the musical torture of liturgical pedagogy. These are the terms under which Holsinger frames his arguments; they are the terms under which I think they should be judged.

Holsinger divides Music, Body, and Desire into four parts. In the first section he demonstrates that the musical legacy antiquity bequeathed to the earliest doctors of the Church was not limited to platonic harmonics of number and ratio. Stoic naturalism and Roman oratory acknowledged the fundamental importance of the performing body, and the Greek and Latin fathers imported precepts from both traditions when they incorporated musical materialism into their biblical hermeneutics. By distinguishing between the body and the flesh, Clement of Alexandria, for example, redeemed the dust and clay that houses the imperishable soul by calling attention not only to its concordant composition but also to the concinnity of the melodies it emits in martyrdom. In the West, Augustine would restore in different keys a similar collision between the anxieties and pleasures of song and flesh; while he continually located music's merit in its incorporeal proportions, he increasingly insisted on its palpability when he discussed its role in the creation, vivification, and resurrection of human bodies.

Holsinger elaborates many more ideas in these first two chapters than I can mention here, and a penetrating intelligence distinguishes all his analyses, even when on the rare occasion a reader may feel he overstates his case. In arguing for the significance Augustine accords the "pleasure of the ears," for instance, Holsinger concludes that in the Confessions, song, even as it fades away, "must always carry with it the flesh that gives it life" (p. 78). This seems to me to misconstrue the thrust of Augustine's discussion; he conceives of song as "formed sound" in order to see the inseparability of matter and form as an analogy or vestige of God's creation of the embodied soul. Whether song or soul, it is the form that inspirits the matter and gives it its life. Nevertheless, in these opening chapters Holsinger assembles a repository of concepts that serve him well as background against which he illuminates the relations between music, desire, and the body in the next section of his book, which he calls "Liturgies of Desire" The musical repertories he examines here are the writings of the twelfth-century abbess and visionary Hildegard of Bingen and the polemics that were occasioned by the introduction of polyphony, especially at Notre Dame around 1200.

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"

Accompanying this exaltation of the musical body in pain, however, were other, more disturbing sublimations of duress and the ordeals that produced it. The two manifestations Holsinger examines are the corporeal punishments of musical instruction and the desire to defile and outrage the body of the outsider (the heretic, the Jew, the unbeliever)-both of which appear in "The Prioress's Tale" Chaucerians were already aware of Holsinger's reading of this tale, which adapts insights from Louise Fradenburg's influential analysis of the tale's anti-Semitism to establish a logic that connects the savage ferocity of the Prioress's demands for vengeance to her attempt to efface all hints of cane or scourge in her narrative of the little clergeon's musical learning. While I agree with those who feel that, as fascinating as Holsinger's comments on the Guidonian hand are, this pedagogic device weighs a bit too heavily on the tale in his account of it, his interpretation has already altered, much for the better, the way we hear this particular "Miracle of the Virgin."

The final part of the book, "Resoundings," focuses on Ovid's Orpheus and his afterlife. The equivocal powers of his music, the homoerotic turn of his desires in the wake of Eurydice's second death, and his dismemberment by vengeful Maenads all become occasions for Holsinger to explore the role of embodiment in the medieval and contemporary recovery of the musical past. In a medley of brief analyses, Holsinger skillfully rehearses the themes he has sounded throughout by examining the Orphic elements in the poems of Baudri of Bourgeuil, Pierre Bersuire's Ovidius moralizatus, the Ovide moralise, Guillaume de Machaut's "Dit de la harpe," Dante's Purgatorio, John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, and Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness. The chapter is a bravura performance; each section has many intriguing insights, which made me wish that they had the depth of engagement of Holsinger's other discussions. By this point, however, he has already given his readers more than 350 tightly packed, well-written pages. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture is an exceptional achievement. It is required reading, not only for medievalists, many of whom will want to thank Holsinger for educating them to hear forms of culture too few had known how to listen to before, but also for everyone who feels music in the pulse of the veins and the beating of the heart.

WARREN GINSBERG

University of Oregon

Copyright Comparative Literature Winter 2003
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