Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture : Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer / Bruce W. Holsinger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holsinger, Bruce W., Author.

Series:

Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (496 p.) : 21 illustrations, 3 figures

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer’s representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress’s Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a sonorous landscape of flesh and bone, pleasure and pain, a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization that will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Preface and Acknowledgments

Contents

Illustrations and Musical Examples

Abbreviations

A Note to the Reader

Introduction

Part 1 Backgrounds: Musical Embodiments in Christian Late Antiquity

Chapter 1 The Resonance of the Flesh

Chapter 2 Saint Augustine and the Rhythms of Embodiment

Part 2 Liturgies of Desire

Chapter 3 Sine Tactu Viri : The Musical Somatics of Hildegard of Bingen

Chapter 4 Polyphones and Sodomites: Music and Sexual Dissidence from Leoninus to Chaucer’s Pardoner

Part 3 Sounds of Suffering

Chapter 5 The Musical Body in Pain: Passion, Percussion, and Melody in Thirteenth-Century Religious Practice

Chapter 6 Musical Violence and the Pedagogical Body: The Prioress’s Tale and the Ideologies of ‘‘Song’’

Part 4 Resoundings

Chapter 7 Orpheus in Parts: Music, Fragmentation, Remembrance

Epilogue: Toward a Musicology of Empathy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1714-9