Experiencing Alba Tressina’s Anima mea liquefacta est through Bodily Humors and the Sacred Erotic

Abstract

Alba Tressina sits, lute in her lap, in the choir room behind her convent's sanctuary, a sheet of music written in her own hand laid out in front of her on a small table. It is a hot weekday in early August, and the windows are flung open to the wide, tree-filled park that wraps around the back of the convent and abuts the river. If she were to look out the windows and beyond the walls of her convent, she would see several upper-class families taking advantage of the last summer warmth, picnicking leisurely on the grass by the river, within earshot of the nuns' rehearsal. Tressina, however, is deep in conversation with the three sisters with whom she is rehearsing. Two stand near one another, sheets of music in their hands, while the third sits at a small, portable organ nearby. A young servant girl stands quietly next to the organ, ready to begin pumping its small bellows. Tressina is explaining to her ensemble that they will perform this piece, her latest, for the rest of the sisters and possibly their father confessor on the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She confides that she chose the text she did--Anima mea liquefacta est--because she wanted to demonstrate in music her close relationship with the Holy Mother, out of whose very body sprung the Lord Jesus Christ. Tressina asks the nuns to meditate on the Virgin Mary's holy body. During her pregnancy, her bodily humors--blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile--had become Jesus's humors, and after Christ's birth, her milk had fed and nourished the infant. In a similar manner, the Virgin Mary might spiritually nourish the nuns devoted to her. Finally, her Assumption--her bodily removal from the Earth to Heaven--demonstrated the sanctity of her body, as well as the physical merging of her body and soul with God. Tressina explains to her sisters that by meditating on these holy attributes of the Blessed Virgin, and by aspiring towards the perfection of the Holy Mother through prayer, music, and mystical practices, a nun might attain a higher level of closeness with God, perhaps even reaching ecstasy or a physical union with the Divine. Tressina asks the singers to pour their love for the Virgin Mary into their singing and to remember that although they would beperformingfor their own sisters they would also be performingfor the Holy Mother and for God himself. Thus, they must sing and play with a pure heart and absolute humility and love. In this article, I situate Tressina's Anima mea liquefacta est (1622) at the nexus of Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual and religious frameworks. I demonstrate the ways in which it connects with the sacred erotic, a major component of European religious thought in the seventeenth century, and Galenic humorism, which by the end of the Renaissance had regained popularity. (1) Through close reading of Tressina's composition, I explore the artistic and cultural celebration of the sacred erotic and its offshoot, liquid eros, as well as the link between humorism and musical performance. Finally, I analyze Anima mea with respect to humorism, mapping Galen's four humors and their cultural connotations line by line onto the piece itself in order to more fully appreciate the associations between sacred eroticism, the psychology and emotion of performance, and the physical bodies of the nuns who performed this music. Tressina's compositions employ many conventions of sacred polyphonic music popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. (2)Such pre-existing conventions function as a shorthand version of collectively agreed-upon cultural meanings, performing cultural work that is easily recognizable to a wide variety of listeners living in a common time, society, and geographic area. (3)By linking Anima mea to prevailing ideas about the body and its connection with the Divine, I demonstrate the extent to which Tressina interacted with and contributed to her artistic and political communities--not cut off from society, as many in the church hierarchy expected from a cloistered nun, but very much a part of it. …