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

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER great sea, and getting through it requires certain skills, as Hollander rightly teaches us. But rather than going straight to life-saving, we should first learn to take pleasure in swimming. Winthrop Wetherbee Cornell University Bruce W. Holsinger. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 472. 21 illustrations , 3 figures. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. This is a joyful, often dazzling study of the musical body in medieval culture. Holsinger’s subject covers the sensuous embodiment of medieval musical performance but also medieval visions of singing bodies and a range of metaphors based on the musical body, above all that of Christ’s crucified body as the taut strings of a harp or lyre. The book takes us from Clement of Alexandria’s vision of the New Song resonating through the bodies of the faithful, Peter Damian’s claim that chanting ten psalms is the equivalent of receiving a thousand blows with the whip, and Augustine’s gradual softening of his early Manichaean hostility to music’s carnality, through the erotic pleasures of Hildegard of Bingen’s chant and Notre Dame polyphony, to literary images of music, including the polyphonic singing of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Summoner, the debased chorus of the snoring and farting Symkyn and his family in the Reeve’s Tale, and the rational discipline of teaching plainsong that the Prioress’s ‘‘litel clergeon’’ avoids. Music, Body, and Desire filled me with gratitude—for its rich and surprising bibliography, its unusual insights , its attention to Latin wordplay, the lucidity with which it explains medieval notation and other musicological technicalities, and its sheer gall—as when Holsinger characterizes Augustine’s claim in the Confessions that God had freed him from his sensuous enjoyment of music as ‘‘the self-assured defensiveness of an addict’’ (p. 74). In his introduction, Holsinger tackles the philosophical question of whether music exists prior to performance. Rejecting the Platonic and Pythagorean understanding of music as transcendental harmony that can only be stained or tainted by its embodiment, Holsinger argues for 380 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:05 PS REVIEWS the materialist claim that music only exists when embodied. Embodied music, however, is inherently sensual and disruptive. Music, Body, and Desire is thus an explicit challenge to the vision of ordered hierarchy D. W. Robertson propounded in his famous Preface to Chaucer, although in its subtle allegories it is also an indirect tribute. (The suggestion that the turn to theory of the last twenty years constitutes ‘‘a final break from Robertsonianism’’ (p. 28) is one of the few moments of naı̈vete in this very sophisticated book.) So, in his exegesis of the Prioress’s Tale, Holsinger interprets the grain the abbot removes from the boy’s tongue not as a soul winowed from the body but as the ‘‘soul miraculously enduring within the body’’ (p. 289, emphasis in original). This reading might also be called incarnational. One of Holsinger’s central claims is that medieval theologians and musicians did not monolithically reject embodiment but sometimes explored and even embraced it. He makes a strong case. A good many will respond with skepticism to Holsinger’s initial claim that in the middle ages ‘‘the intermingling of same-sex voices in plainchant and polyphony allows composers and performers to explore through sonority unsanctioned forms of desire’’ (p. 1). As Allen Frantzen has argued in Before The Closet: Same-Sex Love From Beowulf to Angels in America, (1998), in a passage cited by Holsinger, the drive in some recent criticism ‘‘to show that everything is about sex, same-sex in particular , especially when it claims to be about something else’’ has sometimes led to readings that demonstrate ‘‘the ingenuity of the critics and the malleability of medieval texts,’’ but little more. Holsinger himself has on occasion allowed his desire for medieval texts to express coded sexual transgression to run away with him and he uses Music, Body, and Desire as an occasion to modify some of his earlier claims about Hildegard. This time round Holsinger is not just preaching to the choir...