Reviews: The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics

Abstract

In its title and approach, this book bears a family resemblance to Keith Polk's German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons, and Performance Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics, Gretchen Peters asks what we can know about urban musicians and the work they did, based solely on the traces they have left in the local archives of some twenty important communities. These select late medieval “French” cities are mostly large episcopal and/or independent princely capitals (Toulouse, Avignon, Dijon, Reims) but they also include smaller but highly significant mercantile towns like Saint-Omer. While many of them were not “French” in any geopolitical sense during the time-frame of this book—that is, they were not part of the shape-shifting kingdom centered in the Île-de-France between 1300 and 1500—grouping them together under this rubric allows Peters to trace certain commonalities among them, as well as to highlight significant regional differences. And by not including Paris, which has been the object of so much attention by scholars of late medieval musical culture, she provides a relief map that puts Paris in perspective.In one sense, this book is meticulously organized. Its six chapters fall into two equal parts: the first three survey archival evidence derived from the three major territories into which Peters divides her study (southern, central, and northern France); the second three are topical studies of the varieties of work performed by musicians, their professional relationships, and, as the title of Chapter 6 puts it, the “conflicting images of the medieval minstrel” that emerge from the records. Each of the first three chapters unfolds in a similar way. As in a travel guide, the reader is given a brief history of the region and then introduced to specific towns, or clusters of towns, within it. A description of each town (its political allegiances, sources of wealth) is then followed by a summary account of the civic institutions that sponsored music, the kinds of music that were subsidized, and data about individual musicians and their wages. There are obvious benefits to this schema, but the drawback is that these chapters are very repetitive and drily descriptive. By contrast, the latter three comparative chapters are much more analytically interesting and vital. They allow us to glimpse some of the real people whose livelihoods and artistry lie behind the marks on the clerks' pages, and they also do a better job of placing the archival evidence in context.But despite this careful internal structure, and even because of it, this book lacks overall coherence. There is, to begin with, no interrogation of the vocabularies and categories that shape the documentation of medieval musicians. This is especially problematic because Peters is dealing with sources in Latin and many different, site-specific vernaculars (Occitan, Francien, Picard) that almost certainly did not use the same words in the same ways. It is only in the last chapter (p. 219) that she attempts to define menestrel/menestrer and jongleur/joglar and the possible relationships between them. But by then, these and various other terms (joculator, trompeur, wette/ghet/gayte, even mimus) have peppered every page almost without comment or explanation. A related problem is that those keeping the accounts may not have been using the same terminology accurately or uniformly, to say nothing of the fact that those who earned a (partial) living as musicians (then and now, as Peters reminds us) also worked a variety of other jobs: some related, some not. As I (and others) have shown, terms used for actors and entertainers in similar sources are not consistent, and an individual who appears in one document as a trompeur will appear in another as a falconer; so if we scan the archival record looking only for words that denote self-evident musical activities, we will be missing out on a lot of potentially useful evidence that could assist in explaining those activities.1 A further, more minor problem is that Peters is reporting sums rendered in different monies of account, but she does not pay attention to which currency was being used at any given place, making it hard to compare wages and salaries from one town or region to another. Indeed, those wages are not placed into an economic context (comparable to those of other urban artisans) until the second half of the book, so all of the data cited in the first three chapters is hard to interpret.This book also declines multiple opportunities to address a broader audience. In keeping with its tight focus on certain sources, it situates itself only vis-à-vis studies of late medieval music in cities of northwestern Europe; there is no critical engagement with wider or deeper currents in urban history, social history, cultural history, theater history, or the history of the senses. Despite the promise of her title, Peters does not even gesture toward the important field of sound studies.2 And yet the “musical sounds” of the cities she discusses here were not dictated by town councils or confraternities alone. The urban soundscape was dominated and regulated by ecclesiastical structures, and most obviously by bell towers. It would also have been shaped by the patronage of secular elites. So we cannot get a full, rounded, and robust earful of urban music making unless we try to capture those sounds, too. In so doing, we would gain a better understanding of why urban musicians were more likely to be instrumentalists of a certain kind: players of “loud” (hault/haulx/haut) wind and reed instruments (like trumpets and shawms) rather than vocalists or players of delicate “soft” (bas) stringed instruments (like lutes and vielles). Peters stresses the high value placed on trumpeters (especially those trained in Tournai) because they were needed to sound alarms, mark the hours of the watch, and lead processions or otherwise provide the maximum “bang” for the municipal buck. Again, though, she defers substantive discussion of medieval instruments and their properties until the final chapters of the book, long after it is needed, and relegates most information to an appendix (pp. 246–58) to which she never calls the reader's attention. Meanwhile, the reader longs to know how those instruments competed for attention with other city sounds. What might be said about the different decibel levels they produced? How might they have resonated differently within certain urban spaces—how, indeed, could study of the built environment inform our understanding of its music? In one of the towns in Peters' sample, Arras, the cathedral canons could stifle the mission of the newly arrived Franciscans by limiting them to a single bell so small “that one man should be able to pull it with one hand,” and they also limited the height of the tower to decrease this bell's sonic capacity.3 How might analogous concerns have affected the work of a town's musicians?In many ways, this study complements another published in 2012. Emma Dillon's The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press) situates the sophisticated music of a pivotal era within a larger historical soundscape, and also considers how musical innovations participated in concurrent cultural, intellectual, and devotional trends. The book under review here is not intended to sustain this sort of argument. Its goals are modest, and as a compendium of archival cullings it is very welcome. But I wish its methodology had not been trammeled by the sources' limitations. Peters keeps her gaze too fixed on the records, and the result is a rather narrow kind of positivist history uninformed by post-structural concerns about the composition of archives, or even by rather basic questions about how a town's records were kept (what was included, what was not). And because Peters focuses only on civic archives, we do not learn how jobbing musicians might or might not have been involved in the music of churches or princely households, among other venues. For the most part, that is all right. We already know a great deal more about sacred and courtly music making than we do about music in towns, and Peters has done hard and valuable work of textual excavation. But there is no denying that this book would have been more satisfying to the reader—and probably more fun to write—if her findings has been more imaginatively analyzed and thoroughly contextualized.