Tag: 13thC

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academic life medieval composers publications

A jointly authored monograph

Book cover for 'Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours' featuring an illustration of a woman and a bird.

For years, Jonathan Morton and I have been thinking and talking about Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours (Bestiary of Love). During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 we met for 90 minutes, four times a week over Zoom, with the same document open in OneDrive, to discuss this puzzling work and write down some thoughts. A much-honed version of these thoughts have now been published as a book: Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours.

Writing an entire monograph with another scholar is a fairly unusual thing to do in the humanities, and our process felt pretty modern. It could not have happened without the ability for us both to be working on the same document in real time while also being in dialogue over a video call.

For me, as well as being a really fun and companionable way of keeping in touch during the strange social circumstances of a global pandemic, it was an interesting insight into our different ways of working, thinking, and writing.

The nicest thing about the finished book is that we were able to include so many colour images. The book is available by clicking on the cover image above, but if you want to listen to an AI generated podcast giving a sense of its contents, I’ve uploaded one prepared by NotebookLM. You’ll have to forgive its inability to pronounce the French word ‘je’ (which comes out as jay).

We explore Richard de Fournival’s thirteenth-century text, the Bestiaire d’amours, which presents itself as a bestiary but functions as a cynical and parodic seduction attempt using animal lore. The book analyses the hybrid nature of Richard’s work, discussing how it stages a trial of textuality and blurs the lines between written and oral performance, often employing scholastic methods and lyric subtexts to undermine its own claims to authority. Key themes examined include the je-persona’s unreliable voice, the text’s confused epistemology (especially regarding vision, hearing, and the unreliable nature of resemblance), and the work’s commentary on place, bodies, and desire. We also discuss the work’s generation of responses of various kinds, highlighting its importance for the literary investigation of sexuality and textuality in the later Middle Ages.

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academic life AI resoures Douce 308 project medieval composers music analysis pastourelle publications

New article on an odd song (free PDF download and an AI-generated podcast summary)

My new article on J’ai trouvé, an anonymous and oddly structured song by someone who was probably called Martin, has just appeared in the journal Plainsong and Medieval Music.

Here I re-examine a thirteenth-century texted dance song, ‘Marty’s tune’, which is uncommon for its survival in two sources, one with musical notation. I explore previous academic attempts to define the song’s form and genre, highlighting how these studies often prioritized a perceived ‘correct’ structure over the evidence in the surviving manuscripts. By comparing the textual differences between the two copies alongside the musical notation, the article proposes new understandings of the song’s compositional, scribal, and performance history. It suggests that the less formal aspects of the version without notation might indicate a closer connection to semi-improvised dance performances and argues that the term “note” may have been a broad description for a tune, rather than a strict genre or form label. Ultimately, I advocate for a re-evaluation of medieval pastourelles to include songs like “Marty’s tune,” which feature explicit carnal desire and physical interaction.

The PDF can be freely downloaded from the CUP site (link above).

For those of you that want an accessible audio summary, here’s a podcast produced by feeding the text to NotebookLM (from which the above text summary is also adapted). Enjoy!

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academic life Douce 308 project public talks

Hear me talk about Medieval Sex Lives

I was interviewed by Danièle Cybulskie for an episode of The Medieval Podcast, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The audio for this episode is here.

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Douce 308 project gender medieval composers pastourelle

Book launch pastourelle performance

On 6 Mar 2024 I had a party to celebrate the launch of Medieval Sex Lives, the first book launch party I’ve ever had, although it will not be the last! Nigel Bryant gave a lovely appreciation of my book and Joseph W. Mason and Matthew P. Thomson sang the third pastourelle from the subsection of pastourelles in Douce 308 to the tune of a song by Gautier de Coinci with which it shares its versification. I had provided an English singing translation and captured the performance on my phone. In the spirit of there being two women who perform both male and female parts in the robardel in The Tournament at Chauvency — a possibility that gave me much food for thought when writing the book — Matthew and Joe take the parts of the knight and shepherdess, respectively. I post the video below, with permission from the two singers and apologies for the sound recording quality and poor visual-angle, which are both my own fault. Nice to have this though and my thanks to them both.

And, to repost this link, for those of you keen to get a sense of Medieval Sex Lives without having to read it, I talk about its basic rationale and contents in a podcast episode on the New Books Network.

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Douce 308 project gender medieval composers medieval French literature publications

Hear an interview about Medieval Sex Lives

Earlier this year I was interviewed for the New Books Network by Dave O’Brien about my new book, Medieval Sex Lives. You can hear the result here.

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academic life Douce 308 project medieval French literature publications queer studies

Discount on my new book–now with added code for UK and EU residents

The publishers, Cornell University Press, have sent me some marketing materials for my new book, including a code for 30% discount on orders (scroll down to the end of the post). This post just gives a summary, the cover image, and a few sections from the author questionnaire they sent, which should give a flavour of what’s in the book.

Summary

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 preserves and re-copies the lyrics of over 500 songs, ranging from those written in the late twelfth century, to those composed only a few years before the manuscript was copied in the early fourteenth. Its lack of both musical notation and authorial attribution make it relatively unusual among Old French songbooks. Its arrangement by genre instead invites an investigation of the relationship between a long tradition of sung courtly lyric and the real lives of the people who enjoyed it, in particular their emotional, intimate, sexual lives, something for which little direct evidence exists.

Using the other main inclusion in the original plan for Douce 308, Jacques Bretel’s poetic account of a tournament, The Tournament at Chauvency, Medieval Sex Lives argues that song offered musical practices which provided fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts.

With a focus on parts of Douce 308 not yet treated in detail elsewhere, Medieval Sex Lives offers an account of the manuscript’s contents, its importance, and likely social milieu, with ample musical and poetic analysis. In the process it offers new ways of understanding Marian songs and sottes chansons, as well as arguing for a broadening of our understanding of the medieval pastourelle, both as a genre and as an imaginative prop. Ultimately, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative speculative hypothesis about courtly song in the early fourteenth century as a social force, focusing on its ability to model, instill, inspire, and support sexual behaviours, real and imaginary.

Three ideas in the book

  • The idea that medieval people consumed cultural products (in this case, songs) that fed and moulded their sexual imaginations;
  • The idea that an unnotated songbook might be very noisy with the sounds of sex and tournaments;
  • The idea that minority sexual practices (queer sexualities and paraphilias of various kinds) were present in the distant past.

What inspired me to write the book?

This book arose from two different but related questions. First, I wondered why the sung lyric tradition of Western Europe that is generally called “courtly love had such a long and successful history. Second, I wanted to know why the unnotated songbook, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce had bothered to preserve and re-copy the lyrics of over 500 such songs, ranging from those written in the late twelfth century, to those composed only a few years before the manuscript was copied in the early fourteenth. The lack of musical notation, which was never planned for its songs, makes this manuscriptunusual among Old French songbooks. Nonetheless, curating nearly 150 years of this long-lived tradition was clearly important to the patrons, compilers, owners, and users of this manuscript: but why?

How will this book make a difference in my field of study? In what way is my argument a controversial or one that will shake up preconceived ideas?

Overall, the book challenges the idea that medieval song has nothing (or little) to do with the real lives of its audiences. Ch2’s proposal of love songs as sexual scripts is a controversial use of sociological theory to treat medieval literature. In Ch3 it offers a new way of approaching the sotte chanson (‘silly song’) as something not merely humorous or satirical, but as a potentially serious erotic possibility. Ch4 treats The Tournament at Chauvency from the perspective of sound studies. And Ch5 offers a controversial reading of the medieval pastourelle that firstly expands the definition of the genre to include songs rarely considered as pastourelles (but collected by Douce 308 as such), and secondly makes a difficult argument about some of them as offering fantasies of sexual domination and rape that might have appealed (and been useful) to some audience members, specifically women and queer people.

Residents outside North America should use 30% Discount Code: FFF23 and order online at combinedacademic.co.uk. Details on this PDF:

cornell-university-press-medieval-sex-livesDownload

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Douce 308 project Guillaume de Machaut medieval French literature medieval motets

The tournament of Antechrist

Links to manuscripts of Huon de Méry’s narrative poem.

Continue reading “The tournament of Antechrist”

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Douce 308 project medieval French literature publications

Article on Jeux-partis and demandes d’amours now out

Continue reading “Article on Jeux-partis and demandes d’amours now out”
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Douce 308 project medieval French literature medieval singers speculative musicology

What can we know from ‘unnotated’ estampies?

My essay on the estampies of the Oxford manuscript Douce 308 has just been published in a collection entitled Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Christopher Page, Edited by Tess Knighton and David Skinner.

Continue reading “What can we know from ‘unnotated’ estampies?”
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medieval composers medieval singers Teaching materials

Vernacular song (list A) lecture 4

A brief look at another vernacular song tradition.

Continue reading “Vernacular song (list A) lecture 4”