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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

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.

My review of an edited volume on female-voice song

My review of Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton has just appeared in Advance Access for Early Music. This book is part of the series Brill’s Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe and was published by Brill (Leiden) in 2022 at the somewhat eye-watering price of €215. Although reviewing large edited collections is quite a lot of work, I think it’s important to do so, especially when they’re pricey, as a way of informing potential readers of their contents in the hope that they might get a sense of whether to request their local library acquires the volume or, indeed, whether they fork out the money themselves. I think most universities libraries that teach music before 1500 and/or topics relating to women and music should probably buy this. I used the online version, which seemed pretty useful.

Early Music sent me a link, so you can see what I said about it in full: Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Female-voice song before 1500”. A review of Female-voice song and women’s musical agency in the Middle Ages, ed. Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton Brill’s Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2022), €215. Early Music, advance access [I’ll try to remember to add the exact volume and page details when they are available].

The Cultural History of Western Music

This six-volume series has just been published by Bloomsbury and I am now thinking about how I might incorporate some of it into my teaching next year. As you’ll see from the publisher’s website, the idea here is that all six volumes have the same eight thematically titled chapters: Society, Philosophies, Politics, Exchange, Education, Popular Culture, Performance, and Technologies. The volumes themselves are chronological, with the ‘Middle Ages’ volume that I co-edited with Helen Deeming being no.2, since there is a volume on Antiquity. All the editors met at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge MA in the summer of 2018 to decide the chapter themes and discuss the plans for the book, which was really nice.

It’s a bit pricey but there are some discount options via QR codes that the publishers have offered and which I give here.

Another Machaut patron revisited

A decade after I blogged about a web-only version of my paper proposing the Melun brothers as possible Machaut patrons, a revised version has been published in print.

The original version of this thesis was deemed unsuitable by Gesta because it was too much about music and unpublishable by JAMS because it was too little about music. Feeling that it was simply one of those articles that needed to be out there but which the current configuration of university disciplines was never going to permit to be in a peer-reviewed journal, I self-published it online.

That version has been relatively widely used and cited by Machaut scholars in the years since 2012, so when the editors of a festschrift for the great Machaut scholar Lawrence Earp asked me to offer something, I eventually thought that an updated version of this paper might work well. This volume has now appeared and is exceptionally handsome, with plenty of fully integrated colour reproductions, including in my chapter where they have dutifully put the two recto MS pages on book rectos so that a reader re-experiences at least some of what a reader of the manuscript being discussed would experience.

Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?’

in Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp, ed. Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 291–307.

Sadly I can’t offer an electronic offprint (I don’t have one) but I hope that you might be able to request this very beautiful book to your librarian if you want to read the many wonderful essays in it.

Thoughts on music in Colette’s ‘Pussy’

By Henri Manuel – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90018140

In November 2022 my book group read Colette’s novella, La Chatte, translated (by Antonia White) as The Cat (quotations and page numbers are from the Vintage paperback re-issue, London 2001). This 1933 publication is a rather torrid tale of 24-year-old mummy’s boy Alain, scion of a rather ritzy but declining family of silk merchants, marrying Camille, the somewhat lower class 19-year-old daughter of the owners of a mangle-making empire. The complication is that Alain is actually in love with his female cat, Saha, whom (spoiler alert!) Camille accidentally-on-purpose knocks off the parapet of the top-floor marital apartment when Alain is out. The cat survives and, in a weak bit of the plot, Camille is rumbled by some sweaty paw-prints (that would surely have evaporated given the heat of the day by the time Alain sees them). Alain takes himself and Saha back to his mother’s and Camille is happy because she gets the car, preferring machines to creatures.

First things first: the title of this book should be Pussy. This is important because, as the book group discovered, only by continuously referring to it in that way is the constant sexual, and slightly naughty-comic, undertone brought out in English. The French for a female cat has pretty much the same resonance as the English word ‘Pussy’ insofar as both are used for the human female genitals (I don’t think the French also has the possibility of implying an unmanly man, but I await correction on that point, as that would also fit here). So, the book presents two different kinds of pussy: on the one hand the sexual availability of Camille as wife (and she is described in very sensual terms and as positively enjoying quite a lot of sex after their marriage); and, on the other, a real female cat. Alain wants both, but when forced to choose, he eschews the adult sexual option (and its airy penthouse couple’s flat, sans garden) and plumps for the childishness of his cat (in his parental home, set in lush grounds). All his interactions with the car are sensual and pleasurable: in ‘their bedroom’ (p.69):

‘As soon as he turned out the light, the cat began to trample delicately on her friend’s chest. Each time she pressed down her feet, one single claw pierced the silk of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel and uneasy pleasure’ (p.70).

By contrast, sex with his wife causes misogyny and murderous rage:

‘He mastered her as he might have put a hand on her mouth to stop her from screaming or as he might have murdered her’ (p.111).

His preference for a pre-sexual childishness (or, if you want like Freud to assume there is no pre-sexual, the sublimated sexuality of the Oedipal) is underlined by various other barely disguised features, and in particular by the fact he eventually takes himself and the cat back to his mother’s house (as if he reverts to being a child) with its womb-like space of the dark, moist, fecund, garden in which his preferred pussy thrives.

Various dichotomies pervade the novel to characterize the two pussies. Saha is pure nature, loving the garden, hunting, the earth. Despite occasionally enjoying animal-like description and nudity, Camille is very much on the side of mechanism and artifice, loving the Roadster, driving fast, and the eyrie-like ‘wedge’ flat that is her marital home. There is a class underpinning here with the Aparats (Alain’s family) coming from the pre-war milieu of people who can afford a garden house in central Paris, something which the couple note will not be possible much longer. It’s hard not to see the mangle business of the Malmerts (Camille’s family) and representing a literally mechanized modern squeeze on the very fabric of society represented by the rich silks that the Aparats make.

When we have these dichotomies, however, particularly that between nature and art in which humans sit very messily, it is usually the case that music can provide an additional layer of complexity and/or commentary. And so it is here. Although music is not a major presence in the novel, certain key sounds pervade the book and there is a central passage in which music—notably the acousmatic sounds of jazz and the present performance by Camille’s singing voice—has a prominent role in the narrative (pp.134-140). This is the section after Alain has found the injured pussy and brought her back up to his wife’s flat, tended to her and dismissed the servant. This scene intervenes between Alain’s rescue of the cat and his suspicion (based on the evidence of sweaty paw prints, implausibly still visible on the hot stone of the parapet, showing the cat’s fear, and the pussy’s vocal reaction to Camille) that pussy was pushed and the conversation in which Alain extracts that confession (p.140).

Standing by the open bay window (p.134) Alain feels a tremor in himself which is ‘like the tremolo of an orchestra, muffled and foreboding’ (pp.134-5). The couple watch fireworks at a gala in the amusement park at the Folie-Saint-James and hear something that they first think are guitars but Camille identifies as mandolins, as she sings along and asks Alain to listen. ‘Her voice cracked on the highest note and she coughed to excuse her failure’ (p.135). This astonishes Alain who has been struck by her voice ‘big and open as her eyes’ which is now like that of a ‘little girl. Hoarse, too’ (p.135).

1788 map of the north part of the garden of the Folie-Saint-James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_Saint_James#/media/File:Folie_Saint_James.jpg

Camille’s voice has been remarked on early in the text as shouty, being praised in a backhanded compliment by the servants in Alain’s house: ‘What a fine voice she has. When she’s speaking loud, the neighbours can hear every word’ (p.94). For it to break in this way is telling, but what is it telling. First it is telling her lack of confidence as she knows she has nearly killed his pussy (she is, in fact, the one with the really murderous rage from sex, despite his being articulated). And second it tells us what sort of human ‘animal’ she is. There are several things to notice about the music she hears. First, it is dance music, and thus designed to animate bodies; second, it is acousmatically presented (they can hear but not see it); third, it is deadened by the wind into a ‘vague shrill buzzing’ (p.136), so is indistinct. Eventually Camille identifies the tune as Love in the Night, refers to it as ‘jazz’ and hums it ‘in a high shaky almost inaudible voice, as if she had just been crying. This new voice of hers acutely increased Alain’s disquiet’. Alain tells her to ‘Go on singing’, and she asks ‘Singing what?’ to which he replies ‘Love in the Night or anything else. It doesn’t matter what’. She hesitates and then refuses, saying ‘Let me listen to the jazz…even from here you can hear it’s simply marvellous’ (p.136).

What remains interesting in this novella is where we are meant to place our sympathies, given the presentation of Camille and Alain. Alain is a pathetic, childish mummy’s boy in love with his pussy; Camille is  aloud-mouthed lover of cars and nakedness who attempts to kill Alain’s pussy while singing under her breath, pacing to the rhythm of her song, ‘but her voice failed her’ (p.128). Again, Camille’s song is indistinct, vocally faulty, and good only for bodily movement.

By Puget, Loïsa, 1810-1889, composer. paroles de Gustave Lemoine ; musique de L. Puget. – F920, 19th Century French Sheet Music Collection, Marvin Duchow Music Library – Rare Books, McGill University, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65965882

The presentation of both is neither neat nor formulaic, but singing presents a different Camille, stripped of her loud adult female voice, reduced to a tiny-voiced girl, indistinct, hoarse, and shaky. The cracking on the high note contrasted with the sonic penetration of both the artificial instrumental music of the mandolin dance music (the ‘jazz’) and the clear voices of animals such as the pussy’s warning cry that only Alain understands (pp.67-68) or the four notes of the blackbird’s whistle ‘that rang through the whole garden’ (p.145) when Alain returns. Most other noises are loud, distinct, and communicate something, even the mechanical ‘music’ of ‘distant trams’ (p.146) or the ‘metallic clangs, those sounds as of a boat grinding at anchor, those muffled bursts of music, which echo the discordant life of a new block of flats’ (p.129). Camille’s sonic failure as a singer (in contrast to her loudness as a speaker) deprives her specifically of any musicality, a feature arguably prefigured when she thinks Alain is going to liken her appearance to that of the singer Marie Dubas (p.110) but he instead says she is like the weeping heroines on the cover of romantic songs by Loïsa Puget (a composer who the translator wrongly assumes is a man!). She is not like a professional singer, but like a weeping illustration for some sheet music. Her attempts at musical sounds undermine her.

Colette with cats: image from https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/editorial/why-colette-still-matters

My first Early Music editorial

I took over (from Helen Deeming) as one of the co-editors of Early Music in October 2021 and my first editorial for the journal has now been published in advanced access. This is for the February 2022 edition, which is not yet out (like many journals, Early Music was slowed by the pandemic , although we’re gradually catching up). Generically, an editorial is something that seemed quite different from the sorts of things I’ve written before, perhaps closer to a blogpost than anything else.