Music, body, and desire in medieval literature and culture, 1150--1400: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer

This dissertation argues that music was understood in medieval culture as a practice of the flesh, invested with the propensity to eroticize, torture, even resurrect the human body. Chapter 1 focuses on the writings of Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa, arguing that the patristic era bequeathed to the Middle Ages not a musical worldview uniformly hostile to the flesh but a profoundly inconsistent set of musical representations and anxieties. Chapter 2 treats Hildegard of Bingen, considering the images of sexuality and the female body in her medical writings, letters, and visionary tracts in relation to her musical constructions of female spirituality and devotion in the Symphonia and suggesting that the formal characteristics of her compositions may reflect her idiosyncratic views on female desire and embodiment.;Chapter 3 turns to Notre Dame polyphony and the literary culture of northern France. I explore the striking twelfth-century similarity between polemics against musical innovation and diatribes against sodomy, both of which concern themselves with the sexual inversion of the male singing body (the chapter includes a reading of the unpublished homoerotic verse-epistles of "Master Leoninus"). Chapter 4 treats several Latin devotional works that reveal the musical dimensions of religious pain and suffering: the hagiographical writings of Thomas of Cantimpre; a devotional poem by John Pecham; and the writings of Mechtild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta.;The final chapter examines musical imagery in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a symbolic system for representing bodily difference. While Fragment 1 finds Chaucer juxtaposing the domestic musical scene of the Miller's Tale with the public arena described in the Knight's Tale (in which music serves as a discourse of aristocratic prestige), the convergence of music, pedagogy, and violence is the central theme of the Prioress's Tale. The chapter's final section considers the Pardoner's "polyphonic perversity," the desirous performances that distinguish his musical body from those around him. I conclude with a brief epilogue on the medieval Orpheus tradition.