Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (review)

Toward the close of this book Bruce W. Holsinger quotes a story from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. The lyre, Isidore reports, was discovered by the god Mercury when he came upon the body of a desiccated tortoise. The sinews of the animal still remained stretched across the bottom of the shell, and when the god plucked them, they gave out a sound. "After this pattern," Isidore goes on, "he made the lyre and transmitted it to Orpheus" (344).

This little legend stands for Holsinger as both epitome and epitaph for music in medieval culture. It exemplifies the ways in which the body, animal or human, is the site of musical performance. It reveals the link between artistic beauty and death ("These songs are rung upon a corpse," Holsinger summarizes [344]). And it subtly anticipates the horrid death of Orpheus himself, whose mutilated body would remain a sign of music's terrifying power and whose disembodied yet still singing head would float down rivers to move future listeners to tears.

Such tortured bodies lie at the heart of this book. In dialogue with the whole range of recent studies of the body in society (undertaken by scholars from Caroline Walker Bynum to Carolyn Dinshaw, from Peter Brown to Miri Rubin), Holsinger's project is to write a history of medieval culture through the metaphorics of the sonant self. To this end, he interweaves three distinct yet related narratives designed to illustrate the centrality of musical and bodily imagery to the intellectual and artistic life of the premodern West.

First, Holsinger offers a review of medieval music theory and practice that is centered on an understanding of the body's place in music making and teaching. Medieval music theory, it has long been known, located tones and intervals in a philosophical conception of the music of the cosmos. The inheritance of Pythagorean speculation, coupled with the legacy of Christian Platonism, gave to medieval audiences an understanding of all human music as reflecting universal harmonies. The division of music into celestial, human, and instrumental forms (in writers such as Boethius) became a way not just of organizing the subject into discrete forms of attention but of asserting the unassailable linkage of all three. Yet such speculations did not simply direct their vision to the cosmos. The earthly, human body was, for many theorists and pedagogues, the site of sound. There was, Holsinger educes from their writings, a "musicality of the person" (13). The flesh itself was resonant. In this context, human bodies became "stringed instruments." The body was "most actively and energetically transformed into a musical spectacle itself" (39).

This evocation of a human, corporeal musicality is the heart of Holsinger's argument and forms the basis of his readings of medieval literary texts. The second major purpose of his book, then, is to offer an analysis of canonical medieval literature as fundamentally concerned with musicality—but not just in the sense of figuring the body as an instrument or using human voices to praise God. Rather, he claims that the social function of medieval literature was to expose human relationships as something akin to musical ones. Holsinger rereads writers such as Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Baudri of Bourgeuil, Chaucer, and Lydgate for their musical imagery and polemic. Public and private life fit into harmonies of bodily expression. Yet those harmonies, however beautiful, come at a painful price. Pain itself is key to this study's argument. Violence to the body is a central trope of medieval musical discourses. The tortured, mutilated, marked, or constrained body generates the sounds of pain and pleasure. What Holsinger calls "the musicality of bodily pain" (208) embraces almost everything, from Christ's passion on the cross, to the self-abnegations of his ascetic devotees, to the flagellations of students learning music at the...