Les Paysages sonores: du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance ed. by Laurent Hablot and Laurent Vissiére (review)

This interdisciplinary volume combines essays by historians, literary scholars, and musicologists, all of whom bring diverse approaches to the representation of sound in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (its 'soundscape'). Divided into three parts, the book addresses questions of order and disorder in the soundscape, songs of war and war cries, and closes by considering the sounds of everyday life. As Jean-Marie Fritz writes in the book's excellent Conclusion, the task of exploring the soundscape of an era so long past is inherently fraught: 'on est toujours dans l'aporie, dans le manque et, par voie de conséquence, dans l'hypothétique et dans la fragilité d'une reconstitution' (p. 290). The volume's authors attempt to reconstitute elements of this soundscape through a variety of primary sources, including liturgical chant, legal documents, trouvère song, vernacular polyphony, and Arthurian romance. Interesting contributions discuss the role of sound in judicial proceedings (Romain Telliez), the noises that accompany death (Karin Ueltschi), as well as propaganda songs (Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin). As a whole, contributions train their attention on sounds that are unmusical and inarticulate, focusing on cries of various kinds (see the essays by Sophie Albert, Telliez, Hablot, David Fiala, Martine Clouzot, Isabelle Ragnard, Christelle Cazaux-Kowalski, and Nelly Labère). The soundscape of the period was undoubtedly noisy and disorderly. The somewhat odd focus on shouts and cries prevents the emergence of the kind of immersive, holistic aural picture painted in Fritz's work. Readers hoping for a broad introduction to the topic of medieval and Renaissance soundscapes or a complete review of literature from the burgeoning field of 'sound studies' will likely be disappointed. (The volume does not include a separate bibliography.) The authors only occasionally bring their readings into dialogue with a broad array of relevant English-language scholarship (Fiala's and Fritz's up-to-date chapters are the exception).