Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England

SOUND IN HISTORY

Emma Dillon, Series Editor

SONIC BODIES

Text, Music, and Silence in

Late Medieval England

Tekla Bude

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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ISBN 978-0-8122-5370-2 (hardback)

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For Carson, Steve, Biko, Fela, Cala, and Naima

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Writing Sonic Bodies

Chapter 1.Musica Celestis and Canor: Angelic Song in Speculative Music Theory and Rollean Mysticism

Chapter 2. Touching Music: Walter Hilton, Angels’ Song, and Synaesthesia

Chapter 3. Attending to The Boke of Margery Kempe

Chapter 4. Music, Amicitia, and Carthusian Mystical Diaries

Chapter 5.Piers Plowman, the Sound-Object, and the Singing Community

Chapter 6. Disability, Music, and Chaucer’s Advental Bodies

Coda

Appendix. A Short Exposition of the Manuscripts in Chapter 4

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A first book, at least in my experience, is about the art of losing, inscribed in 12-point font and peer-reviewed, and the story of this book is one of letting go: of places I love, both begrudgingly and unabashedly (Ann Arbor, Oxford, Philadelphia, Johannesburg, Cambridge, Cleveland); of material possessions that couldn’t, for reasons of space or expense, travel with me as I moved (I sold all of my books, in 2013, to a secondhand bookstore in Melville). Over the course of its writing, I have lost parts of myself to surgery and lost a child through miscarriage. I have charted the loss of relationships, some forever, others happily resutured; of time (I began to conceive of this book as a young adult, and now am teetering on the edge of middle age); and of words—so many words!—both less material and more personal than these other things.

But of course, it’s not all loss, and the move I’m going to make here, from negativity to positivity, is as earnest as it is hackneyed. When I set out to write acknowledgments in my undergraduate honors thesis in 2006 and then, the next year, my master’s thesis, I couldn’t think of anyone to thank, or to dedicate the text to. I was lonely, angry, and not in a mood to thank anyone, even if thanks were due.

I couldn’t feel more differently now, and the list of friends, colleagues, and mentors to thank here—for their companionship and their brilliance—should, rightly, take up the rest of these acknowledgments, because if this book is anything but loss, it is because of them.

To the wonderful English faculty at the University of Michigan who gently warned me about the dangers of going to graduate school, all while supporting me unconditionally, in particular Marjorie Levinson and Jonathan Freedman; to Vincent Gillespie, my master’s adviser, who intimidated and molded me in equal measure; to my PhD advisers, whose unparalleled guidance, acuity, and kindness shaped this project and my career: David Wallace, Emily Steiner, Rita Copeland, Emma Dillon, and Ann Matter; to my fellow PhD students at Penn, whose intellectual and political rigor should be a template for all grad students everywhere: Claire Bourne, Kara Gaston, Bronwyn Wallace, Simran Thadani, Lucia Martinez, Marissa Nicosia, and Marie Turner; to the open-hearted, sarcastic, and ironizing wit of my friends in South Africa, who upheld me at my weakest moments: Colette Gordon, Judy Sikuza, and Michelle Schenck; to the women at Cambridge whose conversation kept me tethered: Alex Vukovich, Fiona Stewart, and Sarah Harris; to the wonderful women of the pre-tenure writing group at Oregon State University, who are friends and guardians who model how to be unflinching yet caring professors: Ana Milena Ribero, Trina Hogg, Rena Lauer, Megan Ward, Lily Sheehan, Cari Maes, and Mila Zuo; to my colleagues in SWLF and at OSU, who supported me both personally and institutionally: Rebecca Olson, Tara Williams, Christopher Nichols, and my department chair, Peter Betjemann; to my medieval community more broadly, especially those who took the time to talk with me about this book: Sarah Baechle, Ruen-Chuan Ma, Sarah Watson, Liza Strakhov, Laura Saetveit Miles, Rosemary O’Neill, Carissa Harris, Megan Cook, Jen Jahner, Lucy Allen-Goss, Julie Orlemanski, Andrew Albin, and Christopher Michael Roman; to the readers and editors of this manuscript, who gave more of themselves than was required, especially Andrew Hicks and Elizabeth Lyon, whose excellent Latin translations are a pivotal part of this book; to the institutions—to the corporations of people—without whom this book could not have come to be: the Mellon Foundation, Newnham College, and the Oregon State Center for the Humanities, all of which gave me time to think and to write when time was sorely needed; and, finally, to my husband, my cat, my dogs, and my daughters, who (in that order, temporally) have accompanied me and sacrificed for me as I’ve worked to complete this book.

If this book is constituted by my serial losses, it is also comprised of their presence.

Introduction

Writing Sonic Bodies

Music, Odd Bodies, and Sonic Embodiment: Thinking About This Book

Sometime around 1320, a certain magister artium at the University of Paris named Jacobus sat down to write a treatise summarizing contemporary Parisian music theory and performance.¹ The resulting book was an encyclopedic, seven-volume magnum opus entitled the Speculum musicae that is best known today for its colorful diatribes against the moderni, composers of the ars nova. The moderni’s complex polyphonic compositions and innovative text-setting elicited a colorful tirade from the author that, in its vitriol, rivals Theodor Adorno’s invectives against jazz:²

O what great abuse, what great brutishness, what great beastliness, when an ass is taken for a human, a she-goat for a lion, a sheep for a fish, a serpent for a salmon! For the concdords (concordiae) are so different from the discords (discordiis) that one is in no way like the other.… There are also some who do not observe the good manner, although they have learned a little to sing discant (discantare). They sing discant too frivolously, they multiply superfluous notes. Some of them apply hocket (hoketant) too much, they break consonant (consonantiis) notes too often, run up and divide up, they leap in unsuitable places, they clash, they bellow (saltant, hurcant, iupant), and they yelp and bark in the manner of dogs (ad modum canis hawant, latrant), and like insane people, they take nourishment from a disorganized and convoluted ruckus, they use a harmony that is far removed from nature.³

If this passage evokes an aging man in his doorway, waving his fist in anger at the young musicians on his front lawn, it also serves as a fitting example of the concerns of this book, which are about the relationship of music to the body in the medieval period, and the way that music and the body have material effects on each other. Jacobus’s curmudgeonly attitude toward the moderni and their new art presents a semiotic system that weaves hermeneutics and materiality together; it is one that relies on existing norms about relative animal and human value for its legibility.⁴ In this passage, Jacobus consciously mingles the technical vocabulary of fourteenth-century music (concord and discord, discanting, hocketing, and consonance—concordie a discordiis, discantare, hoketant, consonantiis) to a series of vivid embodied and material metaphors (the moderni break, run up, divide up, leap, clash, bellow, and yelp and bark like dogs—frangunt, scandunt, dividunt, saltant, hurcant, jupant, ad modum canis hawant, latrant). In Jacobus’s estimation, the ars nova makes humans bestial, inverting the normative hierarchy of creation that places animals below humans in a spectrum of rationality and rational behavior. The resulting music is both aesthetically and ethically suspect. In order for this invective to land, however, Jacobus’s readers must already implicitly agree that the human is a nobler being than the ass, the lion more regal than the goat, and the embodied practices of clashing, bellowing, yelping, and barking less salubrious forms of movement and sonic production than more staid forms of musical performance.⁵ The songs and practices of the moderni are unnatural to the extent that they are classified, in medieval animacy hierarchies, as less than human.⁶ If musical performance delineates the bodies it inhabits, cultural assumptions about bodies, in turn, help to articulate judgments about whether a given sound is musical or if it is simply noise.⁷

Jacobus’s judgment of the moderni is one of the most famous in the Speculum. Its logic is a vivid reminder that music and the body always exist in a discursive relationship to each other, but it does more than remind us of that fact. It also suggests that music and the body are literally contingent upon each other. Although Jacobus claims that the difference between good and bad music is a purely intellectual one, he cannot help but elide bodies and minds, thereby yoking together what the body is, what the mind is capable of, and what music is. In Jacobus’s case, he hears the ars nova as noise in part because he imagines the bodies of its singers as animals; conversely, the bodies of the moderni are bestial because the songs they perform are—at least in his estimation—noisy. These two judgments cannot be divorced from each other. Jacobus’s fractious description of the ars nova explicitly addresses the difference between old music and new, but its claim rests upon the implication that pronouncements about music and the body are co-constitutive and linguistically entangled. Jacobus’s curmudgeonly account is both vivid and humorous, but in its coupling of music and the body, it is far from unique among medieval accounts.

This book argues that music and the body are entangled practices that emerge out of social and textual environments so diverse that these musical bodies reach the very limits of what we understand music and the body to be. These are what I call sonic bodies: mutually dependent, relational, historically contingent, and co-emergent processes that rely on dialectics of materiality. From the immaterialism of angelic song to the material musicality of monastic friendship, from the (im)materiality of silence to the matter of disabled bodies, Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence follows a series of late medieval writers—from mystics to spiritual autobiographers, from Langland to Chaucer—to show how sound and the body are co-emergent forms. While these bodies refer to and are accountable to matter (as Jacobus is with his animal-like singers), the sonic bodies imagined by medieval writers sometimes make this accounting by rejecting matter. Thus sonic bodies arise not only out of matter itself, but also out of a dialectic of materiality that also includes the immaterial.

In its attention to music, texts, and embodiment, Sonic Bodies is an inherently transdisciplinary project, building on over thirty years of incisive work in the fields of medieval musicology, sound studies, and medieval literary studies. Although medieval music theory divides into two types—speculative and practical—and practical music theory has always been, as the name suggests, about the practice of singing, for much of the twentieth century, scholars believed that medieval speculative music theory had little, if anything, to do with the body. Notated music and speculative music theory was seen as primarily an academic exercise, more like geometry than art, because speculative theory was written in an arcane vocabulary of mathematical proportions that rarely discussed affect or emotion, and polyphonic music, especially fourteenth-century polyphony, was thought to be overly complex, bizarre, and sometimes simply bad.⁸ But, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a series of seminal studies began to overturn this conventional narrative. As Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has shown, work by Gilbert Reaney, Craig Wright, and Christopher Page proved the singability of music by Machaut and others, demonstrating the carnality of song not only in academic arguments, but also by performing the music in vocal ensembles. In his pivotal Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (2001), Bruce Holsinger argued that medieval music was a practice of the flesh, a deeply sensual artistic mode imbued with pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion. For Holsinger, not just music, but all conceptual systems, philosophical or otherwise are rooted in the body and tempered and constrained by lived, corporeal experience.⁹ Not just practical music and the singing of plainchant, but also speculative music and more complex polyphony are inhabited by performing bodies. Looking beyond speculative music theory to literary and historical texts that described musical experience, these writers argued that the strange polyphony of the high medieval period was not just a mental exercise, but instead, was a practice of the material body.¹⁰

It is now, therefore, impossible to write about medieval music today without in some way thinking about matter and the material body. In Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (2008), Katherine Zieman notes that song’s intimate connection to language, literature, and society politicized, gendered, and disciplined the flesh. Emma Dillon, in The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (2012), proposes that musical listening in the medieval period subordinated the meaning of words to their sonic effects on the world around them, from the cityscape to the cries of the mentally ill.¹¹ One of the central tenets of Andrew Hicks’s Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (2017) is that the medieval Neoplatonic conception of musica mundana, or the harmony of the universe, is materially grounded, and that the human ability to hear the cosmos is predicated upon the transduction of an extrasonic signal … into a sonic representation accommodated to human sensory realities.¹² In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya argues that formal properties of medieval music evoke or embody a creaturely way of thinking.¹³ As this cursory but exemplary sample of recent literature suggests, for a twenty-first-century medievalist, medieval music is now ineluctably and powerfully bound to the flesh. In this way, modern studies of medieval music echo the recent material turn in academia more generally. From object-oriented ontology to new materialisms, and from hyperobjects to vibrant matter and assemblages to intra-actions, the last twenty years have seen new and incisive arguments about matter’s significance within discursive frameworks.¹⁴ Language, culture, and meaning arise out of material considerations in complex and fascinating ways, and Sonic Bodies builds on contemporary philosophy’s more general turn to materialism(s) as well as the material turn more specific to medieval studies.

But this book also wants to push back against scholarship on medieval music and its all-too-easy elision of flesh with body, and to explore what is lost when we equate the two. What does it mean to consider musical embodiment beyond the sensorium of a single, delimited human form? What are the possibilities for sonic embodiment if the bodies are collective, figural, or somehow immaterial, as, for instance, angels were thought to be by many philosophers in the medieval period? In collapsing body into flesh, we run the risk of simplifying the relationship between these two terms: of reading the body as strictly bounded by skin, of understanding the body as a shell or surface, or of reading all uses of the word body as metaphors for materiality.¹⁵ But perhaps most importantly, in equating the body with its culturally hegemonic definition as a spatially organized tactile object, we overlook the ways in which sound might constitute embodiment differently than sight: how does a sensorium that demotes visuality and promotes aurality limn a different understanding of, and capacity for, embodiment? The sonic body, this book argues, is a different sort of body, one that has access to forms of subjectivity, power, ways of being, and linguistic meaning that do not accrue to the visible or visio-tactile body. Matter might be at the heart of this body, but so too might immateriality.¹⁶ What are bodies if (im)matter is sound? Sound may—but then again may not—be a practice of the flesh. What productive work might we do with music and the body when we probe the strange forms of embodiment that exist beyond normative, individualized, human forms, or when we imagine not music as operating on the body or the body as performing music, but instead when we think about the ways in which music and the body—whatever those things are—mutually co-constitute each other and emerge as simultaneous sites of performance? Sonic Bodies outlines the multiple and evasive sonic bodies at play in medieval literature, arguing not only that music and the body are uniquely intertwined, but that their existence determines—and is determined by—literary form and social function.

This is not simply a case of placing modern theories of immateriality and embodiment onto the medieval. After all, the medieval period had multiple and complex understandings of embodiment and materiality. As Ernst Kantorowicz famously outlines, medieval theology and political theory recognize multiple bodies: the king has two bodies (one natural and one mystical), as does Christ (his human, material body and the Church); the Church itself (which is both a material location and a mystical corporate entity) has multiple bodies; and the polity (a material city and a mystical body of collected human beings, both living and dead) is similarly doubly incorporated.¹⁷ More recently, Caroline Walker Bynum traces the difference between the body (soma or corpus) and the flesh (sarx or caro) in medieval theologies of the resurrection, suggesting that the problem’s thorniness and its persistence are inherently related.¹⁸ As Patricia Dailey argues, the Western Christian tradition understood the body not as a simple organic unity, but instead as a body comprised of both inner (intellectual) and outer (sense-perceptual) persons, both of which were culturally and socially determined.¹⁹ In other words, medieval writers had multiple ways of understanding and describing the body and its erotics, pains, and ecstasies—feelings that might not exist in the flesh at all even though they referred back to the body as a metaphor.

Just as Sonic Bodies expands the accepted boundaries of the medieval body, this book also explores the acceptable range of definitions for music in the medieval period. Music is a capacious term, and it means something different in medieval poetry than it does in mystical texts, philosophical discussions, manuscripts of notated music, or texts in the speculative musical tradition; each of these written forms of music are different still, because they are inscribed in texts, from the ephemeral performances of music in viva voce song. What types of music have been overlooked in current critiques of the medieval period? As will become clear throughout the chapters of this book, some of the most interesting music of the medieval period dwells in texts not normally considered musical, and whose sounds commingle music and noise, silence, and the quotidian sounds of daily life. If this book is about expanding the boundaries of the body, it is also about expanding the corpus of medieval music.

The sonic bodies that are the subjects of this book, then, challenge normative conceptions of embodiment and musicality. Sonic embodiment is labile and ductile, manifold and ever changing, as it asks us to exchange the eidetic forms conjured by the word body with auditory replacements.

Each of the chapters of this book looks to specific late medieval textual scenarios in which sonic embodiment is at work, sometimes in radically different ways.

Chapter 1 explores in detail two fourteenth-century attempts to define and describe angelic song. Angelic song provides a helpful framework for thinking about sonic embodiment because of the role that angels played in medieval hierarchies of being based on the types of bodies and intellects they were thought to have. Medieval writers believed that, like humans, angels sang. But most theologians and philosophers believed that, unlike humans, angels lacked physical, material flesh. Because of this, many writers posited that the songs angels sang were also immaterial, incapable of propagating through matter as sound waves. And yet, humans claimed to hear angels’ song, and medieval mysticism, literature, and art were full of singing angels.²⁰ With what ears did these humans hear their impossible music? What sorts of bodies did human audiation of angelic song necessitate? How did writers express the ineffability of this music in language? The answers to these questions provide a glimpse into the strange world of sonic embodiment, and the two discursive arenas that this chapter considers provide divergent answers to these questions. In the first, late medieval speculative music attempts to define and describe angelic song; in the second, Richard Rolle, the early fourteenth-century English mystic, thinks about the relationship between embodiment and his experience of angelic song as canor.

Beginning in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, speculative music treatises like Jacobus’s Speculum began to look for a space for angelic song among the preexisting, tripartite division of music articulated by Boethius (d. 524) in his De musica.²¹ Was angelic song musica mundana (the music of the spheres), musica humana (the music of the human body-soul), or musica instrumentalis (instrumental music)? Each of these forms of music concerned physical matter, but, again, most medieval philosophers argued that angels were not fleshly creatures. Because angels’ song seemingly broke down the traditional taxonomy of music, speculative music treatises like Jacobus’s Speculum tentatively proposed a form of music that added to the old Boethian tripartite model: musica celestis. For Jacobus, angelic song inhabits a body that is transcendental or metaphysical. As Jacobus says, musica celestis considers transcendental things that pertain to metaphysics or theology.²² Although Jacobus was the only late medieval music theorist to account for angelic song in great detail, other theorists of the same period, taking cues from Scholastic philosophy’s discussions of angelic embodiment, seem to have thought about angelic song in a similar way.

Around the same time, Richard Rolle, an English mystic, began to describe angelic song too. Although Rolle did not know Jacobus or his Speculum musicae, Rolle’s mystical writings treat angelic song as an embodied reality much like Jacobus does. For Rolle, angelic song—which he calls canor—is a physical sonorous experience that separates the soul from the body, removing the fleshly restrictions that typically constrain human hearing, audiation, intellection, and musical performance (such as images, phantasms, temporal divisions, and even the necessity to speak normative human language). As Rolle listens to canor, his material body is overwhelmed by his spiritual body, and he begins to speak, quite literally, an angelic language—one that is mimicked in his written work through florid alliteration and prosopoetics. In Rolle’s account, canor actively creates the metaphysical organ of its audiation; it also affects the formal properties of the written word. If Jacobus and other late medieval music theorists postulate the existence of angelic song as a form of metaphysically embodied music, Rolle’s accounts perform its effects in writing.

Both medieval music theory and mysticism describe a spiritual body—and a metaphysical sensorium—that performs and tunes in to angelic song. For Jacobus and Rolle, the music that angels make is silent, and the body that performs and hears this music is not made of matter. Both Jacobus and Rolle argue that there is such a thing as the metaphysical sonic body, and they saw its potential for performance. However, in the generations that followed, some writers—far from being excited about the prospects for immaterial sounds—were downright suspicious of them and sought to contain the potential theological harm that the human experience of angelic song might effect. Angels’ song, the thinking went, might encourage its listeners to neglect religious orthopraxis for heterodox, personal, and potentially heretical mystical experiences.

In this vein, Chapter 2 explores the work of one such skeptic, Walter Hilton (d. 1396), whose Of Angels’ Song both describes metaphysical music and admonishes his reader to stay away from it, focusing on the psalms, hymns, and anthems of the Church instead. In this little-studied but provocative treatise, Hilton describes angels’ song as a form of gastly touch that can be feled and a persayved in a saule, but it may noght be shewed. (Hilton’s assessment is borne out in visual art of the period, where touch between humans and angels is almost never depicted; there was, it seems, real anxiety around showing the impossible, invisible interface between human bodies and angelic ones.)²³ Nevertheless, in spite of his misgivings, Hilton posits a convincing description of angelic songs and the human organs that perceive them.

Hilton juxtaposes the interior, spiritual, and fluid noneidetic body that hears angelic song to an exterior, material, and visual body that performs the liturgy and is open to discipline, punishment, and social conformity. Because Hilton calls angels’ song a sort of inner touch, this chapter considers the role that touch or tactus played in the embodying discourses of medieval medicine and music. Throughout the medieval period, the word tactus was used in a variety of metaphorical ways: first, it connoted the musicality of the heartbeat (an interoception that could be felt but not shown); and later, in the fifteenth century, tactus came to refer to a fundamental unit of musical time.²⁴ As each mensura or tactus passed, a singer tapped their partner or partners on the shoulder to indicate time’s passing. The notion of the touch, then, has both interior, noneidetic meanings and exterior, disciplinary ones. While Hilton ultimately rejects angelic songs and the ghostly bodies touched by them as imprudent, nevertheless, he still describes a body that is noneidetic, that is not flesh, and yet is distressingly real, so real that Hilton marshals the disciplinary logic of exteroceptive touch and (exterior songs) as a containment mechanism.

For Hilton, hearing is a synaesthetic experience out of which the body emerges: angelic song is neither truly eidetic (it cannot be shown) nor physical (it is ghostly). Instead, the body that emerges out of angelic song is a process-oriented one, a body of simultaneous and undifferentiated feeling or affect.

Chapter 3 continues this investigation of sonic embodiment, sound, and silence in mysticism and life-writing, arguing that Margery Kempe (d. ca. 1438) constructed her spiritual autobiography—The Boke of Margery Kempe—as a type of sonic body. More specifically, her sonic body is social and intersubjective: Margery deftly leverages the intervals between sound and silence to create in her audience a sense of participatory rhetorical expectation and attendance. This chapter argues that Margery’s sonic embodiment is what the twentieth-century sound theorist Jacques Attali might have called a noisy silence or what Lisbeth Lipari refers to as an ethics of attunement That is, sonic meaning accrues at the social intersection of silence and noise, and listening is at the heart of all communicative acts.²⁵ Margery’s noisy weeping—her most famous attribute—is, throughout her Boke, balanced and given meaning by moments of tactical silence that bring the listener into attunement with her vocal performances.²⁶

Because of its focus not just on the sensation of sound and silence, but on sound as a marker of communication between two people or groups of people, this chapter develops the notion of the sonic body begun in Chapters 1 and 2. However, whereas the first two chapters make a single self the focus of sonic embodiment, Chapter 3 opens up the self to the listening other, arguing that the sonic body can also be intersubjective. Here, I build on Julie Orlemanski’s conception of Margery’s sonority as a form of distributed expressivity.²⁷ For Margery Kempe, the sonic body arises out of interdependence; the Boke is simultaneously congenial and unsettled because canor and the self are always dependent on the experience of the other.

Chapter 4 continues the exploration of intersubjective sonic bodies in mysticism that Chapter Three began. In the margin of folio 33v of the sole surviving manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, next to a moment that describes Margery’s vociferous weeping, there is a cryptic reference to two Carthusian monks: so fa RM & f Norton of Wakenes & of the passyon. Who are RM and f Norton, and what was their relationship to Margery’s noisy performance of Rollean canor? This chapter answers these questions in the first modern study of the mystical diary of John Norton (from a unique manuscript, Lincoln Cathedral MS 57), which I read alongside its partner-text, the mystical diary of Richard Methley (also contained in a unique manuscript, Trinity MS O.2.56).²⁸ Both men lived and wrote in the Charterhouse of Mount Grace in the late fifteenth century, and their manuscripts perform an intersubjective, textual sonic body.

As the multiple similarities, borrowings, and exchanges in their manuscripts show, Methley’s and Norton’s manuscripts were written collaboratively: both contain accounts of their mystical experiences, which are in large part indebted to Rollean canor. Both also rely heavily on intertextuality in order to encompass their experiences: the manuscripts share an extensive array of formal, generic, and thematic qualities.²⁹ Carthusians sang their offices together less frequently than other monastic orders; in this chapter, I argue that Methley and Norton displace sonic embodiment onto their texts. Their manuscripts show a sense of friendly responsibility and kinship, not only to each other, but also to the unique needs of their Carthusian community, where their musical intertexts produce a sonic body that is itself open to other readers and overhearers. In the words of John Norton, canor is the unbounded spiritual love that exists between brothers.

Chapters 5 and 6 turn away from forms of sonic embodiment in life-writing or literature that imagines itself as nonfiction to explore sonic bodies in narrative and lyric poetry of the fourteenth century.

In Chapter 5, I argue that William Langland’s figural or allegorical personifications are sonic bodies. This chapter uses Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of the objet sonore (sound object) to argue that William Langland’s Piers Plowman is an experiment in reifying sound and in making music—literally—matter. For Schaeffer, sounds themselves could become objects according to the principles of Husserlian adumbration. Schaeffer, a composer and electronic musician, took sounds out of their original context and clipped, distorted, and looped them; when he did so, the sounds became unrecognizable, forcing the listener to attend to them merely as sounds without any of their original intentionality or causal referents. Out of Schaeffer’s early experiments arose a discourse—inflected by contemporary sound studies—that understood sounds as objects: ones not bounded by space or tactility, but instead by temporality and memory. Like Schaeffer’s music, Piers Plowman is built of sonic objects, from the aural loops of its alliterative long lines to its resonating personifications and its final passus, which experiment with the ramifications of sonic objecthood for the Christian commune. All of these forms of sonic embodiment are related, as Piers Plowman’s soundscape enacts subjectivities that are mutable, profoundly incorporative, and methexic rather than mimetic. The poem’s sonic landscape is the ground on which the interrelatedness, interpenetration, and intersubjectivities of the text are built, the source of its ethics, assimilatio, and protreptics. In the context of the sonic object, Piers’s musical moments can be seen as experiments in communitarian thinking—moments in which bodies are formed not around individual identity, but instead around the belonging of communal performance. For Schaeffer and other sound studies scholars—Michel Chion, Brian Kane, Mladan Dolar, and Rey Chow among them—sound studies is primarily reliant on the possibility for iterable auditory phenomena that the phonograph and pursuant technologies of the last century or so have allowed. But, I argue, Piers Plowman, in giving sounds bodies, imagines this reification of sound avant la lettre.³⁰ Reading Piers Plowman for the way it reifies sound opens an avenue for sound studies prior to the invention of modern recording technology.

In the final chapter, I argue that Chaucer makes the notions of musicality as disability, loss, and absence central to his poetics. Chaucer crips medieval music theory’s definition of itself as mental and physical capability, instead showing that musical not-having, lack, and delay allow his work—which is uniquely antagonistic to music among his fourteenth-century contemporaries—to inhabit the potency of music tout court. In Chaucerian poetry, the body of music is quite literally an absence or aporia, and by casting the body of music into the elsewhen/elsewhere, Chaucer authorizes his poetic project as the reparative site of musical lack. Music in Chaucer’s poetry frequently exists in spaces of embodiment beyond the body, a maneuver that Chaucer makes intentionally, challenging the assumption that the voice indicates presence and text is a form of absence. Poetry becomes poesis in the moment it emerges from dichotomous notions of embodiment as presence and text as absence. I call this poetic endless deferral of musical ability an advental body. The chapter investigates the body of Echo in the Franklin’s Tale, the lyric I in the triple ballad Fortune, which has resonances in the formal structure of Chaucer’s dream poems, and Troilus’s body in Troilus and Criseyde. Each of these bodies inhabits sonorous asynchronies, delaying music for the purposes of poesis.

Sonic Bodies attempts to break down ways of thinking about the body that conflate the normative physical form, the flesh, and the body, and to imagine a more capacious body and a more capacious musical landscape that includes intersubjective subjects as well as forms of discourse on the fringes of organized sonority. The project of sonic embodiment is a project of recuperation, of trying to imagine the ways in which sound or music—sensations that we generally think of as transient or fleeting—might take on some of the qualities of the body, and, in doing so, challenge our notions of the body’s limits.

Chapter 1

Musica Celestis and Canor

Angelic Song in Speculative Music Theory and Rollean Mysticism

But another species of music can, as it seems, to be added to these, which can be called celestial or divine. This species of music considers things separated from motion and perceptible matter, and according to their being and according to the intellect: namely, transcendental things pertaining to metaphysical or divine knowledge.

—Jacobus, Speculum musicae

In the seventh book of his Speculum musicae, Jacobus passes judgment on the songs and singers of the ars musica in an extended, bestial metaphor: the ars nova is bad because its music sounds animalic, and its singers are like dogs because of the animalistic bodily contortions the musical style requires.¹ This passage is colorful and evocative, and has garnered much scholarly attention as a result. But in a much less well-known and less commented-upon moment in the Speculum, Jacobus considers a different type of singing body and the music that flows from it. These are the metaphysical bodies of separate substances (or what we moderns might