Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture
Literary Studies and LiteratureAward Winner
2005: John Nicholas Brown Prize
Winner of the 2005 John Nicholas Brown Prize, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America.
2002: MLA 2002 Prize for a First Book
Winner of the 2002 MLA 2002 Prize for a First Book, sponsored by the Modern Language Association.
2001: Philip Brett Award
Winner of the 2001 Philip Brett Award, sponsored by the American Musicological Society.
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer’s representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress’s Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh.
The book reveals a sonorous landscape of flesh and bone, pleasure and pain, a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization that will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
"The book is interesting, intriguing, and provides a valuable model for new ways of approaching musical repertory."—Notes
"Provides a very close reading of a wide range of texts from late Antiquity to the early modern period that deal with the corporeal production and reception of music . . . .Some of these texts are well known to musicologists or students of literature, but few scholars of any stripe would know all of them or even the majority intimately. Scholars of literature and music, and of culture in general, will therefore find much of interest here as well as an important synthesis of many of the most colorful passages on music from the writings of this period."—Echo: A Music-Centered Journal
"Bruce W. Holsinger's Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer is an ambitious and original book. It is also something rarer, a genuine pleasure to read; because of the confident way the book moves between literary criticism, iconography and musicology, it will provide most medievalists with glimpses of something outside their particular field; an obscure or under-read text, an unfamiliar element of musical practice, an unknown aspect of pedagogy in the Middle Ages, a new vision of the medieval body."—Maud Burnett McIrney, Haverford College
"The virtues of Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer are many. Holsinger's volume is deeply learned, forcefully argued, generous even in its polemics, and, not least, written with a soaring and searing elouence...it is a brilliant provocation that will change its field forever, and what is more, it will bring music vividly to the attention of medievalists who have neglected it far too long."—The Journal of Religion
