Elizabeth Eva Leach's "Medieval Sex Lives"

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Sung Birds and Guillaume de Machaut.

Leach applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of my book you will find yourself in the middle of a discussion of the Marian songs that are included within the subsection of “grands chants” (high style songs) in the fourteenth-century song manuscript that is the book’s focus—Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308. The point being set up on the page is about the interpenetration of sacred and secular discourses in medieval song, something the page established via earlier scholarship by Daniel E. O’Sullivan, Sarah Kay, Sylvia Huot, David J. Rothenberg, and Barbara Newman. In particular, the page situates this sacred/secular interchange within the practice of song contrafacture on the one hand (the provision of a new text for an existing song melody) and motet polytextuality on the other (i.e. the singing of different texts simultaneously in a polyphonic musical piece that is performed by two or more singers singing different melodies).

Page 99 only gives a very partial sense of what this book is about. It is not atypical in some ways in being quite heavily referenced (8 footnotes) and solidly dependent on earlier scholarship, but I have to admit to being disappointed that, given the book’s overall title, this page is somewhat tame because it is only the necessary set-up for one of my more provocative arguments, which is that the lexis of Marian song is not only about sublimated sexuality but might (also, or alternatively) offer some listeners a form of what Ela Przybylo has termed “asexual erotics”. To get to that, you’ll have to turn the page.

Asexuality is really only mentioned in this chapter and is different in many ways from the other kinds of sexuality and sexual practices that the book finds lurking in medieval courtly songs. These much more often involve paraphilias and kinky scenarios, which have been minimized, moralized, or dismissed as humour, but which I think it might be salutary to take seriously.

Learn more about Medieval Sex Lives at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue