Sonic Bodies

Since the turn of the millennium, the research field of medieval sound studies has attracted the lively attention of scholars of literature, history, art, music, religion, and more, and assembled a bibliography nearly as eclectic and interdisciplinary as the field of medieval studies itself. Roughly defined, medieval sound studies seeks to investigate embodied medieval sounding and hearing practices, medieval hearers’ lived experiences in aural environments, medieval sound’s discursive and cultural contexts, and the representation and transmission of sonic meaning through historical archives. Because it centers the distinctive meaning-making of one region of the sensorial plenum, medieval sound studies has long attended to human embodiment and psychology, made variously intelligible through medical, philosophical, and theological paradigms, as a foundational site for its investigations. Landmark studies like the Warburg Institute’s prescient The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgment from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (1991), Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999), and Bruce Holsinger’s, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (2001) elaborated the sensitive human body, in the wildly manifold possibilities of its cultural sculpting, as an indispensable starting place for the study of historical soundworlds. Plentiful studies since have extended this work to consider the diverse interface of sound and body during the Middle Ages across a range of social positionalities and collectivities.Tekla Bude’s Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England begins from a refreshingly new place, gently shifting fleshy notions of the body to one side in order to trace the unexpected intersubjective and transpersonal bodily forms that emerge when we conceptualize sound and body otherwise: not as sensory signal and receptor but as “mutually dependent, relational, historically contingent, and co-emergent processes that rely on a dialectics of materiality” (3). From a steady (but not overstated) Deleuzian and posthuman stance, Bude theorizes what she terms “sonic bodies” through inventive readings of medieval literary, visual, philosophical, and musicological sources. The book’s six chapters each consider in turn new focal authors and texts, mostly late medieval English spiritual writings, in order to explore how music and body are “entangled practices” whose examination as such brings us to “the very limits of what we understand music and the body to be” (3). Original in its ideas, resourceful in its analyses, Sonic Bodies defamiliarizes, reimagines, and multiplies the medieval corpus as sonic phenomenon from start to finish. The thinking and theorizing spaces the monograph opens up are full of promise and will, I expect, spur further inventive work on medieval embodiment, spirituality, sound, silence, and other related topics. For all its promise, the book also evinces shortcomings in argumentation, provision of evidence, and theoretical application that impede the full realization of its significant potential.Sonic Bodies begins by staking its chief theoretical venture: take music and the body as mutually coconstituting sites of performance in the late Middle Ages, as conjoint modes of becoming guided by medieval literary form and social function, and we shall discover “strange forms of embodiment that exist beyond normative, individualized, human forms” (5). Resisting the easy elision of caro and corpus that disciplinary investments in materiality and ocularity have facilitated, Bude’s introduction asks us “to exchange the eidetic forms conjured by the word ‘body’ with auditory replacements” (7), arguing that sonic bodies “ha[ve] access to forms of subjectivity, power, ways of being, and linguistic meaning that do not accrue to the visible or visio-tactile body” (5). Reading for sonic bodies thus becomes “a project of recuperation, of trying to imagine the ways in which sound or music . . . might take on some of the qualities of ‘the body,’ and, in doing so, challenge our notions of the body’s limits” (12).The six subsequent chapters each recuperate a distinct medieval sonic body, at times asking a quotient of readerly effort for its definition. These sonic bodies form a loose trajectory that expands in scope from the individual to the interpersonal to the communal and beyond. Chapter 1 offers thoughtful consideration of Jacobus quidam’s Speculum musicae, a conservative Continental summa of early fourteenth-century music theory and practice, alongside the writings of Richard Rolle, Jacobus’s insular contemporary best known for his mystical doctrine of heat, sweet, and song. Jacobus augments Boethian tradition by denominating angels’ immaterial, inaudible song properly musical; in related fashion, Rolle describes the mutual emergence of angelic song and beatific embodiment—that is, of a sonic body—in the mystical phenomenon he terms canor. Chapter 2 turns to Walter Hilton’s epistle Of Angels’ Song, which redescribes Rollean canor as a kind of interior touch liable to spiritual and medical discernment. In doing so, Hilton proposes a synesthetic sonic body whose dedifferentiated sense modalities and affective intensities render putative audition of canor more tractable to religious orthodoxy. Drawing on Lisbeth Lipari’s ethics of attunement and John Cage’s “silent” compositions, chapter 3 considers The Boke of Margery Kempe, cleverly drawing our attention not to Margery’s vocal outbursts but to the silences she strategically deploys around them so as to cultivate auditory interdependency with her historical and textual audiences. This oscillation between cacophony and quiet generatively expands what we might count as organized or meaningful sound in the Middle Ages; it performs the first of Bude’s intersubjective sonic bodies.A second such intersubjective sonic body features in chapter 4, which contains the monograph’s most striking treatments and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late fifteenth-century devotion in England. Here, Bude reads in parallel the spiritual diaries of Richard Methley and John Norton, confreres at Mount Grace, whose collaborative mystical reading and writing practice creatively adapts Rollean canor to their Carthusian context. Supported by an informative appendix, the chapter deftly maps the enactment of Methley and Norton’s epistolary friendship across a pair of manuscripts through whose pages a sonic body comes to be, shared not just between the two brothers but across the entire charterhouse. To conclude Sonic Bodies, chapters 5 and 6 turn to well-studied literary texts, Piers Plowman and a bundle of Chaucerian excerpts, to consider poetry’s particular affordances for sonic embodiment. Langland’s allegorical and alliterative techniques teach readers to detect sound objects in a manner reminiscent of composer Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic experiments, preparing us to recognize the unstable sonic body of Christian community gathered under the eschatological Barn of Unity. By regularly affiliating music performance with disorderly, illegitimate, and impaired figures, Chaucer populates his poems with sonic bodies whose promissory or “advental” integrity marks them as disabled within traditional Boethian frameworks of ethical musicianship. In turn, by adventally deferring music from his verse so as to claim music’s potency for his own art, Chaucer links musical disability with poetic making. Across his writings, “sonic bodies inhabit crip asyncronies for the purposes of poesis” (152)—that is, poetry serves as prosthetic substitute here and now for an able musical body always deferred to the future. A brief coda reiterates the political, ethical, and social utility of theorizing sonic bodies for our investigation of the Middle Ages.Sonic Bodies is at its strongest when it dwells inside its core theoretical concepts and elaborates how and why the enacted assemblages of sensation, affect, discourse, and matter it discovers in medieval texts yield a thing we might properly call a sonic body. Chapters 1, 3, and 4 achieve this task most capably, and the effect is thrilling: by the end of each of these chapters, Bude has gifted us with a textured and multidimensional model of what a body could be in the Middle Ages, its arcs of motion and relation paused so we can take that body up, turn it about in our hands, and consider its delicate dynamism as a livable practice of becoming, foundationally shaped by the modal specificities of sound. This is impressive and difficult work, which Sonic Bodies achieves through a combination of exposition and evocation, adducing relevant medieval and modern contexts to animate the theoretical distillate. The close readings are resourceful and frequently summon medieval sonic bodies into sudden, striking nearness. At its strongest, Sonic Bodies likewise amplifies the creative and conceptual domain of medieval sound, medieval music especially, to encompass phenomena that might otherwise go unrecognized as such. In this regard, Bude’s work is reminiscent of scholarship by figures like Nina Sun Eidsheim, Stefan Helmreich, and Salome Voegelin, who seek to dismantle Western ocular bias, rehabilitate sonic meaning, and cultivate vibrational auralities in alliance with Deaf Studies. By the book’s end, both body and music emerge notably more capacious in the medieval configurations they might describe, no small accomplishment.I say “body and music” rather than “body and sound” because Sonic Bodies is invested in music as the privileged sonic kind around which it organizes its theoretical and analytical work. The book repeatedly asserts that the sonic enactments it describes are musical: Margery’s silences “orchestrate a type of musical resonance in her readers” (80); Norton and Methley’s “intertwined manuscripts . . . embrace and perform their deeply collaborative musical expression” (103); Langlandian alliterative verse “is a sort of ameliorated or attenuated form of musique concrete” (134) whose “[m]eaning emerges . . . as musical meaning does: it is emotive” (141), a stance Pierre Schaeffer might contest. This insistence leads to the occasional shoehorning of sonic practices into a notion of music that is never clearly defined, at times belying the key concept that gives Sonic Bodies its title. We are never told what the stakes are behind retaining music as a master category while still denominating the bodies the book catalogs as specifically sonic. The distinction is not incidental; the field of sound studies was founded upon it in an effort to decenter music as the privileged category of aural experience, much as the field of visual culture studies was formed to help decenter the art historical canon and its attendant epistemological certitudes. A theoretical project as exciting and ambitious as Sonic Bodies needs conceptual precision; slippage between sound and music (cf. the quote from p. 12 above) gets in the way. Similarly, it is unclear whether there is meaningful difference between the sonic body (a definitional identity), sonic bodies (an open-ended class), and sonic embodiment (a lived state), and the effort it takes to describe the sonic body under consideration in some chapters amplifies this uncertainty.The monograph is less successful in incorporating critical frameworks beyond its core concerns. Chapter 2 on Hilton’s Of Angels’ Song is illustrative. It opens by noticing in John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn the same sense-blurring synesthesia it will soon identify in Hilton’s epistle. The comparison implies the postmedieval viability of sonic bodies, an exciting theoretical prospect but one that raises a knotty new question for the monograph: What, then, is distinctive about late medieval sonic bodies that Sonic Bodies should dwell on them? After an initial reading of Hilton’s epistle, chapter 2 turns to cognitive science, citing fMRI data–driven neurobiological research to support the comparison of spiritual sensation to “the modern biophysiological concept of the interoception” (41–42). The argument’s scientism is unconvincing. A brief art historical excursus follows to illustrate the unrepresentability of angelic touch, a point whose relevance to Hilton only becomes clear in the section’s closing paragraph; a miniature from British Library Royal MS 2.B.xv that does represent angelic touch and that receives sustained visual analysis is missing from the book’s figures. We next read that “all physical objects subsist in three spatial dimensions; touch, at most, encounters only surfaces, or two dimensions” (52), categorical Euclidean statements difficult to reconcile with the Merleau-Pontian phenomenological framework invoked on the next page. The passage’s one footnote points to modern particle physics to underline again the imaginariness of touch. The chapter closes with a consideration of medieval medical and musical tactus as an avenue back onto the firmer ground of Hilton’s text. Citational practices are overall uneven; the chapter’s analytical roadmap takes a number of digressive turns before it reaches its destination.At various points, Sonic Bodies also allies itself with contemporary social justice causes: Margery’s noisiness is antiheteropatriarchal punk avant la lettre (66); her silences echo protest techniques of the Black Lives Matter movement (78–79) and enact a “radical feminist politics” (90); Norton and Methley’s epistolary exchange exhibits “a polyamory of queer desire” (110). These gestures, while suggestive, are not integral to the critical work underway. Chapter 6 is the one exception: it engages substantively with disability studies to examine Chaucer’s instrumentalization of musically unable bodies to found his poetics. There is no question that these Chaucerian bodies are hierarchically debased; whether they are disabled is a more difficult question. We are told, for example, that “speculative music treatises of the medieval period mark bodies, minds, and affects as normative and nonnormative, as orderly or disorderly—in short, as abled or disabled—based on the type of music they perform.” Philosophers of music were the true musicians; rote singers were their mere “deanimated” instruments, “demoted from the ranks of humanity,” thus disabled (148). Such a reading too easily elides distinctions crucial to the social dimension of disability: rote musicians did not face marginalization and restricted social access because of their perceived rational incapacity, nor did they navigate a built world hostile to their embodiment. It also misses the opportunity to draw attention to medieval people whose disabilities intersected in fascinating ways with sound and music: lepers famously used clappers and bells to attract the almsgiving intentions of passers-by, and, as Julie Singer notes in her contribution to Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), the blind were often encouraged to become musicians due to their reputed keener hearing (45). Renowned Italian poet-composer Francesco Landini, whom Bude notes as Chaucer’s contemporary (152), was blind from childhood; in De inventione et usu musicae, music theorist Johannes Tinctoris recounts with admiration the music-making of blind violist brothers. Considering sonic bodies like these would have helpfully grounded Sonic Bodies’s engagement with disability studies in the lived lives of disabled historical subjects; it might also have encouraged the inclusion of medieval music among the book’s primary sources.I do not wish the queries and critiques I have raised here to outweigh the genuine admiration I have for Sonic Bodies. The International Piers Plowman Society has deservingly awarded it the Anne Middleton Book Prize in recognition of the book’s contributions to Langland studies. The book is ambitious and inventive; its readings are frequently revealing and its vision is bracingly capacious. It is possible, for instance, that I have not paid sufficient mind to the monograph’s form and style, which might mirror the logic of the sonic body whose looser configurations the book sets out to describe. What I have characterized as chapter 2’s digressive analytical plan might, for instance, practice an accretive style of argumentation in which process is more meaningful than pronouncement. If so, a helping rhetorical hand extended to the reader would have been welcome; especially for large-minded theoretical projects, clarity and creativity must always be equal partners, a balance Sonic Bodies sometimes misses. Ultimately, if I pressure this monograph, it is because I am so eager to understand the medieval sonic body it seeks to articulate, eagerness wholly creditable to the vigorous thought on the book’s every page. Sonic Bodies makes thinkable a differently embodied sonic past others will surely seek to play in

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Middle Ages · Politics · Silence · Diverse Musicological Studies · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy