obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

OBSCENITES
RENAISSANTES
Sous la direction de
HUGH ROBERTS, GUILLAUME PEUREUX
et LISE WAJEMAN
Preface de MICHEL JEANNERET
LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A.
11, rue Massot
GENEVE
2011

Public avec le concours
de I'Arts & Humanities Research Council
ISBN: 978-2-600-01466-3
ISSN: 0082-6081
Copyright 2011 by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Geneve.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by
print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission.

II. L'OBSCENITE COMME
JEU DE FRONTIERES

INTRODUCTION
The contributions in this section investigate intersections of visual and sonic culture
with the literary obscene. Sexually transgressive images did not travel in isolation: the
Masons discussed by Cecile Alduy, for example, were accompanied by engravings, and
several were widely disseminated in musical settings. The rapidly evolving world of
print provided new arenas for these interactions between sight, sound and word, and
the configurations of obscenity they helped to articulate.
As the opening chapters of this book make clear, the nature of obscenity as a
category of reception or effect implies a continual process of definition and disruption
of boundaries between licit and illicit expression. Here we are partly concerned
with discerning how limits are established or tested, and how artists, writers and
musicians work around the variable borders of the obscene, often in highly selfconscious
or knowing ways. Many of the texts and images we discuss contain some
acknowledgement of transgression: that is, censorship - the drawing of limits
elsewhere - may be incorporated into the representation itself in some way. Gestures
toward the potential for offence serve not only as a forestalling device; the imagined
censorious reaction also acts to comment upon (and thus sometimes to heighten)
transgressive effects. Alduy uses filmic concepts to discuss this aspect of obscenity,
demonstrating how the Blasons anatomiques are framed and re-framed to create a
complex counterpoint between the permissible and the obscene that destabilizes the
very categories it purports to construct.
A related theme involves the demand for action as a component of the obscene: how
texts and images not only anticipate but provoke audience response. Patricia Simons's
paper is concerned with the solicitation of shock or condemnation, particularly
from women, as a mode of calling the obscene into being as meaningful, that is, as
transgression. Simons, Rebecca Zorach and I are all interested in how the corporeal
qualities of the visual or sonic image invoke corporeal responses, creating a somatic
circularity that profoundly disturbs the boundaries between representation and
action. Whether the action is complicit - as in the behaviour of the wedding guests in
Gohory's Amadis (Jeanice Brooks) - or resistant, involving defacement or destruction
(Zorach), this aspect of the obscene's proliferative energy was among its most troubling
qualities for contemporary actors. Tales of virtue, such as the story of Augustus's wife
Livia (discussed by Simons), thus often involve a refusal to engage in bodily reflexivity.
Some mid-century conduct books aimed at Protestant women recommend that they

no
JEANICE BROOKS
literally stop up their ears, avert their eyes and shut their mouths against lascivious
words, sounds and sights; like Livia's ostentatious non-reaction, these efforts to close
ofF bodily orifices to prevent penetration from the outside might be read as attempts at
short-circuiting the action of sights and sounds on the body to deny the obscene its very
existence as such.
Differences of rank as well as gender play an important role in defining boundaries.
As Simons points out, shock must be elicited from elite, 'honest' women, not courtesans
or low-class individuals. The imputation of sexual knowledge and unshockability
characteristic of the courtesan onto a high-status woman could thus function as an
act of aggression (as in the story of Cellini and Madame d'Estampes), and women
themselves had a stake in the performance of shock, at least in public. Gauging women's
reactions through sexually explicit imagery, as when a phallic chanson is sung for a
princess (Brooks) or a goblet with indecent images is given to a series of court ladies
(Simons), not only explored the nature of the obscene, but also tested the quality of
the woman.
Dissimulation of inappropriate emotions and reactions was a sign of the successful
courtier, and had a role in defining rank in male courtiers as well. As we are largely
concerned here with poems, art and music of courtly origin, the interrogation of these
dynamics becomes an important concern. The ability to package oneself - to render
one's performances beautiful - was prized, and included the skill of cloaking indecency
so as to render it acceptable. Disgust at this aspect of courtly aesthetics, the use of high
style to describe low things, lies behind some of the most stringent critiques, such as
Corrozet's condemnation of the blasonneurs (Alduy). When printed engravings and
songbooks began to disseminate images and music, that had previously been restricted
to courtly audiences, to new publics, they rendered the court newly vulnerable to the
accusations of dissipation and decadence that had characterized anti-aulic attacks since
the classical period. Joan Dejean has emphasized how print made material previously
restricted in circulation to elite men available to women and girls, whose ostensible
need for protection was a strong motivation for the emergence of the legal category of
obscenity. But since women already had access to potentially obscene material at court -
and indeed were essential to the courtly use of sexually transgressive images - the effect
of print may have been equally powerful in ripping things out of courtly performative
frameworks and making them available in new contexts, a shift that forces their
evaluation away from situational judgment and into the realm of categorical verdict.
Print thus encourages interpretations based on some concept of obscene content, a
problem that can lead to the blurring of a further boundary, that of time. As Zorach
points out, modern readings of sexually explicit material, particularly in the visual
domain, are often based on notions of a transcendent rather than historically specific
corporeality. Thus we believe we can differentiate the erotic from the obscene according
to our own preconceptions and readings of style; this may lead, for example, to the
aestheticization of court culture through art history (so that if something is judged
as art it cannot be obscene), or to efforts to use notions of civility to connect songs of

II. L'OBSCENITE COMME JEU DE FRONTIERES - INTRODUCTION 111
earthy physicality to popular rather than elite culture. But as Zorach remarks, obscene
effects may not have formed part of initial reception but may occur at any time. In the
case of defaced images, for example, it is often impossible to tell whether interventions
date from the sixteenth century or later. Other examples of such dislocation include
the marginalia - apparently from the seventeenth century - commenting on the
phallic poem in the Arsenal copy of Gohory's Amadis, or the late nineteenth-century
editor Henry Expert's suppression of certain songs in Costeley's Musique. And the
capacity of the obscene to trouble boundaries continues to the present day, for in
interrogating obscenity we are forced to confront our own reactions to the material, to
resist its insistent ability to disturb and to confuse, in order to historicize more fully
the emergence of an early modern notion of the obscene.
Les contributions de cette section etudient les rencontres entre I'obscene litterairc
et les cultures visuelles ou musicales. Les images sexuelles transgressives n'apparaissent
pas isolees d'un contexte : les hlasons poetiques commentes par C. Alduy, par exemple,
sent accompagnes de gravures, et certains de ces blasons ont ete mis en musique. Lessor
rapide de I'imprime a offert de nouvelles possibilites a ces interactions entre le mot,
rimage et le son, et a ainsi permis d'articuler de nouvelles configurations obscenes.
Ainsi que le montrent les chapitres d'introduction de ce livre, I'obscenite implique,
si on I'envisage comme une categoric ou un effet de reception, un processus continuel
de definition et de perturbation des frontieres entre ce qu'il est licite d'exprimer et
ce qu'il est illicite de dire. Dans ce chapitre, nous nous efforcerons notamment de
comprendre comment ces limites sont etablies ou mises a I'epreuve, et comment
les artistes, les ecrivains et les musiciens travaillent autour des frontieres variables de
I'obscene, souvent de maniere tres consciente ou savante. Nombre des textes et images
que nous commentons reconnaissent qu'ils sont transgressifs : ainsi certains procedes
permettent d'integrer la censure - en etablissant d'autres limites - a la representation
elle-meme. Designer son propre potentiel offensif ne permet pas seulement d'anticiper
sur la reception: les reactions de censure que I'cEuvre prete au recepteur permettent
aussi de produire un commentaire des effets transgressifs, parfois pour intensifier ces
derniers. C. Alduy recourt a des concepts d'analyse filmique pour traiter de cet aspect
de I'obscenite, montrant comment les Blasons anatomiques sont cadres et recadres pour
creer un contrepoint complexe entre ce qui est permis et ce qui est obscene, de telle
sorte que les blasons bousculent les categories que, precisement, ils pretendent etablir.
Un autre probleme, lie au precedent, est la fa(jon dont I'obscene peut pousser a
Faction: il s'agit de voir comment textes et images non seulement anticipent une
reaction du public mais la provoquent egalement. La contribution de P. Simons porte
sur la fa^on dont des oeuvres travaillent a susciter un choc ou une condamnation, en
particulier chez les femmes, de maniere a rendre I'obscene signifiant, c'est-a-dire

Ill
JEANICE BROOKS
transgressif. P. Simons, R. Zorach et moi-meme nous interessons toutes trois aux fa^ons
dont les qualites physiques de 1'image visuelle ou sonore suscitent des reponses physiques,
produisant une circularite somatique qui perturbe profondement les frontieres entre
representation et action. Que Ton consente a Taction {cf. le comportement des invites
au mariage dans VAmadis de Gohory, dans la contribution de J. Brooks), ou qu'on y
resiste, ce qui peut conduire a efFacer ou a detruire I'ceuvre (R. Zorach), on est pris par
I'energie proliferante de I'obscene, qui est Tune de ses plus troublantes caracteristiques
pour les hommes de I'epoque. Les exemples de vertu, comme I'histoire de Livia, femme
d'Auguste (dont parle R Simons), supposent souvent que Ion refuse de sengager dans
ce jeu reflexif des corps. Certains livres de bonnes manieres du milieu du siecle, destines
aux femmes protestantes, leur recommandent litteralement de se boucher les oreilles, de
detourner les yeux et de fermer leur bouche face aux sons, aux images et aux mots lascifs.
Livia, de fa^on ostentatoire, s'abstient de reagir; de meme, ces efforts pour fermer
les orifices du corps afin d'empecher toute penetration de I'exterieur peuvent etre lus
comme des tentatives pour circonvenir I'effet que les sons et les images pourraient avoir
sur le corps : il s'agit de nier I'existence meme de I'obscenite.
Les frontieres de I'obscene se definissent differemment selon la position sociale,
selon qu'on est un homme ou une femme. Comme le montre R Simons, c'est Telite,
ce sont les « honnetes » femmes qui doivent se montrer choquees, pas les courtisans
ou les individus de basses conditions. Ainsi, imputer a une femme de haut rang des
connaissances en matiere sexuelle, la traiter comme si elle ne pouvait etre choquee,
ce qui est un trait de courtisane, c'est une fa^on de I'agresser (comme dans I'histoire
de Cellini et de Madame d'Estampes commentee par R Simons), et les femmes ellesmemes
avaient tout interet a se montrer saisies, au moins en public. Jauger les reactions
des femmes par le biais d'images explicitement sexuelles, comme lorsqu'une chanson
paillarde est chantee pour une princesse (J. Brooks) ou que Ton fait passer un gobelet
decore d'images indecentes a des dames de la cour (R Simons), c'est non seulement
explorer la nature de I'obscene, mais aussi mettre a I'epreuve la qualite de la femme.
Savoir dissimuler des emotions ou des reactions inappropriees, c'est le propre
du courtisan qui reussit, et cela peut meme contribuer a definir le rang d'un homme.
Dans la mesure ou nous nous occupons essentiellement ici de poesie, dart et de
musique d'origine curiale, il est important de s'interroger sur ces dynamiques. On
prise I'art avec lequel le courtisan doit savoir se presenter et tenir un role, ce qui
suppose notamment qu'il ait la capacite de camoufler I'indecence de fagon a la rendre
acceptable. Certaines des critiques les plus rigoureuses, comme la condamnation par
Gilles Corrozet des blasonneurs (C. Alduy), s'expliquent ainsi par une aversion pour cet
aspect de I'esthetique dc cour, I'utilisation d'un style clcve pour decrirc des choses viles
notamment. Lorsque les gravures et les livres de chansons commencerent a diffuser
aupres de nouveaux publics des images et des musiques qui avaient ete auparavant
reservees a des audiences curiales, ils rendirent la cour vulnerable aux accusations de
dissolution et de decadence qui avaient caracterise les attaques anti-auliques depuis
la periode classique. J. Dejean a beaucoup insiste sur le fait que I'imprime a rendu

II. L'OBSCENITE COMME JEU DE FRONTIERES - INTRODUCTION 113
accessible aux femmes et aux filles des materiaux qui etaient a I'origine reserves aux
elites masculines. Le besoin notoire de protection qua la gent feminine a d'ailleurs
considerablement contribue a I'emergence de la categorie legale de I'obscenite. Pourtant
les femmes avaient deja acces, a la cour, a des materiaux potentiellement obscenes, et
leurs reactions etaient essentielles a I'usage curial des images sexuelles transgressives.
II se pourrait que I'effet de I'imprime soit d'avoir arrache des elements de ce
fonctionnement performatif de I'obscenite a la cour pour les inserer dans de nouveaux
contextes; ce changement oblige a ne pas les evaluer en fonction de la situation mais a
les soumettre a un verdict etabli en fonction de categories legates.
L'imprime engage ainsi a des interpretations fondees sur une certaine definition de
ce que serait un contenu obscene ; ce probleme peut conduire a rendre floue une autre
frontiere, celle du temps. Comme le montre R. Zorach, les lectures modernes dun
materiau explicitement sexuel, en particulier dans le domaine de I'image, s'appuient
souvent sur des conceptions transcendantes du corps plutot que specifiquement
historiques. Nous pensons pouvoir done distinguer la categorie de I'erotique de celle
de I'obscene en fonction de nos propres a priori et de nos conceptions des styles. Cela
peut mener, par exemple, a I'esthetisation de la culture de cour a travers I'histoire de
I'art (et reviendrait a considered que ce qui releve de I'art ne peut pas etre obscene), ou
bien a recourir a des notions de bienseance pour affirmer que des chansons terre-a-terre
relevent de la culture populaire plutot que de celle de I'elite. Mais comme le remarque
R. Zorach, si les effets obscenes peuvent ne pas avoir existe lors de la reception initiale,
ils peuvent se produire a n'importe quel moment. Dans le cas des images defigurees,
par exemple, il est souvent impossible de dire si les interventions datent du XVP
siecle ou si elks sont ulterieures. Les marginalia - datant apparemment du XVir
siecle - commentant le poeme phallique dans la copie de la Bibliotheque de I'Arsenal de
I'Amadis de Gohory, ou bien la suppression a la fin du XIX" siecle de certaines chansons
dans Musique de Costeley par I'editeur Henry Expert constituent d'autres exemples de
semblables bouleversements. Et la capacite qua I'obscene de brouiller les frontieres est
encore manifeste aujourd'hui, car en interrogeant I'obscenite nous sommes contraints
de confronter nos propres reactions au materiau, nous devons resister a son insistante
capacite a nous perturber et a nous troubler, afin de mieux cerner historiquement
r emergence dune definition de lobscene dans la premiere modernite.
Jeanice Brooks, University of Southampton

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY: THE CHANSON
LASCIVE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF OBSCENITY
As Hugh Roberts points out, Erasmus's Institution of Christian Matrimony (1^16)
contains the most wide-ranging discussion of obscenity of the entire sixteenth century. It
is all the more interesting, then, that the anecdote with which it opens - about a noblewoman
who accidentally swears in church - is immediately followed by an attack on the
purveyors of erotic stories and songs. Girls need protection not only from hearing swear
words, but from other sonorous forms of obscenity. Erasmus describes how storytellers
drip poison into tender ears, imagining the obscene as literally invading the listeners'
bodies in order to corrupt their minds. But in the case of music, instead of defending
girls from these incursions, parents misguidedly believe that familiarity with obscene
songs will enhance their daughters' standing within a courtly economy of social grace:
In some countries these days, as a sort of annual ritual, new songs are published for
girls to learn. Their themes are something like - a husband deceived by his wife,
a girl escaping her parents' vigilance, a secret tryst arranged with a lover. [...] To
these poisonous tales are added words of such obscenity, through euphemisms
and innuendo, that pure filth could not be filthier. A lot of people, especially in
Flanders, earn a living from such stuff; if the law were more vigilant, the authors of
these lullabies would be flogged by the hangman, and made to sing dirges, not dirty
songs. And yet these brazen corrupters of youth make a living from their crimes,
and there are even parents who think that civility consists, in part, that their
daughters should not be ignorant of such songs.'
It is not just the immoral stories and filthy words that constitute the obscenity of these
pieces. The music alone is able to communicate obscene content through a process
likened to physical gesture:
Translation adapted from Institution of Christian Matrimony, trans, by Michael J. Heath,
Collected Works of Erasmus, LXIX, Spiritualia and Pastoralia, ed. by John W. O'Malley and
Louis A. Peraud (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 415. For the Latin text see
Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden: Clericus, 1703-1706; reprint, Hiidesheim: Olms, 1961), V,
7i7f-7i8c; it is reproduced and extensively commented in Jean-Claude Margolin, Erasme et
la musique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965), pp. 16-23.

194 JEANICE BROOKS
And is not our own music, even leaving aside the foul language and disgusting
themes, full of frivolousness, not to say madness? There used to be a kind of performance
in which, without using words, the actors could represent whatever they
wished by no more than the movements of their bodies. It is similar with today's
songs: even without the words, you can still understand, from consideration of the
music alone, the filthy character of the theme.^
Erasmus's exposition of musical obscenity ends with a quote: As Aristotle said, "A foul
mouth will not shrink from foul deeds".' This points up how frequently the problem
of the obscene involves the potential passage from representation to action. Music is
especially implicated in the blurring of this border because it is already an action, so
that sexually transgressive texts become animated in sound and performed in time.
Composed music scripts aspects of delivery (dictating rhythms, pitches, and other
musical elements, to emphasize certain words or to colour their meaning in some
way) to produce and re-produce obscene images and narratives; words are transformed
into enactment through imitation of voices and sounds. Such effects can be written
in by composers, who may, for example, represent the speech of a female character by
dropping the lower voices for the setting of her lines, or mimic sighs by the strategic
placement of rests. In performance, singers could heighten these effects or introduce
new ones, by manipulating tempo, dynamic, and attack, changing vocal colour to
imitate cries, sighs or characters' voices, and exploiting other performance elements
such as facial expression and gesture. For Erasmus, such sonic animation of the obscene
in songs acts as inducement to further enactments of their illicit content outside the
performance. His call for censorship is motivated by concern that the performed will
become performative, bringing about what it purports to describe.
Erasmus's ire was especially aroused by the idea that some of his contemporaries
were making money from the production and dissemination of obscene songs. His
worries over the free circulation of obscene material suggest attitudes toward print
that would come to underpin the secular legal category of obscenity in the following
century. But in 15x5, music printing from moveable type was still in its infancy. Most
chansons were still transmitted with their music only in manuscript; those that were
printed usually appeared without musical notation. Only a few years later, the situation
would change dramatically when Pierre Attaingnant became the first to exploit a new
single-impression system for printing music that was both faster and cheaper than the
methods of his predecessors. In the decades following the appearance of his first music
print in 1518, he produced a staggering number of music books - the most successful
going through multiple editions - which were distributed all over Europe. His efforts
Institution, p. 427. Heath's translation elides this passage with the next, which concerns
instrumental dance music, but it is clear from the Latin text that Erasmus is still here
concerned with songs.

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 195
were supported from the beginning by a series of royal privileges, and further rewarded
in 1537 when he was named the first imprimeur et libraire du Roy en musique by Francois
I.' The bulk of his production was devoted to secular chansons; and this continued to be
the case for the firm of Le Roy & Ballard, who acquired the office of royal music printers
soon after Attaingnant's death in late 1551 or 155Z. The print market for music was soon
flooded with the kind of song Erasmus deplored. And alongside the Neoplatonic and
Petrarchan love lyrics that dominate the corpus stood a significant number of chansons
setting more explicit texts in a variety of registers, ranging from corporeal fantasies in
the style of the blason, to courtly texts in feminine narrative voices expressing lustful
wishes, to humorous or mock-rustic sexual and scatological anecdotes.
Attacks on secular song, often significantly indebted to Erasmus, feature in
discussions of bringing up girls through the rest of the century, and condemnation of
obscene songs - usually designated chansons lascives or impudiques - frequently marks
the polemic of the Wars of Religion.'' In both pedagogical and polemic texts, Protestant
writers were particularly apt to counterpose the licit singing of psalms against the
pernicious performance of secular songs. But while it is clear that for many early modern
writers, the notion of the chanson lascive could refer to a setting of an amorous text of
any kind, Erasmus here targets songs that depict and serve to stimulate female sexual
appetites. His concern with narrative and action also points toward a type of sexually
transgressive song that was a speciality of French poets and musicians. Their texts consist
of brief stories, often including direct speech, and the punchline generally involves
a strong physical image. They may feature stock characters such as the mal-mariie, a
frustrated young woman married to an old, impotent husband; rustic and pastoral
characters and settings are also common, though humour is sometimes generated by
imputing indecent behaviour to social elites. Settings of these texts in chanson prints
use a different musical style from that employed for standard love lyrics, deploying a
wide range of vivid musical effects to represent the progression of the narrative, often
On Attaingnant and the early history of music printing, see Stanley Boorman, 'Printing and
publishing of music', §1, 'Printing', in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, (accessed 6 April,
2.009) and Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant: Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
Jeanice Brooks, "'All you need is love": Music, Romance and Adolescent Recreation in
Sixteenth-Century France", in Attending to Early Modern Women - and Men, ed. by Amy
Leonard and Karen Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). On
obscenity in religious polemic, see Lise Wajeman's article below. Further on music in
particular, see Richard Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso: Music, Piety, and
Print in Sixteenth-Century France (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, zooo); Craig
Monson, 'The Council of Trent Revisited', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55
(zooz), 1-37; David Crook, 'A Sixteenth-Century Catalog of Prohibited Music, Journal of
the American Musicological Society, Gt (1009), 1-78.

196 JEANICE BROOKS
with particular emphasis on the punchhne.' Such pieces emerge as perhaps the most
physically immediate type within the large subset of chansons whose corporeal concerns
stand in stark contrast to the spiritualized eroticism of courtly love songs.
As in the Blasons anatomiques discussed by Cecile Alduy, printed chanson
collections present disconcerting juxtapositions: ethereal love lyrics and sexually
transgressive songs appear side by side without comment. The question of how to read
their relationship, within and outside the print, remains problematic. The office of royal
printer was awarded both to furnish music for use by royal musicians and to represent
the royal musical establishment to the outside world; and texts and music for both types
of song were overwhelmingly the work of court poets and musicians. Early scholarship
on the narrative chanson was often aimed, however, at recovering elements of popular
culture, and cast the sexually transgressive narrative chanson in opposition to settings
of love lyrics along high/low, courtly/popular axes.^ More recent studies that interpret
the pieces as examples of Bahktinian inversion do not fundamentally alter this pattern.'
While the often jarring juxtapositions of textual and musical languages between the lyric
and narrative chanson types and the lack of contextualizing paratext in music prints
tend to support oppositional readings, there has been little thought about whether
performance contexts and the ideologies of musical performance through which songs
were interpreted might offizr a different view. In fact we know almost nothing about
the performance of sexually transgressive songs, under what circumstances they might
be considered legitimate or obscene, much less how either music prints or musical
performance might figure in a broader history of obscenity in early modern France.
Melanie Marshall's research on Venetian dialect pieces and William Prizer's
work on Italian carnival song has shown how social elites used sexually transgressive
repertories that earlier scholarship had considered as popular in origin or function.
Whether in the streets during carnival, or in the homosocial environment of academies,
nobles had access to a range of extra-courtly settings for performance and audition
of obscene songs.® The court origins of so many sexually explicit French chansons
A good example is Clement M.zvots Martin menoitsonpourceau au marche, which circulated
in musical settings by Clement Janequin and Claude de Sermisy from 1535 at the latest; see
Jean-Pierre Ouvrard, 'Du narratif dans la polyphonic au XVIeme siecle: Martin menoit son
pourceau au marche - Clement Marot, Clement Janequin, Claudin de Sermisy', Analyse
Musicale, 9 (1987), 11-16.
For example, Patrice Coirault, La Formation de nos chansons folkloriques, 4 vols. (Paris:
Editions du Scarabee, 1953-63); Chansonspopulaires desXV' etXVI'sihles avec leurs melodies,
ed. by Theodore Ceroid (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1913; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1976).
For example, Kate van Orden, 'Sexual Discourse in the Parisian Chanson-. A Libidinous
K\v!Lvy\Journal of the American Musicological Society, 48 (1995), 1-41; van Orden situates her
interpretation by pointing (p. 3, footnote) to the long tradition of emphasizing text-based
'convtXy-gallois opposition' in chanson scholarship.
Melanie Marshall, 'Cultural Codes and Hierarchies in the Mid-Cinquecento Villotta
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southampton, 2.004); William F. Prizer,

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 197
suggests that further investigation might legitimately look within court practice
for other performance milieux. The letter of dedication to Ottaviano Petrucci's
Odhecaton A (1501), the first collection of polyphony to be printed by moveable
type, outlined the main occasions for the use of its contents, specifically mentioning
weddings and banquets.' However, studies of court spectacle have usually focused on
formal festivities, in which the musical components are generally large-scale settings
of elaborate ceremonial and occasional texts, often in Latin. In Dejean's reading, more
equivocal material was principally a feature of popular entertainments that have left
few documentary traces before the seventeenth century.'" Her association of crude or
sexually explicit content with popular events echoes the approach of some of the early
scholarship on the chanson literature. But in the Institution of Christian Matrimony,
Erasmus attributes the custom of boisterous weddings, where obscene songs, stories and
jokes are given free rein, to a desire for social climbing: in his view, such events do not
reflect popular practice but result from imitation of elite magnificence. Elsewhere in
the treatise his location of obscene behavior is cast in even more specifically anti-aulic
terms." Although it seems likely that Dejean was unaware of the large body of printed
chansons setting equivocal lyrics, their existence also argues against ephemerality and
gestures towards the emerging concept of the musical work, whose basic elements are
stably preserved through print.
Dejean's arguments on the emergence of a modern concept of the obscene rely
not only on the appearance of sexually transgressive material in print, but on how
print made such material available to groups whose perceived need for protection
led to secular censorship.'^ In this reading, transgressive content was tolerated if
'Facciamo pur noi carnevale-. Non-Florentine Carnival Songs of the Late Fifteenth and Early
Sixteenth Century,' in Musica Franca: Essays in Honor of Frank A. D'Accone, ed. by Irene
Aim, Alyson McLamore and Colleen Reardon (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1996), pp.
173-211.
A translation of the letterfigures in Bonnie J. Blackburn, 'Lorenzo de' Medici, A Lost Isaac
Manuscript, and the Venetian Ambassador,' in Musica Franca, pp. 19-44 (pp. 33-34)-
'There was probably a good deal of sexually transgressive content in such popular genres as
mime and Fescennine [«V] (a type of verse featured at weddings and harvest festivals), genres
that would not have respected the rule of formal elegance. [...] Such forms of ephemeral
sexually transgressive material are so hard to document, at any period but the present day,
that I limit my discussion to works whose circulation was more traditional' Dejean, The
Reinvention of Obscenity, p. 133, n. 9.
'The wedding will be considered beggarly unless a horde of aristocrats, grandes dames,
plutocrats, and other notables is invited to the feast. A so-called respectable wedding is
one where vast sums of money are squandered on frippery [.. . ] and where licence is freely
granted to filthy language and silly pranks.' {Institution, pp. 348-9). Further on (p. 350),
Erasmus complains that the marriage sacrament is sullied by 'silly games, laughter, lutes,
pipes, foolery, and dancing.' On how scandalously girls are brought up at court 'in certain
countries', see p. 414.
Dejean, The Reinvention of Obscenity, p. 7.

198 JEANICE BROOKS
limited in circulation to elite men, as it was in classical antiquity when the Latin term
obscenitas enjoyed its first life. Consideration of music prints complicates this picture.
Music books circulated sexually transgressive material in several different ways: song
texts could be read on their own, and the musically literate could get an idea of the
techniques used to heighten the imagistic or pictorial aspect of some of the settings.
Music literacy was an elite or professional attainment, and access via print to the
effects songs contain was reduced even for the musically literate, since music books
were published in partbooks rather than in score. That is, the full impact of any given
piece is available only through realized sound, supporting to some extent the notion
of limited circulation. However, there is considerable evidence that elite women were
musically literate and skilled enough to produce performances of this material, and
Erasmus declares disapprovingly that their ability to do so was in fact considered by
many of his contemporaries as a sign of elite status. Furthermore, musical literacy was
not necessary to hear and understand musical performances; once print made sexually
transgressive songs widely available, musicians could produce them for audiences who
were not themselves capable of reading music books. Components of delivery added in
performance do not figure at all in the prints. If obscenity is considered as a relation
between content and effect - the reaction to sexually explicit material that marks it
as obscene - musical culture of the sixteenth century offers a range of different sites
of reception in which that effect could be produced. The situation is complex, and it
is useful to distinguish analytically between types of dissemination (print versus
performance) and types of engagement (performers versus listeners) in interrogating
the relationship of the love lyrics that make up the majority of the chanson literature,
and the large subgroup of cruder or more sexually explicit songs.
Detailed accounts of song performance are scarce from this period, however, and
aside from the blanket condemnations of lascivious music that figure in moralizing
or polemic texts, descriptions of how sexually explicit chansons were performed and
received are almost nonexistent. This renders all the more valuable the musical episodes
in the thirteenth installment of the serial romance Amadis de Gaule, translated by
Jacques Gohory. Le Trezieme livre d'Amadis is an example of sexually transgressive
courtly print material in its own right, and it also includes a musical episode that
suggests court contexts in which sexually transgressive song performances may have
been not only tolerated but encouraged.
The French Amadis was the publishing sensation of the century, but its early success
was in direct proportion to its later fall from grace." Michel Simonin shows that the
Spanish model texts were condemned by moralists such as Vives and Guevara before
mid-century. French translations of Spanish attacks on chivalric romance in general
13 On the series see Les Amadis en France au XVIe siecle, ed. by Robert Aulotte, Cahiers V.
L. Saulnier, 17 (Paris: Editions rue d'Ulm, 2.000); Marian Rothstein, Reading in the
Renaissance: Amadis de Gaule and the Lessons of Memory (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1999).

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 199
and Amadis in particular were soon in circulation, rapidly joined by similar assaults
on the novel by French critics. Notably, French condemnations of Amadis often
bracket it together with Ovid, bringing the vernacular novel into dialogue with the
themes William McKenzie discusses above. These attacks frequently took an antiaulic
turn, with Amadis cast as the mirror of a dissipated court culture, where elegant
language and stylized manners serve only as cover for depraved sexual behaviour.'"^ By
1571 the chorus of disapproval was loud, and Gohory accordingly uses the preface of
the Trezieme livre to defend the book against charges of lasciviousness. Fiis argument
uses charges of hypocrisy to evoke the very desiring woman whose portrayal within
the novel had been targeted by moralizing attacks. He first seems to agree with the
'mesdisans' who claim that the love episodes in the novel could be considered 'un peu
gayes et lascives.' However, this is only to be expected in a recreational work; and he
reels off a list of authorities who recommend recreational reading to balance more
serious activity, especially for princes and other elites who require such relaxation
from their efforts in civil and military domains. The 'scrupuleux et facheux', who deny
the usefulness of recreation, should just not read the novel - or else get someone to
mark the chapters that might contain objectionable things so they can avoid them. He
closes with a scornful comment about hypocrites who read romances but pretend not
to, using them as primers for relationships with their lovers while condemning their
lasciviousness:
sans y epargner les damoiselles qui ont confesse a leurs amans, que le soir que leur
maistresse commandoit de estaindre les lumieres, elles les avoient leuz a la lueur des
tisons, lesquelles neantmoins a d'autres gentilshommes qui louoient les Amadis les
disoient estre trop dissolus: 6 les sucrees 6 les tendrettes, pour ainsi deguiser sous
le masque de gravite ou Gel de severite, le doux miel qu'elles y avoient savoure des
amoureux delices.''
This blast at female readers and their dissimulation comes to seem disingenuous, for it
is precisely this aspect of response that is underlined by his depiction within the novel
of how noblewomen should handle encounters with sexually suggestive material. And
Gohory's preface evokes another central quality of the obscene dynamic, in which
charges of sexual immorality - whether proffered by others, or ostensibly refuted -
serve to articulate the obscene and thus contribute to its proliferation. Reading
Gohory's preface alongside the musical episode that closes the novel suggests that the
spectre of condemnation, like the figure of the hypocritical woman reader, is here
deliberately evoked both to heighten the transgressive effect and to defuse it by seeking
14 Michel Simonin, 'La disgrace d'Amadis', Studi Francesi, 18 (1984), 16-19.
15 Jacques Gohory, Le Trezieme livre dAmadis de Gaule (Paris: Breyer, 1571), 'Preface aux
lecteurs' (unfoliated).

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JEANICE BROOKS
readerly complicity. Gohory uses the putative shocked reaction of prudish 'scrupuleux'
and the vyanton lust of the 'sucrees' both to titillate and to invoke a sophisticated audience
who are, in contrast, capable of enjoying erotic material as recreation in a civilized,
courtly and indeed almost morally superior manner.
Le Trezieme livre d'Amadis ends with an episode in which nine courageous knights
who have endured several volumes' worth of adventures in pursuit of their ladies are
finally married to their beloveds. Gohory's description of the wedding features both
formal and informal entertainments, and includes song texts for several musical
components. It begins with a song performed by imperial musicians, set as a pavan
(the musical idiom most often used for processionals); the text Gohory supplies is
a classicizing epithalamium complete with the Latinate refrain 'Hymen Hymen 0
Hymen' addressing the god of marriage (fol. 330'). After the wedding Mass, the newlyweds
return to the palace for a banquet accompanied by music from the 'menestriers
de la grande bande' followed by dancing until suppertime; supper is followed by a
staged marine battle complete with Tritons and monsters, and a Pyrrhic dance by the
nine knights in regional costume. Until this point, Gohory's narrative - including his
elaborate descriptions of the participants' sumptuous dress - corresponds closely to
published accounts of court festivals.The company then breaks into conversational
groups spread around the room, and are entertained by three performers who between
them articulate a whole catalogue of difference from the noblemen they serve: Darinel,
a shepherd; Busend, a dwarf jester; and an unnamed African female dancer. The
song texts each one performs are included, identified as the work of 'Suave', Gohory's
pseudonym and the name of a tutor character in the novel who functions as his
alter ego.^^
Gohory signals the less formal performance register by emphasizing how Darinel
and Busend decide to 'donner plaisir a la compagnie tel qui leur sembla que la
matiere des nopces meritoit': that is, the performance is unscripted in the celebratory
choreography, but the content is inspired by the occasion and its meanings, 'c'est a
savoir a chanter de la beaute de I'amour'. That 'amour' in its corporeal dimension is the
'matiere des nopces' becomes clear from the song texts. Darinel's Chanson de la Beaute
was written by Suave in honour of Pentasilee, the beloved of his young charge Sylves de
la Selve. It is a complex blason that schematically dissects the princess's body into 'trente
16 On Pyrrhic dance, included in court pageantry from the 1540s, see Kate van Orden, Music,
Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1005),
pp. zi8-ii. Marine spectacles figured in court festivals at Fontainebleau (1564) and Bayonne
(1565); see Frances A. Yates, The Valois Tapestries (London: The Warburg Institute, 1959;
repr., London: Routiedge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 56-57.
17 On Gohory's use of the pseudonym, see Willis Herbert Bowen, 'Jacques Gohory (1510-1576)'
(unpublished doctoral thesis. Harvard University, 1935); Rosanna Gorris, 'Pour une lecture
steganographique des Amadis de Jacques Gohory,' in Les Amadis en France au XVI' Steele,
pp. 117-56.

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY
loi
beautez', ten groups of three elements sharing the same attribute (fol. 3340- The praise in
several of the triplets tacks between the visible and the concealed, as in lines 4 ('Sourcils
noir, noire chose et les yeux'), 10 ('La chose estroitte et bouche et le corsage') and 11
('Levre grossette et la fesse et cuissage'); only the mouth and 'la chose' are mentioned
twice, focusing attention on these two orifices. Busend then strikes up his own Chanson
de I'Amour, whose text is 'extrait d'un vieil Romain' (fol. 335"). This little story of how
the penis lost his ears continues the theme of bodily fragmentation, personifying the
male member and describing how he jumps up on contact with a woman's breasts when
he thinks he will regain ears stolen long ago to form female nipples. In its poetic form
as well as the unfurling of the narrative, complete with salacious punchline and quoted
speech, it strongly resembles the kind of sexually transgressive narrative song that
regularly circulated in contemporary printed songbooks. Here, however, the line 'taken
from an old Roman' alerts the reader of a classical context. Busend's song aims to evoke
the Latin genres offescennini, bawdy wedding songs, and Priapea, humorous phallic
pieces. According to Aristotle, the genre of comedy began with phallic songs used to
accompany processions; this, along with Augustine's description of a bride sitting on
the phallus of the god Mutunu Tutunus, provided textual authority for the notion that
both verbal and physical representations of the phallus regularly figured in classical
wedding ceremonies.'®
The final song is performed by a 'Negre de Sabee, Baladine fort plaisante' who
sings and dances 'le cantique de I'antique Roine de sa region en son langage' (fol. 336').
Gohory supplies the translation into French by 'Suave' of the Queen of Sheba's song, as
well as a response for King Solomon. Presented as a set of quatrains, the dialogue is a
free rendition of passages from the lyrico-erotic Song of Songs, describing the bride's
desire for her husband, his welcome of her to the marriage bed and his enumeration
of the extraordinary beauty and erotic effects of her various body parts. The evocation
of feminine and then masculine desire echoes the dialogue between female and
male primary obscenities traced by the previous pair of songs, while returning to the
marriage topos of the opening epithalamium. This Biblical reworking of earlier themes
associates them not only with Christian marriage, but the standard contemporary
exegesis of the Song of Songs also links them to the marriage of Christ and the Church;
such a symbolic project fits with Gohory's broadly Neoplatonic approach to eroticism,
which seeks to integrate erotic and spiritual meanings within a humanistic Christian
framework.''
Gohory's description of the courtly audience's response to each performance
operates careful distinctions between listeners. The reception embraces intellectual
18 Aristotle, Poetics, i449aii; Augustine, City of God, 6.9, 7.24. My thanks to Patricia Simons
for these references, and for drawing the classical context to my attention; thanks also to
Leofranc Holford-Strevens for further discussion of classical fescennini.
19 Further on how this approach informs Gohory's treatment of music, see Jeanice Brooks,
'Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance', Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 1207-56.

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JEANICE BROOKS
reactions - the blason is admired by poetry connoisseurs in the audience for its
structural complexity as well as its content but it is more strongly marked by corporeal
response. The blason, for example, makes Pentasilee blush, for its causes other audience
members, especially the young men, to stare at her from head to foot, mapping the
song onto her own body as each part is enumerated. The penis song generates both
ribald laughter and a gut reaction in female listeners, who are 'chatouillees en la ratte'
('tickled in the viscera'). Busend first sings this piece in a corner for a small group of
young women, but at the initial sounds others, including higher-ranking and
dames, move from elsewhere in the room to hear it. Arriving after the song but not after
the laughter it has sparked, the recent arrivals insist on a repeat; and the point that the
performer is not only singing about bodies, but using his own to produce the sound,
seems to be emphasized when Busend s master threatens to literally beat the song out of
him unless he performs it again for the wider audience.
Gohory's description underlines the degree to which noble women must dissimulate
to live up to courtly expectations. Pentasilee must hide her discomfiture with a graceful
blush when the others stare at her so intently that she is 'en danger, si elle n'eust este
trop bien apprinse, de perdre contenance'. Erotically stimulated women must pretend
to be unperturbed, although both those who laugh and those who adopt the 'masque
de gravite' are equally titillated by the phallic song (note, too the return of the mask
image from Gohory's preface). The description conforms closely to the well-known
recommendations of Castiglione's Magnifico, who in describing the court lady says that
when confronted with lascivious talk she should not withdraw in a huff; at the same
time, her own speech must be decent and she must not demonstrate too much sexual
knowledge.^" The connection to dissimulation as a quintessentially courtly art seems clear,
but Gohory's text also points to the importance of female response as an exciting erotic
element and/or a defining attribute of obscenity, as Patricia Simons's work on visual
culture suggests above. Further in keeping with the courtly concepts of theatricality and
interiority, overlaps and contrasts between public and private behaviours and thoughts
are continually evoked: the anatomical songs make the newly-wedded men anticipate
later, private 'anatomie[s] de beaute' of their ladies; the scene closes as lovers retreat into
their 'soulas prive' after the imaginative rehearsal provided by the 'deduits publiques.'
After the blason, Pentasilee's would-be lover Sylves is 'transi' in a swoon-like interruption
of physical mobility, frustrated at his own restriction to a purely imaginary view of
the female anatomy, unlike the newly-weds. Gohory's manipulation of public/private
images contributes to a blurring of boundaries between representation within the song
performances and actions outside of them, boundaries that the juxtaposition of the song
texts with the description of listeners' embodied reception has already muddled.^'
10 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. by Daniel Javitch, trans, by Charles S.
Singleton (New York: W. W, Norton, xooi),
11 Compare this to Erasmus's account of how flaunting female beauty at weddings makes
young women available for imaginary couplings whose effects on their chastity are hardly

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 203
The fluctuating nature of another kind of boundary - between permissible and
forbidden expression - is explicitly addressed when the narrative voice pauses to remark
that marriage festivities justify trespass against the usual rules of decency: 'chacun a
I'occasion de nopces s'adonnant volontiers a toute resjouissance, voire aucunement
excusable si elle passoit le moins du monde les bornes de la modestie en tels lieux
acoustumee' (fol. 335'). That is, the 'occasion des nopces' leads to the 'matiere des
nopces': the wedding functions as licence in both senses of the word, granting authority
for sexually charged images and behaviour that would be considered immodest in
other circumstances. The focus on fertility and reproduction the wedding requires
is presented as legitimizing bodily celebration; but the attempt at justification, as in
Gohory's preface, has the opposite effect. This excuse for immodesty, which precedes
the account of Busend's initial reluctance to repeat his phallic song, provides a strong
build-up to the song itself and underlines the potential for opprobrium even if
unrealized within the text. Licentiousness is carefully prepared as such, and borders
are evoked only so that they may be flouted. However, a Bakhtinian 'world-upsidedown'
reading of the wedding seems unwarranted, since the crossing of the 'bornes
de la modestie' here reinforces in obvious ways the structure of court social relations.
Servants, rustics, women and elite men all act in ways consistent with their access to
power outside the festive context. In anthropological terms, the event is an example
of cultural remission - involving the relaxation of normal codes of behaviour - rather
than inversion; no reversal happens in this collective engagement in festive licence, and
the event does not act as release for social inferiors (whether that release is considered
a force for change, or one reinforcing extra-festive structures of oppression). The event
Gohory imagines differs sharply in this regard from charivaris, carnival festivities and
other disorderly rites of inversion that have drawn the attention of literary scholars.
Gohory's highly literary wedding scene, with its virtuoso rewriting of the erotic
marriage in multiple registers and its weaving of classical, biblical and contemporary
models with self-commentary, is of course not a straightforward description of
court practice. And while he evokes his characters' responses to songs, the Trezieme
livre provides only their texts, without describing musical elements that may have
characterized their settings. Strong connections with music at court are suggested,
however, by intriguing overlaps between this episode and contemporary songbooks.
Most revealing is comparison with the Musique of the royal keyboard player Guillaume
Costeley, which appeared in print a year before the novel. Both books carry dedications
less real than actual sexual activity: 'It is humiliating, not honourable, for a blushing
young virgin [... ] to be exposed to the lustful eyes of the young men [...] A virgin has lost
something of her chastity if she has delighted so many eyes, has awoken desire, has been
pursued by lustful cries and perhaps appeared by night in someone's dreams and suffered
defilement, so to speak, as the plaything of a phantom.' Institution, p. 350.
For a review of various approaches to such events, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and
Culture in Early Modern France, rev. edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 101-03.

104 JEANICE BROOKS
to Catherine de Clermont, and Costeley's volume features a prefatory poem by Gohory
himself, the earliest of a series of poems and prefaces Gohory contributed to Le Roy
& Ballard music prints between 1570 and 1373.^' Costeley's book also contains at least
one setting of a poem by Gohory, 0 comhien est heureux celuy qui se contente, which
had figured as a song in Gohory's Onzieme livre d'Amadis de Gaule (1551). Two other
pieces are notable for their resonance with the Trezieme livre: Muses chantez le loz de
la Princesse, which appears to be a formal wedding song along the lines of Gohory's
epithalamium, and Que de baisers de sa bouche, a different French translation of
the same passage from the Song of Songs that Gohory used as the basis for his own
rendition. In the rest of Costeley's volume, settings of high-register Neoplatonic and
Neopetrarchan love texts by Ronsard and other court poets mingle with occasional
pieces (celebrating military victories, praying for the king's recovery from fever, and
so on), alongside a healthy dose of sexually transgressive songs of varying types.
Among these are Elle craint I'esperon, humorous advice on how to handle a sexually
inexperienced but willing woman that might have seemed particularly apt as a wedding
joke, and many pieces about sexual encounters involving rustic or pastoral characters
such as Robin, Colin, and Guillot, whose function as either topic or narrator echos that
of Darinel in Gohory's novel.^"^
Costeley's book was published the same year as the real wedding between Charles
IX and Elisabeth d'Autriche, and the publication of Gohory's novel coincided with the
entry of the royal spouses into Paris the following year. Hope for the rapid appearance
of progeny to continue the Valois line during a time of politico-religious instability
no doubt encouraged even more than usual the imagery of fecundity and abundance
that was already such a strong component of courtly representational strategy, and
celebration of the wedding may well have involved informal performance of sexually
explicit chansons in circumstances similar to those Gohory describes in Amadis. The
novel's connection with music by a favoured chamber music performer seemingly
personally known to Gohory lends weight to the notion that musical elements in the
Trezieme livre % idealized festivities contain some residue of contemporary performance
practice. At the least, they suggest that analysis of compositional techniques, and
13 On Catherine, Gohory and Adrian Le Roy, see Jeanice Brooks, 'Chivalric Romance, Courtly
Love and Courtly Song: Female Vocalicy and Feminine Desire in the World of Amadis de
Gaule\ in Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. by Thomasin
LaMay (Aldershot: Ashgace, 2.005), PP- 68-71. A list of Gohory's prefaces figuresin Brooks,
'Music as Erotic Magic', p. 1251, Cosceley's Musique (Paris; Le Roy & Ballard, 1570) is edited as
three fascicles, Les Maitres musiciens de la Renaissancefranfaise ed. by Henry Expert (Paris:
Leduc, 1894-1908; repr., New York: Broude, n.d.); pieces suppressed by Expert, including the
intensely scatological Grossegarce noire et tendre, are edited as vol. 8 of The Sixteenth-Century
Chanson, ed. by Jane Bernstein, 30 vols (New York: Garland, 1987-95).
14 Among the most amusing is Le jeu, le riz, le printemps, on the sexual prowess of 'Colin',
whose ability is likened to that of a good keyboard player; the joke would have been
especially appreciated by those who heard Costeley perform it himself.

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 105
speculation about performance elements that may have contributed to the corporeal
responses Gohory imagined, might usefully start with Costeley.
For the purposes of this book, however, it is more important to note how both
Costeley's Musique and Gohory's Amadis enter the print market as court products,
and what this means to emerging notions of obscenity. Whatever their relation to
originating context may have been, both volumes appeared in the new context of print
culture as representations of courtly performances. By 1571, the tradition of reading
the Amadis romances as a mirror of court practice was well established; Gohory's
dedication of the book to a leading court noblewoman and his claim that he wrote the
book at her request merely confirms an existing link. Costeley's self-identification as
'organiste ordinaire et vallet de chambre du treschrestien et tresinvincible roy de France
Charles IX' in the title of his book; his dedicatory poems to the king and the Comte
and Comtesse de Retz; his engraved portrait in fashionable courtly dress; the liminary
poetry to Costeley by court poets such as Remy Belleau and Jean-Antoine de Baif; and
the royal privilege and visual symbols of monarchy stamped on the book by the royal
printers, all combine to overdetermine the courtly origins of his Musique.
Costeley's book appears as representation of his own performances for the courtly
patrons he serves, however ventriloquized through the rustic voices some of his songs
adopt. In the Trezieme livre, though 'Suave' is the author of their song texts, Gohory's
performers are low-status men and a black woman, and they play musette, cittern and
percussion, not the lutes and harps that accompany the Petrarchan love-complaints of
aristocratic singers earlier in the narrative. While these differences and the location
of the performers' voices in the bodies of a rustic, a disabled fool and an exoticized
foreigner appear to distinguish them sharply from their noble listeners, the somatic
response of the audience to their songs in turn breaks these distinctions down. Gohory
insists on this mimetic reaction to sexual imagery both in terms of erotic stimulation
during the span of the performance, and re-enactment of the song content afterwards.
The wedding episode thus not only involves bending the 'rules of modesty', it also seems
to underline basic impulses that join the different social strata. While at a textual level
rustic or exoticizing topoi allow for the handling of sexual narratives at one remove
from courtiers themselves, their performance here brings courtly bodies into alignment
with other bodies, underlining their connection through physical experiences of
sexuality as well as communal ideological concepts such as investment in fertility.
Emphasis on such somatic circuits through musical performance is not unique
to the sixteenth century (or to Western music), as studies on contemporary popular
music, for example, have amply demonstrated.^' What is significant in relation to
sixteenth-century French culture is the way that courtly products such as Gohory's
2-S For an especially valuable discussion of these issues see Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On
the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 12.3-44 and
Z03-25.

io6
JEANICE BROOKS
novel or Costeley's songbook reinforce Erasmus's mapping of this performance
ideology onto elite culture. In relation to the emerging notion of obscenity, this
becomes intensely problematic despite (or even because of) attempts to dislocate
bodily response by attributing it to non-elites, or to defuse it through humour or
other attempts to establish audience complicity. Torn from any licensing structure
that may have characterized the real performance of sexually transgressive songs at
court and launched into new contexts determined by print, such volumes fostered a
connection between sophistication and sleaze that allowed obscenity to be conceived
in anti-aulic terms, a problem that only intensified when charges of obscenity become
a weapon of confessional dispute during the religious wars. This failure successfully to
control readings of sexual imagery, once print had begun to disseminate accounts of
court practice far beyond the court's own confines, may have served to motivate some
of the reorientations of French court culture in the early seventeenth century. When
the royal court began slowly to reformulate, after the paroxysms of the 1580s and
1590S, the concept of honnetete began to play a newly central role. The courtly artistic
production of the previous century was regularly characterized as crude by seventeenthcentury
actors; and though much sexually explicit material continued to be produced,
it was often segregated into new kinds of publication such as the receuils satyriques
discussed by Guillaume Peureux. Sexually transgressive songs largely disappeared from
the volumes of secular vocal music so tellingly labelled airs de cour, and while court
composers continued to exploit pastoral imagery in their songs, the highly sexualized
rustic and more explicit corporeality of earlier music prints all but vanished. Within
the officially sanctioned representional arena represented by the royal music printer,
that is, courtly bodies begin to sing in new and different ways.
Jeanice Brooks, University of Southampton

TABLE DES MATIERES /
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 7
Preface 9
MICHEL JEANNERET
Introduction 15
GUILLAUME PEUREUX, HUGH ROBERTS, LISE WAJEMAN
Avertissement 14
I. LE MOT ET LA CHOSE
Introduction 27
EMILY BUTTERWORTH
I. Defining Obscenity 31
EMILY BUTTERWORTH
z. From Latin to French
Z.I Ovidian Obscenity in Renaissance France 39
WILLIAM McKENZIE
2.2 Obscenity and the /ex Catulliana:
Uses and Abuses of Catullus 16 in French Renaissance Poetry 48
PHILIP FORD
3. Preliminaires a I'obscene : le Moyen Age « gaulois » 63
NELLY LABERE. HELEN SWIFT
4. From Word to Thing
4.1 'L'Obscene' in French Renaissance Texts 87
EMILY BUTTERWORTH, HUGH ROBERTS
4.2 Emblem Books • 93
HUGH ROBERTS
4.3 Erasmus 100
HUGH ROBERTS

492- TABLE DBS MATIERES
11. L'OBSCENITE COMME JEU DE FRONTIERES
Introduction 109
JEANICE BROOKS
Gender, Sight and Scandal in Renaissance France 115
PATRICIA SIMONS
« La terre encor aux ongles demouroit » : definir I'obscene
dans le champ visuel 129
REBECCA ZORARCH
Archeologie dun gros plan : semiologie du sexe imprime
AznsXcs Blasons anatomiques du corpsfeminin 163
C£CILE ALDUY
Singing the Courtly Body: The Chanson lascive and the
Performance of Obscenity 193
JEANICE BROOKS
III. LOBSCENE COMIQUE
Introduction 109
JOSEPH HARRIS
La revoke du Membre : epopee organique et dissidence stylistique
dans la litterature medicale renaissante
DOMINIQUE BRANCHER
Obscene Laughter and Renaissance Comedy 237
JOSEPH HARRIS
L'euphemisme comique et les limites de I'obscenite au debut du XVIP siecle 247
HUGH ROBERTS
Uncivil Conversation: Etienne Tabourot's£icri2i^««

TABLE DBS MATIERES 493
Le sexe du diable : I'obscenite dans les textes demonologiques 319
MARIANNE CLOSSON
Construction de I'obscenite dans les narrations facetieuses :
d'une scene al'autre 335
MICHELE CLfiMENT
Le scandale de Rabelais: une Renaissance contre-nature 349
PETER FREI
V. POLITIQUE DE L'OBSCENE
Introduction 365
LISE WAJEMAN. GUILLAUME PEUREUX
Censured and Censored: Reactions to Obscenity 367
EMMA HERDMAN
Six questions sur la notion d'obscenite dans la critique rabelaisienne . . . 379
ARIANE BAYLE
Usages Chretiens de I'obscenite 393
LISE WAJEMAN
L'obscenite satyrique (1615-1612) 409
GUILLAUME PEUREUX
The Destruction and Re-Creation of Obscenity in
Seventeenth-Century Pornographic Prints 413
RUSSELL GANIM
Conclusion 441
LISE WAJEMAN. GUILLAUME PEUREUX. HUGH ROBERTS
Bibliographic generate 445
Index 475
Table des illustrations 487
Table des matieres 491