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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.
Page 1 and 2: OBSCENITES RENAISSANTES Sous la dir
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Page 25: TABLE DBS MATIERES 493 Le sexe du d

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