obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

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).