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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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