obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

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.