obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

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.