obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

SINGING THE COURTLY BODY: THE CHANSON
LASCIVE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF OBSCENITY
As Hugh Roberts points out, Erasmus's Institution of Christian Matrimony (1^16)
contains the most wide-ranging discussion of obscenity of the entire sixteenth century. It
is all the more interesting, then, that the anecdote with which it opens - about a noblewoman
who accidentally swears in church - is immediately followed by an attack on the
purveyors of erotic stories and songs. Girls need protection not only from hearing swear
words, but from other sonorous forms of obscenity. Erasmus describes how storytellers
drip poison into tender ears, imagining the obscene as literally invading the listeners'
bodies in order to corrupt their minds. But in the case of music, instead of defending
girls from these incursions, parents misguidedly believe that familiarity with obscene
songs will enhance their daughters' standing within a courtly economy of social grace:
In some countries these days, as a sort of annual ritual, new songs are published for
girls to learn. Their themes are something like - a husband deceived by his wife,
a girl escaping her parents' vigilance, a secret tryst arranged with a lover. [...] To
these poisonous tales are added words of such obscenity, through euphemisms
and innuendo, that pure filth could not be filthier. A lot of people, especially in
Flanders, earn a living from such stuff; if the law were more vigilant, the authors of
these lullabies would be flogged by the hangman, and made to sing dirges, not dirty
songs. And yet these brazen corrupters of youth make a living from their crimes,
and there are even parents who think that civility consists, in part, that their
daughters should not be ignorant of such songs.'
It is not just the immoral stories and filthy words that constitute the obscenity of these
pieces. The music alone is able to communicate obscene content through a process
likened to physical gesture:
Translation adapted from Institution of Christian Matrimony, trans, by Michael J. Heath,
Collected Works of Erasmus, LXIX, Spiritualia and Pastoralia, ed. by John W. O'Malley and
Louis A. Peraud (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 415. For the Latin text see
Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden: Clericus, 1703-1706; reprint, Hiidesheim: Olms, 1961), V,
7i7f-7i8c; it is reproduced and extensively commented in Jean-Claude Margolin, Erasme et
la musique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965), pp. 16-23.