Evan MacCarthy (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Musical Erudition and Humanist Ethics in Fifteenth-Century Italy”

After having removed all roughness or lack of refinement, and thereby ignorance, those possessing erudition claim expertise and authority over their field of study. The discerning judgments of the erudite, enabled by deep learning together with visual and aural (and other sensory) perception, have established long-held patterns and modes of literary and artistic taste, discretion, and ingenuity. Fifteenth-century poetic and musical texts frequently refer to training one’s eyes or ears to become erudite, to championing those who possess them, or to acknowledging the discerning evaluations they facilitate and their effect in the cultivation of virtue. These texts also provide detailed comparisons of each organ's strengths and weaknesses as sources of knowledge, tools of judgement, and media of pleasure and devotion. But what ultimately constituted an “erudite” sense of sight or hearing, and how did ideas of earlier authorities inform these senses and their refinement toward a more advanced giudizio dell’occhio or dell’orecchio? Examining Latin and Italian treatises on music and the visual arts, together with contemporary humanist fables, allegories, and dialogues by the likes of Leon Battista Alberti and Giannozzo Manetti, this paper investigates the affinities between discourses concerning the ears and eyes of erudite listeners and viewers as the relationships between knowledge, perception, and beauty evolved in early modern Italy.

Michael Randall (Brandeis University), “The Good, The Bad, and Human Salvation in Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Concorde des deux langaiges (1511)”

La Concorde des deux langaiges by Jean Lemaire de Belges is divided, grosso modo, into two parts.  The first, in which the protagonist visits a Temple of Venus is highly redolent of the ethos of Jean de Meung’s section of the Romance of the Rose (1278c).  In the Concorde, as happened in the Rose, a character called Genius, who is the archdeacon of Nature, makes a sermon in which he tells the protagonist that he needs to follow the urges of Nature.  In the second part of the poem, the protagonist, having been tossed out of the Temple of Venus, comes across an austere Temple of Minerva, which is located on the summit of a rocky peak.  Here, the protagonist is encouraged by a character called Labeur historien to follow a more intellectual form of personal salvation. In many ways, the Concorde is part of a long medieval tradition responding to the Romance of the Rose.  If Jean de Meung vaunted a kind of Averroistic world view in which the good was determined by the need to regenerate the species, throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, writers like Guillaume Deguileville, Jean Gerson, and Jean Molinet respond with treatises and literary works that describe the good more in terms of individual will and Christian morality. The Concorde crystallizes this medieval debate in its opposition of the Temple of Venus and the Temple of Minerva.  Although Lemaire does not simply recreate this medieval debate, his juxtaposition of the forces of natural necessity and Christian salvation exercised through individual will brings into focus how these two forces made for quite different understandings of the good and the bad.  

Joseph Gauvreau (Harvard University), “The Contrafacta of Simon Goulart: from ‘la lettre accommodée à la Musique’ to ‘la Musique accommodée à la lettre’”

In one of the many liminary sonnets of Simon Goulart’s Sonets Chrestiens (1578-80)—a four-volume contrafactum collection re-texting Guillaume Boni and Anthoine de Bertrand’s recently published settings of Ronsard sonnets—Goulart recounts how the sounds of Bertrand’s ‘tons doucereux’ touched his very soul, until the song’s impure lyrics quickly destroyed any positive effects of this music. The task of writing contrafacta to these chansons is then presented as a moral imperative: ‘alors vertu m’enflamme, / Et dit, Purge ceci…” Yet despite this professed necessity of purging lascivious lyrics, Goulart’s liminary poetry also betrays an insecurity about the aesthetic risks of fitting new texts to a polyphony that was beautiful precisely because of how it ‘animated’ the original verse. My paper thus first explores how these often competing moral and aesthetic concerns play out in Goulart’s particular approach to contrafaction in the Sonets Chrestiens, as he attempts to challenge the authorship of Ronsard while nevertheless aiming to respect the composers’ decisions in setting the original poetry. The Sonets Chrestiens’ approach to re-texting secular songs is also apparent in Goulart’s other contrafacta of the 1576-83 period, which together form part of the pastor’s broader Genevan musical response to Le Roy & Ballard’s 1570s chansonniers. However, it is not reflected in his final publication of polyphony, the 1597 Cinquante Pseaumes. This is a work that presents a completely different notion of contrafaction—one that has, I wish to demonstrate, largely been misunderstood. Here, the stakes of Goulart’s practice have changed drastically, with his preface primarily concerned with defending the publication from moral criticism—within his own community—of polyphonic singing. Goulart thus ‘authorizes’ his endeavour by relinquishing authorship of his contrafacta: contrary to his prior practice of modifying (at times quite minimally) the original lyrics of a song, he now completely replaces the lyrics with Psalms by Marot and Bèze. Goulart further employs this scriptural guarantee to override the earlier aesthetic concerns of contrafaction, claiming a unique license here to fit the music to a new text, a process of re-composition that I will consider in the second half of my paper.

Julien Goeury (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne) and Isabelle His (Université de Poitiers), “The Composition of Guillaume de Chastillon’s Airs (1592-1593): An Investigation in Two Voices”

This paper reconsiders the collections of secular and sacred Airs by Guillaume de Chastillon (c. 1550-1610) that were published in Rouen in 1592-1593. An examination of the liminal writings prefacing these collections situates these works within contemporary debates over the relationship between text and music, on both the moral and aesthetic level. We will then explore the composition of the poetic texts, revealing a phenomenon of centonization (on the textual and not the melodic level), which raises new reflections on the status of the poetic text between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Sarah Koval (Harvard University), “Musical Economies: Managing Households and Bodies in Early Modern England”

For almost a century, starting around 1640, at least four generations used the manuscript recipe book of Martha Hodges (Wellcome MS 2844) to care for their households. Martha and her descendants learned from and added to the medicinal and alimentary recipes in this heirloom repository of scientific knowledge, offering insight into early modern domestic knowledge production. Still more compelling are the book’s non-recipe contents, including over fifty texts for psalms and hymns. Lacking notation even in the form of a “to the tune of” direction, these musical texts are interspersed among recipes dedicated to bodily care. While unique in the sheer quantity of tunes it contains, Hodges’ manuscript is far from the only recipe book of this era with musical entries. This paper presents select examples of music collected in manuscript recipe books in seventeenth-century England. Such music represents the now-inaudible sounds of home economies, in which singing often took on a utilitarian function and left fewer traces than music of the court or playhouse. Women rarely wrote down such functional music with any notational specificity; the melodic content would have been committed to memory. I suggest that these pieces, while lacking conventional music notation, were sung, most often as part of daily worship. Situating music found in this and other recipe books within a Galenic worldview that saw music as potentially restorative (Gouk 2000, Austern 2020), we begin to see how music might not be wholly out of place among cures for plague and gout. Investigating music’s inclusion in recipe books illuminates its role in the essential task of caring for both the bodies and souls of the household. I argue that the musical soundscapes crafted within domestic spaces, from kitchen to prayer closet, served as an integral part of the daily performance of household and bodily management.

Alisha Rankin (Tufts University), “Music or Medicaments? Treating Melancholy in Early Modern German Recipe Books”

Early modern health recommendations for patients suffering from bouts of melancholy or mania routinely suggested music as a cure. This recommendation appeared not only in advice for people constitutionally prone to fits of mental illness, but also for patients falling into melancholy owing to their suffering from other diseases. In other words, music was viewed as one method, along with others such as exercise, games, and jokes, to provide a spiritual boost to sufferers (literally, as melancholy and mania were sometimes seen as a venous constriction that inhibited the animal spirits from reaching the brain). These types of melancholy cures are now well known in the scholarly literature. Yet alongside these spirit-boosting remedies, early modern individuals also sought out medicaments, which have received less attention from historians. This paper examines remedies for melancholy in sixteenth- century German recipe books. These recipes tend to focus on melancholy as one of the four humors – often described as “melancholy blood”- and treat it accordingly with purges, potions, and baths rather than trying to lift the sufferer’s spirits. I compare recipes from a variety of individuals in the Palatinate region of the Holy Roman Empire, including learned physician Burchard Mithobius, musician Georg Forester, an unnamed midwife, and various aristocrats from the Palatinate court. I use these recipes to examine how notions of melancholy as a physical disease of the blood fit into the broader picture of mental illness as an affliction of the spirits that could be helped by music and merriment. 

Catherine Gordon (Providence College), “François Berthod’s Airs de devotion (1656) and the Creation of the Pious ­Honnête Femme”

French-language sacred songs were part of efforts by the Reformed Catholic Church to reach out to lay women to enforce a standard of belief and behavior based on Christian doctrine.  By mid-century, the Church’s initiatives coincided with a renewed evaluation of a woman’s place in society called the querelle des femmes, a debate concerning the status, ability, and value of women that for some, like Jacques Du Bosc, combined Christian virtues with courtly ideas of honnêteté andgalanterie.  Those engaged in the querelle argued that any woman, even an honnête femme, could attain a degree of agency and a sense of identity by living a pious life. This paper asserts that François Berthod’s Airs de devotion from Book One (1656), which are contrafacta of mid-century airs sérieux, represented a Christian version of honnêteté andgalanterie in line with ideals associated with the querelle des femmes, thus a morality of virtue and honorability mixed with a type of sociability involving good taste and wit.  An analysis of Berthod’s airs reveals a correlation with Pierre Le Moyne’s La Dévotion aisée (1652).  Addressed to female courtiers expected to achieve a modest level of devotion, Le Moyne indicates that leading a pious life need not be difficult for the honnête femme. All kinds of activities undertaken by a courtier could be honnête and galant when instructive and agreeable.  An honnête femme, Le Moyne observes, is not expected “to act like a nun or philosopher.”  Berthod’s introduction and airs connect with Le Moyne’s treatise in intent and content, representing an expression of a female religious sensibility.  Berthod’s airs reveal a conscious attempt to mix the pleasurable melodies of secular airs with sacred instructional lyrics.  Singing his airs needed to be part of an honnête femme’s recreational activities and devotional exercises.  Berthod’s airs de devotion belonged to a comprehensive effort by the Church to shape the role of women at all levels of French society, providing dévotes with a means of gaining a respectable identity.  For courtiers, however, a devout life needed to be compatible with the social requirements expected of the honnête femme.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis (Tufts University), “Music, Reason, and Natural Law: Jean Bodin's Harmonic Justice”

Jean Bodin's Six Books on the Commonwealth has an Aristotelian goal: to establish a comprehensive political science on proper foundations.  It also has an Aristotelian structure, beginning with a consideration of the same building blocks of commonwealths that Aristotle addressed in the Politics, such as the family and household.  Bodin's great treatise also follows the Aristotelian principle that location, climate, and circumstances render different types of constitutions suitable for different peoples.  Yet, for all its Aristotelian signals, the Six Books is also an Anti-Aristotelian work, not least because Bodin aspired to have it replace Aristotle's Politics and do away with several of Aristotle's arguments that he saw as faulty. One of the many important areas of disagreement between the two centers on the concept of justice, with Bodin opting for a mixture of arithmetical and geometrical justice, which he terms "harmonic justice."  In this paper, I trace the role of music in Bodin's conception of justice, and argue that Bodin's choice of the language of music to describe the concluding topic of the Six Books is the culmination of an argument that pervades that work from start to finish.  Bodin's emphasis on natural law and the common good, as exemplified in his choice of the terms "république" and "republica" to describe the political association, make the language of harmony ideal for conveying the interdependence between the commonwealth's constitutive elements, as well as its place in the world at large.  Curiously, although this language is clearly also aimed at reinforcing Bodin's agreement with Plato, it is consistent with an argument that Aristotle also makes at the end of the Politics.  I will then situate this argument within the broader contrast between Plato and Aristotle that Bodin often relies on for his moral and political theory, especially as it manifests itself in his Paradox.

Melinda Latour (Tufts Unversity), “Musical Paradoxes and the Performance of Stoic Consolation”

Stoics and Neostoics were famous for their interest in paradox. Their counterintuitive maxims left an indelible imprint on the wisdom literature of the early modern period–––circulating quirky and astute proposals through emblem books, moral poetry, and musical settings. In this paper, I consider the layers of paradox that guided the composition and practice of Stoic musical settings. Not only were the Stoic paradoxes paraphrased in moral poetry and sung in polyphonic arrangements, but the prevailing compositional language of the time offered a colorful palette for experimenting with enigma and contradiction. From the pithy paraphrase settings of the Paradoxa Stoicorum included in Guillaume Boni’s and Paschal de L’Estocart’s Quatrains (1582) to the rhetoric of contradiction structuring the poetic, visual, and musical corpus of Octonaires de la vanité du monde launched by Antoine de Chandieu (c. 1574), these sonic and emblematic expressions offer sophisticated engagement with the Stoic consolatory techniques recommended for eliminating destructive emotions and finding inner freedom and constancy. By exploiting the artistic tensions embedded in musical and visual practices, these materials dramatize the Stoic advice to focus on what is always in our power—that is the ability to cultivate virtue regardless of the inconstancy of worldly fortune.