Sound Matters: by Susan Boynton, Sarah Kay, Alison Cornish

Sound Matters
By S u s a n B o y n t o n , S a r a h K a y, A l i s o n C o r n i s h ,
and Andrew Albin
1. Introduction
By S u sa n B oy nt on
Writers throughout history have commented on the elusive nature of sound, its
ubiquity in human experience, and its mysterious effect on the soul. In the litera-
ture of the Middle Ages, with its strong oral component, sound can become the
subject as well as the substance of the text. Literary thematization of sound is a
common thread in the three essays that follow, which all engage with the critical
discourse of sound studies, a profoundly eclectic area of inquiry grounded in phi-
losophy and aesthetics, the history of science and technology, religion, sociology,
and social history, in addition to ethnomusicology and the history of music.1 The
authors’ shared focus on the materiality of sound aligns them with the subfield of
historical sound studies, which focuses on the social history and ethical implica-
tions of sound production and listening.2
One of the central concepts in historical sound studies is the notion of aurality,
encompassing both auditory culture (including the production and reproduction
of sound) and the history of audition (habits of hearing and listening).3 In recent
decades medievalists have turned their attention to these aspects of premodern
sonic practices and environments.4 Joyce Coleman coined the use of the term
“aurality” to characterize late-medieval reading practices.5 Building on the forms
1
Volumes illustrating the range of sound studies include Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Lis-
tening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford, 2004); Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and
Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC, 2015); Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and
Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge, UK, 2013); and The Sound Studies Reader, ed.
Jonathan Sterne (London, 2012).
2
Some influential publications in historical sound studies include Richard Cullen Rath, How Early
America Sounded (Ithaca, 2007); Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: At-
tending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999); Mark Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens, GA, 2004); and
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003).
3
On aurality see particularly Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
(New York, 2010); Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-
Century Colombia (Durham, NC, 2014); Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener
(Cambridge, 2012). The range of subjects encompassed by auditory culture is reflected in The Audi-
tory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford, 2003).
4
Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Age: Le versant épistémologique (Paris, 2000).
Studies of the soundscape of antiquity include Maurizio Bettini, Voci: Antropologia sonora del mondo
antico (Turin, 2008); and Shane Butler, The Ancient Phonograph (New York, 2015).
5
Joyce Coleman, “Interactive Parchment: The Theory and Practice of Medieval English Aurality,”
Yearbook of English Studies 25 (1995): 63–79; Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in
Late-Medieval England and France (Cambridge, UK, 1996).
Speculum 91/4 (October 2016). Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America.
DOI: 10.1086/688003, 0038-7134/2016/9104-0003$10.00.
Sound Matters 999
of orality in early French literature described by Evelyn Birge Vitz and Brigitte
Cazelles, Mark Cruse has theorized the sonic character of literary manuscripts.6
The nature and significance of sound itself was a subject of enduring fascination
for medieval writers. Jean-Marie Fritz points out the emergence of an “acoustical
perspective” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as witnessed by increasingly
detailed descriptions of musical performance and sound.7 Musicologists’ contri-
butions to historical sound studies have employed both musical and nonmusical
sound as evidence, in addition to texts and images.8 Reinhard Strohm invoked the
notion of the soundscape (the sonic environment comprised of ambient noise of
all kinds) a quarter century ago in reference to the aural landscape of medieval
Flemish towns, including bells, processions, and other types of performance.9
Natural and artificial sounds also comprise essential components of the urban
and rural sites studied by architectural historians.10
Nevertheless, the inherent intangibility of sound makes it a slippery form of
historical evidence, especially for the study of the distant past. The field of sound
studies has tended to focus on modernity because sound-recording technology,
even in its infancy, offers the possibility of a putatively fixed object. To study
sound as an element in the cultural history of earlier periods depends on wit-
nesses that are by necessity less direct. Just as writing is a secondary vestige of
language, music (although often written down) is only imperfectly represented in
conventional notation; it demonstrates the instability of the relationship between
a nonlinguistic aural object and its written trace. A musical score or a historical
account of musical performance is far from a static referent. Instead, it highlights
the difficulty of capturing music in images and words. Musical notation must be
supplemented to some extent by an oral tradition,11 particularly in the case of
6
Evelyn Birge Viz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Woodbridge, 1999); Bri-
gitte Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe, AZ, 2005); Mark Cruse, “Matter
and Meaning in Medieval Books: The Romance Manuscript as Sensory Experience,” Senses and
Society 5 (2010): 45–56; and Cruse, “Pictorial Polyphony: Image, Voice, and Social Life in the Ro-
man d’Alexandre (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264),” in The Social Life of Illumination:
Manuscripts, Images and Communities in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and
Kathryn A. Smith (Turnhout, 2013), 371–402.
7
Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre: Pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Genève,
2011), 109.
8
Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York, 2012);
Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2007).
9
Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1991), 1–9. The term “soundscape”
was coined by R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
World (Rochester, VT, 1977). For a useful methodological discussion of the concept and its applica-
tions see David Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello, “Soundscapes:
Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 329–45.
10
Most recently, Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, “Performing Silence and Regulating Sound: The
Monastic Soundscape of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes,” in Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of
Art, Music and Sound, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Turnhout, 2015), 47–70; and Tom
Nickson, “The Sound of Conversion in Medieval Iberia,” in Resounding Images, 91–107.
11
The literature on the oral traditions in medieval music is too vast to address here. Some over-
views that cite previous literature are Susan Boynton, “Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of
the Office Hymns,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 99–168; Peter Jeffery,
Re-envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (Chicago,
Speculum 91/4 (October 2016)

1000 Sound Matters
medieval music, which originated in a society that did not employ notation as the
primary support for musical learning and performance.12 Chant was effectively a
sung text; Susan Rankin has shown that early neumatic notations do not repre-
sent melodies as an entity separate from language, but rather represent how texts
should be sung.13
It was the nature of medieval language to be indissolubly bound to its aural-
ity. As Alison Cornish notes in this cluster, for the ancient writers who laid the
foundation of medieval thinking on language, “it was very clear that the essential
matter of words was sound.” Medieval writers were aware that sound is both
material—the “matter of words”—and ephemeral (existing only in the moment
of audition). The physical phenomenon of sound can be produced or experienced
as a form of violence, as described by Cornish. Andrew Albin examines in his es-
say below how embodied sound can also be spiritual, as in the choiring of song
felt by Richard Rolle in response to his audition of angelic singing (and inspired
also by his own psalmody). As described by Rolle in his Incendium amoris, canor
is the inner musical sensation stimulated by the singing of angels. Since the pas-
sage from the Incendium amoris was cited in a matins lesson of the Officium for
Rolle, perception of angelic song was, in effect, performed on the saint’s behalf
during the office, transforming into perceptible sound the description of Rolle’s
own experience of interiority.
The idea of angelic song is also part of another major theme in this cluster, the
role of sound in the overlap of human and nonhuman realms. The human choir’s
song is in some sense an echo of the wordless song of angels; likewise, the song
of the troubadour is defined to some extent by its relationship to the sounds pro-
duced by animals. In Dante’s Inferno, the speech of the suicide transformed into a
tree underlines sound’s capacity for fusing the human with the nonhuman. Sarah
Kay’s “The Soundscape of Troubadour Lyric” explores the equivocal relation-
ship between human and nonhuman animals in troubadour song. As represented
in the manuscripts of this corpus and in the texts themselves, singing exposed
the continuities and tensions between human and nonhuman, as did Orpheus
with the objects of his song. Poetry frequently employs animals in a metaphorical
vein, and visual representations of animals are common in manuscripts of poetry
and song. At the same time, some poets, such as Marcabru, exploit the verbal
depiction of sound, including both the cries of animals and the noises emitted
by inanimate objects, precisely because it is nonsemantic; he also accumulated
poetic effects that similarly obscure meaning in favor of the material sonority of
language. As Elizabeth Eva Leach has argued, the auditory realm is a site of con-
testation and reflection about the relationship between human voices and animal
1992); Oral and Written Transmission in Chant, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly (Farnham, UK, 2009); Ken
neth Levy, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians (Princeton, 1998); and Leo Treitler, With Voice and
Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (New York, 2003).
12
Hendrik Van der Werf over half a century ago coined the expression “notationless musical cul-
ture,” which became a widely used term. See Hendrik Van der Werf, “The Trouvère Chansons as
Creations of a Notationless Musical Culture,” Current Musicology 1 (1965): 61–68.
13
Susan Rankin, “Capturing Sounds: The Notation of Language,” in Cantus Scriptus: Technolo-
gies of Medieval Song, ed. Lynn Ransom and Emma Dillon (Piscataway, NJ, 2012), 11–38.

Sound Matters 1001
sounds at the nexus of culture and nature. The mise-en-page of manuscripts
14
aligning troubadours with animals can be compared to the mingling of animals

and musicians on sculpted capitals in monastic cloisters of the twelfth century,
such as those at Cuxa and Silos.15 These visual representations evoke a mixture
of imagined sounds.16 Perhaps the troubadours’ use of sound self-consciously
inscribes the boundary between the human and the nonhuman only in order to
cross it, opening up new possibilities, as the author states, for “escape beyond the
restrictive soundscape of the human, courtly world.”
As Alison Cornish’s “Words and Blood” demonstrates, the materiality of sound
arises from the actions that produce it. According to Aristotelian tradition, vio-
lence is inherent to sound. Hence the cry produced by the thorn bush in Inferno 13
reveals the presence in the tree of Pier della Vigna, whose ability to communicate
in words points to the soul he sacrificed in suicide. As Sarah Kay and Alison Cor-
nish explain, the type of sound that medieval grammarians define as articulate is
what characterizes human utterance: it is the voicing of a rational soul articulated
by a body. By virtue of his transformation into the lowest level of animate being (a
plant has a soul, but no feeling and no voice), Pier’s utterance straddles the border
between the meaningless noise of a cracking twig (described vividly by Dante as
the sputtering of a green log in a fire) and the painful cry of an injured animal, on
the one hand, and rational argumentative human speech, on the other. In the Mid-
dle Ages the sound of an inanimate object, such as the ringing of bells, functioned
through a combination of human agency (striking the bells) and the distinctive
resonance of a material object (bells often were considered to “speak” and to have
“voices”).17 The noisy voice uncannily emanating from Pier’s tree body recalls, in
a monstrous way, the “inarticulate” song of the birds evoked in the poems of the
troubadours and depicted in the illustrations of some chansonniers. Dante’s re-
flection on the nature of sound illustrates the violent separation of body and soul
that is wrought by suicide, which is figured here as the rupture of the relationship
between body and soul that makes a voice human.18 In Dante’s Inferno, a human
voice issuing from a tree disrupts the distinction between human and nonhuman
(recalling an analogous disruption operated by the visual association of animals
with troubadours in the illustrations discussed by Sarah Kay). Andrew Albin’s
“Canorous Soundstuff” introduces another nonhuman sound, that of the angels.
14
Leach, Sung Birds.
15
Thomas E. A. Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-
Michel-de-Cuxa,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 402–36; Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo, “Touch Me, See Me:
The Emmaus and Thomas Reliefs in the Cloister of Silos,” in Spanish Medieval Art: Recent Studies,
ed. Colum Hourihane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 346 (Tempe, AZ, 2007), 35–64.
16
On this form of representation see most recently Matthew Shoaf, “Picturing the Voiceless in an
Age of Visible Speech,” in Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman (New
York, 2015), 213–34; Shoaf, “The Voice in Relief: Sculpture and Vocal Surplus at the Rise of Natural-
ism,” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 31–45.
17
John H. Arnold and Caroline Goodson, “Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of
Medieval Church Bells,” Viator 43 (2012): 99–130; and Alain Corbin, Village Bells: The Culture of
the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York, 1998).
18
While space does not allow for a thorough review of theorization of voice here, for an overview
of some current musicological approaches to the voice see “Colloquy: Why Voice Now?”, convened
by Martha Feldman, Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 (2015): 653–85.

1002 Sound Matters
Place and space are crucial to the sonorous dimensions of all the texts studied
in this cluster. The performance of Rolle’s Officium, like the saint himself, is an-
chored in a place, the Hampole Priory chapel. It is not limited to that location—
the office could of course be performed elsewhere—but it is implicitly associated
with the geographic center of the saint’s cult and the community of nuns there.
The Officium indicates the sonic dimensions of the liminal spaces in which Rolle
experiences spiritual transformation, just as Dante vividly describes the sound
effects of the infernal landscape in which the Pilgrim, entering a liminal state,
undergoes conversion. Likewise, in the soundscape of the troubadours, the voice
becomes the locus of a limen, or threshold, between the human and nonhuman.
In Albin’s reading, music is a form of spiritual harmony, whether inspired by
the act of devotion or created through communal worship. The implied experi-
ence of music in the celebration of Rolle’s liturgy also shapes the meaning of this
office.19 The Officium as a whole indexes sounding devotion; its internal refer-
ences to music implicitly remind us that the office itself is meant to be sung. Thus,
the Officium points beyond itself to the angelic song of praise described by Rolle
and other writers as the celestial liturgy, which humans emulate in the earthly lit-
urgy. The fact that Rolle heard angelic singers and experienced his first sensation
of canor while singing the psalms himself recalls the joining of human and angelic
choirs that is a frequent topos in medieval liturgical poetry and the visual arts.20
Sound as a form of connection—between human and nonhuman, body and
soul, or natural and supernatural—is a common concern of the three essays that
follow. The authors bring out the ethical, philosophical, and theological signifi-
cance of sound in texts that foreground sound itself, whether as an evocation of
nonhuman noise, of surreal speech, or of divine song. Sound matters in these texts,
as in others, because it is central to our experience of the world. As Jacques Attali
wrote of music, “It is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding.”21
19
No musical notation survives for this office, but the chant melodies could be reconstructed hy-
pothetically by analogy with chants that exhibit the same verse structure.
20
See, for example, Gunilla Iversen, Laus Angelica: Poetry in the Medieval Mass, ed. Jane Flynn
(Turnhout, 2010), a translation of Iversen’s Chanter avec les anges: Poésie dans la messe médiévale,
interprétations et commentaires (Paris, 2001); Lori Kruckenberg, “Neumatizing the Sequence: Spe-
cial Performances of Sequences in the Central Middle Ages,” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 59 (2006): 243–317; and Judith Oliver, Singing with Angels: Liturgy, Music, and Art in the
Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock (Turnhout, 2007).
21
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1985), 4.
Susan Boynton is Professor of Music at Columbia University, New York (e-mail: slb184
@columbia.edu)
2. The Soundscape of Troubadour Lyric, or, How Human Is Song?
By Sa r a h Ka y
The concept of “soundscape,” developed in the 1960s by the Canadian com-
poser and writer R. Murray Schafer in relation to that of “landscape,” promotes
exploration and knowledge of the world through hearing as much as through
Sound Matters 1003
sight, since it is as much made up of sounds as it is of visual stimuli. As with a
landscape, a soundscape may include the human but is not limited by it; for ex-
ample, some of the sounds it includes exceed what the human ear can perceive.1
Schafer’s term has been taken up by medievalists seeking to discover the import
of the sonorous in opposition to the visual, to situate music within the larger
field of ambient sound, and to recontextualize the sounds produced by humans
within the totality of human and nonhuman acoustic effects.2 These dimensions
of the soundscape enable connections to be drawn between its study and other
approaches currently being explored by medievalists, such as ecological criti-
cism and critical animal studies, approaches united by the way they call into
question the prevailing anthropocentrism of scholarly discourses on medieval
culture.
In this article, I consider how human and nonhuman sounds combine in an
imagined soundscape at a specific historical moment, that of the troubadours and
their songs; and I ask what the implications of this combination are for how these
songs might be interpreted. Several topoi of medieval poetry put in question the
exclusively human character of song. One is that linking air, breath, or “spirit.” Air
is the element of both winds and breath, many troubadours speak of it as exciting
or carrying their songs, they are aware of sharing breath with other living beings,
and conscious too of its potentially spiritual nature; the essay in this cluster by Ali-
son Cornish examines how, following Aristotle, sound in Dante results from the
violent disruption or breaking of air. Another topic is the notion of canor analyzed
in the essay by Andrew Albin that concludes the cluster. A mystical saintly sound-
stuff, canor is inaudible in itself and yet mingles with and infiltrates liturgical chant
performed by, or in honor of, the saintly late fourteenth-century Richard Rolle.
My own focus is on a third topos that crosses over between human and nonhu-
man and that these other essays also address: that of “voice,” vox, which medieval
writers used to refer to the human production of words and music, and also for the
voicings of birds, other animals, angels, and sometimes instruments too. Taking
my cue from the posthumanism implicit in the concept of soundscape, I develop
(rather than answer) a question implicit in many troubadour compositions—
and articulated, too, in their manuscript copies—namely, how human is song?
How Human Is Song?

Like other medievalists interested in challenging humanist assumptions about
the Middle Ages, I find helpful the writings on art and being by Martin Hei-
degger and their subsequent critique by posthumanist thinkers.3 Song’s capacity
to dissolve and reform identity is the problem at the heart of Heidegger’s essay
1
See in particular R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of
the World (Rochester, VT, 1993).
2
See Brigitte Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe, AZ, 2005); Jean-Marie Fritz,
Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le versant épistémologique (Paris, 2000); Fritz, La cloche et la lyre:
Pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Genève, 2011); and Emma Dillon, The Sense of
Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford, UK, 2012).
3
The key post-Heideggerian thinker for the forms of thing-oriented criticism practiced by many
medievalists is Graham Harman, e.g., Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chi-
cago, 2002).

1004 Sound Matters
“What Are Poets For?,” the title of which reprises Hölderlin’s anguished enquiry,
“Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” (What are poets for in destitute times?)4 Here
Heidegger argues that singing is human because of its instability. Song is what
discloses human being (Dasein), and it does so through exposure and risk—being
emerges by being wagered or threatened, brought up against the limit of death.
In poetry, Dasein ventures toward “the Open” (das Offene), “that indescribably
open freedom” known to “animals and flowers” that “has its (extremely fleeting)
equivalents among us only in those first moments of love,” as Rilke puts it.5 As a
poet who did indeed live “in times of distress,”6 Rilke offers Heidegger the dream
that the poet’s daring consists in venturing into this experience of the Open in
which subjects and objects, agents and goals, are all relinquished.7 And yet, as
Heidegger goes on to argue, the poetic wager can only be made within the capaci-
ties of human language, which render such objects present as existent within a
human horizon.8 In effect, even for Rilke the world opened by human creativity
is related to the Open of the animal or plant only insofar as it turns away from it.
Heidegger’s ruminations provide Giorgio Agamben with the title for his long
essay The Open: Man and Animal.9 In it, Agamben concludes that Heidegger’s
Open is “nothing but a grasping of the animal not-open,”10 or less aphoristically
put, that the world realized and conceptualized by human beings is precisely what
is not open to the rest of nature.11 The Heideggerian Open, then, is in fact the
condition of closure between human and other sentient beings, and as such what
marks both their separation and their point of connection.12 Agamben elsewhere
refers to this conjunction-disjunction as a caesura which, he stresses, does not just
separate “man” from “nature” but also passes within the human, defining only
some individuals as fully human, or only a part of their physical entity as what
makes them so.13 Understanding the historical circumstances that inflect this cae-
sura differently at different times is urgent because, as Agamben sees it, “[i]n our
culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that
between the animality and the humanity of man.”14 He analyzes the historical
construction of this contested point of overlap and demarcation in hopes of its
eventual suspension, so that finally the Open can truly be opened up.
4
Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hoft
stadter (New York, 1971), 89–139.
5
Letter from Rilke to a reader, quoted by Heidegger, “What are Poets For?,” 105.
6
“What are Poets For?,” 139.
7
Ibid., 118.
8
Thus “Song is existence” and “To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself”:
ibid., 135.
9
Giorgio Agamben, L’Aperto: L’uome e l’animale (Turin, 2002); trans. Kevin Attell, The Open:
Man and Animal (Stanford, CA, 2004). My quotations are from the latter.
10
Ibid., 79.
11
Agamben also cites Heidegger’s essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” which elaborates on
the opposition between “world” as what is opened by Dasein and “earth.”
12
See David Hult, “Editor’s Preface,” Yale French Studies 67 (1984): iii–vi: the verbal dimension of
closure means that, at the same time as closing, it points to an opening.
13
Agamben, The Open, esp. 16.
14
Ibid., 80.

Sound Matters 1005
How Open Is Medieval Song? Human and Nonhuman Vox
Singing, medieval poets knew, exposes the precariousness of being and the po-
tential openings between its human and nonhuman manifestations. Orpheus’s
voice moved rocks and trees, tamed wild animals, and stopped the torments of
hell; he almost brought Eurydice back to life.15 But although song can vivify, it
can also kill; in the Physiologus tradition, the swan and the nightingale sing when
dying, and sirens lure humans to a watery death.16 Singing that can charm others
risks merging the singer back into the rest of nature, undoing his very being, like
Orpheus again, dismembered among the rocks and streams.17 It is not necessary to
know the history of Latin carmen—literally “song” but also the origin of the word
“charm”—to know that song is enchantment. The French poet Machaut repeat-
edly puns on the idea that enchantement, the act of producing song or of setting
words to music, is also a bewitching. The pun is particularly associated by him
with Orpheus, and with falling victim to the ravishment of other people’s singing.18
The troubadours composed at a time when the teaching of song reflected explicit
debates about how human it is. Singing was taught alongside grammar in church
schools, because like speech it was a form of the basic grammatical category of
vox and could be represented in writing in a way very similar to speech. The use
of musical staves on which notes are named after letters of the alphabet meant
that melody was “litterized,” as Leach puts it: it acquired “a language character
of its own.”19 Music’s status as a liberal art was maintained against changing at-
titudes to the songs of birds, some of which were also melodic and could therefore
be notated using the letters of a stave. As Jean-Marie Fritz and Elizabeth Leach
have both documented, Donatus’s twofold differentiation between sounds that are
capable of being represented in writing (because they are “distinct”), and those
that are not (because they are indistinct or “confused”), is quickly overtaken by
a further one, between sounds that are deliberately “meaningful” (vox articulata)
and those that are not. Since within each of these new categories of “articulate”
versus “inarticulate” voice some sounds are writable and others not, this develop-
ment results in a fourfold division of vox.20 The two models, the Donatian binary
opposition and its subsequent elaboration into four branches, can be represented
diagrammatically as follows:
15
For how the Orpheus myth served to reflect on song, see Susan Boynton, “The Sources and Sig-
nificance of the Orpheus Myth in ‘Musica Enchiriadis’ and Regino of Prüm’s ‘Epistola de harmonica
institutione,’” Early Music History 18 (1999): 47–74. My thanks to Susan Boynton for this reference
and her assistance elsewhere with this paper.
16
The swan and nightingale are regularly found in troubadour and trouvère lyric, though curiously
not the siren.
17
According to Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.1–19, the Maenads are drawn by Orpheus’s singing and,
as part of their vengeance on him, try to drown it in their clamor.
18
Sarah Kay, “Chant et enchantement dans l’oeuvre de Guillaume de Machaut: Métamorphoses du
risque et du désir,” Revue des langues romanes 118 (2014): 447–68.
19
Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Grammar and Music in the Medieval Song-School,” in Medieval Gram-
mar and the Literary Arts, ed. Rita Copeland, Christopher Cannon, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford,
UK, 2009): 195–211, at 200.
20
Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages sonores, 190–202; Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature
and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2007), 28–53, recapitulated in Leach, “Grammar and
Music,” 196–98.

1006 Sound Matters
Twofold division of vox
vox
↓
distinct confused
(capable of being written) (incapable of being written)
Fourfold division that results from superimposing

the criterion of meaningfulness on the above
vox
↓
articulate
(can be meaningful) ↓ non-articulate
(cannot be meaningful)
↓
↓
↓
distinct confused distinct
↓ confused
The effect of this second distinction between articulate and inarticulate voice is
to privilege all human sounds over all sounds voiced by other sources. The two
categories of human voice—whether they can be notated (vox distincta) or not
(vox confusa)—are alone credited with conveying meaning and thus deemed ex-
pressive. Animal sounds, even if they are writable, are by definition inarticulate
or meaningless. At their lowest, in an extreme manifestation of their own closed-
ness, they cannot even be written down, like the chattering of a jay or the croak-
ing of a frog. Officially, then, the art of song is human and exclusively so; but this
outcome is achieved only through prolonged contesting of the opposing view.21
When many of the early troubadours compare their songs with those of birds,
they seem to make use of their shared organ, the voice, in order knowingly to put
in question once more the human prerogative of song, or at least quizzically to
inquire, just how human is it? This is the question Jaufre Rudel seems to pose in
“Pro ai” (262.4):22
21
Augustine’s role in this outcome attests the endurance of his “sovereign decision” in favor of an ex-
treme anthropocentrism that was not shared by other inheritors of the Platonic tradition, such as Eriugena.
On Augustine, see Boynton, “Sources and Significance,” 68, and Leach, Sung Birds, 52; on Eriugena, see
Peter Dronke, “La creazione degli animali,” Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome, 1992),
193–217, at 199–202.
22
I identify troubadour songs by their PC numbers (originating in the bibliography of Pillet and
Carstens) and cite them as updated in the Bibliografia elettronica dei trovatori, at http://www.bedt.it
/BEdT_04_25/index.aspx (accessed 31 May 2016).

Sound Matters 1007
Pro ai del chan essenhadors
entorn mi et ensenhairitz:
pratz e vergiers, albres e flors,
voutas d’auzelhs e lais e critz
per lo dous termini suau.
(lines 1–5)23
[I have plenty of song masters and song mistresses around me: meadows and orchards,
trees and flowers, birds’ trills and lays and cries, because of the sweet, gentle season.]
What does Jaufre mean by turning the landscape into a soundscape and evoking
it as his teacher?24 Perhaps he is asserting, contrary to the prevailing wisdom,
that the melodies of nature can be taught like other rational pursuits and that his
own song follows the vox of birds whose music is a grammatical, that is, a writ-
able and hence a teachable art. This would undo the schism between human and
animal voices and restore the simple distinction between distinct and indistinct
ones. Alternatively, he might be using the image paradoxically within the fourfold
division of vox so as deliberately to place the troubadour’s song on the nonhu-
man side of the divide, along with other natural sounds. Then his song would
be distinct but nonarticulate: unlike speech it would not be primarily engaged
in expressing a meaning, it would be an act of uttering (énonciation) but not an
uttering of something (énoncé). In favor of this second possibility is the fact that
Jaufre comes close to composing nonarticulate (and barely writable) sounds in his
“Non sap chantar” (PC 262.4), which starts by running through the categories of
the art of composition—melody, verse form, rhyme words, and their subordina-
tion to a rational theme or even to reason itself—only to protest in line 5 that the
beginning of his song begins quite differently:
Non sap chantar qui so non di
ni vers trobar qui motz no fa,
ni conois de rima co·s va
si razo non enten en si.
Mas lo mieus chans comens’aissi:
com plus l’auziretz, mais valra. a a
(lines 1–6)25
[No one knows how to sing who can’t make a tune, or “find” a vers if he can’t com-
pose [rhyme] words, or recognize how rhyme works, unless he understands the theme
in itself. But my song begins like this: the more you hear it, the more valuable it will be.
ee ee]
The editor prints the final line of each stanza in a form that repeats the rhyme
vowel. The repetition marks the prolongation of the final syllable when the song
was sung, but thereby introduces what look like nonsense syllables into the verbal
23
Text from Giorgio Chiarini, Il canzoniere di Jafre Rudel (Roma, 1985), song 2, reproduced on-
line at http://www.rialto.unina.it/BdT.htm. Translations are mine.
24
An analogous question is raised by Guilhem IX, 183.1, line 3, which refers to birds as singing
each in their “lati” (Latin). See Guglielmo IX d’Aquitania: Poesie, ed. Nicolò Pasero (Modena, 1973),
song 1.
25
Chiarini, song 1.

1008 Sound Matters
text when it is copied without its melody; that is, it indexes its value as sound
more than as word.26 It is curious that this repetition is found in copies that do
not contain music, and not in the single chansonnier that does;27 it is as if, in the
absence of music, effects of resonance are nonetheless to be perceived. The latter
part of this article will be devoted to performance of soundscape in troubadour
manuscripts.
Examples could be multiplied of troubadour songs that seem not so much to
be seeking to express the ineffable as to explore ways in which the human voice
passes over into nonexpression.28 These singers, while presenting their songs as
the quintessence of courtly refinement and idealized human aspiration, also admit
their opening onto the inarticulate: on the one hand the untamed phenomena
of nature, such as the wind or animal noises—warbling, chattering, drumming,
whistling, roaring, or screeching—and on the other the noises of automata, like
those of repetitive machinery or harsh, repeated rhyme sounds. Well-known trou-
badours fling sentiment back and forth between these two poles of the wild and
the mechanical, challenging its identity as human expression.
This is particularly the case with Arnaut Daniel, whose importance for Dante
and the subsequent history of the lyric is so well known. Arnaut’s poetics were
influenced by his immediate forebear Raimbaut d’Aurenga, and both of them
by Marcabru, who as a contemporary of Jaufre Rudel was the earliest of these
three troubadours and a determining influence on the other two. The final part
of this paper focuses on Marcabru in particular, thereby proposing a hitherto
unexamined genealogy for the Dantean voice analyzed in the essay which follows
this one.29 Marcabru evokes the “words and sound” (motz e son) of several of
his songs (see below), but this formula can be reversed to highlight instead the
“sound and words” that make up the varied soundscape of his works, as if the
sound was his first concern and the words only secondary.
Chansonnier Performance and the Precariousness of the Human

While it is certain that many troubadour songs were performed musically, it is
hard to reconstruct their sonorous dimension today; the written forms in which
they have come down to us, however, are rich in indications of the kind(s) of
resonance their texts can be understood as voicing. In particular, a number of the
troubadour songbooks compiled from the mid-thirteenth century prepare readers
for the inhumanity or hybridity of voice by insinuating nonhuman voices along-
side the human words. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12474, known
to Occitanists as chansonnier M, was probably copied in the Angevin kingdom of
Naples in the early fourteenth century and is thought to have been decorated by
northern French artists brought in by the Angevin patrons; it contains no musical
26
See Chiarini’s note to this line in his edition, 60.
27
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 22543 (chansonnier R), fol. 63r.
28
Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 53: “. . . ce chant est moins une forme esthétisée ou hyperbolique de la
parole que le signe d’une parole impossible.”
29
On voice in Marcabru see also Ruth E. Harvey, “‘Rhymes and Rusty Words’ in Marcabru’s
Songs,” French Studies 56 (2002): 1–14, and Matilda Bruckner, “Marcabru’s Estornel: On Ventrilo-
quism or the Art of Putting Words in Your Belly,” French Studies 68 (2014): 451–64.

Sound Matters 1009
notation. Its contents are organized hierarchically, as in most songbooks, but in
30
a unique way.31 Selections from the major troubadours are placed so as to begin
at the start of a fresh recto—and really major ones at the start of a fresh quire—
with an opening author portrait, an enlarged initial, sometimes with an animal
or bird perched on the ascender, and an animal, bird, or grotesque bas de page.
Middling poets are positioned in the larger spaces remaining; they are not graced
with a portrait, but they do get an enlarged initial, sometimes with an animal or
bird perched on the ascender, and an animal, bird, or grotesque bas de page. And
the really minor poets are used to fill up smaller spaces: no portrait or enlarged
initial for them, but each gets an animal, bird, or grotesque bas de page. Every
troubadour, then, comes together with a creature of some kind at the foot of the
page where his section begins, busy with its own concerns and somewhat derisive
of the text above, while only really important troubadours are represented as
human. A stark exception to this generalization, the very first troubadour in the
codex, Giraut de Bornelh, not only has no bas de page but is not accompanied by
any animal at all, since, whereas other troubadours are portrayed on horseback,
he is depicted at his desk (fol. 1r). Seemingly he is the only troubadour whose
humanity is not in any way compromised or questioned: the only one to sing with
an uncontestably articulate and writable voice.32
The other major figures with which M opens are Folquet de Marselha and
Bernart de Ventadorn. The lone Marcabru song that M includes is placed be-
tween the more prestigious selections of lyrics by Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Ar-
naut Daniel, each of whom has a portrait, enlarged initial, and bas de page. The
images accompanying Raimbaut have been defaced, and it is hard to make out,
lurking beneath the famous “Ar resplan la flors enversa” (389.16) with which
his selection opens, the sirenlike creature with a sword, accompanied by another
figure with a fishlike tail (fol. 135). The portrait of Arnaut Daniel on horseback
provides a perch for some kind of falcon or hawk, and his siren is more visible
(fol. 143). These animal images frame the first song in his section of the anthol-
ogy, the likewise well-known “Si·m fos Amors de joi donar tan larga” (29.17).
Sandwiched between the works of these two “stars,” Marcabru’s “Dirai vos
senes duptansa” (293.18) is unceremoniously attributed to Raimbaut d’Aurenga
(fol. 142v).
Aside from the sirens that accompany Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Arnaut Daniel,
the bas de page creatures shadowing the texts of all the other troubadours have
not been chosen for their singing ability. Their voices rank at the lowest level of
the four-term scale, since they are neither meaningful nor distinct: lions, hawks,
30
Anne-Claude Lamur Baudreu, “Aux origines du chansonnier de troubadours M (Paris, Bibl. nat.,
fr. 12474),” Romania 109/2–3 (1988): 183–98.
31
François Zufferey, “À propos du chansonnier provençal M (Paris, B. N.: fr. 12474),” in Lyrique
romane médiévale: La tradition des chansonniers, ed. Madeleine Tyssens (Liège, 1991), 221–44, at
258.
32
See Ursula Peters, Das Ich im Bild: Die Figur des Autors in volksprachigen Bilderhandschriften
des 13. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 2008), 27. I would dissent, however, from her description of
the author portraits in M (and also in C) as “unproblematic,” 25.

1010 Sound Matters
peacocks, fowl, dogs, serpents, a wolf, a boar.33 Chansonnier M offers a complex
response to the question, how human is song?, one in which Giraut de Bornelh,
Raimbaut d’Aurenga, and Arnaut Daniel stand out as presenting greater or lesser
degrees of humanity and writability, and Marcabru does not even have an animal
to call his own.34
In other prestige chansonniers from Italy, images are typically placed within
initial letters at the beginning of a selection of songs, instead of outlying the
writing in self-contained vignettes or marginalia, and are of human figures. Thus
framed, these images assume the status of “author portraits” for the songs that
follow and lend imaginative substance to the voice that articulates them. But two
songbooks produced in early fourteenth-century Occitania, probably in the orbit
of the burgeoning Consistori at Toulouse, BnF fr. 856 (chansonnier C) and BnF
fr. 22543 (chansonnier R), present the peculiarity that many of these initial “por-
traits” are of nonhuman animals. In C, where many of these initials have unfor-
tunately been excised,35 we find, alongside human figures, a variety of creatures
that have no connection to song: a sheep, a lion, a hound, a peacock, various
eaglelike birds.36 Although their execution differs, much of this fauna is the same
as M’s bas de page now promoted from the margins to the status of “author”; the
number of grotesque hybrids alongside recognizable species implies the difficulty
of distinguishing a “human” from an “animal” voice.37 C, like M, has no musical
notation and so the evocation of voice is primarily verbal.
The decorated initial C opening the Marcabru section on fol. 171 (“Contra
l’inverns,” 293.14) has been cut out as one of the victims of the vandalism un-
dergone by this manuscript, and so it is impossible to identify his voice as hu-
man, animal, or hybrid. Marcabru is represented here by a huge collection of
twenty-three songs (one a misattribution), but he is nevertheless placed a long
way into a volume that, similarly to M, opens with the clearly more highly re-
garded Folquet de Marselha and Giraut de Borneilh. However, Marcabru in turn
takes precedence over Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Arnaut Daniel, whose sections
are once more juxtaposed and which open on fols.196v and 202v respectively.
The start of Raimbaut’s “Peire Rogier a trasallir” (389.34) has been mutilated,
but the initial L of Arnaut’s sestina (29.14) contains a human figure speaking and
clutching a book. Like Giraut de Bornelh’s in M, Arnaut’s songs are presented as
33
For example, Guilhem de Bergueda has a lion (fol. 23r), as do Folquet de Marselha (fol. 25r) and
Rigaut de Berbezilh (fol. 99r); Guilhem de la Tor has a hound above and a hawk below (fol. 87v),
Alegret also has a hawk (fol. 117r), Cadenet a peacock (fol. 152r), Peire Bremon Ricas Novas a fowl
of some kind (fol. 21v), Peire de Blai a wolf (fol. 158r), Jaufre Rudel a boar (fol. 165r), and Guilhem
Ademar a serpent (fol. 68r).
34
This song is however identified as Marcabru’s in the index to M, so this presentation is likely a
copying error.
35
Only five human portraits remain: see Peters, Das Ich in Bild, 29 and n. 39.
36
For example, Peire d’Alvernhe has a sheep (fol. 178r), Jaufre Rudel a lion (fol. 214r), Gui d’Ussel
a hound (fol. 215v), Uc de Saint Circ a peacock (fol. 224r), Rigaut de Berbezilh an eagle (fol. 219r), as
also Elias de Barjols (fol. 221r), Bertran de Born a gryphon with maybe a vulture (fol. 136v), Gaucelm
Faidit two serpents (fol. 60r), and so forth.
37
For example, Raimon de Miraval (fol. 75r), Guilhem de Bergueda (fol. 210r), Guilhem de Cabes-
tanh (fol. 212v), or Peire Bremon Ricas Novas (fol. 253v).

Sound Matters 1011
both human and writable; the same cannot be said for all the troubadours, whose
representation in the manuscript visibly poses (but does not answer) the question,
how human is song?
Marcabru and the Soundscape of Chansonnier R

In R, there is a wild mixture of human, animal, and grotesque portraits in and
around the initials;38 I shall consider those on the opening pages of its song collec-
tion that begins on fol. 5 with the works of Marcabru, pushed here to the head of
the line with Raimbaut d’Aurenga following only a little later (fols. 7r–8r, eleven
songs) and Arnaut Daniel clearly less highly valued (six songs, one misattributed,
20 folios later, on fols. 27r–v).39 Nine songs are copied on the recto and verso
of this folio, and three more later in the same manuscript; I shall concentrate
on the recto where the songs are, in col. a, the crusade song “Pax in nomine do-
mini” (293.35), “Hueymais dey esser alegrans” (293.34), “Pus la fuelha revirola”
(293.38), and the start of the pastorela “L’autrier jost’ una sebissa” (293.30);
and, in col. b, “Dirai vos e mon lati” (293.17), “Cortesamen vuoill comensar”
(293.15), and “L’iverns vai e·l temps s’aizina” (293.31).40
Geneviève Brunel-Lobrichon’s iconographic study distinguishes two hands
responsible for most of the décor of R: a very fine northern artist, or at least
one influenced by Parisian styles of decoration of the late thirteenth to early
fourteenth centuries, executed a small number of fine heads, such as the head of
Christ in the large initial P of Pax on the opening folio; whereas a southern art-
ist executed the smaller, somewhat cruder initials that predominate on this page
and throughout, and that are typically accompanied by grotesques and marginal
images, many of which are of animals, like the centaur and unicorn in the lower
margin of fol. 5.41
R is unique in placing Marcabru at the beginning and hailing him as the first
and founding poet of the tradition. This first page orchestrates this promotion
by opening with the rubric “Aisi comensa[n] so de marc e bru que fo lo pre-
mier q[crossed out] trobador que fos” (here begin the melodies/sounds/songs of
Marcabru, who was the first troubadour there was).42 The word so[n] can mean
“melodies,” which R is one of the rare troubadour chansonniers to transmit.
38
An “irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem” as Michael Camille calls it: Image on the Edge:
The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), 22.
39
A high-resolution scan of this folio is available on the BnF Gallica site http://gallica.bnf.fr
/ark:/12148/btv1b60004306/f15.image.r=francais%2022543, accessed 31 May 2016.
40
The forms of these first lines are taken from Simon Gaunt, Ruth Harvey, and Linda Paterson,
eds., Marcabru: A Critical Edition (Woodbridge, 2000). All subsequent citations of edited lines are
drawn from this same edition, which is also available online at http://www.rialto.unina.it/BdT.htm,
accessed 31 May 2016. Translations are likewise taken from the printed version of the edition, though
I have slightly adapted them in some cases.
41
Geneviève Brunel-Lobrichon, “L’iconographie du chansonnier provençal R,” in Lyrique romane
médiévale: La tradition des chansonniers. Actes du colloque de Liège, 1989, ed. Madeleine Tyssens
(Liège, 1991), 245–71, at 268–69.
42
I emend R’s singular “comensa” to the plural and translate accordingly. Given the use of the
oblique “trobador” in place of the expected nominative, “so” could likewise be a singular, but the
absence of an article before “so” and the placing of the rubric like those in other chansonniers that
introduce a group of songs make the plural more likely.

1012 Sound Matters
From the foot of col. a to the top of col. b is the musical notation of the pastorela,
and overleaf “Dire vos vuoill ses duptansa” (293.18) also has its accompanying
music, though subsequently the majority of staves are blank. There are also two
references to the songs’ son on this first page. The opening song, Marcabru’s call
to crusade, demands silence from the audience and states the troubadour’s au-
thorship of the text and music they are about to hear (“fez Marcabrus lo motz e·l
so”).43 In col. b, the concluding stanza of “Cortesamen vuoill comensar” voices
the intention to send “lo vers e·l son” overseas to Jaufre Rudel.
The first song inaugurates the section, the chansonnier and, according to the
rubric, the entire troubadour tradition in a commanding manner. The call to
silence insists that the only sound to be heard should be that of Marcabru’s vers
e son; the face of Christ in the initial P of pax (“silence”) makes its authority ir-
resistible. Yet both verse and music risk being drowned out by the buzz of sound
evoked later in these songs. Marcabru’s works proliferate with noises: insects
buzz, frogs sing, birds cry, and there are indistinct grunts, grumbles, squawks,
and chatter everywhere, in which human voices barely rise above the unintelli-
gible noises of nonhuman creatures.44 Even within “Pax in nomine domini,” the
singer must contend with what the editors render as boisterous “wine-trumpeters,
dinner-gobblers, brand-blowers [and] hearth-squatters” (lines 46–48, “corna-vi,
coita-dinar, bufa-tizo, crup-e·l camin”) and the general mutterings of dissent that
crusade provokes (e.g., lines 60, 65, 68).
The buzz of discordant noise grows louder in the next song. Although stanza 1
of “Hueymais dey esser alegrans” starts by evoking the gentle wind and the lays,
trills, and songs of birds (“lays e voutas e chans / dels auzelhs,” lines 2–3), the
prospect of pleasure in the soundscape soon fades as it rapidly degenerates, being
overwhelmed in particular by “sharp-tongued slanderers” who “put prowess in
jeopardy and promote evil” (15–17) and by women who “cheat, and . . . know
how to cheat and lie,” sowing “evil delusions” and banning talk of “joy or plea-
sure” (22–28).45 Such women are no longer human, since they are identified as
hammers that bang away on the nail (33) or as horses that can be unsaddled and
ridden (41–42).
Marcabru’s “lays e voutas e chans” (lays, trills, and songs, line 2) appear to fol-
low Rudel’s “voutas d’auzelhs e lais e critz” (“Pro ai,” line 4, discussed above). If
he thereby concedes that song may not be articulate or meaningful, this embrace
of it in its “natural” form appears confirmed by his censure of corrupt human
speech. However, Marcabru cannot relinquish human communication and falls
back on language after all. At the end of the song, the singer commits the song
to his messenger, who is not told to sing but eloquently to explicate it so it can
be understood by its recipient; speech is apparently needed to supplement and
explain musical performance.
43
Gaunt, Harvey, and Paterson, Marcabru, line 2. R reads “lo uers el so.”
44
Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 122–24.
45
“Estz lauzengiers, lenguas-trencans—/ cuy Dieus cofonda e azir—/ meton proeza en balans,”
151–17; “Eyssamens son domnas trichans / a sabon trichar e mentir” (22–23); “d’aqui naysso·l mal-
vat cuiar, / q’us no·n ama joy ni deport, ni·n auza hom entr’ ellas parlar” (26–28).

Sound Matters 1013
After the noble Christly head in the opening song it is many pages before we
see any more of the northern painter’s exquisite work (not until fol. 67, in fact).
All the decoration until then is by the cruder but livelier southern artist. He paints
a crowned head in the initial U of “Ueimai,” the spelling for the incipit “Huey-
mais” in col. a. Then, in the initial P of the third song, “Pus la fuelha revirola,”
two thirds down this column, he inserts a twisting form with a dragonlike head.
On the b column of this page, two initials contain the bust of what looks like the
same blond youth in a red tunic, but since the identical blond hair and red top
characterize the upper part of the centaur in the bottom margin, the youth’s hu-
man credentials are somewhat compromised. There are no more human busts in
any of the remaining Marcabru songs in this section. In their absence, the initials
usually sprout heads or faces of other kinds.
The second initial P, that of “Pus la fuelha revirola,” differs from the opening
one not only because Christ’s head has been replaced by the twisting snake-headed
form, but also because its ascender bears aloft a sinister green face, its tongue pro-
jecting to touch (or terminate in) a greenish ball. This monstrous “voicing” stands
immediately beside the stanzas of the preceding song, which denounce the “sharp-
tongued slanderers” and ladies who “know how to cheat and lie” as if epitomizing
their debased language;46 a maniculum in the margin endorses these denuncia-
tions—or else the wish, in the stanza next following, that God should never forgive
anyone who respects whores such as them (“Hueymais,” lines 29–32). In col. b,
the initial C of “Cortesamen vuelh comensar” is similarly surmounted by a face,
more human in coloring, though with a suggestion of horns or ears on its fore-
head, again with a protruding tongue ending in a greenish burr. This head stands
beside, and may interact with, two stanzas of the song above, “Dirai vos en mon
latin” (293.17), that use images of a white or a piebald pony to illustrate the way
youth is turning treacherous while married men with goatish desires randomly
beget bastards. These open-mouthed faces provide a grotesque “voicing over” or
dubbing of the songs, which chimes uncannily with the way Marcabru presents his
own voice as drowned out by other, distorting noises.
The animal character of the voices on this page may be further implied by the
bas de page unicorn (a creature to which Latin authors sometimes attributed a
horrible roar) and centaur (seen by some as a hybrid monster unable to frame
articulate human speech).47 The fact that the unicorn is white and the centaur pie-
bald suggests a link to the ponies of “Dirai vos en mon latin” which “turn from
white to dappled” (line 21, “van volven de blanc vaire”), while their equine ap-
pearance echoes with the sex-as-riding images in “Hueymais dey esser allegrans.”
See Camille, Image on the Edge, 20–46, on marginal art as a form of annotation or gloss.
46
See Fritz, Paysages sonores, appendix 2, 335–424, on the sounds made by animals, citing a large
47
number of “authorities” ranging from Pliny to Thomas of Cantimpré and Albertus Magnus. For the
unicorn specifically, see 367–68, and the centaur, 381. According to the verse bestiary of Theobaldus,
“Onocentaurs likewise have a double nature: in them there is an ass combined with a man’s body. Very
many men are thus two-faced in their behavior, saying one thing to you, the next moment doing an-
other; what they say in public does not accord with what they do in private. In just the same way there
are many who talk about virtue and indulge their vices; how dazzlingly attractive these men find the
stage.” Cited from P. T. Eden, Theobaldi Physiologus: Introduction, Critical Apparatus, Translation
and Commentary (Leiden, 1972), para. 10.

1014 Sound Matters
To the question, how human is song, they add another maybe more disturbing
one: how human is love?
In this light, the rubric that hails the beginning, here, of the so of Marcabru
takes on fresh meaning—we might prefer to translate “thus begins the soundscape
created by Marcabru, who was the first troubadour there was.” These semihuman
or monstrous faces and the implied surround sound emanating from them persist
throughout the songbook. The first song to introduce their mouthings into R is
“Pus la fuelha revirola” (283.38), which occupies most of the bottom half of col. a
of fol. 5. Since it is also permeated by unintelligible noises I will end with some
comments, not just on the soundscape that it summons up, but more specifically
on the question of how it views song as such.
Striking in this difficult piece is the way Marcabru attributes mouths or voices
to nonanimate substances. The wind in stanza 1 “cuts the throat of” a leaf (line 3;
degola); arrogance “bares its teeth” (line 21; ·s contradenteia). Nature is full of
noisy, smelly, dangerous creatures—toads, snakes, flies, horseflies, beetles, cock-
chafers that mercifully fall silent in winter.48 The cold puts a stop to birdsong
too, the noisy oriole as much as the sweet lark, the chattering jay as much as the
melodious nightingale (lines 15–18). But it fails, alas, to put a damper on sexual
activity, mention of which brings out reference to tools once more: this time Mar-
cabru compares sex to an adze, a pick, and a mallet, quite as noisy as the hammer
and nail of the song before, and rather more destructive. In a stanza whose trans-
mission is contested, but which the editors take as referring to the deployment of
a siege engine, in front of a fire an excessive amount of sex (line 31, sobrefotre)
is undertaken, which involves manipulating a handle (line 32, coa) and turning
a crank (line 36, segunhola), again with connotations of sound, since the word
for crank, according to the editors’ note, connects to words meaning “to emit a
monotonous grinding noise” or “to creak.” Although literal animals have been
silenced by the winter, animal imagery returns in the mongrel products of such
debauchery (line 35, girbaudoneia, a neologism meaning “to mongrelize”?),
while both coa (literally “tail”) and segunhola (literally “little stork”) reference
the animal as much as the mechanical and suspend sexual activity ambiguously
between the two.
These are “times of distress,” as Marcabru perceives them. What happens to
poets in such times? Like the sex machine energetically at work in front of the
fire, Marcabru “does not entirely waste his time” (line 43, “Jes del tot non ba-
daiola”). The Occitan word badaiola, a version of the verb “to gape, to stand
agape,” takes us back to the mouth. Marcabru is not standing agape; instead, a
true product of a “good school,” he is exhorting to (or stimulating) joy (lines 45–
46; “Car sel es de bon’ escola / que jou quera ssormover”). The image of the
school may imply that he wants to produce words that are articulate and writ-
able according to a properly grammatical and rational art. But in a way similar
to the bird schoolmasters and -mistresses in Jaufre, the pedagogical image could
also be being used against the schoolroom as officially understood. Marcabru’s
48
As Gaunt, Harvey, and Paterson point out in their commentary on this passage, Marcabru here
seems to be following a Latin model, maybe Eugenius of Toledo.

Sound Matters 1015
soundscape in this song is so complex and his voice so blended with the noises
made by natural and mechanical entities that it is hard to see him defining his po-
sition as human in opposition to nonhuman. His wager, or his venture, is rather
to risk the specifically human nature of his being in an effort to emulate the purity
of winter in a so that is ascetic, elusive to the grasp, and struggling to free itself
from the taint of human corruption.
Closed or Open Song?

Clearly Marcabru, like Jaufre Rudel before him and Raimbaut d’Aurenga and
Arnaut Daniel after, is saying something in his songs, and as Heidegger points
out with regard to Rilke, he cannot but draw on the resources of language to do
so. Yet the content of Marcabru’s songs is, as it were, deliberately buried under
a cascade of sound brought on by lexical difficulty, metrical intricacy, and ac-
companied by the competing noises of animals and machines. The obscure poetic
style associated with Marcabru and his followers, often known as trobar clus,
or “closed” composition, is achieved by his being open to worlds and sounds
beyond the human and by his submitting to the enchantment of admitting their
voices within his own; perhaps that is why Marcabru himself terms his style
trobar naturau (“natural composition”) in “Lo vers comens” (293.33), line 7, a
copy of which is found on R fol.5v. We cannot know if this was the reason the
compiler of R privileged Marcabru’s “sounds” as inaugural above all others, but
it may be what led Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Arnaut Daniel to produce songs that
also foreground “sounds” over “the word” in complex exchanges with the non-
human. By showing how openness (to the nonhuman) is also a closing off (from
the human), these troubadours identify a particular historical caesura between
“man” and “animal” and point to ways that greater openness can help the poet
escape beyond the restrictive soundscape of the human, courtly world.
Sarah Kay is Professor of French at New York University (e-mail: hsk8@nyu.edu)
3. Words and Blood: Suicide and the Sound of the Soul in Inferno 13
By A l is on Cor nis h
Despite the ink-stained hands of our ancestors and the carpal-tunnel syndrome
of our contemporaries, for the ancient grammarians it was very clear that the
essential matter of words was sound. Priscian begins his grammar with sound,
for which he uses the word vox (“voice”): “According to the philosophers, vox
is ‘very fine air when it is struck.’” The matter of words is voice, or sound; the
matter of sound is air that has suffered violence. As Chaucer’s eagle in the Hous
of Fame puts it, “speche is soun” and “soun is noght but air y-broken.” Priscian
goes on to say that letters combine to produce sound, “as if it were a body,” but,
as the grammarian quickly notes, sound is a real body, consisting of air that is
Thanks to Sarah Kay and Andrew Albin for initiating this collaboration in New York and to Susan
Boynton for her eloquence, both oral and written.

1016 Sound Matters
struck, that can touch the ear. Writing preserves voice, but not a particular voice,
1
not the unmistakable pitch, cadence, and dynamics of each individual speaking
at a certain unrepeatable moment in time. For this we need sound recordings
in kinds of matter that, unlike air, do not as easily forget the violence done to
them. In a recent New Yorker article about the Berkeley physicist Carl Haber,
who has succeeded in digitizing early recordings made in wax, soot, and shellac,
Alec Wilkinson observes that “anything you can embed sound in you can scratch,
crease, crumple, bend, break, tear, warp, or melt.”2 Some people have theorized
that, even without recording technologies, sound itself is only apparently ephem-
eral. Its disturbance of the air is permanent, though faded to the point of in-
audibility. Wilkinson notes that “Guglielmo Marconi, who sent the first radio
message, in 1902, believed that with a microphone that was sufficiently sensitive
he could hear Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, and in 1925 a writer for
the Washington Post speculated that a radio was capable of broadcasting the
voices of the dead.” Other sources Wilkinson cites have imagined that “all sounds
that ever existed [are] still present, hovering like ghosts.” In Paris in 1860, one
of the most intriguing early recorders, or “archeophonists,” embedded his own
voice singing a folksong in soot on a piece of paper. Only in 2008 did Carl Haber
figure out how to digitize this ingenious trace so that it could be heard. Its in-
ventor had aimed only for it to be “read,” believing that this series of squiggles
would be “more revealing of character” than that other, older technology for
recording speech—writing—in that it would preserve “a visual record of the pitch
of someone’s voice, how loudly he spoke, and with what emphasis.” This the
inventor defined as “living speech,” while “our manual or printed calligraphy is
nothing but dead speech.”3
What is writable is not speech, but a remnant of that audible event. Its dead-
ness derives from what is lost, the sound that once disturbed matter. In this way,
sound would appear to be more like soul than body, since the body is dead when
the soul leaves it. But if, on the contrary, it is sound that is the body of speech (“a
real body, consisting of air that is struck”) then what writing preserves is the soul,
the meaning that can be written in another matter, the matter of letters (“a letter
is a sound that can be written separately.”)4 Voice, which for the grammarians is
the basis of their art, is already a subcategory of sound. A sound that is a voice is
already evidence of something inaudible as well as immaterial: the soul.
1
Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae 1.1–3, in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, ed. Rita Cope
land and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford, 2009), 172–73. Hous of Fame 2.762, 765, in The Complete Works of
Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1894–97), 3.23. Thanks to Karla Taylor for
pointing this out to me. As Andrew Albin has commented in conversation, Chaucer’s eagle is some-
thing of a “blowhard,” giving an obtusely material definition of what voice is.
2
Alec Wilkinson, “A Voice from the Past: How a Physicist Resurrected the Earliest Recordings,”
New Yorker (May 19, 2014): 50–57.
3
Against this assumption that “the voice is precisely that quantity which, before Edison, eluded
transcription,” Shane Butler argues for the “phonographic claim” of ancient literary works: Shane
Butler, The Ancient Phonograph (New York, 2015), 13–14.
4
“Unless sounds are remembered by men, they perish, for they cannot be written down”: Isidore
of Seville, Etymologies 3.15, in Source Readings in Music History, ed. William Oliver Strunk and Leo
Treitler (New York, 1998), 149.
Sound Matters 1017
The grammarians distinguished between sounds that could and could not be
written, as well as between meaningful (articulate) and nonmeaningful ones. An
example of articulate sound that can be understood, but not written, is “when
human beings hiss or groan: for although these sounds indicate some intention
of the person who delivers them, they cannot be written.”5 Articulate sound is a
hallmark of the human, one of those lines that divide the human from the beast,
as Sarah Kay notes in her essay, showing how troubadour song tends to cross
that line. Music, in its rationality, based essentially on arithmetic, is really above
or prior to the human, since it is an activity shared with the angels, even now,
while they are in heaven and we on earth, as we can see in Andrew Albin’s study
of Rolle’s angelic canor. Indeed, in Boethius’s famous three kinds of music (mun-
dana, humana, and instrumentalis) only the lowest was audible to the senses.6 In
considering the inherent hierarchies of the medieval soundscape (from angels to
humans to beasts) we can go a step lower, to the subanimal, to the category of
vegetables, who do not have voice. This is the monstrosity of Dante’s suicides:
tree men who bleed words.
The speech act of the suicides in the circle of violence in Dante’s Inferno is
horrific from the very start because normally trees do not talk; unlike animals
with breath and blood, they do not have voice, because that implies an animating
principle that can intentionally shape the sounds they make. The speech of these
tormented thorn bushes has become an involuntary release of pent-up material
(“words and blood”) and it must be brought about by external violence, by peck-
ing harpies, by the haphazard destruction of other sinners and black hounds who
chase them through the woods, or by an unsuspecting pilgrim advised to “break
a branch” if he wants to know where the voices are coming from. Yet violence
is necessary in the production of all sound, because sound is a breaking (fractio)
of air. When Chaucer’s talking eagle says that “the air is twist with violence, /
and rent,” he is echoing the contemporary scientific understanding of sound.7 A
thirteenth-century commentator on Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul explains: “For
the generation of sound [three things] are required: something hit, something do-
ing the hitting, and a medium. The body that initiates the vibration is as much
an active cause of the sound as the body that vibrates, because the first is the ac-
tive cause of sound in so far as it breaks the air, yet the vibrating body holds the
air and does not let it get out easily. Air is the subject of that breaking and that
breaking is sound.”8
5
Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae 1.1, in Strunk and Treitler, Source Readings, 172.
6
The musica mundana is the music made by the heavenly spheres as they turn against each other,
inaudible to humans. The musica humana has to do with the relationship of soul to body. Only mu-
sica instrumentalis, which includes vocal (naturalis) as well as instrumental (artificialis) music, is the
kind you can hear: Boethius, De institutione musica 1.2, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867), 188–89.
7
Chaucer, Hous of Fame 2.775–76.
8
“In generatione soni requiruntur percussus et percutiens et medium. Et tam verberantis quam
verberatus est causa activa soni, quia corpus verberans est causa activa soni in quantum frangit aerem,
corpus autem verberatum retinet aerem et non permittit ipsum faciliter ire. Aer ergo est subjectum
illius fractionis et cetera talis fractio fit sonus”: Simon de Faversham (c. 1260–1306), Quaestiones
CXIV in Aristotelis libros de anima, in Vox atque sonus: Studien zur Rezeption der Aristotelischen
Schrift “De anima” und ihre Bedeutung für die Musiktheorie, ed. Michael Wittmann, 2 vols. (Pfaffen-
weiler, 1987), 2.38.
1018 Sound Matters
Sound is precipitated by violence, produced out of what Algazel called a vehe-
ment percussion or separation.9 Although the act of eliciting the sonorous poten-
tial out of matter is natural, the conditions of soundmaking essentially require
violence.10 Indeed, for the commentators on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata,
sound is a suffering (passio) of the air, caused by the collision of solid bodies.11
Sound can also be produced where something does not seem to be striking
something else, as another fourteenth-century commentator notes. For example,
when we break a piece of wood by bending it, there would seem to be no per-
cussion or blow, and yet there is a loud sound when it snaps.12 Or, in another
example, if someone puts fresh chestnuts under hot ashes without first cutting
their skins, they will produce a very loud noise when they explode. The sound
from the broken twig, it is explained, comes when it returns impetuously to its
natural curve from which it was being bent away with violence. The explosive
sound from the chestnuts has to do with wet matter being transformed into dry
air, which occupies more space and must necessarily find an exit by bursting
through the uncut husk.13
9
“Sonus vero est quiddam quod fit in aere propter undationem accidentem aeri ex motu fortissimo
proveniente ex vehementi aliquorum inter se percussione vel separatione. Tunc autem contingit ex
percussione cum concurrunt sibi fortiter duo corpora, et aer qui erat inter ea excluditur violenter;
tunc vero contingit ex separatione, cum movetur aer violenter inter duo corpora quae separantur, et
fit sonus cum commotus aer pervenit usque quo pervenit motus commotionis”: Algazel, Physica 4,
De anima vegetabili et animali et humana 3.3, in Algazel on the Soul, ed. Eva St. Clair, Traditio 60
(2005): 47–84, at 64. See also Albertus Magnus, “Quid sit sonus?,” Summa de creaturis 2.24.1, in
Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia, ed. August Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris, 1896), 35:233.
10
“Illa est falsa, quod omnes conditiones circumstantes generationem soni, sunt violentae. Sunt
enim conditiones soni ex parte materiae: actus enim sonativus educitur de potentia materiali, et pro-
portio illius ad ipsam non est violenta, sed naturalis. Sed verum est, quod conditiones agentis violen-
tae sunt”: Albertus Magnus, “Utrum generatio soni sit naturalis vel violenta?,” Summa de creaturis
2.24.3, in Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia, 35:236.
11
“Est autem sonus passio vel accidens ex motione aeris causata collisione corporum solidorum
auditu proprie percepta”: Pietro d’Abano, Expositio Problematum 11.1, quoted in Charles Burnett,
“Sound and Its Perception in the Middle Ages,” in Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical
Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Pe-
nelope Gouk (London, 1991), 43–70, at 66.
12
“Etiam dictum est, quod requiritur fortis ictus, modo in frangendo lignu flectendo ipsum non
fit ictus, eo quod non fit approximatio duri ad durum sed potius remotio duri adverso. . . . Modo
conplicatu lignum ultra naturam iste partes de quibus tibi dixi extenduntur et partes versus quas sit in-
curvatio condempsantur ultra naturam et tunc fractionis partes ligni rarefacte ultra naturam et partes
condemsate ultra naturam inpetuose redeunt ad naturalitatem et situm suum, quod non fit sine ictu et
percussura. Et pro hoc apparet, quod hic causari sonus et causa dicitur”: Blasius Pelacanus de Parma
(1347–1416), Quaestiones in Aristotelis De anima libri I–III, in Wittmann, Vox atque sonus, 2:124.
13
“Quod causatur sonus fortis et magnus cum sub cinibus ignitis ponuntur castaneae recentes,
habentes corticem non scissam alicubi, quia hic non videntur concurrere ea, quae dicta sunt primo
articulo, ut percutiens et percussum. . . . Responduntur, quod et putandis est castaneam recentem
habere in se multitas humiditatem aquosam. Cum autem ponitur ad ignem sub cinibus cortice eius
non scissam, tunc caliditas ignitis agens in castaneam generat ex ea materiam ventotem, scilicet trans-
mutando materiam aquosam in aerem. Et claris est, quod aer generatus ex materia aquosa occupat
maiorem locum, quam facebat illa aquositas. Ergo oportet, quod substantia castaneae dividatur. Et
quia non potest exire ista ventotitas nisi per subitam fractionem corticis cortex frangitur, quae ultra
naturam est extensa et tunc partes redent ad locum et situm, ut primo”: Pelacanus, in Wittmann, Vox
atque sonus, 2:124–25.

Sound Matters 1019
The broken wood and exploding chestnuts have particular resonance for the
canto of the suicides, where the breaking of the branch releases something that
was pent up: not vapor, but words and blood. Hearing the sound of cries in the
strange wood, Dante looks around for the persons who are making them. In or-
der to “cut off” what Virgil thinks are Dante’s mistaken thoughts about the origin
of voices, he prompts him to break off a little stick from one of these plants. Out
of this wound come words and blood.
Come d’un stizzo verde ch’arso sia
da l’un de’capi, che da l’altro geme
e cigola per vento che va via,
sì de la scheggia rotta usciva insieme
parole e sangue; ond’io lasciai la cima
cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme.
(Inferno 13.40–45)14
[As from a green log that is burned from one end, so that from the other it groans and
squeaks because of the escaping wind, so from the broken twig came out together words
and blood; so that I let the tip fall, and stood like a man who fears.]
The sound and substance spluttering from the uncured log on the fire are de-
scribed as a meteorological event. Dry heat encountering moist cold produces
a wind that then needs to escape from its confinement. It is, like all weather, a
matter of flatulence. From the simile of the hissing log, Leo Spitzer concluded that
“the language of the plant-men is mere flatus vocis, wind-begotten speech,” that
the genesis of this speech is a “purely material process,” and, most memorably,
that speech has become simply a matter of “bodily discharges”—an involuntary
effluence of words out of the body, like blood.15
The expression flatus vocis has the pejorative sense of “empty speech,” “mere
words,” or “voice-fart,” as Valerie Allen has suggested in her 2010 book On Far-
ting.16 The image of “hot air” may well be a critique of this soul’s literary output.
As notary and intimate secretary to the emperor Frederick II, Pier della Vigna
(c. 1190–1249) authored legal documents, epistolary prose, and vernacular po-
ems.17 As many critics have noted, in the canto Dante has him seem almost to
14
Citations of the Inferno are from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed.
Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols. (Milan, 1966–67). Translations are mine.
15
“The fact that Dante chose to describe a hissing, guttering fire-log by way of characterizing the
genesis of speech in his uomini-piante shows that he conceived this as representing a purely physical
process: the issue of blood and cries is on the same low ‘material’ level as is the issue of sap and hiss-
ing sound from a fire-log. Indeed, the fact that we have to do with speech of a non-human order, with
speech that is a matter of bodily discharges, was already suggested by the terrible line usciva inseme pa-
role e sangue”: Leo Spitzer, “Speech and Language in Inferno XIII,” Italica 19 (1942): 81–104, at 89.
16
Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York, 2010), 160.
Dante gives us a bona fide fart a little further on, made by the devil Malacoda to muster his troops by
means of his rear end (“ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta,” Inferno 21.139.)
17
On the literary style of the historical Pier della Vigna and its echoes in the canto, see William
A. Stephany, “Pier della Vigna’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: The ‘Eulogy’ of Frederick II and ‘Inferno’
13,” Traditio 38 (1982): 193–212. On the ethical implications of rhetoric in the canto, see Simone
Marchesi, “‘The Knot of Language’: Sermocinatio and contrapasso for the rhetoricians in Dante’s
Inferno,” Romance Languages Annual 9 (1998): 254–59.

1020 Sound Matters
stutter, to repeat words, to get entangled in verbiage almost as thick as the thorny
wood in which he subsists as a bush.
The ghastliness of Pier’s bloody speech, where his body must be torn in order to
emit sound, is an apt example of what Bruce Holsinger sees as the sonic violence
endemic to the medieval period, where the Psalmist’s harp could be understood as
Christ’s body stretched out on the Cross and in regular pedagogical practice the
human body suffered to produce music (in what he scathingly calls the “the longue
durée of pedagogical terror upon which the Church built the musical foundations
of its liturgical tradition.”)18 Pier della Vigna’s suffering does not produce music,
but it certainly can be seen to recall the Aristotelian understanding of sound,
with its inherent violence. That same discussion of sound production, pored over
by the commentators of the De anima, defining voice as special kind of sound,
a sonus animati, provides a gloss on the sin of suicide itself. The degradation of
human language into animal noise (the hissing of snakes among the thieves, the
sound of Ugolino’s teeth against bone) is a feature of hell generally. The forced
exhalation of a green log set on fire makes Pier’s speech something less than voice,
less than animal, indeed an inanimate sound. It is a sound without a soul behind
it, like the wind through the trees.
Voice (vox) is a special kind of sound, Aristotle specified, emitted by an ani-
mate being accompanied by some sort of image, intent, or desire to signify some-
thing either naturally or conventionally.19 The soul is the principal agent of the
voice, using the body to act upon air. The soul is the percutiens (the striker), the
vocal chords are what is struck (percussum), and breathed air is the medium of
the sound.20 Pietro d’Abano explains that “voice is caused by the striking of the
air breathed from the soul through the windpipe with the intention of signifying
something.”21 Animals also have voice, through which they express happiness or
sadness, comfort or discomfort, as does a barking dog.22
18
Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer
(Stanford, 2001), 1 and 261.
19
“Vox autem sonus quedam animati. . . . Non enim omnis sonus animalis, vox est, sicuti diximus.
Est enim et lingua sonare, et sicut tussientes. Sed oportet, et animatum verberans et cum imagina-
tione aliqua. Significativus eni quidam sonus est vox, et non respirati aeris, sicut tussis”: Aristotle,
De anima, 402b5–6 and 420b31–2, translatio antiqua from Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De
anima 2.18, in Doctoris angelici divi Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia, ed. Stanislas Fretté and Paul
Maré, 33 vols. (Paris, 1875), 24.111. An anonymous commentator adds that the image accompany-
ing the sound should come with the desire to signify either naturally or conventionally: “Ad hoc enim
quod sonus dicatur vox seu dicatur fieri ab anima inquantum huius requiritur, quod sit cum ymagine
et appetitu intendente ad aliquid significandum, quia omnis vox est significans naturaliter vel ad
placitum”: Anonymous, Quaestiones super Aristotelis libros De anima I–III, in Wittmann, Vox atque
sonus, 2.90.
20
“Et dictis patet, quod in formatione vocis anima est principalis agens et utitur aere ut instru-
mento ad formandum vocem. . . . Anima igitur in formatione vocis est percutiens et arteria percussum
et aer respiratus est medium”: Anonymus, Quaestiones, in Wittmann, Vox atque sonus, 2:90–91.
21
Charles Burnett, “Hearing and Music in Book XI of Pietro d’Abano’s Expositio Problematum
Aristotelis,” in Tradition and Ecstasy: The Agony of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nancy van Deusen
(Ottawa, 1997), 153–90, at 156.
22
“Brutis animalibus inest vox, per quam solummodo explicant laetitiam aut tristitiam, seu conve-
niens seu disconveniens, sicut latrans canis”: Pelacanus, in Wittmann, Vox atque sonus, 2:116. The
harpies who live in the wood of the suicides are ambiguous part-animal, part-human beings; they too

Sound Matters 1021
What is necessary to voice is soul, even an animal soul. Although all living
things have souls, not all of them have voice. Plants do not have voice. Moreover,
animals without blood do not have voice, and even some with blood, such as fish,
also do not have voice since they do not breathe in air.23 When Pier scolds Dante
for his violence, he in fact makes reference to this Aristotelian hierarchy of being.
Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi:
ben dovrebb’esser la tua man più pia,
se state fossimo anime di serpi.
(Inferno 13.37–39)
[We were men, and now we are made dried thorn bushes; your hand should be more
pitying if we had been the souls of serpents.]
The irony is, of course, that Pier is here because of his own pitilessness when
he violently took his own life, the life of a man, not of an animal (let alone one so
unlikeable as a serpent) or of a plant (let alone a useless thorn bush). The infer-
nal punishment—metamorphosis into plant rather than animal—suggests that he
mowed himself down as if he had been a crop or a clump of weeds—a bloodless,
presumably painless act, palatable even to vegetarians. The basic capacity of soul,
even a vegetable one, is to live; the suicide’s final form is a constant reminder of
that basic natural inclination, so violently negated in the act of self-murder. It is
also part of the monstrosity of the punishment for a plant to have a voice.
The torment of the suicide seems to be equal to the torment of the suicidal: to
feel “trapped” inside a body from which one yearns for release, constricted like
expanding hot air inside the casing of a chestnut. Successfully separated from his
body at death, his soul is now “tied up” or “bound” in the knotty limbs of this
infernal tree. Addressing him as an “incarcerated soul” (spirito incarcerato), Vir-
gil asks Pier on Dante’s behalf, since the pilgrim is too upset to speak,
di dirne come l’anima si lega
in questi nocchi; e dinne, se tu puoi,
s’alcuna mai di tai membra si spiega.
(Inferno 13.88–90)
[. . . to say how the soul is tied in these knots; and say, if you can, whether any soul ever
unfolds itself from such limbs.]
It is clear that the suicide, as Virgil here suggests, has a Platonic view of the
soul: that it is simply “housed” or “clothed” or “imprisoned” by the body, from
which it longs to be free—a view readily apparent in the Aeneid where Aeneas
asks his father how souls in Hades, cleansed of memory by the river Lethe, could
“crave our daylight so” or might ever be persuaded to “return to bodies’ dead
have voice; perched in the trees like birds, they make their “laments”: “fanno lamenti in su li alberi
strani” (Inferno 13.15).
23
“Multa animalium vocem non habent, ut quae sunt sine sanguine, et sanguinem habentium pi-
sces. Et hoc rationabiliter: siquidem motus sonus est.” Compare the translatio recens: “sonus motio
quaedam aeris est”: Aristotle, De anima 2.18, in Thomas Aquinas, Doctoris angelici divi, 24.111. See
also Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca,
2007), 21–24.

1022 Sound Matters
weight.” Anchises agrees that embodied souls are blinded and incarcerated by
their own bodies: “Imprisoned in the darkness of the body / They cannot see
clearly heaven’s air.”24 Macrobius similarly comments on Cicero’s Dream of
Scipio: “For a creature to have existence, it is necessary that a soul be confined in
a body; for this reason the Greek words for body are demas, that is a ‘bond,’ and
soma, a sema, as it were, being a ‘tomb’ of the soul. Thus you see that Cicero,
by the words those who have flown from the bonds of their bodies, as if from a
prison, means both that the body serves as fetters and that it is a tomb, being the
prison of the entombed.”25
Pier della Vigna was actually in a dark prison, accused of treason against the
emperor, where he was blinded and eventually killed himself by beating his head
against the wall. Suicide appeared to be a way out. As he puts it, in one of several
convoluted phrases in his speech,
L’animo mio, per disdegnoso gusto,
credendo col morir fuggir disdegno,
ingiusto fece me contra me giusto.
(Inferno 13.70–72)
[My mind, with disdainful gusto, believing to flee disdain with death, made myself un-
just against my just self.]
These lines are remarkable for their splitting of the single self of Pier (me contra
me) into guilty perpetrator and innocent victim and for the obvious impossibility
of a disdainful soul to flee disdain by fleeing its body. The soul cannot be sepa-
rated from itself. And even if death does separate the soul from the body, this is
only temporary, because human beings are a composite of these two, not one im-
prisoned in the other. According to Aristotle, rather than Plato, the soul is united
to the body as form to matter.
As Teodolinda Barolini observes, “Suicide as Dante treats it is best considered
in the context of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which is a doctrine
that claims the inseparable personhood of soul that is embodied and of body
that is ensouled. Neither can be divided from the other: together, for all eternity,
they compose self.”26 Although Aristotle believed neither in the resurrection of
the body nor in the immortality of the individual soul, his doctrine of form and
matter serves to support both. The differing views of soul and body are taken
up in the discussion of the resurrected body in the supplement to the third part
of the Summa theologica. Platonists saw the weakness of the human body as a
hindrance to happiness (“the soul, to be happy, must avoid all bodies”), and re-
cent heresies held that bodily things were inherently evil, just as spiritual things
were inherently good. Neither of these would be concerned with the body’s resur
rection, since it would be alien or even detrimental to man’s final happiness. A
24
Virgil, Aeneid 6.719–21, 724–34, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1981), 185.
25
Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 2.45, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York,
1970), 130.
26
Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 13: Our Bodies, Our Selves.” Commento Baroliniano, Digital
Dante (New York, 2015), http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-13/,
accessed November 30, 2015.

Sound Matters 1023
third view holds that a person’s whole being resides in his soul, so that the body
is nothing more than a useful instrument that can be discarded without any es-
sential loss. Aristotle’s hylomorphism is engaged precisely to refute this view of
the body’s mere instrumentality: “Others said that the entire nature of man is
seated in the soul, so that the soul makes use of the body as an instrument, or as
a sailor uses his ship. . . . But the Philosopher sufficiently destroys this foundation
(De Anima ii, 2), where he shows that the soul is united to the body as form to
matter.”27
The suicide’s desire for escape from the body, like air leaving a balloon, is, like
all infernal desires, both granted and intensified by the eternal punishment. At the
resurrection on the day of the Last Judgment, the suicides in Dante’s hell are the
only ones who will not get their bodies back. Or rather, the suicide will get his
body back, but he will not be able to “put it on.” In other words, he will not be
able to be incarnated by it: it will just drape over his branches like an old coat,
like a lifeless body hanging from a tree.28
This broken relationship between body and soul is dramatized also in Pier’s
production of speech. Words exit his split bark like sound escaping from a green
log on the fire, like blood oozing from a wound. To sustain the dialogue he must,
however, “blow hard” into his trunk to get more words to come out.
Allor soffiò il tronco forte, e poi
si convertì quel vento in cotal voce.
(Inferno 13.91–92)
[So the trunk blew hard, and then that wind was converted into such a voice.]
Can wind become voice? Aristotle says that voice is the sound of an animated
body, a body with a soul. It is not mere ventositas, as in the heated chestnut or
log, or even in the deliberate playing of an instrument. Inanimate things can only
have the semblance of voice. What Pier has now for a body is a hollow wooden
casing into which he can force air to produce sound: a kind of musical instru-
ment. Aristotle in fact uses a wind instrument and a stringed instrument (the flute
27
“Unde Porphyrius dicebat, ut Augustinus dicit, in libro de Civ. Dei, quod animae, ad hoc quod
beata sit, omne corpus fugiendum est. . . . Haeretici posuerunt, omnia corporalia esse a malo prin-
cipio, spiritualia vero a bono. . . . Quidam vero posuerunt totam hominis naturam in anima constare,
ita ut anima corpore uteretur, sicut instrumento, aut sicut nauta navi. Unde secundum hanc opin-
ionem sequitur quod, sola anima beatificata, homo naturali desiderio beatitudinis non frustraretur.
Et sic non oportet ponere resurrectionem. Sed hoc fundamentum sufficienter Philosophus, in II de
Anima, destruit, ostendens animam corpori, sicut formam materiae uniri”: Thomas Aquinas, Summa
theologiae, tertiae partis supplementum 75.1, ed. Pietro Carmello, 3 vols. (Turin, 1956), 3:283. Trans-
lation from Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (New York,
1947), 5.2863.
28
Inferno 13.103–8: “Come l’altre verrem per nostre spoglie, / ma non però ch’alcuna sen rivesta,
/ ché non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie. Qui le trascineremo, e per la mesta / selva saranno i nos-
tri corpi appesi, / ciascuno al prun de l’ombra sua molesta.” The body hanging from the tree is an
iconographic reference to Judas, whose suicide is sometimes seen as a greater betrayal of Christ than
the kiss that identified him to the Roman authorities. See Anthony Cassell, Dante’s Fearful Art of
Justice (Toronto, 1984), 46–56; and Robert Hollander, “Pier delle Vigne and Judas Iscariot: A Note
on Inferno XIII,” Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America, July 12, 2014, www.princeton.
edu/~dante/ebdsa/hollander_071214.html#two, accessed November 30, 2015.

1024 Sound Matters
and the lyre, or the pipe and the harp) as examples of inanimate objects that can
be said to have voice only metaphorically.29 As one anonymous commentator
elaborates, these instruments resemble voice in three ways: in their capacity to
sustain sound (extensio), to vary their pitch between sharp and flat (consonantia),
and to articulate (locutio), by starting and stopping and thereby enunciating a
musical phrase.30
But if the soul is the principal agent of voice, using air as its medium, produc
ing held notes, changes in pitch, and articulated syllables, it seems to be, precisely,
a musician, blowing his horn. So this same commentator reminds us that, for
Aristotle, unlike for Plato, the soul is not the driver of the body, but its substantial
form, which means it is completely and wholly in all of it: “Therefore in the for-
mation of voice the soul is the one that makes the percussion (percutiens) and the
chords are the thing struck (percussum) and breathed air is the medium. Finally it
is said that [the soul] is in these parts, because even though the soul is completely
in all parts in the whole, as it is the substantial form (forma substantialis), none-
theless insofar as it is the mover or movement of the body, it is principally in the
heart.”31As its substantial form, the soul is not simply housed, clothed, impris-
oned, or trapped by the body. Rather it is the soul that gives matter its existence,
“it is through its form that a thing is the very thing that it is.”32 The relation of
soul to body is precisely not that of a trumpet player to his trumpet, or a sailor
to his ship. The body is what it is because of the soul, and is therefore a sign of
it, not a container for it.
This essential identity of soul and body is what the suicide rejects, what he in
fact aims to rupture. There is a lot of breaking in the canto—the breaking of the
branch (“why do you tear me?”; “why do you break me?”), the crashing of the
spendthrift sinners through the bushes, making the thorn bushes bleed and “dis-
membering” their fronds, the feeding of the harpies on their leaves, the tearing
apart of the spendthrifts by black hounds who “carry off their suffering limbs”—
all terrible echoes of the violent uprooting (disvelta) of the fierce soul from its
body.33 Pier swears by the new roots of his tree that he never broke faith with his
29
“Vox autem sonus quidam animati. Inanimatorum enim nullum vocat, si secundum similitudi-
nem dicitur vocare, ut tibia, et lyra, et quaecumque alia inanimatorum, extensionem habent, et melos
et locutionem”: Aristotle, De anima 2.18, in Thomas Aquinas, Doctoris angelici divi, 24.111.
30
“Tertium in quo vox instrumentorum habet similitudinem vocis est locutio, id est discretio et in-
terruptio sonorum ad similtudinem locutionis. . . . Oratio enim per dictiones distinguitur et dictiones
per sillabas et hoc accidit propter diversas percussiones aeris ab anima. Et similiter soni instrumen-
torum distinguntur secundum diversas percussiones, ut puta diversarum cordarum vel diversorum
flatuum et cetera, et cetera habent similitudinem locutionis”: Anonymous, Quaestiones, in Wittmann,
Vox atque sonus, 2.91.
31
“Anima igitur in formatione vocis est percutiens et arteria percussum et aer respiratus est
medium. Deinde dicitur quae est in his partibus, quia licet anima sit tota in tota in toto, ut est forma
substantialis, tamen secundum quod motiva principaliter est in corde sive secundum quod motum
corporis”: Anonymous, Quaestiones, [Vat. lat. 3016], in Wittmann, Vox atque sonus, 2:88–89.
32
“Hoc proprium formae substantialis quod det materiae esse simpliciter; ipsa enim est per quam
res est hoc ipsum quod est”: Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de anima, quaestio 9, trans.
John Patrick Rowan, Corpus Thomisticum, www.corpusthomisticum.org/qda01.html#64775, ac-
cessed November 30, 2015.
33
Inferno 13.94–95: “Quando si parte l’anima feroce / dal corpo ond’ ella stessa s’è disvelta.”

Sound Matters 1025
lord, who was so worthy. If that is true, then it is equally clear that Frederick did
34
break faith with Pier, because he did not believe him and threw him in jail. And
whether or not Pier is innocent of breaking faith with that lord, from whom, like
Saint Peter, he received the keys to lock and unlock his heart, he is certainly guilty
of breaking faith with another, worthier Lord, who never breaks faith.35
Breaking faith with Christ, at the root of the suicide’s despair, is also a blind-
ness to the Incarnation of the Word, the ultimate speech act. Augustine uses the
reality of human speech, whereby thoughts become sounds without losing their
integrity as thoughts, as an illustration of the Incarnation: “Just as when we
speak, in order that what we have in our minds may enter through the ear into
the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an out-
ward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the
sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being
modified in its own nature by the change: so the Divine Word, though suffering
no change of nature, yet became flesh, that He might dwell among us.”36 Thus it
is not just that voice is a sign of soul; articulate speech is a sign of the incarnation
of the divine in the human.
Apart from this Christological truth inscribed in human experience, faith is al-
ready necessary on the level of ordinary conversation. Faith is belief, on which the
efficacy of speech depends. The infernal wood is so unbelievable that Virgil warns
Dante that he will see things that could “remove belief (fede) from my speech.”
Indeed it is precisely because of a failure to believe, according to Virgil, what he
could only have seen before in his own verses (in the episode of Polydorus meta-
morphosed into a bush in Aeneid 3), that Dante the protagonist inflicts violence
on the suffering soul, thereby eliciting his blood and words. This act is precipi-
tated by the strange line, “I believe that he believed that I believed,” which illus-
trates a fundamental hazard of ungrounded human communication.37
The matter of words is not just sound, but voice; and voice is the sign of an ani-
mate being, a soul that is not just using a body to make a sound, but a soul that is
that body. Elizabeth Leach has connected the late-medieval retheorizing of the
human soul as both rational and embodied with the medieval concept of music as
a similar conjunction of rationality and materiality.38 Suicide aims to break the
essential bond between body and soul, a bond evident in the very fact of voice
34
Inferno 13.73–75: “Per le nove radici d’esto legno / vi giuro che già mai non ruppi fede / al mio
segnor, che fu d’onor sì degno.” For the historical Pier’s idolatrous eulogy of Frederick II, equating
him with Christ, see Stephany, “Pier della Vigna’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecies.”
35
Inferno 13.58–59: “Io son colui che tenni ambo le chiavi / del cor di Federigo.”
36
“Sicuti cum loquimur, ut id quod animo gerimus in audientis animum per aures carneas illabatur,
fit sonus verbum quod corde gestamus, et locutio vocatur, nec tamen in eundem sonum cogitatio nos-
tra convertitur, sed apud se manens integra formam vocis qua se insinuet auribus sine aliqua labe suae
mutationis assumit, ita verbum dei non commutatum caro tamen factum est ut habitaret in nobis”:
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 1.13.26, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995), 22–25.
37
Inferno 13.25: “Cred’ ïo ch’ei credette ch’io credesse”; 13.46–51: “‘S’elli avesse potuto creder
prima,’ / rispuose ’l savio mio, ‘anima lesa, / ciò c’ha veduto pur con la mia rima, / non averebbe in
te la man distesa; / ma la cosa incredibile mi fece / indurlo ad ovra ch’a me stesso pesa.’” On belief
as the theme of the canto, see Dennis Looney, “Believing in the Poet: Inferno XIII,” Allegorica 13
(1992): 39–52.
38
Leach, Sung Birds, 21.

1026 Sound Matters
itself, which is why now, in order to speak, the thorn bushes involuntarily burst
open with pent-up affliction like green logs seething on the fire and blow painful
speech through their bloody trunks.39 They produce flatus vocis, broken air, the
orphaned matter of words. As Paul said, without love, even though we should
speak “with the tongues of men and of angels,” we are just noise, instrumental
sound, not voice, “like sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.”40
39
Inferno 13.138: “soffi con sangue doloroso sermo.”
40
1 Cor. 13.1: “Si linguis hominum loquar, et angelorum, caritatem autem non habeam, factus sum
velut aes sonans, aut cymbalum tinniens.”
Alison Cornish is Professor of Italian at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (e-mail:

acorn@umich.edu)
4. Canorous Soundstuff: Hearing the Officium of

Richard Rolle at Hampole
By A ndr ew A lbin
In late fourteenth-century Yorkshire, it was not uncommon to hear angels sing-
ing—not just on pageant wagons bearing golden-faced and -throated choristers
in Corpus Christi plays, not just in churches and chapels reverberating Sanctus,
sanctus, sanctus during the daily ministrations of Mass, but also in the recesses
of the souls of the pious, made hungry for heavenly harmonies by the writings
of a local saintly figure, Richard Rolle of Hampole. Never canonized, Rolle was
among the most enthusiastically embraced of a spate of fourteenth-century York-
shire saints, with veneration at his shrine lasting past the dissolution of the mon-
asteries.1 Rolle also stood among the most widely read of medieval England’s
authors, composing hundreds of pages of spiritual and mystical literature surviv-
ing in some 470 attested manuscripts dating between 1390 and 1500.2 In Latin
and Middle English, this most influential forebear of medieval England’s mystical
tradition exhorts his readers to turn from the world to the love of God and ex-
tols the trio of spiritual sensations for which he is best known: heart-borne heat,
fragrant sweetness, and, loftiest of all, a constant, transcendent state of inwards
coparticipation with the heavenly choirs Rolle terms canor.
Although he authored his texts primarily for solitary religious dedicated to the
contemplative life, Rolle’s writings came to circulate well beyond the anchorhold
following his death in 1349 as a cult took root around his burial place at the
Cistercian nunnery at Hampole. Miraculous visions and cures from beyond the
grave multiplied, and his remains were translated to a stone tomb in the third
I am grateful to Christopher Baswell, Susan Boynton, Alison Cornish, and Sarah Kay for their
generous encouragement, thoughts, and feedback on various drafts of this essay.
1
See Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval York-
shire (Woodbridge, 1988), especially 82–95, 202–75. Hughes’s readings are, however, regarded as of
uneven quality.
2
Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), 31.

Sound Matters 1027
quarter of the fourteenth century, apparently at lay urging. Latin works like the
3
Emendatio vitae and Incendium amoris, where Rolle dwells more explicitly on his
mystical sensations than in his vernacular works, were also translated into Middle
English at the beginning of the fifteenth century, widening the audience for ghostly
heat, sweetness, and song well beyond what the hermit had originally envisioned.
As Rolle’s mysticism traveled further and further from the solitary’s cell, how-
ever, it began to take on new spiritual and social meanings, a cause of increas-
ing anxiety among custodians of the church. While he held the archbishopric of
York, Thomas Arundel and his circle strove to redeem Rolle’s texts from heretical
interpolation, given that his vernacular writings, especially his English Psalter,
had begun to attract Lollard audiences.4 Lay audition of canor appears to have
become a particularly vexing problem: Walter Hilton, one of the more uneasy
inheritors of Rolle’s mysticism, authored his epistle Of Angels’ Song to help rein
in the phenomenon among worshipers too rude to discern grace-given canor
from delusions of grandeur. Where fiery love and divine sweetness were familiar
figures from Cistercian, Franciscan, and Victorine mystical writings, and thus
relatively uncontroversial, hearing canor was as contentious as it was catching:
Rolle describes it as an experience reserved for elect souls and a token of advance
admission to the angelic hierarchy. Audition of and participation in heavenly
song could thus be a powerful sign of spiritual authority, at the same time that
its private and unverifiable experience placed its authenticity deeply in question.
It was against this cultural setting that an elaborate rhymed office honoring
Saint Richard the Hermit was composed in the early 1380s. Rolle’s Officium
is no modest undertaking: it describes a major feast of nine lessons containing
numerous newly composed liturgical items, including a vita spread over the les-
sons of Matins and a Mass celebrating Rolle’s memory, together with a Miracula
recounting Rolle’s posthumous prodigies in the lessons of the octave following his
feast day. The office survives without music notation. As a secular office, the Of-
ficium was intended for performance not in the monastery but in ecclesial spaces
that welcomed all Christian worshippers, including pilgrims to Rolle’s shrine at
the nunnery at Hampole where the office was most likely performed.5 One won-
ders, though, whether Rolle’s wonder-working body was rolling in its tomb at
these developments: despite the anti-intellectual and egalitarian posture of some
3
The construction of Rolle’s tomb by a local layman, “quidam paterfamilias Rogerus nomine,”
is the subject of the first miracle of Rolle’s Miracula: Reginald Maxwell Woolley, The Officium and
Miracula of Richard Rolle, of Hampole (New York, 1919), 82. André Vauchez writes that the transla-
tion of a saint’s remains to an above-ground tomb often amounted to unofficial canonization in the
minds of the laity: Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1997), 20.
4
Hughes, Pastors, 216–45. See also the introduction to Two Revisions of Rolle’s English Psalter
Commentary and the Related Canticles, vol. 1, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford, 2012).
5
Despite the opening rubric’s admission that Rolle’s office is only to be sung “postquam fuerit ab eccle-
sia canonizatus” (after he shall be canonized by the church), scholarly opinion largely agrees with Vau-
chez that “there is good reason to think that this was a purely formal clause or pious falsehood” and that
“such statements . . . reveal both awareness of the rules in force and every intention of ignoring them”:
Vauchez, Sainthood, 96 and 96 n. 36. The endowment of masses at Rolle’s chapel at Hampole and the
success of his cult suggest a devotional climate amenable to the Officium’s performance. There are even
signs it may have been sung outside Hampole: a chaplain of Saint Giles’ church, York, possessed a paper
copy of the office that he later left to the library of Saint Leonard’s Hospital in 1427: Hughes, Pastors, 94.

1028 Sound Matters
of his works, Rolle’s mystical disciplines are essentially elitist and uninterested
in lay devotional life.6 What’s more, over and over in his Latin writings, Rolle
rejects coenobitic living as inimical to mystical accomplishment, since its taxing
routines, noisy liturgy, and temptations to vainglory and carnal indulgence read-
ily obstruct spiritual sensation.7
Designed to accord with the routines of claustral life, then, the Officium capi-
talizes on popular sensory devotions the church found vexatious, in order to
promote the cult of a hermit who found claustral life and popular religiosity
vexatious—a conflicted text, indeed. The Officium is not insensitive to these con-
flicts, however. Rather, the text of the office, that text’s realization in perfor-
mance, and the dialogue that arises between text and performance gather the
spiritual sensations that proved so attractive to late medieval pious back into the
sanctioned ambit of liturgical rite. In this way, Rolle’s Officium seeks to resolve
the tensions between mystical song’s sensorial immediacy and spiritual loftiness
on the one hand, and its devotional potency and extrainstitutional promiscuity
on the other, by reimagining what canor is and what it means to hear it inside the
more tractable acoustic environment of liturgical singing.
Thus, where readers have usually mined it for insight into Rolle’s life and
times,8 I want to study the Officium as a literary and performance text at Ham-
pole Priory, one that diegetically represents Rolle’s enactment of social, liturgi-
cal, and mystical performances at the same time that it scripts present sonorous
performance in the space and time of the nunnery chapel. In the discussion that
follows, I show how the biographical narrative recited during the hour of matins
consistently locates Rolle in liminal spaces in ways that resonate with his liminal-
ity as mystic-saint, as one who resides somewhere between mortal and angelic
conditions, as well as with the liminality of the sacred space and time in which the
liturgical performance of the Officium unfolds. This resonance effectively blurs
the line between text and performance, sponsoring the arousal of sensations and
identifications among singers of the office that consequently permits Rolle’s cha-
risma to spill into the present moment of liturgical performance. The result is the
transmutation of spiritual canor into a kind of matter, a sonorous stuff that the
hermit’s liturgy puts into circulation. In contrast to the Aristotelian and scholastic
philosophy of sound Alison Cornish examines in her preceding essay, the Offi-
cium is less interested in the material circumstances of sound’s airy engendering
than in rendering sound of decidedly unairy origin miraculously material, in the
space and time of a liturgy charged with the saintly virtus of Rolle’s physical re-
mains and with the extrasensory musicmaking of angelic voices.9 Song, singers,
6
“Rolle is a spiritual elitist who never wrote a whole work directly for the laity and was mainly
interested in the few capable of seraphic or ‘fervent’ love”: Nicholas Watson, “The Middle English
Mystics,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge,
1999), 539–65, at 548.
7
Chapter 47 of the Melos amoris, for example, is constructed as a disputatio on this topic. An-
timonastic sentiment recurs repeatedly, if less disputatiously, over the length of the Incendium amoris.
8
A dubious enterprise, as Nicholas Watson points out: see Watson, Invention, 295–98.
9
This is not to say that scholastic thinkers were uninterested in the angelic voice: see Ghislain
Casas, “Language without Voice: Locutio angelica as a Political Issue,” in Voice and Voicelessness in
Medieval Europe, ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman (New York, 2015), 13–28.

Sound Matters 1029
and hearers come to hover between outwards and inwards, earthly and heavenly,
liturgical and devotional, Church Militant and Church Triumphant, and in their
suspension become capable of savoring sweet angelic soundstuff. Reading Rolle’s
contextualized office as both literary object and script for performance thus al-
lows us to extrapolate the effects and meanings arising from the audition of that
office’s music, even when notation for that music does not survive. Close atten-
tion to how the Officium strives to make mystical canor substantial thus helps
amplify one potent arena in which sound mattered as matter in late-medieval
England.
The circumstances under which Rolle’s Officium and Miracula were composed
can be reconstructed to a degree of certainty, in large thanks to Elizabeth Free-
man’s careful study of the literary culture at Hampole Priory.10 Rolle’s connection
to Hampole during his life is unclear. Though he may have written for religious
women at Hampole as early as the 1340s, there is little evidence for Rolle’s pas-
toral role at or affiliation with the nunnery during his lifetime, outside the Offi-
cium’s biographical account.11 After his death, however, the fortunes of Hampole
Priory and Rolle’s renown appear to go hand in hand. Earlier fourteenth-century
bishops’ visitations reveal a Cistercian house languishing in notorious poverty.12
It is only after a late-century effort to spread the word about Rolle’s physical,
miraculous, and textual connections to Hampole—a campaign to which the Of-
ficium clearly belongs—that the nunnery’s and hermit’s estates improve: Boniface
IX grants an indulgence to pilgrims donating to Hampole’s church; archiepis-
copal injunctions investigate the house’s large volume of secular visitors; York
clergy at the Council of Constance secure formal approval for Rolle’s teachings;
the priory builds a chapel housing an “ymage of Seynt Richard,” where interces-
sory Masses are sung.13 One mid-fifteenth-century copy of Rolle’s English Psalter,
Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 286, opens with an advertisement in neon for Hampole:
its metrical preface reels off miracles, gives directions, and vouches for the or-
thodoxy of “Richard Hampole” (lines 21, 52), as if saint and site were one and
the same.14 Rolle’s cult brought good profit, spiritual and material, to the nuns
charged with the hermit’s legacy.
Freeman convincingly argues that “the composition of the Officium and Mi-
racula must have been a joint effort” between the women’s religious commu-
nity and their mendicant confessors, who likely composed the sisters’ memories
and stories in the framework of the nine-lesson secular office observed by the
mendicant orders.15 Its audiences were multiple: Woolley sensibly offers that the
10
Freeman, “The Priory of Hampole and Its Literary Culture: English Religious Women and Books
in the Age of Richard Rolle,” Parergon 29/1 (2012): 1–25.
11
Ibid., 4–8.
12
The archbishop of York, John Thoresby, threatened the nunnery with closure in 1353 due to its
impoverished state: Ibid., 3.
13
Hughes cites the approval of Rolle’s teachings at the Council of Constance in Pastors, 226. Free-
man provides citations for the remainder of these events in “Priory,” 15–16.
14
Richard Rolle, The Psalter, or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, ed. H. R. Bramley (Ox-
ford, 1884), 1–2.
15
Freeman, “Priory of Hampole,” 16. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne describes the significance of this
model of collaborative authorship for late-medieval women in “‘Reading Is Good Prayer’: Recent

1030 Sound Matters
Officium was intended for celebration at Hampole Priory; Hughes widens the
diocesan scope to include religious communities at York, and agrees with Hope
Emily Allen on an even wider audience of pilgrims; Watson suggests that the Of-
ficium’s authors have the papal curia in their sights, despite the sharp decline in
canonizations by the time of its authorship.16
Whatever its end—inspiring devotion to God, memorializing a local holy man,
securing financial solvency, successfully petitioning a pope—the Officium can be
said to observe one primary aim: to style Richard Rolle as a bona fide saint.
Though the office only fully realizes this aim in performance, its text lays the
foundations for Rolle’s sanctity—and all the miraculous and material effects that
sanctity generates—in the nine biographical lessons of matins, which comprise
what amounts to the hermit’s “liturgical vita.”17 These lessons are divided evenly
into three nocturns, each nocturn opening with three psalms and antiphons fol-
lowed by three lessons and responsories. As a whole, the lessons rehearse the ma-
jor events of Rolle’s life, from birth to death: son of a tenant farmer, Rolle attends
Oxford, drops out of Oxford, declares himself a hermit, gains his first patron,
takes refuge in a cell, feels the fire of love, preaches and writes, resists demons,
comforts the dying, heals the sick, and meets his mortal end. With the addition of
Rolle’s Miracula, all the major points of a hagiography are accounted for.
From the first lesson onwards, however, the Officium characterizes Rolle’s
body and the spaces his body occupies as enduringly in-between, emphasizing the
hermit’s liminal status before, during, and after his acquisition of canor. Lesson 1
culminates, for example, with Rolle’s makeshift ceremony of eremitic investiture,
a colorful passage that brings the hermit’s liminality into sharp relief. Having
summoned his sister to meet him at the edge of a wood with a pair of her robes
and their father’s rain hood, the teenaged Richard strips naked, tailors the gar-
ments on the spot, and theatrically dons them “sic aliquantum iuxta modum sibi
pro illa hora possibilem effigiaret confusam similitudinem heremite. Cum hec
igitur soror eius fuisset intuita stupefacta clamauit: frater meus insanit, frater
meus insanit. Quo audito cominatorie fugauit eam a se, et ipse protinus sine
mora, ne comprenderetur ab amicis et notis, affugit”18 (so that thus to a certain
degree, as much as he was capable of at the time, he might portray a hodgepodge
likeness to a hermit. But when his dumbfounded sister saw this she cried out in
astonishment: “My brother is mad! My brother is mad!” When he heard this,
he drove her from him with threats and fled himself at once without delay, lest
he be seized by his friends and acquaintances). Rolle enters what amounts to the
Research on Female Reading Communities,” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 229–97, at 246–47.
In this respect, the Officium stands as strong evidence “that knowledge of Latin was not completely
extinct, even in the fourteenth century, among English nuns”: Alexandra Barratt, “Small Latin? The
Post-Conquest Learning of English Religious Women,” in Anglo-Latin and Its Heritage, ed. Sian
Echard and Gernot R. Wieland (Turnhout, 2001), 51–65, at 65.
16
Freeman cites most of these critical opinions in “Priory of Hampole,” 15; for Hughes, see Pastors,
264. For the decline in fourteenth-century canonizations, see book 2, part 2 of Vauchez, Sainthood.
17
Thomas Heffernan holds up Rolle’s Officium as exemplary of this hagiographical subgenre: see
“The Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas
Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo, 2000), 73–105, at 104.
18
All quotations of the office are taken from Woolley, Officium. All translations are mine.

Sound Matters 1031
liminal phase of a classic rite of passage, in the anthropological sense. His state 19
of transition between cultural categories is marked by the performative dissolu-

tion of previously stable cultural signifiers: he strips naked at the geographical
margins of civilization and dresses himself in his sister’s robes and his father’s rain
hood, confusing categories of gender and generation through his costume. The
accusation of madness that immediately leaps to his sister’s lips confirms Rolle’s
removal from social intelligibility, and his flight into the woods away from friends
and acquaintances marks his willing alienation from existing structures of kin-
ship and affiliation.
Lessons 2 and 3 extend the theme of Rolle’s transitional indeterminacy. On
the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin, a feast that celebrates the liminal status
of Mary’s mortal body, Rolle is discovered in the very place where the wife of
the local gentryman John Dalton is accustomed to pray. The Dalton household’s
reaction to Rolle’s presence acknowledges his imposition on a space marked by
gender and social status: “Postquam autem illa ad uesperas audiendas intrauit
ecclesiam, familiares de domo armigeri ipsum de loco sue domine amouere uole-
bant” (but once [the Lady Dalton] entered the church to hear vespers, servants
of the squire’s house attempted to remove him from their lady’s place). Rolle’s
improper occupation of social space carries over to Lesson 3, where he steals
away to a dingy storeroom upon entering the Daltons’ manor as an invited dinner
guest. The first nocturn thus emphasizes how Rolle’s pursuit of the eremitic vo-
cation renders him categorically in-between. The second nocturn opens with his
reaggregation into stable social order when John Dalton dresses him in a proper
hermit’s habit and establishes him in a cell on his manor’s premises. Yet even after
Rolle’s rite of passage is complete, the lessons do not stop emphasizing his lim-
inality: they only ever depict him in his cell or in similar spaces of enclosure and
withdrawal, even while admitting to and defending his gregarious and peripatetic
lifestyle. From beginning to end, then, the hour of matins carefully delimits its
representation of the spaces that Rolle inhabits to heterotopic sites out of joint
but in active communication with their environs, zones to which the divine and
the demonic have ready access.20 These are the liminal crucibles in which Rolle’s
saintly charisma is proven.
Woven among the lessons’ characterful vignettes are a number of direct quota-
tions from Rolle’s writings, the lengthiest two supplying autobiographical reports
of the hermit’s first encounters with mystical heat, sweetness, and song. Lesson
9, for example, quotes the well-known firsthand account of Rolle’s ascent into
spiritual sensation from chapter 15 of the Incendium amoris, one of Rolle’s most
19
Arnold van Gennep first theorizes liminality in Les rites de passage (Paris, 1909). Victor Turner
elaborates on van Gennep in his influential The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chi
cago, 1969); see especially the chapter “Liminality and Communitas,” 94–130. See also Victor Turner,
“Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in Symposium on New Approaches
to the Study of Religion: Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, ed. June Helm (Seattle,
1964), 4–20.
20
For heterotopic spaces, see Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miscowiec, Diacritics
16/1 (1986): 22–27.

1032 Sound Matters
frequently copied works. This description of Rolle’s first audition of canor is
especially revealing of how the Officium constructs liturgical and angelic song:
Dum enim in eadem capella sederem et in nocte ante cenam psalmos prout potui decan-
tarem: quasi tinnitum psallencium, uel pocius canencium, supra me ascultaui. Cumque
celestibus eciam orando toto desiderio intenderem, nescio quo modo mox in me concen-
tum canorum sensi et delectabilissimam armoniam celitus excepi mecum manentem in
mente. Nam cogitacio mea continuo in carmen canoris commutabatur et quasi odas habui
meditando ac eciam in oracionibus ipsis et psalmodia eundem sonum edidi, deincepsque
ad canendam que prius dixeram, pre affluencia interne suauitatis prorupi. Occulte quidem
quia tantummodo coram conditore, non cognitus eram ab hiis qui me cernebant.
[While I was sitting in that same chapel, and singing the psalms the best I could in the
night before supper, I heard above me the ringing of psalm chanters, or rather, of sing-
ers. And while I trained my thoughts on heavenly matters by praying with all my desire,
I cannot explain how, I next felt in me a choiring of song, and received from heaven a
most delectable harmony which dwelt with me in my mind. For my thought was con-
tinuously transformed into canorous song, and I had odes as it were by meditation, and
in those same prayers and in psalm chanting I produced the same sound. Thenceforth,
continuously singing what before I had spoken, I burst out overflowing from inward
sweetness. And this was hidden within—since I sang only before my Maker, I went un-
detected by those who observed me.]
The passage opens by rhetorically dramatizing Rolle’s coming-to-awareness of

acoustic difference between corporeal and spiritual sounds.21 At first, Rolle takes
the heavenly music to be “quasi tinnitum psallencium,” like the psalm chanting
of the religious community he attends and sings with. Upon reflection, though,
he recognizes his mistake and recharacterizes “tinnitum” as “canencium,” as the
sound of singers, a music distinctly more tuneful than the mouth-deep chant his
human community performs. It seems as though corporeal and spiritual sounds
can be distinguished through attentiveness to their different timbres.
If it begins by rhetorically enacting aural discernment, though, Rolle’s descrip-
tion of canor goes on to emphasize its simultaneity and contiguity with liturgical
singing, an emphasis the Officium can recruit to promote the emergence of canor
into the present moment of its own liturgical performance. Where the passage’s
first sentence distinguishes between external and internal, corporeal and spiri-
tual sensations, the remainder of the passage erodes their categorical difference
as Rolle’s personal and perceptual boundaries blur. The sounds he realizes are
coming from above him are suddenly also inside him. Temporally and sonically,
prayer, psalmody, and canor coincide: “eciam in oracionibus ipsis et psalmodia
eundem sonum edidi.” This blurring between the external sound of liturgical
chant, the internal sound of private prayer, and the spiritual sound of angelic song
yields a strategically crucial ambiguity for the Officium. These sounds become
linked together not just in Lesson 9 of matins but across the hours of Rolle’s feast
day, where their linkage is reiterated in the office’s text precisely as that text is
sung aloud as liturgy. For an office that aims to fold naive enthusiasm for angelic
21
I analyze Rolle’s acoustic sensitivity at greater length in “Listening for canor in Richard Rolle’s
Melos amoris,” in Kleiman, Voice and Voicelessness, 177–98.

Sound Matters 1033
song back into institutional and ecclesiastical frameworks, this blurring together
of distinctive sounds in Lesson 9’s narrative is a useful effect: it recruits the het-
erotopic qualities of sacred space and the transhistorical collage of liturgical time
to support the emergence of canor into the present sounding space and time of
the office’s performance.
An earlier lesson and its responsory illustrate how singing the hour of matins
translates the Officium’s narrative liminality into the space and time of the reso-
nant chapel at Hampole.22 Lesson 6 recounts an evening when the Lady Dalton
brings her dinner guests to Rolle’s cell, there to find the hermit rapidly writing. She
asks him to stop and entertain her guests with edifying words; he complies with a
two-hour jeremiad against worldly vanities, simultaneously maintaining his scrip-
tural work on an entirely different topic. The lesson is followed by a responsory:
R. Solui cupit a carnis carcere.
Clamat mors ueni, festina propere!
Curre, uola, noli pigrescere!
V. Dulcis mors en diu langui.

Fac me meo dilecto perfrui.
Curre, uola, noli pigrescere!
[R. He longs to be loosed from the prison of the flesh. / Death calls, “Come! Hurry quickly! /
Run! Fly! Don’t slow down!” // V. “Sweet Death, look! I’ve languished a long time! /
Make me to enjoy my Beloved! / Run! Fly! Don’t slow down!”]
The function of the responsory—a short, melismatic dialogue between soloist

and choir with a repeated refrain—is to comment and expand upon the lesson
it follows, as this responsory surely does. At first, the communally sung respond
appears to comment on Rolle’s contempt for the world (“Solui cupit a carnis car-
cere”), but then it veers in an unexpected direction and becomes a dialogue with
Death. Those performing the office find themselves ventriloquizing Death and
enter into an ambiguous discursive context with an implied interlocutor whose
identity asks to be resolved. After the choir concludes the respond with Death’s
summons to his still-unidentified mortal interlocutor (“ueni, festina propere! /
Curre, uola, noli pigrescere!”), a soloist sings the first two lines of the verse, tak-
ing on that interlocutor’s persona and enjoining sweet Death to transport him
to the spiritual Bridegroom. The choir then joins in again to repeat the refrain,
Death’s former summons now in the mouth of the world-weary mortal who in-
vites Death to “Curre, uola, noli pigrescere!”
Taking a cue from its first line, we could simply understand the responsory as a
dialogue between Rolle and Death, the hermit longing for release into the angelic
condition.23 This drama in miniature, however, is also an excellent example of
22
Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa also comments on the “state of liminality . . . accessible to congrega-
tions as they experience the liturgical rites which commemorate a saint’s feast day” in “Veneration of
Virgin Martyrs in Margery Kempe’s Meditation: Influence of the Sarum Liturgy and Hagiography,”
in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed.
Christiania Whitehead and Denis Renevey (Toronto, 2000), 177–95, at 178.
23
Chapter 16 of the Incendium amoris offers just such a dialogue, though its text is distinct from
Lesson 6’s responsory.

1034 Sound Matters
the rhetorical flourishes familiar to preachers, just the sort of flourish we might
expect Rolle, himself a gifted preacher, to offer the Lady Dalton and her entitled
party guests. The soloist and choir who sing the responsory may thus understand
themselves to enact Rolle’s diatribe against worldly vanities from Lesson 6; they
are invited to identify with the sermonizing Rolle and insert themselves into his
narrated space and time. The responsory’s refrain plays an important role in this
regard: using the same words to voice the persona of Death and of Death’s inter-
locutor, the refrain sustains an openness of identification among its performers
that dilates the discursive and performative channels across which the lesson’s
internal liminality might flow.
Importantly, the inosculation of person, space, and time that Lesson 6 and its
responsory promote can only occur in the resonant acoustic space and time of
liturgical performance. In singing the office, blurry boundaries inside and outside
the lessons’ narrative diegesis come into alignment: where chapel and cell, where
celebrant and saint, where chant and canor end and begin becomes difficult to pin
down, especially when we recall that Rolle’s office would have been sung at Ham-
pole in the presence of the blessed hermit’s tomb. Of course, the emergence of
canor into outward audibility that this alignment of structural liminalities enables
adulterates the mystical rarefaction that characterizes canor in Rolle’s teachings,
giving rise to conceptual conflicts over what canor is, how it’s perceived, and
what it means to hear it. In order to resolve some of these conflicts and maintain
control over canor, the Officium exploits ambiguities arising from the dialogue
between text and performance to render canorous sound a kind of charismatic
substance it can more readily shape and put to devotional use. Taking full advan-
tage of Hampole Priory’s unique relationship to Rolle’s remains, his reputation,
and even his texts, the Officium’s performance strives to transform sound’s ontol-
ogy and summon it into substantial, material being, nothing short of a miracle at
the shrine of Saint Richard.
Given that Rolle first heard canor during the singing of vespers, it makes sense
to examine that twilight hour for how it sponsors the movement of mystical song
out from the soul and into the chapel. “Totis precordiis,” the hymn performed
the evening before Rolle’s feast day at first vespers, anticipates the biographical
sequence of lessons that will be sung in a few hours at matins.24 The hymn al-
ludes to many of the lessons’ major narrative events, the third stanza clearly citing
Rolle’s first encounter with the fire of love in Lesson 5, the fourth anticipating
Rolle’s simultaneous preaching and writing in Lesson 6:
Labor dulcissimus apis eligitur.
instructor optimus mellita loquitur.
docet dulcissima fauus exprimitur.
uita fit uerbis consona.
[The sweetest labor of the bee is chosen. / The best doctor speaks honey-sweet words, /
Teaches sweetest things; the honeycomb is squeezed. / His life becomes harmonious with
his words.]
24
The hymn plays a similar retrospective function when it is sung again at Vespers on the evening
of Rolle’s feast day.

Sound Matters 1035
Here, words are made metaphorically material. Sweetness dominates the stanza,
with references to the industrious bee, its honey, and the honeycomb squeezed by
the hand made sticky with sugar and beeswax.25 Yet the stanza melds this imagery
of tactile, toothsome sweetness with sounds, with speech, words, and harmony:
the bee’s sweetest labor is the pronunciation of words; medicinal teachings drip
from the squeezing hand; Rolle’s life in pursuit of sweet labor is not just conso-
nant with his honeyed words, but also filled with the spiritual harmonies that urge
those words forward. This alignment of sweetness and sound would redound for
those singing Rolle’s office onto the melodies they themselves sang during their
performance of the hermit’s liturgy, not just during first vespers but across the
hours of the feast day to come. It would also limn the resonant acoustic space of
the candlelit chapel in which the celebrants sing with the same intersensorial po-
tential that characterizes Rolle’s own mystical experience, as widely attested across
his writings. The fourth stanza of “Totis precordiis” thus bridges between sense
faculties, promoting tactile and gustatory remappings of sonorous experience.
Reminiscent of the “affluencia interne suavitatis” Rolle experienced when he
heard canor for the first time, the flavorful metaphors in “Totis precordiis” can-
not be contained by the hymn’s formal bounds but spill into the surrounding
liturgical items. Indeed, the versicle and response that immediately follow enable
the emergence of notional sweetness into actual sonority, framing the celebration
of vespers as the direct degustation of Rollean harmony. Reciting Song of Songs
2.3, a soloist sings “Sub umbra illius quem desideraui sedi” (I sat down under his
shadow, whom I desired) and the community responds with “fructus eius dulcis
gutturi meo” (his fruit was sweet to my palate). Inhabiting the scriptural first-
person singular of the respond’s pronouns and verbs, singers of the office declare
that they have tasted sweet matter directly, the past tense of their verbs locating
that savor in their performance of “Totis precordiis,” the very hymn they just
completed, that laid the groundwork for sound’s refashioning into sweet matter.
The Magnificat antiphon that immediately follows extends sound’s material-
ization in a striking new direction:
O quam te magnificant
exempla caritatis.
Scriptis tuis emicant
fomenta sanctitatis.
Facta mira predicant
uim tue potestatis
et egris multiplicant
medelas suauitatis.
[O how they magnify you, / the examples of your charity! / Out from your writings they
spring, / the healing salves of sanctity! / Your extraordinary deeds preach / The might of
your power, / And for the sick they multiply / the remedies of sweetness.]
Here, Rolle’s miraculous deeds are said to preach and to multiply sweet rem-
edies for the sick, recalling the praise the hermit received in “Totis precordiis,”
25
For a discussion of aesthetic sweetness as knowledge, as persuasion, and as medicine in the
Middle Ages, see Mary Carruthers, “Sweetness,” Speculum 81/4 (2006): 999–1013.

1036 Sound Matters
“instructor optimus mellita loquitur.” Curiously, though, “O quam te magnifi-
cant” proclaims that Rolle’s holy remedies leap from the pages of his writings, a
surprising transferral of the healing honey, until now associated with sound, to
the books that contain Rolle’s texts. I understand this unusual turn in a few ways.
On the one hand, it extends one step further the accretion of materiality to sound
that vespers has so far encouraged: sound is honey, medicine, fruit, and now writ-
ing. By placing the magnifying, curative, and textualized “exempla caritatis” in
the second line, the antiphon also leaves temporarily open who the subject of its
opening verb “magnificant” is. In that grammatical delay, who better to supply
the missing plural subject, the ones who magnify Saint Richard, than the singers
of vespers themselves, on the cusp of singing the Magnificat to which the verb
might playfully be taken to refer? By conflating texts and singers by virtue of their
vocality, the antiphon endows Rolle’s health-radiating books with miraculous
praise, as if the folios speak up and “predicant” the “facta mira” recorded on
their pages themselves.
The antiphon’s unusual turn to books also echoes more local considerations.
As Freeman demonstrates, by the end of the fourteenth century the nunnery at
Hampole had gained fame as a “secure repository for the written word,” espe-
cially authenticated copies of Rolle’s texts.26 One crucial book among the nun-
nery’s holdings was Rolle’s English Psalter. The aforementioned metrical preface
to Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 286 hints at the striking role this psalter might have
played in the performance of Rolle’s Officium at Hampole Priory. In assuring us
of the scribal accuracy of the text it precedes, the preface publicizes the nunnery’s
autograph copy of the English Psalter, chained in place and available for consulta-
tion and copying:
This same sauter in all degree is the self in sothnes
That ly3t at hampole in surte at Richard own berynes,
That he wrote with his hondes to dame Merget kyrkby:
And thar it ly3t in cheyn bondes in the same nonery.
…………………………………………………………..
Whos wol it write, I rede hym rygth wryte on warly lyne be lyne,
And make no more then here is dygth or ellys I rede hym hit ne ryne.
(lines 25–28, 47–48)27
[In every detail, this Psalter is identical to the one / That lies in safekeeping at Hampole,
at Richard’s own burial place, / Which he wrote with his own hand for Dame Marga-
ret Kirkby; / And it resides there in that same nunnery, bound in chains. . . . Whoever
would copy it, I advise that he copy it carefully line by line / And add nothing more than
what is written there, or else, I warn him, it will not be valid.]
The reported location of this book is intriguing. That it “ly3t in cheyn bondes”
suggests a library; no evidence exists for such a library at Hampole Priory, though
one would not have been impossible given the good fortunes Rolle’s cult brought
the house by the mid-fifteenth century. More provocatively, the preface can also be
26
Freeman, “Priory of Hampole,” 19–21.
27
Bramley, Psalter, 1–2.

Sound Matters 1037
construed to indicate that the nunnery’s psalter was chained to Rolle’s “berynes,”
his tomb or his shrine, where it would be more accessible to visiting pilgrims and
devout; Hampole would not be the only place in Yorkshire to chain Rolle’s texts
in churches to increase their public availability.28 Chanting “Scriptis tuis emicant
/ fomenta sanctitatis” at Rolle’s shrine might thus have taken on a much more
literal sense: were the autograph English Psalter chained there, books would enter
into canor’s mystical ambit not in the abstract but by reference to a physical book
made by Rolle’s own hand and physically present during the performance of the
Officium. Even if Rolle’s autograph psalter were in fact stowed away, the metri-
cal preface attests to the conceptual (if not physical) linkage of Rolle’s books to
his burial place and, by extension, to the liturgy performed there. Books are thus
folded into the mystical-sensorial dynamics that the Officium in performance
seeks to construct; the Rollean codex takes on the condition of a relic bearing the
same healing power as the hermit’s saintly body, participating in the same spiri-
tual sensations that the liturgy enhanced by that body’s presence materializes.
Local considerations grow even stronger when we recall that the vespers an-
tiphon “O quam te magnificant” surrounds the Magnificat, Mary’s canticle of
praise and thanksgiving for being elected the Lord’s handmaid and mother of
God. With the feminine first-person singular of the hymn respond’s Song of Songs
quotation still in recent memory, the Magnificat now invites singers of the office
to inhabit the voice of Mary, a paragon of devotional emulation for a women’s
monastic community, by the same deictic means. This Marian identification en-
larges the Officium’s efforts to make sound matter: as the Magnificat’s text re-
peatedly refers to the Incarnation, through which Mary becomes the vessel for
immaterial divinity made material flesh, so the singers of Rolle’s office become
the vessels for spiritual sound made substantial soundstuff. The circulation of
canoric substance during the performance of Rolle’s liturgy takes on an almost
sacramental quality among a community of women unable to perform sacra-
ments.29 Glancing back, this effect was anticipated in the preceding versicle, “Sub
umbra illius quem desideraui sedi,” where Christ and Rolle seemed to blur as
the object of the singer’s desire and in whose shadow she rests. Saint and Savior
flow into one another. For the nuns of Hampole, the degustation of sweet sound
thus draws not just on the Song of Songs exegetical tradition and Rolle’s spiritual
doctrine, but also on the potency of the Virgin Mother as corporeal and mysti-
cal exemplar.30 Through their identification with an expectant Mary, not only do
28
John Newton, one of Rolle’s most assiduous readers and correctors of the late fourteenth century,
“left his volume of Rolle’s works to be horned and nailed in the cathedral of York where it was acces-
sible for the local gentry”: Hughes, Pastors, 225.
29
Anne Bagnall Yardley alludes to similarly gendered negotiations of power in the nunnery in Per-
forming Piety: Musical Cultures in Medieval English Nunneries (New York, 2006), 51. This effect is
strikingly echoed in the hymn for matins, a contrafact of Thomas Aquinas’s “Pange lingua” written
for the Feast of Corpus Christi in praise of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, transformed
in the Officium into praise for Rolle’s scorn for the world and the real presence of canor in his soul:
“Dum deuota meditatur rapitur in iubilum” (While he reflects on devout matters, he is ravished in
ecstatic song).
30
In his commentary on the Magnificat—the concluding commentary of the English Psalter—Rolle
describes a pregnant Mary immersed in canor: Bramley, Psalter, 523–24.

1038 Sound Matters
the nuns of Hampole incarnate canor through the performance of liturgy, they
come into intimate maternal relationship with a hybrid Christ-Rolle through the
performance of his office, a relationship that powerfully echoes their material
custody over the holy man’s tomb, books, shrine, and cult.
***
One fundamental condition that of necessity shapes the authorship of the litur-
gical office is its expected realization as musical sound; the text of an office can-
not but register its anticipated future residence in the singing voice. This must be
doubly true of Rolle’s Officium, given his mysticism’s elevation of the sonorous as
the privileged channel of highest sanctity. It should come as no surprise, then, that
a careful reading of the Officium’s text, even in the absence of notated music, can
help us reconstitute domains of meaningful sonorous experience arising from the
performance of the office, especially among the nuns at Hampole Priory, whose
experiences I have endeavored to reimagine here.31
For them, canor may very well have been the melodies they themselves sang in
the presence of Richard Rolle’s tomb, in their capacity as vessels through which
inward mystical song graciously flowed into acoustic space. Not merely acous-
tic aesthesis, the sounds filling Hampole Priory stimulated the entire sensorium,
coaxing sweetness onto the singing tongue, stimulating hands that had thumbed
the leaves of Rolle’s books, in the visual presence of the hermit’s tomb, image,
and autograph, all of these contributing their reverberant share to the liturgy’s
festival of song. Performing Rolle’s Officium at Hampole was thus a much more
complex business than may appear at first glance: besides its function as an act of
worship, it attracted the nuns into Rolle’s vita; it circulated his charismatic virtus
on the breath of their voices; it metamorphosed sung melody into a complex ma-
terial, textual, devotional, sensorial, and ritual apparatus that, on the experiential
plane, rendered inwards canor outwards soundstuff in the regulable and regular
environment of the liturgy. For lay pilgrims, for ecclesiastical visitors, for men-
dicant confessors, and most richly for the nuns of Hampole themselves, angelic
song thus emerged out into the open—not a Heideggerian Open describing the
topography between animal and human that Sarah Kay explores in her essay, but
a mystical Open articulated in the caesura between human and angel.
Like Kay, in reconstructing Rolle’s office at Hampole, I am interested in sound-
scape, in the combination of human and nonhuman sounds in a historically spe-
cific arrangement. An important distinction between our texts’ relationships to
the soundscape obtains, however, at the level of the imagination. The chanson-
niers Kay analyzes are interested in evoking a soundscape in the imagination
at the same time that they script music that may open up future occasions for
performance. The Officium, in turn, is interested in scripting a sounding space
of performance that involves and exceeds imaginative work. It augments the
31
I have taken encouragement for reconstructing medieval devotional experiences from method-
ological provocations in Rachel Fulton’s “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Prac-
tice,” Speculum 81/3 (2006): 700–733, and Monika Otter’s “Entrances and Exits: Performing the
Psalms in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius,” Speculum 83/2 (2008): 283–302.

Sound Matters 1039
raw acoustic through an array of material and performative means, thereby
introducing particular sounds into particular sounding spaces, such that a partic-
ularly meaningful soundscape arises around them. Studying the Officium in this
way might then move us from acoustics to what anthropologist Steven Feld has
termed acoustemology to what we might term an acoustemopoetics undertaken
in the historical mode.32 Doing so helps affirm that the matter of sound matters,
and that it might be a more material matter than we usually suspect. Thus, in its
circulations of desire and sanctity, of memory and sound, the Officium grasps
after the immortal not yet open to humankind, almost grasping the immaterial in
its efforts to locate sound’s sweet matter in hand and mouth and ear.
32
Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe,
NM, 1996), 91–135. Bruce Smith reworks Feld’s “argu[ment] for the existential force of hearing in
the shaping of cultures” (47) in historical terms in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England:
Attending the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999).
Andrew Albin is assistant professor of English and Medieval Studies at Fordham Univer-
sity (e-mail: aalbin@fordham.edu)

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Sound Matters

Speculum 91/4 (October 2016)

Speculum 91/4 (October 2016)

aligning troubadours with animals can be compared to the mingling of animals

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2. The Soundscape of Troubadour Lyric, or, How Human Is Song?

How Human Is Song?

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Fourfold division that results from superimposing

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Chansonnier Performance and the Precariousness of the Human

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Marcabru and the Soundscape of Chansonnier R

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Closed or Open Song?

Sarah Kay is Professor of French at New York University (e-mail: hsk8@nyu.edu)

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Alison Cornish is Professor of Italian at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (e-mail:

4. Canorous Soundstuff: Hearing the Officium of

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of transition between cultural categories is marked by the performative dissolu-

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The passage opens by rhetorically dramatizing Rolle’s coming-to-awareness of

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V. Dulcis mors en diu langui.

The function of the responsory—a short, melismatic dialogue between soloist

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