Sonic Bodies : : Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England / / Tekla Bude.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Bude, Tekla,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Sound in History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.) :; 11 bw halftones, 1 table

What is the body when it performs music? And what, conversely, is music as it reverberates through or pours out of a performing body? Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise—that music requires a body to perform it—to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period.Progressing by way of a series of case studies of texts by Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and others, Bude argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" not as separate objects or ontologically prior categories, but as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being in complex and shifting ways. For Bude, these "sonic bodies" are often unexpected, peculiar, even bizarre, and challenge our understanding of their constitutive parts.Building on recent conversations about embodiment and the voice in literary criticism and music theory, Sonic Bodies makes two major interventions across these fields: first, it broadens the definitional ambits and functions of both "music" and "the body" in the medieval period; and second, it demonstrates how embodiment and musicality are deeply and multiply intertwined in medieval writing. Compelling literary subjects, Bude argues, are literally built out of musical situations.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Writing Sonic Bodies -- Chapter 1. Musica Celestis and Canor: Angelic Song in Speculative Music Theory and Rollean Mysticism -- Chapter 2. Touching Music: Walter Hilton, Angels’ Song, and Synaesthesia -- Chapter 3. Attending to The Boke of Margery Kempe -- Chapter 4. Music, Amicitia, and Carthusian Mystical Diaries -- Chapter 5. Piers Plowman, the Sound-Object, and the Singing Community -- Chapter 6. Disability, Music, and Chaucer’s Advental Bodies -- Coda -- Appendix. A Short Exposition of the Manuscripts in Chapter 4 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index