Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780812253702

Table of Contents

Reviews

Drawing on a wide range of texts in Latin and Middle English, Tekla Bude shows how thoroughly medieval culture imagined its soundscape in material terms. -Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia Tekla Bude offers a richly transdisciplinary account of the medieval entanglements of music and body, expanding the range of literatures and disciplines relevant for the understanding of medieval sonic practices. -Andrew Hicks, Cornell University

Author Information

Tekla Bude is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available