Control Issues: Music and Sexuality in thirteenth-century Legal, Doctrinal, and Literary Discourses

Ideology, Society, and Medieval Religion seminar series

The control of sexual activity was a central concern for early thirteenth-century clerical writers, as ensured by the church’s contemporary reform to the canon law and doctrine of marriage. As William of Auxerre’s Summa aurea (1220s) comes to the end of what seems like another exemplar of such sexual moral regulation, it turns to a different kind of self-restraint: the morality of listening to music. This paper moves outwards from William’s juxtaposition in two stages. First, it examines its underlying logic, showing that thirteenth-century clerics saw the regulation of sex as closely analogous to the control of musical behaviours. Second, it traces the responses of authors of vernacular French literature to such clerical attempts at control, demonstrating their sophisticated and humorous attempts to undercut, frustrate, and satirise clerical narratives.

The similar problems posed by music and sex, as adumbrated by clerical texts from academic theology to confessors’ manuals, stemmed from the difficulty they posed for self-control. Both had crucial social utility: sex promoted reproduction and marital affection, while music could change human behaviour, inspiring the faithful and calming the violent. Both music and sex, however, produced a morally perilous level of sensual pleasure, which could impair humans’ power to control their own behaviour, by overcoming their ability to think rationally about the morality of their actions. Problematically, this pleasure was vital: without it, music could not change behaviour and sex was unlikely to promote marital affection. These similar problems caused clerics to establish closely analogous regulatory mechanisms to control musical and sexual behaviour. Some texts required participants to retain their rational ability to judge between right and wrong. Other writers acknowledged that such complete self-control was unlikely or impossible. They therefore described the conditions under which sexual and musical pleasure would lead to virtue and away from vice, even if participants’ judgement were temporarily overcome.

Although music and desire formed central themes of thirteenth-century French literature, scholars have often seen its treatment of them as being isolated from the clerical attempts at control considered in this paper. Through an analysis of episodes from Henri de Valenciennes’s Lai d’Aristote (1210s) and Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette (c. 1227–29), I demonstrate that vernacular authors carefully manipulated their literary narrative and the songs they inserted into it in order to engage meaningfully with clerical narratives about the difficulty of controlling music and sex, if only to frustrate and poke fun at them.

MATTHEW P. THOMSON is an Assistant Professor in Early Music at University College Dublin. His current monograph project examines the close interactions between narratives about music and sexuality in thirteenth-century France, exploring the impact that these intertwined narratives had on French literary and musical production. He is also being a new project, which investigates interactions between music and gendered identities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He has further interests in the analysis of medieval music. The book he co-edited with Elizabeth Eva Leach and Joseph W. Mason, A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C, came out with Boydell and Brewer in 2022; recent articles are found in Music Theory Online, Plainsong and Medieval Music, and Music and Letters, the latter of which won the 2024 Westrup Prize.

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This seminar will last approximately 90 minutes including a Q&A, and will begin at 18:00 GMT on Monday 23 March 2026. This is an online event, which will be broadcast on Microsoft Teams; a link will be emailed to you upon registration. Please check your spam/junk folder for this email if you cannot find it. The talk will not be recorded.