Howling like wolves, bleating like lambs: Singers and discourse of animality in the late middle ages PDF

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HOWLING LIKE WOLVES, BLEATING LIKE LAMBS: SINGERS AND THE DISCOURSE OF ANIMALITY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES Jason Stoessel* Abstract: In 1247 Simon of Saint-Quentin compared Mongol song to the howling of wolves. Like Simon, authors writing about music from the late thirteenth to mid-sixteenth century o...

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Howling like wolves, bleating like lambs: Singers and discourse of animality in the late middle ages Jason Stoessel

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HOWLING LIKE WOLVES, BLEATING LIKE LAMBS: SINGERS AND THE DISCOURSE OF ANIMALITY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES Jason Stoessel* Abstract: In 1247 Simon of Saint-Quentin compared Mongol song to the howling of wolves. Like Simon, authors writing about music from the late thirteenth to mid-sixteenth century often associate the singing of certain socio-linguistic groups with the vocalizations of animals. This article argues that these statements betray what Cary Wolfe has termed the discourse of animality. This discourse seeks through a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin West’s place in the world. Yet anthropomorphized animals in literature and song often instruct human readers/listeners in social and moral conduct. What might it mean when singers take on the voices of animals in Giovanni da Cascia’s Agnel son bianco and Donato da Cascia’s Lucida pecorella? By tracing metaphorical references to sheep, goats, and wolves in classical Roman and medieval literature, the article offers new social and political readings of these two madrigals. Keywords: the singing voice, discourse of animality, musical ontologies, Dante Alighieri, Nicolò Soldanieri, late Middle Ages, animal symbolism, Trecento music, hocket.

HOWLING LIKE WOLVES In 1241 the fury of the Mongol Empire fell upon Eastern Europe. Duke Henry II of Lower Silesia, the son of Saint Hedwig, lost his head at Legnica (Liegnitz) along with the lives of many of his Polish and Templar knights. The Hungarian King Béla IV fled from the fields near Eger after his large royal army was defeated. The invasion was short-lived and for reasons still debated by historians, the tumans of Batu Kahn left Europe in the following year as quickly as they had arrived.1 Europe’s princes were mostly too preoccupied with their own affairs to respond to the events of 1241–1242. The new pope Innocent IV (1243–1252), however, found enough time between rallying support for a new crusade to the Holy Lands and fending off the suave enfant terrible of Europe, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, to commission no less than three diplomatic missions to the Mongols in the wake of the Council of Lyon in 1245. The task of undertaking these missions fell to the two new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans.2 Simon of Saint-Quentin provides an eyewitness account of one of these missions that the Dominican friar Ascelin of Lombardy led to the camp of Baichu (Baiju), Batu

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School of Arts, University of New England, Armidale NSW 2350, Australia; [email protected]. I am most grateful to David Catalunya, Barbara Haggh-Huglo, Lauren Jennings, and Leofranc HolfordStrevens for their respective contributions, and to the Interlibrary Loans Department at Dixson Library, University of New England. I also warmly thank Annamaria Cavallaro and an anonymous reviewer for suggesting improvements to the respective Italian and Latin translations in this article, which unless otherwise indicated are mine. A shorter version of this study was delivered at the 19th Congress of the International Musicological Society, Rome, 1–7 July 2012. 1 On relations between the Mongol Empire and the West, see Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West (Harlow 2005). For an excellent introduction to the history of the Mongols, see David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd ed. (Malden 2007). 2 A musico-poetic response to this crisis occurs in the motet Li douz maus m’ocit que j’ai/ Trop ai lonc tens en folie/ Ma loialtez m’a nuisi/ IN SECULUM. The motetus’s text (Ma loialtez m’a nuisi) playfully bids the Tartars (Tartarin) to wreak swift revenge upon her who has betrayed the narrator’s loyalty; see Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre (Cambridge 1994) 146– 147; David J. Rothenberg, The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York 2011) 81–84. Viator 45 No. 2 (2014) 201–236. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103918

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Kahn’s general in Greater Armenia.3 Part of Simon’s account survives thanks to the Dominican encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais who incorporated it, and part of John of Plano Carpini’s journal of a Franciscan mission to Karakorum, into his widely circulated Speculum historiale (ca. 1259).4 In a chapter entitled “Concerning the external qualities of the Tartars,” Simon describes the appearance and behavior of the Mongols he encountered in the summer of 1247, including a brief but fascinating judgment of their singing: Furthermore, the Tartars speak in an argumentative and noisy manner from a fierce and horrible gullet; singing they bellow like bulls or howl like wolves, issuing forth inarticulate vocalizations (voces inarticulatas) in their singing and they sing this song “Alay, Alay” communally and very frequently.5

Simon refers to the Mongols as the Tartars, a usage first found in the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, conflating the name of a subjugated Mongol tribe, the Tatars, and the Latin name for the underworld, Tartarus.6 The commonly sung “Alay, Alay” cannot be a garbled reference to the Muslim Takbir, but perhaps refers to a song serving as, or referring to, a rallying cry for battle, exercises or the hunt (nerge) within the still largely shamanistic and highly militarized Mongol society.7 Simon’s simile comparing the singing of particular peoples to the sounds that animals make is what interests me here.8 Several late medieval musical writings discussing the vocal qualities of various peoples (mostly from the Latin West) also compare various types of singing to animal

3 On papal embassies to the Mongols, see Igor Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys to the Great Kahns (London 1971) 115–119 (specifically on Ascelin’s mission); Jackson, The Mongols and the West (n. 1 above) 87–92. 4 Gregory G. Guzman, “The Encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais and His Mongol Extracts from John of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin,” Speculum 49 (1974) 287–307; M. Paulmier-Foucart and MarieChristine Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand miroir du monde (Turnhout 2004) 102–103 and 292. 5 Simon of Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, ed. Jean Richard (Paris 1965) 31–32: “Preterea Tartari modo interrogativo et clamoso loquuntur gutture rabido et horribili. Cantantes mugiunt ut thori, vel ulalant ut lupi, voces inarticulatas in cantando proferunt et hanc cantilenam ‘alai, alai’ communiter ac frequentissime canunt.” Also see Gregory G. Guzman, “Simon of Saint-Quentin and the Dominican Mission to the Mongols, 1245–1248 (Parts I and II)” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati 1968); idem, “Simon of Saint-Quentin and the Dominican Mission to the Mongol Baiju: A Reappraisal,” Speculum 46 (1971) 232– 249. Portions of Simon’s account only survive in Books 29–31 of the revised version of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale completed in the period 1250–1259. The Speculum naturale, Speculum doctrinale and Speculum historiale together form the Speculum maius. For a conspectus of previous scholarship on the extensive and long reception of Speculum majus (including the Speculum historiale) in late middle ages and early modern period, see Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais et le Grand miroir du monde (n. 4 above) 105–116. A French translation of relevant portions of Simon’s and John’s accounts of the Mongols can be found in ibid. 293–302. 6 Matthew of Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London 1876) 488; Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys to the Great Kahns (n. 3 above) 72–73; Jackson, The Mongols and the West (n. 1 above) 59. On the iconography of “hellish” Tartars, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton and London 2003) 196. 7 Alai appears to be a Turkic military term for banner, regiment or procession (with the connotation of rallying to a banner); Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und Mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, 4 vols. (Wiesbaden 1963–1975) 2.108–109 (§523). I warmly thank Leofranc Holford-Strevens for drawing my attention to this word’s military origin in a private communication. Islamists augmenting the Mongol army after Genghis Kahn’s conquest of Khwarazm in the early 1220s would have enjoyed the religious toleration that was a feature of Mongol society. 8 A contemporary Armenian chronicler describes Mongolian voices as “sharp and piercing”; see Ernst Emsheimer, “Earliest Reports about the Music of the Mongols,” Asian Music 18 (1986) 1–19 at 6.

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vocalizations, although the technical term inarticulate vocalization occupies a special place in medieval musical discourse. Late medieval Latins also charged Lombard, German, Spaniard or Italian singers with the offence of howling like wolves, bellowing like cattle or even bleating like sheep or goats, instead of singing like humans (see Appendix). Here I will focus on selected examples wherein certain vocal qualities are associated with specific nouns that denote a certain socio-linguistic group or race.9 While I do not intend to dwell on medieval constructions of race, it is beneficial to elaborate briefly on some of the contexts of this discourse’s use shown in the Appendix.10 Writing in Lyon in the 1270s, Elias Salomon (Appendix, no. 1) offers up an image of Lombards howling like wolves to illustrate the consequences of poor, perhaps indiscrete, pitch control upon consonance’s role in governing four-part “harmony.”11 An anonymous early fifteenth-century Italian author notes the mutual displeasure of various Mediterranean socio-linguistic and religious groups towards one another (Appendix, no. 2).12 Towards the end of the same century Franchino Gafurio (1451–1522) refers to the different singing styles of the English, French, Germans, Italians and Spanish in a conventional if not slightly fraught discussion of the effects of music arising from the melodic modes (Appendix, no. 3).13 In the same passage, he notes that some foreigners (barbari) accuse an unnamed Italian people of barking rather than 9 On vocal qualities of singers in the middle ages, including reference to them sounding like asses, jennies, horses and farm carts, see Timothy J. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises (Oxford 1998) 16–28; Joseph Dyer, “The Voice in the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. John Potter (Cambridge 2000) 165–177; Andrew Hughes, “Charlemagne’s Chant or the Great Vocal Shift,” Speculum 77 (2002) 1069–1106, esp. 1078–1079. On these and medieval references to singing like birds or sirens, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature and Poetry in the later Middle Ages (Ithaca 2007). 10 On medieval concepts of race/ethnicity, compare Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001) 39–56; Jeffery J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis and London 2003) 188–221. 11 Elias Salomon, Ars scientiae musicae 30, in Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, ed. Martin Gerbert, 3 vols. (St. Blaise 1784; repr. Hildesheim 1963) 3.60a. On this treatise, see Joseph Dyer, “A Thirteenth-Century Choirmaster: The “Scientia Artis Musicae” of Elias Salomon,” The Musical Quarterly 66 (1980) 83–111. This article has benefitted from the searchable online repository of Latin music theory on Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature’s Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/start.html. 12 I thank David Catalunya for his assistance in providing the reading of this text as it appears in Seville, Biblioteca Capitolare y Colombina, MS 5.2.25, fols. 35v–36r. The emended reading at the end of the extract in the appendix is my own. I do not believe it is the case that this author is attempting to project these views back onto antiquity as Blackburn states when she gives this quote; Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Music and Festivities at the Court of Leo X: A Venetian View,” Early Music History 11 (1992) 1–37 at 15 n. 50. The distinction between Western Latins and Eastern Greeks is a medieval one. Also see Jacques Handschin, “Réflexions dangereuses sur le renouveau de la musique ancienne,” in Atti del terzo congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1938 (Firenze 1940) 40–57 at 53; repr. in Jacques Handschin, Über Reine Harmonie und Temperierte Tonleitern: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Michael Maier (Schliengen 2000) 263–275. 13 Franchino Gafurio, Theorica musice (Milan 1492, repr. Bologna 1969) fol. kvr; Franchino Gafurio, The Theory of Music, trans. Walter Kurt Kreyszig (New Haven and London 1993) 187. Blackburn, “Music and Festivities” (n. 12 above) 14–16, discusses the meaning of the verb jubilare with respect to Gafurio, Ornithoparchus, Aaron and Finck, citing Uguccione da Pisa’s definition: “to sing, to rejoice through a sound confused out of joy, to exult and to be joyful”; Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes, 2 vols. (Florence 2004) 2.623. This considered, translating jubilare using the English verb “to carol” seems most appropriate in light of, for example, the definition of the verb carol in the Oxford Dictionary of English (3rd ed.): “sing or say (something) happily.”

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singing. Was Gafurio, maestro di cappella at Milan cathedral, still defending Lombard singers from the same sort of prejudices expressed in the late thirteenth century? Andreas Ornithoparchus (ca. 1490–?) explicitly quotes and accepts Gafurio’s statement (inquit Franchinus) that his fellow Germans howl (Appendix, no. 5). Venetian Pietro Aaron (ca. 1480–after 1545) relishes the opportunity to champion Italy’s cultural leadership (Appendix, no. 7). 14 A little more than a decade later Hermann Finck (1527–1558) in a pluck of German pride responds to what seem like contemporary socio-linguistic rivalries, repudiating commonplaces (omnibus in ore est usitatum illud dictum) expressed by the likes of Gafurio and to some extent Aaron (Appendix, no. 8).15 Simon of Saint-Quentin’s comparison of Mongol singing to animal vocalizations suggests that such language was not confined to the writings of music theorists. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, northern humanists show a marked interest in the same type of similes. In his Annotations on 1 Corinthians Desiderius Erasmus (1466– 1536) excoriated the “Britons” for their monks’ “whinnying” instead of singing solemnly (Appendix, no. 6).16 Erasmus had spent long periods in England between 1499 and 1517, and found English choral institutions even more deplorable than the Continental ones against which he elsewhere rails.17 Matthaeus Herbenus of Maastricht (1451–1538) on the other hand offers an unusual perspective in his De natura cantus ac miraculis vocis (Appendix, no. 4). Herbenus describes himself as a human (Et tamen idem homo sum) using different vocalizations depending on what socio-linguistic group he was among, a participant in French, German and Italian culture, rather than their judge.18 Perhaps his extensive travels, which included ten years of study in Italy, had fostered Herbenus’s cosmopolitan views. Yet his understanding of the world was predicated on a traditional mixture of Aristotelian science and Christian-Neoplatonic metaphysics. This much is apparent in his discussion of Pliny the Elder’s men with dog’s heads that bark instead of speaking 14 Pietro Aaron, Lucidario in musica (Venice 1545; repr. New York 1978) fol. HHiijr; The passage in question is paraphrased in Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols. (London 1789) 3.182–183. I have translated the passage literally in the appendix. Blackburn attributes Aaron’s reference to the vocal characteristics of various peoples to Gafurio; see Blackburn, “Music and Festivities” (see n. 12 above) 14 n. 46. 15 Andrea Ornithoparchus, Musice active micrologus (Leipzig 1517; repr. New York 1973) fol. Mijr; Hermann Finck, Practica musica: Exempla variorum signorum, proportionum et canonum, iudicium de tonis, ac quaedam de arte suaviter et artificiose cantandi continens (Wittenberg 1556; repr. Hildesheim 1970) fol. Ssir. Also see John Dowland’s early English translation of Ornithoparcus (not used here): Andrea Ornithoparchus, Micrologus or Introduction: Containing the Art of Singing, trans. John Dowland (London 1609) 88. 16 Desiderius Erasmus, Annotations on the New Testament: Acts, Romans, I and II Corinthians, ed. A. Reeve and M. A. Screech, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 42 (Leiden 1990) 506–507. 17 See Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470–1530 (New York and London 2005) 108–121 where further light is shed on Erasmus’s polemic against polyphonic music. 18 Matthaeus Herbenus, De natura cantus ac miraculis vocis 1.5, ed. Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte 22 (Köln 1957) 31. On Herbenus’s generally positive attitude to polyphonic music so long as the text remained intelligible, see Wegman, The Crisis of Music (see n. 17 above) 175–177. Eugene Schreurs suggests that Herbenus’s biographical experiences encapsulated in this statement betray a “kind of ‘border syndrome’ which is rather typical for the region [the Maastricht area of Belgium]”; Eugeen Schreurs, “Music for Canons, Emperors, Dukes and Prince Bishops in the Collegiate Church of Maastricht (c.1450–1520): An Updated Overview and Some Samples,” Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 7 (2008) 255–274 at 259.

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and other forest-dwelling men that only screech. Herbenus deduces through reasoning based on Aristotelian-Stoic values that these fabulous creatures were in fact animals due to their beastly behaviors.19 Indeed all writers discussed here betray a medieval epistemology (some might say mentality) originating in Western antiquity that featured in discourses directed at foreigners, and at internal socio-linguistic groups of the medieval Latin West, whose behavior was perceived as unacceptable within its general social and moral codes.20 In this article I ask what it means when a late medieval singer is accused of sounding like an animal, and how such accusations might be situated more broadly within medieval culture. Furthermore, what is the significance of a singer taking on the character of an animal? To address these questions I begin with a brief account of how medieval authors conceptualized animals and their sounds, and how they used animals in literature as mirrors of human behavior and character. By way of addressing the second part of my enquiry, I examine Giovanni da Cascia’s Agnel son bianco and Donato da Cascia’s Lucida pecorella. In these two Trecento madrigals singers play the part of an animal in satirical complaints directed towards unnamed antagonists. A close reading of Agnel son bianco in conjunction with Dante’s Divine Comedy argues that this song is a thinly veiled complaint directed against detractors of the poet’s art. An even stronger vein of literary influences, biblical, classical and Dantesque, run through Donato’s setting of Nicolò Soldanieri’s Lucida pecorella, forming an elaborate allegory cautioning poets and singers against indulging in unethical creativity. The performers of their songs must not only sing the first “person” speech of an anthropomorphized animal. Instead they are compelled to assume the very nature of the animal by uttering what would have been considered in...