<i>Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song</i>, edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong and <i>A Companion to Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages</i>, edited by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton

In these two compelling texts found in Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, edited by Rachel May Golden and Lisa Colton, and A Companion to Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton, female desire and female subjugation are expressed in the same breath. These tropes, the “sexually curious nun” and the “discontented wife,” represent only a fraction of female experience present in these volumes. Although both compilations probe the subjective and somewhat elusive nature of female voice, gendered voice is extended to men in Golden and Kong’s text and to a “third gender” in both. Central to each volume is the exploration of how creative works—musical and/or literary—challenge, uphold, or subvert the medieval binary gender system.Golden and Kong’s book focuses on musical and literary works in France from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, whereas Grau and Colton’s collection examines medieval female-voice song across Western Europe and beyond. Despite some overlap (four authors appear in both), differing approaches define each volume. Golden and Kong concentrate primarily on close readings of secular works and the shape-shifting nature of voice, while Grau and Colton emphasize the multiplicity of “women’s musical agency” through deep contextual analysis, manuscript studies, and sacred contexts. Both volumes shift the study of female-voice song away from authorship as the principal criterion of a song’s legitimacy. Given that the strength of an edited volume lies in the individual contributions, I briefly summarize each chapter in order to explore how each book conveys various perspectives on gendered expression.By opening their volume with Katherine Kong’s study of Lancelot’s outwardly (not internal) verbal silence in Chrétien’s romances, editors Golden and Kong signal their intention not to merely incorporate the male voice within the broader discourse of voice and gender, but to foreground it from the outset. Kong discusses how Lancelot’s mantle of masculinity and privilege subverts what she calls his otherwise feminine silence into an instance of situational “amorous fealty” (p. 42).The subsequent four chapters of Golden and Kong’s volume, however, situate the reader in a more fluid and destabilized position within the gender continuum. Arguing that “the domna has suffered from scholarly bias and silencing” in Occitan tenso, Tamara Bentley Caudill (ch. 2) contends that mixed gender performances of these songs restore the embodied female voice, eliminating the “grotesque parody inherent in cross-gender comedic performance” (pp. 65, 57). Anne Adele Levitsky (ch. 3) provides grammatical consideration of Aimeric de Peguilhan’s vers chanso, a novel troubadour genre that she considers to be “middle gender” or “doubly gendered” (pp. 76, 79). Meghan Quinlan (ch. 4) refines the courtly lady’s “empty placeholder” role in trouvère songs by identifying a specific woman, Blanche de Castille, whose royal position as regent of France made her like “a ‘manly woman’ (virago)” (p. 105). Moreover, Rachel May Golden (ch. 5) demonstrates how two lamenting crusade songs “queer” the gender binary: one with a female narrator who uncharacteristically draws her listener into her own erotic sensibility, the other with a male narrator who unexpectedly indulges in emotional vulnerability (p. 123).Midway through the compilation, Lydia Walker (ch. 6) offers a study of hypermasculinity. Her fascinating study of the thirteenth-century crusade preacher Jacques de Vitry diverges significantly from the gender fluidity explored in prior chapters. Walker examines sermons and preaching manuals to demonstrate how the exponential increase of men’s verbal and gestural virility in these contexts transformed preachers into homiletic gladiators, a position that is undoubtedly antithetical to gender shape-shifting.The focus returns to gender fluidity in Lisa Colton’s chapter on ars antiqua motets (ch. 7). Colton presents the monastic view that certain polyphony can cause texts to “emote too much,” potentially triggering monastics into unrestrained emotion (p. 183). This raises the question of whether these uninhibited sentiments degrade the monastic by feminizing him. Conversely, Anna Kathryn Grau (ch. 8) explores the interplay of hybrid voices in her study of motets, illustrating how, in one example, the adolescent novice in the motetus voice sabotages her own subjectivity by objectifying herself while the voice of the triplum subverts its typically courtly male role.Golden and Kong conclude their volume with two chapters that focus on female selfhood, providing examples where women assert power even at the expense of integrity or community. Emily Hutchinson (ch. 9) sets out to disabuse the assumption that Christine de Pizan was an unwavering champion of women’s intellect and experience. Hutchinson expertly reveals that Pizan subjugated other women by using her “privileged textual voice” to “polic[e] women’s speech” (pp. 233, 232). Daisy Delogu (ch. 10) closes the book with a study of authorial appropriation, discussing how Anne de Graville brandished her own subjectivity in commandeering a Boccaccio story, inserting and asserting a female perspective into the narrative.Supporting this collection’s exploration of gendered expression is a plethora of song transcriptions, song translations, and imaginative musical analyses. In their chapters that incorporate specific song analyses, Colton, Golden, Grau, and Quinlan’s collective and individual interpretive prowess reveals how music can illuminate the explicit text as well as reveal subtext. Each author’s clear and accessible writing allows readers without musical backgrounds to follow their interpretations.By contrast with Golden and Kong’s framework of ten standalone chapters, Grau and Colton organize their volume into four parts: “Ritual Discourse,” “Materiality,” “Subjectivity and Emotion,” and “Representation.” Resonances abound across the divisions as the essays reexamine much-studied repertoire through new lenses and illuminate repertoire not yet studied. Though Grau and Colton’s compilation largely focuses on women’s musical agency in religious, political, and domestic contexts, they also address gender fluidity.Lisa Nielson’s opening chapter on mukhannathūn, or male cross-gendered singers of the Islamicate court, evinces the editors’ aims to disrupt gender categories and broaden the scope of female-voice song beyond the borders of Western Europe. Nielson challenges readers to question the origin and expression of a metaphorically female voice. In her work on chansons de femme, Helen Dell (ch. 8), using a psychoanalytic approach, investigates the very construction of the female voice. Alternatively, Lauren Purcell-Joiner (ch. 2) explores the commingling of monks and nuns in liturgical singing at the double monastery of Engelberg in thirteenth-century Switzerland, while situating her work in relation to Judith Butler’s theorization that “gender is an ‘act’” (p. 43). In her study of French devotional yet erotic song, Rachel May Golden (ch. 5) further complicates gendered voice in suggesting that the gender-fluid aspect of being medieval monks and nuns allowed them to defy typical gendered constraints while singing of their passion for Christ (p. 132). The idea that medieval nuns and monks could be classified as “third gender” because their lifestyle or practices contravened the binary gender system has been theorized in current medieval scholarship, notably by Jo Ann McNamara and Jacqueline Murray.The ambiguity of female voice extends beyond the performer’s gender to include questions of textual interpretation. Meghan Quinlan (ch. 14) asks what subtexts arise in the “sonic and semantic aspects of a new text” when a male narrator is replaced by a female narrator in the female-voice contrafacta of Bernart de Ventadorn’s Can vei la lauzeta mover (p. 407). In her study of a female-voiced pastourelle, Lisa Colton (ch. 10) exposes the “ventriloquism” inherent in the lyrics where the female narrator sings both the misogyny of the male character and the resistance of the female character (p. 272). Colton raises questions of power dynamics and interrogates the perennial conundrum of male authorship of female-voice song.But as the title of Grau and Colton’s book indicates, women’s musical agency remains at the center of the contributions. Through a grammatical study of archival documents at Las Huelgas, as well as an examination of scribal hands in such sources, David Catalunya (ch. 3) masterfully shows that nuns’ participation was not at all static or submissive. In fact, nuns flexed their agency by defying ecclesiastical mandates, celebrating mass, and performing polyphony. Meanwhile, Claire Taylor Jones (ch. 4) persuasively demonstrates how nuns’ strategic deployment of psalm singing contravenes stories of female hysteria and histrionics in fifteenth-century Germany. But Jones cautions us from bestowing unequivocable praise on the nuns’ resistance, as their tactic exploited anti-Jewish rhetoric found in the psalms’ exegesis. In her study of a fifteenth-century book of hours from Barking Abbey, Anne Bagnall Yardley (ch. 7) proposes that paying homage to the abbey’s foremothers in sacred songs defined communal identity and encouraged female empowerment. Traditional authorship as the benchmark of female-voice song is challenged in Gillian Gower’s work on the patronage of a thirteenth-century Scottish sequence (ch. 15). Not only does Gower expand our perception of authorship to include patronage, she also prompts us to consider how Queen Eleanor’s sponsorship of a marriage song for her granddaughter served as musical diplomacy and political propaganda. Conversely, Anna Kathryn Grau’s work on the transmission of female-voice motets (ch. 6) demonstrates the suppression of agency. Grau asks whether the low level of transmission of certain female-voice motets could be understood as deliberate silencing of and resistance to the female voice.Performance is not an afterthought in Grau and Colton’s compilation, but treated as a crucial and legitimate aspect of scholarly inquiry. Leah Studdard’s comparative analysis of recordings of Comtessa de Dia’s A Chantar (ch. 9) illuminates the power of performance in shaping perceptions of identity and emotion; the recordings, she shows, essentially create sonic, musical portraiture. Additionally, Nielson’s (ch. 1) valuable inclusion of excerpts of Islamicate vocal performance practice illuminates understandings of the singers’ performance approaches, finding parallels, for instance, in how we study seventeenth-century vocal treatises.In Grau and Colton’s text, the act of listening is also framed as an important artistic pursuit. Nielson (ch. 1) advocates for the responsibility of the listener in practicing sama (listening), which can result in good or ill. In her study of Mary’s lament in Middle English Passion lyrics, Melissa Tu (ch. 12) argues that, by engaging with the acoustics of grief, the participant is thrust out of a complacent relationship with the text (p. 323). Annemari Ferreira (ch. 13) not only examines female vocality, but also the larger “feminized soundscapes” of Old Norse “work-songs,” exposing readers to the region’s musical terrain (p. 366).Female-voice song and women’s musical agency cannot be considered without discussing the sexual politics that loom large over this volume. Carissa M. Harris (ch. 11) scrutinizes how regret is employed pedagogically to repress and suppress female sexuality while also revealing how female pleasure is similarly utilized. Colton acknowledges interpretations of songs that find humor in nonconsensual acts of sexual violence. In her study of English carols, Louise McInnes (ch. 17) reminds us that, while these songs depict female disempowerment and male pleasure, women of the period were rarely perceived as blameless in such encounters. In addition to investigating women’s music making in literary sources, Angelica Vomera (ch. 16) encourages readers to move beyond superficial readings of Trecento songs and uncover the erotic meanings of metaphors found in the texts in order to further complicate understandings of female experience. Even though misogyny lurks in much of the repertoire, women’s desire is indeed represented in some songs.Together, these two volumes provide rich, imaginative, and significant contributions to medieval scholarship by considering the disruption of the binary gender system via voice. Each succeeds in examining granular aspects of specific musical or literary works while maintaining broad perspectives on gender, voice, and musical agency.