DrMatthew Thomson

My research approaches the music of thirteenth-century France from multiple angles, examining its purposes within medieval society, its interaction with contemporary intellectual thought, its compositional technique, and its use within medieval literature. My earlier research, including my doctoral thesis, concentrated on thirteenth-century polyphonic motets, especially their interactions with the monophonic songs of the trouvères. My current project considers the links between music, sexuality, and literary culture in thirteenth-century France, associating music with the wide-ranging reform of marriage practices in the thirteenth century. In Latinate texts from music theory to confessional literature, I argue, song is often described as having problematic connections to desire in ways that closely recall the moralistic accounts of sexuality in texts discussing and enacting marriage reform: both music and sex are vital but morally dangerous social tools, which clerical writers attempt to control through a characteristic mix of guilt and encouragement. This ethical homomorphology of music and sex, I show, influences the use of music within contemporary vernacular literature. These impacts are felt not only in texts which explicitly discuss marriage, such as songs employing the malmariée (unhappily married woman) trope, but also in the treatment of music and sex in central thirteenth-century literary texts, such as Guillaume de Dole by Jean Renart and Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Characters in these texts use song to provoke and control desire in a series of moral and immoral ways that recall contemporaneous discussions of the morality of marital sex.