Sean Curran
"The Motets of the "La Clayette” Manuscript and the Pious Possibilities of Thirteenth-Century Polyphony""
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Abstract
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My research illuminates how a thirteenth-century scribe used the intractable sounds of the polytextual motet to censor ribald vernacular songs of his day. Faced with the noisy onslaught of its syllables, scholars have struggled to decide to whom the motet was meaningful, and how. By reconstruing it as an opportunity for a unique kind of corporal experience, situated within the performative modes of medieval devotion, I argue it was precisely its hermeneutic opacity that was useful to the scribe of the 55 pieces in MS “La Clayette,” Paris BN, n.a.fr. 13521. I demonstrate that he suppressed the unsanitary resonances of the pastourelle genre invoked by his French texts, converting rape into Marian revelation. For his Latin texts, I show that he created motet settings of popular prayers and devotions, linking the collection to a variety of prayer books for contemplative use by the laity. These motets thus sit at the intersection-point of a preacher’s controlling guidance and lay individuals’ cultivation of pious interiority. I ask how live performance rendered motet-making a devotionally instructive exercise. These melodies are transformed in polyphony, and I argue that the preacher mobilized the bodily experience of transformation as a site of revelation. The music’s difficulty complemented the scribe’s shrewd rewritings, for it provided an opaque sonic terrain to be rendered devotionally transparent through persistence, practice and prayer. It taught a more potent lesson about interpretation than could be merely written on the page, because the literary erasures were powerfully inscribed upon the performing body.
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