Abstract
Richard Rolle’s concept of canor considers a divine sound ecology that works through Rolle’s work. Rather than emphasize God’s love visually as many mystics do, Rolle experiments with the ineffability of sound, an acousmatics, in order to express an ecological relationship, one in which the singer inhabits the sound of God and, thus, renders the body porous as sound permeates it. Rolle’s use of the lyric reveals the enmeshed quality of singer, song, divinity, and body. In this way, Rolle’s lyrics create environments that queer the body’s relation to song. The gift of canor in Rolle’s work creates a performative aspect to contemplative living. Rolle’s experiment with sound and lyric open up a divine ecology that intermediates between singer and God.
For what is more glorious than music, which modulates the heavenly system with its sonorous sweetness, and binds together with its virtue the concord of nature which is scattered everywhere? For any variation there may be in the whole does not depart from the pattern of harmony. Through this we think with efficiency, we speak with elegance, we move with grace. Whenever, by the natural law of its discipline, it reaches our ears, it commands song.
—Cassiodorus
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Notes
- 1.
Mary Arthur Knowlton, The Influence of Richard Rolle and of Julian of Norwich on the Middle English Lyrics. (Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 51.
- 2.
For a discussion of acousmatics see Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Kane defines acousmatic sound as “the cause of the noises—whether seismic, chemical, carbuncular, or divine—remain unseen; its sound is an audible trace of a source that is invisible to the listener,” p. 3.
- 3.
Stuart A. Kaufmann, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 287.
- 4.
Dianne Chisolm writes of the queer desire of the desert that informs my thinking here where “non-reproductive sex is a primary force of nature,” p. 360. Dianne Chisolm, “Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire.” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, and Desire. Eds. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
- 5.
For a wide-reaching history of the medieval lyric see Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996). For a discussion of medieval poetics that informs this analysis see Paul Zumthor, Towards a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Phillip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
- 6.
Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 9.
- 7.
Galvez, Songbook, p. 19.
- 8.
Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays in Movement, Knowledge, and Description. (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 139.
- 9.
As Bruce Holsinger writes, “the sonorous body performed an essential role within poetic practice, theological and devotional discourse, liturgical performance, pedagogical transmission, and visual culture throughout the medieval era.” Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildgard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 3.
- 10.
For a discussion of music as a relation with God see Èlisabeth-Paule Labat, The Song That I Am: On the Mystery of Music. Trans Erik Varden. (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian, 2014).
- 11.
For a film introduction to Adam’s project see John Luther Adams—A Sonic Geography of Alaska. Youtube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvPUlgUWsz8.
- 12.
Alex Ross, “Forward,” in John Luther Adams, The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), p. x.
- 13.
Jan Herlinger, “Music Theory of the Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries” in Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages. ed. Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie J. Blackburn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 293.
- 14.
Herlinger, “Music Theory,” p. 293.
- 15.
Calvin Martin Bower, Boethius’ The Principles of Music: An Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. George Peabody College for Teachers, diss., 1967, p. 24.
- 16.
Bower, Boethius’ The Principles of Music, p. 32.
- 17.
Bower, Boethius’ The Principles of Music, p. 34.
- 18.
Bower, Boethius’ The Principles of Music, p. 295.
- 19.
Andrew Albin, “Listening for Canor in Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris. Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe. Ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), p. 178.
- 20.
Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love. ed. and trans. Clifton Walters. (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 93.
- 21.
Rolle, The Fire of Love, p. 93.
- 22.
John Luther Adams, The Place Where, p. 1.
- 23.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 239.
- 24.
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 86.
- 25.
William Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 156.
- 26.
As Jonathan Hsy comments, “if we think of language not only as a vehicle of speech, sound, and writing, but also as a phenomenon that occupies space and disperses itself across locations, then any language might be considered a living organism with its own agency,” p. 37. My idea of Rolle’s lyric as a sound with its own agency to create parallel’s Hsy’s. See Jonathan Hsy’s Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013).
- 27.
For a discussion of Rolle’s use of canor rooted in Augustinian musicology see Robert Boenig, “St. Augustine’s Jubilus and Richard Rolle’s Canor.” Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 1995), 75–86.
- 28.
Patrick S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 43.
- 29.
For a discussion of historical sound see Peter A Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Towards an Environmental History of Sound and Noise.” Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. I Ed. Michael Bull (London: Routledge, 2013), 277–308.
- 30.
For a discussion of the frontiers of sound study, see Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “New Keys to the World of Sound” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 5.
- 31.
See Matthew 17: 5. It is worth noting here that the emphasis is on the sound of God and hearing Jesus in this verse as cloud has descended and the disciples are unable to experience God except in sound. Sound introduces the disciples to the awe of divinity; it is only when they are prostrate that Jesus then touches them and they look up to see Jesus alone. This sensory order reveals the primacy of the introduction of divinity as experienced through sound and then the acquaintance of the other senses to Jesus.
- 32.
For a discussion of Rolle’s use of the Song of Songs see Denis Renevey, “Encoding and Decoding: Metaphorical Discourse of Love in Richard Rolle’s Commentary on the First Verses of the Song of Songs.” The Medieval Translator 4 Ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 200–217.
- 33.
Galvez, Songbook, p. 35.
- 34.
For a discussion of the participatory element in religious lyric as well as the debate over the definition of lyric see Patrick S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) especially pp. 20–21 and 22–30.
- 35.
For a full discussion of “modes of listening” see Pinch and Bijsterveld, “New Keys,” p. 14.
- 36.
Diehl, Medieval European Religious Lyrics, p. 120. For an overview of key themes in medieval English lyrics see Christiana Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (ed. Thomas G. Duncan. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 96–119 and Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge, 1972).
- 37.
Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 106–107. For a discussion of the exegetical genre connected to the Song of Songs see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphi: University of Pennsylvaia Press, 1990). Also, Peter Dronke, “The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric.” The Bible and Medieval Culture. Ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979), 236–262.
- 38.
Astell, p. 118.
- 39.
See Amy Hollywood, “Queering the Beguins: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch of Anvers, Marguerite Porete.” Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body. Ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 163–175. Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies.” Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 180–200.
- 40.
Tison Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 21.
- 41.
William F. Pollard, “The ‘Tone of Heaven’: Bonaventuran Melody and the Easter Psalm in Richard Rolle.” The Popular Literature of Medieval England. Ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 253.
- 42.
For a discussion of Rolle’s English Psalter and its adaptations see Anne Hudson’s Two Revisions of Rolle’s English Psalter Commentary and the Related Canticles. EETS. no. 340 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). As Hudson comments in her introduction, “critics suggested that three revised versions should be recognized, and associated all of them, with varying degrees of certainty, with the Lollards. In general terms, as will emerge, both of these suggestions appear to be reasonable,” p. xxiii. For a discussion of Richard Rolle as a biblical commentator see J.P.H. Clark, “Richard Rolle as a Biblical Commentator.” Downside Review 104.356 (1986): 165–213.
- 43.
Andrew Albin, Auralities: Sound Culture and the Experience of Hearing in Late Medieval England. PhdDiss. (Brandeis University, 2011), p. 151.
- 44.
Richard Rolle, The Psalter or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles. Ed. H.R. Bramley (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1884), p. 3.
- 45.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 3.
- 46.
For a discussion the aural properties of “earcons” found in sacred spaces see Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, “Ancient Acoustic Spaces” in The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. (London: Routledge, 2012), 186–196.
- 47.
For a discussion of architecture and ambient medieval sound see Sheila Bonde and Clark Mannes, “Performing Silence and Regulating Sound: The Monastic Soundscape of Saint-Jean-Des-Vignes.” Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound. Ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 47–70.
- 48.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 3.
- 49.
For a discussion of the power of Psalter translations to morally educate the community, see Michael P. Kuczynski, “The Psalms and Social Action in Late Medieval England” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages. ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State Univerisity of New York Press, 1999), 199–214.
- 50.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 3.
- 51.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 3.
- 52.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 3.
- 53.
Michael P. Kuczynski, Prophetic Songs: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 122.
- 54.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 18.
- 55.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 18.
- 56.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 20.
- 57.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 20.
- 58.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 21.
- 59.
For a descriptive overview of the lyrics see Rosemary Woolf’s seminal The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
- 60.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 114.
- 61.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 222.
- 62.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 334.
- 63.
Albin, Auralities,p. 14.
- 64.
Albin, Auralities, p. 14.
- 65.
For an examination of language and ecology in a different sense than my own see Tim William Machan’s The Ecology of Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) in which he utilizes ecology to describe language usage across groups and spaces in order to account for language evolution.
- 66.
Qtd. from Ludger Honnefelder, “The Concept of Nature in Medieval Metaphysics” in Nature in Medieval Thought: Some Approaches East and West. Ed. Chumaru Koyama (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 84. For a complete discussion of Greek philosophical antecedents in the work of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus see Honnefelder’s article, especially pp. 89–92. For further discussion of Thomas Aquinas’ ecology see Willis Jenkins’ Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially Chapter 7, “Environmental Virtues” in which Willis argues that Aquinas offers a counter-biology in order to reveal “virtue in light of the sanctifying share given humans in the divine uses of creation (naming, praising, glorifying),” p. 134.
- 67.
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 4.
- 68.
As Maria Galvez writes, “since medieval songbooks translate performative, oral, and auditory experiences of lyric poetry, they are useful for thinking about how archival objects relate to the medium and social conditions in which the lyrics are performed, just as modern poetry continues to be anthologized, and literary traditions are made and unmade through the practice of the songbook—the very process of making lyric poetry,” p. 217. Rolle’s lyrics appear in various manuscripts and excerpted in others—they are constantly in process as they are moved from context to context, for example, as in the Carthusian Miscellany BL MS Add 37049, as I will discuss later in this chapter.
- 69.
William T. Flynn, “‘The Soul is Symphonic’: Meditation on Luke 15:25 and Hildegard of Bingen’s Letter 23” in Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver. Ed. David Zager (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2007), p. 2.
- 70.
In using encounter, I am borrowing from Susan Crane’s work in Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
- 71.
Susan, Crane, Animal Encounters, p. 5.
- 72.
Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, “Introduction” in Readings in Performance and Ecology (ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), p. 4.
- 73.
Cornelia Hoogland, “Sound Ecology in the Woods: Red Riding Hood Takes an Audio Walk” in Readings in Performance and Ecology (ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), p. 189.
- 74.
Morton, p. 9.
- 75.
Morton, The Ecological Thought, p. 11.
- 76.
For a discussion of Rolle’s oeuvre see Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle: Hermit of Hampole (New York: D.C. Heath, 1927); Ralph Hanna, The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010); and, for an argument as to chronological order of Rolle’s work, see Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991). For a general discussion of the problems of medieval lyric and their collection and editing see Julia Boffy, “Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (ed. Thomas G. Duncan. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 1–18.
- 77.
Albin, Auralities, 144. For a discussion of performance of English Monophony and other medieval musical styles see A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music. Ed. Ross W. Duffin. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). In Paul Hillier’s discussion of “English Monophony,” he discusses a variety of ways to sing the un-notated medieval English lyric, such as declamatory or equal syllabic style. Hillier’s argument dovetails with my own in terms of sound experience when he writes, “the more one sings such music, the less arbitrary this process appears as one develops an innate sense of articulating the text and allowing the music to breathe, without doing violence to each other,” p. 184.
- 78.
Albin, Auralities, p. 145.
- 79.
Richard Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole. Ed. Hope Emily Allen. (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), l. 1.
- 80.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 6.
- 81.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 9.
- 82.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 57–58.
- 83.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 72.
- 84.
As Alfred Pike argues in his A Theology of Music, “I regard music as a means of penetration to the reality behind all appearances.” Alfred Pike, A Theology of Music (Toledo, OH: Gregorian Institute of America, 1953), p. x.
- 85.
In the MED, however, the earliest use of glue is from John Gower, dated much later than Rolle: (a) (a1393) Gower CA (Frf 3) 5.3603: “Sche tok him thanne a maner glu.of so gret vertu That where a man it wolde caste It scholde binde anon so faste That noman mihte it don aweie.”
- 86.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 12.
- 87.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 54.
- 88.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 61–62.
- 89.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 11.
- 90.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 59–60.
- 91.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 8.
- 92.
Pike, A Theology of Music, p. 48.
- 93.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 96.
- 94.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 67–68.
- 95.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” l. 69.
- 96.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 311.
- 97.
Rolle, Psalter, p. 333.
- 98.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 73, 86.
- 99.
Rolle, “A Song of the Love of Jesus,” ll. 41–42.
- 100.
John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 8 and 9.
- 101.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” ll. 4 and 6.
- 102.
The liturgical connection in this lyric is evident as the worship of the Mass is centered on the Eucharist, a memento of the act of the Crucifixion. For a discussion of the liturgical connections to medieval lyric see Douglas Gray’s discussion of liturgy and lyric in Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), especially Chapter 2, “The Inherited Tradition, pp. 4–17.
- 103.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” l. 29.
- 104.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” ll. 35–36.
- 105.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” ll. 37, 38.
- 106.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” l. 40.
- 107.
Rolle, “A Song of Love-Longing to Jesus,” l. 44.
- 108.
Rolle, “Salutation to Jesus,” ll. 18–20.
- 109.
Rolle, “Salutation to Jesus,” l. 27.
- 110.
Rolle, “Salutation to Jesus,” ll. 1–4.
- 111.
Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 39.
- 112.
Rolle, “Salutation to Jesus,” l. 28.
- 113.
Rolle, “Salutation to Jesus,” l. 24.
- 114.
As Timothy Morton comments on the plight of coexistence, “don’t just do something—sit there. But in the mean time, sitting there will upgrade your version of doing and sitting,” The Ecological Thought, p. 125.
- 115.
Rolle, “Gastly Gladnesse,” ll. 9–10.
- 116.
See note p. 52, l. 10 (144): “Rolle uses jangle usually in an unfavourable sense.”
- 117.
Rolle, “Gastly Gladnesse,” l. 6.
- 118.
Rolle, “Gastly Gladnesse,” l. 11.
- 119.
Rolle, “Ghastly Gladnesse,” ll. 12–13.
- 120.
For a color version of this folio page see http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_37049_f030v.
- 121.
For a discussion of the illustrators of BL Add MS 37049 as amateurs drawing on Carthusian sources and aimed at Carthusians and the devotional aspects of the illustrations see Julian M. Luxford, “Percept and Practice: The Decorations of English Carthusian Books” Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages. Ed. Julian Luxford (Brepols: Turnout, 2009), 225–267. For a discussion of the representation of music in manuscripts see Nicholas Bell, Music in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
- 122.
For other examples of the use of banderoles in this manuscript compare f30v to f19r, f20r, f25r, f27v (where the banderoles are blank), f29v (where the couplets do not rhyme with each other), f36r, f48v, and f54v. In each case, the banderoles are more indicative of other kinds of speech patterns (sermon, monologue, etc.) than any kind of song. As Jessica Brantley writes, the lyrics in this Miscellany “can provide a clearer idea of how a late-medieval meditative poetics was informed by ideas of performance.” Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 123. For a collection of the images from BL Add. MS 37049 see An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany British Library London Additional MS. 37049. Ed. James Hogg. (Salzburg: Institut Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, 1981).
- 123.
Brantley discusses this image as well highlighting the dialogic quality of the page, but does not chose to analyze it in terms of a sound ecology. See Brantley, p. 138.
- 124.
In his repose and open-eyed state, this possible portrait of Rolle can be likened to the top of a transi tomb. In this way, his death pose allows him access to the paradise as it is opened before him in the starry night beyond the Virgin’s sunburst. The transi tomb is iconographically replicated many times in BL Add MS 37049 as a way to remind the monks to contemplate their death. For a full discussion of the moribund concerns of the Carthusians see M.V. Hennessy, “The Remains of the Royal Dead in an English Carthusian Manuscript, London, British Library, MS Additional 37049” Viator 33 (2002): 310–354.
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Roman, C.M. (2017). Richard Rolle’s Ecology of Canor: An Aesthetics of Desire. In: Queering Richard Rolle. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49775-4_4
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