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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2021
While ancient texts contain many descriptions of soundscapes, early medieval literature remains largely silent. How can we explain the dwindling references to sound following the passage from antiquity to the early Middle Ages? Does this “silencing of the world” point to an alteration of the “objective” soundscape induced by changes in the material and physical environment, or does it indicate a deeper shift in the aural culture of the period? If there is reason to suppose that the decline in noise can be partly explained by an overall change in infrastructures, this transformation cannot account for the growing scarcity of sound references in the literature of the time. In order to understand this phenomenon, one must focus on the didactic character of hagiographic literature and on the theological motivations of its authors, whose goal was to sensitize their flock to a “sacred sonography.”
This article was translated from the French by Troy Tice and edited by Robin Emlein, Chloe Morgan, and Stephen Sawyer.
1 Sidonius Apollinaris, “To Domitius,” in Poems and Letters, ed. and trans. William B. Anderson, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 2.2, vol. 1, p. 429.
2 Sidonius Apollinaris, “To Volusianus,” in ibid., 7.17, vol. 2, p. 391. See also the references to sound in Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, “De reditu suo,” in Minor Latin Poets, ed. and trans. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), book 1; and Ammianus Marcellinus, “Res Gestae,” in Rerum Gestarum qui Supersunt, ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 18.4.29.
3 Sidonius Apollinaris, “To Leo,” in Poems and Letters, 8, vol. 2, p. 407.
4 François Ploton-Nicollet, “Entre éloge de la nature et récriture précieuse : le carmen III de Mérobaude,” in Le païen, le chrétien, le profane. Recherches sur l’Antiquité tardive, ed. Benjamin Goldlust and François Ploton-Nicollet (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), 43–63, here p. 57.
5 Françoise Prévot, “Sidoine Apollinaire et l’Auvergne,” in L’Auvergne de Sidoine Apollinaire à Grégoire de Tours. Histoire et archéologie, ed. Bernadette Fizellier-Sauget (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’études du Massif central/Association française d’archéologie mérovingienne/Service régional de l’archéologie d’Auvergne, 1999), 63–80.
6 Denis Henry and B. Walker, review of Zoja Pavlovskis, Man in an Artificial Landscape: The Marvels of Civilization in Imperial Roman Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1977), Classical Philology 72, no. 4 (1977): 365–67. On Sidonius Apollinaris’s relation to pagan culture, see Lucie Desbrosses, “L’Ancien monde chez Sidoine Apollinaire. Prégnance et signification du modèle païen,” in Une Antiquité tardive noire ou heureuse ? ed. Stéphane Ratti (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2015), 209–26.
7 Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul, trans. Judith W. George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 189–91.
8 Anne Rolet, “L’Arcadie chrétienne de Venance Fortunat. Un projet culturel, spirituel et social dans la Gaule mérovingienne,” Médiévales 15, no. 31 (1996): 109–27, here p. 111; Michael Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145–47.
9 According to François Cassingena-Trévedy, Fortunatus’s poems constitute a sort of logbook: Cassingena-Trévedy, “Son et lumière, la ‘matière’ liturgique des Carmina de Venance Fortunat : entre l’Adventus de la croix et l’icône de Martin de Tours,” in “Présence et visages de Venance Fortunat, xive centenaire,” special issue, Camenae 11 (2012): www.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/6Cassingena_Camenae.pdf. It is interesting to note the realism of some of his descriptions, such as when he dwells at length on the dryness of the Gers in his poem “De Egircio flumine”: Venantius Fortunatus, Opera omnia quae extant vel quae ejus nomine circumferuntur, post Browerianam editionem (Rome: Antonius Fulgonius, 1786), 1.21, pp. 32–34. See Gustave Laurent, “L’Armagnac et les pays du Gers,” Annales de géographie 20, no. 110 (1911): 143–54, here p. 148. See also Fabrice Guizard-Duchamp, Les terres du sauvage dans le monde franc, iv e–ix e siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 108.
10 Luce Pietri, “Fortunat, chantre chrétien de la nature,” in Venanzio Fortunato e il suo tempo (Treviso: Fondazione Cassamarca, 2003), 317–30.
11 Charles Mériaux, “Du nouveau sur la Vie de saint Éloi,” Mélanges de science religieuse 67, no. 3 (2010): 71–85.
12 Vita Eligii ep. Noviomagensis, ed. Bruno Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum (hereafter “MGH, SRM”) 4 (Hanover: Hahn, 1902), 2.16, p. 705; The Life of St. Eligius of Noyon, 588–660, trans. Jo Ann McNamara, Fordham University Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/eligius.asp.
13 Some may argue that chronicles and hagiographical texts correspond to narrative models that are not comparable. However, “recent research tends rather to demonstrate, if not the similarity between historical and hagiographical works, at least their belonging to a common genre,” according to Patrick Henriet, “Texte et contexte. Tendances récentes de la recherche en hagiologie,” in Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge, ed. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet et al. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 75–86, here p. 81. This shift from one genre to another, a “contamination” of historiography by hagiography, is characteristic of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards: Christiane Veyrard-Cosme, “Saints et rois dans l’Histoire des Lombards de Paul Diacre (viiie siècle) : une tentation hagiographique ?” in Des saints et des rois. L’hagiographie au service de l’histoire, ed. Francoise Laurent, Laurence Mathey-Maille, and Michelle Szkilnik (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 47–60, here p. 47.
14 Fredegar, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with Its Continuations, ed. and trans. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London: Nelson, 1960), chap. 20 and 36, pp. 24 and 94.
15 “Keynote sounds” make up the background of the soundscape, such as “water, wind, forests, plains, birds, insects, and animals.” See Raymond Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977; repr. Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993), 9–10.
16 Éric Palazzo, “Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge. État de la question et perspectives de recherche,” in Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge, ed. Éric Palazzo (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2016), 11–57, here pp. 13–31; Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2014).
17 Schafer takes up, without explicitly citing it, the fundamental question posed by the philosopher George Berkeley to explain the relationship between perception and reality: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
18 Jean-Marie Fritz, “Littérature médiévale et sound studies,” in Le paysage sonore de l’Antiquité. Méthodologie, historiographie, perspectives, ed. Sibylle Emerit, Sylvain Perrot, and Alexandre Vincent (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2015), 63–85.
19 Schafer, The Soundscape, 7.
20 Sound culture studies can be defined as “an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies”: Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–48, here p. 636. For a recent overview of research in this field, see Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
21 The “sensory turn,” which developed in the 1980s in history and anthropology, spawned an incalculable number of studies and subfields. See David Howes, “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,” Centre for Sensory Studies, 2013, www.sensorystudies.org/sensorial-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensory-studies.
22 Francisco López, “Schizophonia vs. l’objet sonore : Soundscapes and Artistic Freedom,” in “Écologie acoustique/Acoustic Ecology,” special issue, eContact! 1, no. 4 (1998): https://econtact.ca/1_4/Lopez.html; Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 10–13. See also David Dunn’s critique of Schafer’s naturalism as related by Pauline Nadrigny, “Paysage sonore et pratiques de field recording. Le rapport de la création électroacoustique à l’environnement naturel,” Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur l’histoire de l’art contemporain 2010, http://hicsa.univ-paris1.fr/documents/pdf/CIRHAC/pauline nadrigny.pdf, pp. 10–11. For an assessment of the term and its shortcomings, see Ari Y. Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies,” Senses and Society 5, no. 2 (2010): 212–34; Alexandre Vincent, “Paysage sonore et sciences sociales : sonorités, sens, histoire,” in Emerit, Perrot, and Vincent, Le paysage sonore de l’Antiquité, 9–40.
23 Emily Thomson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: Mit Press, 2004), 1–2.
24 Ibid., 2.
25 Schafer, The Soundscape, 237.
26 Ibid., 49.
27 Ibid., 272, for the definition of the terms “lo-fi” and “hi-fi.”
28 Nadrigny, “Paysage sonore et pratiques de field recording,” 7.
29 Christopher M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 66.
30 Jean-Pierre Gutton, Bruits et sons dans notre histoire. Essai sur la reconstitution du paysage sonore (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 19.
31 Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre. Pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Geneva: Droz, 2011), 98; Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge. Le versant épistémologique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000).
32 Didier Lett and Nicolas Offenstadt, eds., Haro ! Noël ! Oyé ! Pratiques du cri au Moyen Âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 40, explain that the lack of research on cries in the early Middle Ages is “surely not because the late Middle Ages were noisier, but rather because the documentation for this period, more abundant and from more diverse and secular authorities, gives cries a more prominent position.” For a bibliography of studies of urban noises, see Andrea Martignoni and Mickaël Wilmart, Les bruits de la ville. Choix bibliographique, 2006, http://questes.free.fr/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=76; Laurent Hablot and Laurent Vissière, eds., Les paysages sonores. Du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015); Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, eds., Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); Philippe Guérin, “Du bruit dans le Décaméron,” Chroniques italiennes, web series 19, no. 1 (2011): http://chroniquesitaliennes.univ-paris3.fr/PDF/web19/Guerinweb19.pdf.
33 On the concept of the landscape and its ideological implications, see Vincent, “Paysage sonore et sciences sociales,” 17–22.
34 Steve Mills, “The Contribution of Sound to Archaeology,” Buletinul Muzeului Judeţean Teleorman 2 (2010): 179–95, here p. 184.
35 Kristopher Poole and Eric Lacey, “Avian Aurality in Anglo-Saxon England,” World Archaeology 46, no. 3 (2014): 400–15; Eric Lacey, “Birds and Words: Aurality, Semantics, and Species in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, ed. Michael D. J. Bintley and Simon C. Thomson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 75–98. Unfortunately, acoustic archaeology is of no help in the context of the early Middle Ages: the first acoustic jars date from the eleventh century. See Bénédicte Palazzo-Bertholon and Jean-Christophe Valière, eds., Archéologie du son. Les dispositifs de pots acoustiques dans les édifices anciens (Paris: Société française d’archéologie, 2012). Among the rare studies, see David J. Knight, “The Archaeoacoustics of a Sixth-Century Christian Structure: San Vitale, Ravenna,” in Music and Ritual: Bridging Material and Living Cultures, ed. Raquel Jiménez, Rupert Till, and Mark Howell (Berlin: Ekho Verlag, 2013), 133–47.
36 Paul Van Ossel, “De la ‘villa’ au village. Les prémices d’une mutation,” in Autour du “village.” Établissements humains, finages et communautés rurales entre Seine et Rhin (IVe–XIIIe siècles). Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve, 16–17 mai 2003, ed. Jean-Marie Yante and Anne-Marie Bultot-Verleysen (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’études médiévales de l’université catholique de Louvain, 2010), 219–36, here pp. 224–25.
37 Elio Lo Cascio and Paolo Malanima, “Cycles and Stability: Italian Population before the Demographic Transition (225 B.C.–A.D. 1900),” Rivista di storia economica 21, no. 3 (2005): 5–40, here pp. 12–13. Some historians explain the demographic decline as the result of an ensemble of economic and social phenomena brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire: Jean-Pierre Devroey, “Catastrophe, crise et changement social. À propos des paradigmes d’interprétation du développement médiéval (500–1100),” in Vers une anthropologie des catastrophes, ed. Luc Buchet et al. (Antibes/Paris: Apdca/Ined, 2009), 142–47.
38 On the plague in England, see John Maddicott, “Plague in Seventh-Century England,” in Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750, ed. Lester K. Little (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 171–214.
39 Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, trans. William Dudley Foulke, ed. Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907; repr. 2003), 2.4, pp. 57–58.
40 Philippe Leveau, “La ville antique et l’organisation de l’espace rural : villa, ville, village,” Annales ESC 38, no. 4 (1983): 920–42, here p. 925.
41 Van Ossel, “De la ‘villa’ au village,” 223. According to Claude Raynaud, “Les campagnes en Gaule du Sud-Est dans l’Antiquité tardive et le haut Moyen Âge,” Zephyrus. Revista de prehistoria y arqueología 53/54 (2000–2001): 473–507, here p. 478, some regions, notably southeast Gaul, witnessed the “obliteration of the Roman villa between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century.”
42 Devroey, “Catastrophe, crise et changement social,”143.
43 Ibid.
44 Steve Mills, Auditory Archeology: Understanding Sound and Hearing in the Past (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014), 129.
45 Ibid., 130.
46 Cyrille Ben Kaddour, “Chartres et sa proche campagne au haut Moyen Âge (fin ve–fin xe siècle). Topographie urbaine et péri-urbaine, analyse de structures et étude du mobilier : un premier bilan,” Revue archéologique du Centre de la France 53 (2014): http://racf.revues.org/2104. For example, Reims shriveled to twenty or thirty hectares, while Paris covered no more than eight or nine and Soissons twelve. Jean Heuclin, Georges Jehel, and Philippe Racinet, Les sociétés en Europe du milieu du vi e à la fin du ix e siècle (Nantes: Éd. du Temps, 2002), 101, as well as John H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 84–85, give the following figures: Orléans, 30; Sens, 25; Bordeaux, 32; Lyon, 21 compared to 65 at the beginning of the Empire; Autun, 12 down from 180; Narbonne, 3.
47 Guy Halsall, “Town, Societies and Ideas: The Not-So-Strange Case of Late Roman and Early Merovingian Metz,” in Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Neil Christie and Simon T. Loseby (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 235–61, here p. 246.
48 For example, the city of Tours saw the construction of a basilica dedicated to Saint Martin more than 800 meters from the city walls where the vestiges of the Roman city were located and where the centers of power still lay. This phenomenon also existed in Orléans, which reoriented itself around three religious establishments: Saint-Paul, Saint-Aignan, and Saint-Euverte. Monastic centers often had their own walls, as was the case in Tours, Bourges, Reims, Poitiers, Soissons, and so on. See Ben Kaddour, “Chartres et sa proche campagne au haut Moyen Âge.”
49 Since the 1980s, debate has crystalized around the question of how to interpret dark earth, the layer of slightly darker topsoil that appears around castra. Initially taken as a sign of an increasingly sparse habitation, areas of dark earth are now considered to indicate the continued presence of a relatively dense population. They compel us to consider criteria for this “urban interim” that are radically different from those that have guided the study of either the ancient or the medieval city: Henri Galinié, “L’expression terres noires, un concept d’attente,” Les petits cahiers d’Anatole 15 (2004): 1–29, here pp. 3 and 13, http://citeres.univ-tours.fr/doc/lat/pecada/F2_15.pdf; Hélène Noizet, “La ville au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne. Du lieu réticulaire au lieu territorial,” EspacesTemps.net, 2014, www.espacestemps.net/articles/la-ville-au-moyen-age-et-a-lepoque-moderne.
50 Rainer Schreg, “Farmsteads in Early Medieval Germany: Architecture and Organisation,” Arqueología de la arquitectura 9 (2012): 247–65, here p. 252.
51 See the study of the soundscape of a small Sudanese village by Samuel Rosen et al., “Presbycusis Study of a Relatively Noise-Free Population in the Sudan,” Annals of Otologie, Rhinology and Laryngology 71, no. 3 (1962): 727–43, here p. 733: “the absence of hard reverberating surfaces, such as walls, ceilings, floors, and hard furniture, etc., in the vicinity apparently accounts for the low intensity levels measured on the sound level meter: 73–74 dB at the worker’s ear.”
52 Marc Heijmans, “Les habitations urbaines en Gaule méridionale durant l’Antiquité tardive,” Gallia 63 (2006): 47–57, here p. 51. This was the situation in Arles and in many other cities such as Nîmes, Cimiez, and Fréjus. Procopius of Caesarea’s History of the Wars, cited in ibid., 52–53, provides further evidence of this practice, citing “a great stadium where the gladiators of the city used to fight in former times, and the men of old built many other buildings round about this stadium.” Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books V and VI: The Gothic War, trans. H. B. Dewing (London: William Heineman, 1919), 6.1, p. 291.
53 Marc Heijmans and Claude Sintès, “L’évolution de la topographie de l’Arles antique. Un état de la question,” Gallia 51 (1994): 135–70, here p. 160.
54 In Poitiers alone, five new churches were added to the five existing ones during the fifth century, with nine others built before 700: Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 85.
55 Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards 2.4, p. 57.
56 Raymond Murray Schafer, “Open Ears,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 25–41, here p. 25.
57 On this ambivalence, see Avitus of Vienne, Histoire spirituelle, ed. and trans. Nicole Hecquet-Noti (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 2005), 2:27.
58 Anne Fraïsse, “Épopée biblique entre traduction poétique et commentaire exégétique,” Cahiers d’études du religieux. Recherches interdisciplinaires 4 (2008): § 1–44, here § 8–11, http://cerri.revues.org/570.
59 Roger P. H. Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
60 For a definition of the genre, see Paul-Augustin Deproost, “L’épopée biblique en langue latine. Essai de définition d’un genre littéraire,” Latomus. Revue d’études latines 56, no. 1 (1997): 14–39.
61 Hecquet-Noti, introduction to Avitus, Histoire spirituelle, 35.
62 Juliette Guérard, “Le thème du cortège divin dans la littérature latine de l’Antiquité tardive : lectures profanes et adaptation chrétienne,” Camenulae 7 (2011): 1–16, here p. 1.
63 Ibid., 15. On the imitative techniques of Christian poets, see Paul W. A. T. van der Laan, “Imitation créative dans le Carmen Paschale de Sédulius,” in Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays, ed. Jan den Boeft and Antonius Hilhorst (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 135–66.
64 Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 227.
65 Fraïsse, “Épopée biblique,”§ 2.
66 Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003).
67 René Martin, “Poésie, politique et religion à l’époque carolingienne,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé 1, no. 2 (2000): 157–74. Indeed, only during the Carolingian Renaissance did elegy reappear in the closed literary circle of Charlemagne’s court. However, its relationship to nature had undergone profound changes since late antiquity, mixed with a “Virgilian” bucolism: Guizard-Duchamp, Les terres du sauvage, 105. In these poems, nature, just like the murmurs of the universe that rise to the surface, is no more than a backdrop in which “conventionality overshadows sensibility” (ibid., 107). Following the model of ancient poetry, the verses of Carolingian poets no longer reflected a sensory experience, but rather poetic conventions that only an educated, firmly Christianized audience could appreciate and understand without being suspected of paganism. This was the outcome of a long process—and bears testimony to the impressive conversion performed by Merovingian hagiographers.
68 Sylvie Labarre, introduction to “Présence et visages de Venance Fortunat, xive centenaire,” special issue, Camenae 11 (2012): 1–7, here p. 3.
69 Cassingena-Trévedy, “Son et lumière,” 10.
70 Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow, 320.
71 Marc Van Uytfanghe, “L’hagiographie de l’Antiquité tardive : une littérature populaire ?” Antiquité tardive. Revue internationale d’histoire et d’archéologie (iv e–vii e siècle) 9 (2002): 201–18. On the sermo humilis, see Michel Banniard, Viva Voce. Communication écrite et communication orale du iv e au ix e siècle en Occident latin (Paris: Institut des études augustiniennes, 1992), 126–27.
72 Marie-Céline Isaïa, “Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin (ve–xvie siècle),” Bulletin du Centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre 15 (2011): 229–36.
73 Jamie Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8, argues that hagiographers hoped that “their prose would train willing readers to follow new patterns of thinking, and that audiences would eventually reorient their behaviour and their sense of community along the lines that the Vitae suggested.”
74 For a detailed study of Gregory the Great’s literary influences, see John Moorhead, “Gregory’s Literary Inheritance,” in A Companion to Gregory the Great, ed. Neil Bronwen and Matthew Dal Santo (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 249–67, here p. 263; Claude Dagens, Saint Grégoire le Grand. Culture et expérience chrétiennes (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1977), 34.
75 Jacques Fontaine, “Esthétique et foi d’après la poésie latine chrétienne des premiers siècles,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 137, no. 4 (1993): 881–88, here p. 887.
76 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 222.
77 Susan Rankin, “Écrire les sons. Création des premières notations musicales,” in Palazzo, Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge, 78–98, here pp. 81–83.
78 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 225.
79 “Soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” Schafer, The Soundscape, 10.
80 Van Uytfanghe, “L’hagiographie de l’Antiquité tardive,” 217.
81 On this transition from secular chronicles to historiae, a specifically Christian historical genre, see Martin Heinzelmann, “L’hagiographie au service de l’histoire. L’évolution du ‘genre’ et le rôle de l’hagiographie sérielle,” in Laurent, Mathey-Maille, and Szkilnik, Des saints et des rois, 23–44, here pp. 34 and 36.
82 For a discussion of the theology of the five senses, see Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 31–73.
83 Paulinus of Nola, Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh, 2 vols. (Westminster/London: Newman Press/Longmans, Green and Co., 1966), 2:158.
84 Gregory the Great, Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, trans. Brian Kerns, 5 vols. (Athens: Cistercian Publications, 2014–2019), 21.2.4, vol. 4, p. 286. For the image of man as a citadel, see Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 73.
85 On the Origenian roots of the notion of spiritual senses, see Régis Courtray, “Une exégèse des cinq sens chez Jérôme. Du mépris au salut,” in Le débat des cinq sens de l’Antiquité à nos jours, ed. Géraldine Puccini (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013), 201–15, here p. 201.
86 Epistle to the Romans 10:17. See Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge, 34–40.
87 Paul Tombeur, “‘Audire’ dans le thème hagiographique de la conversion,” Latomus. Revue d’études latines 24, no. 1 (1965): 159–65, here p. 159.
88 Saint Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 3.
89 Courtray, “Une exégèse des cinq sens chez Jérôme,” 201.
90 Mariette Canévet et al., Les sens spirituels. Sens spirituel, goût spirituel, toucher, touches, gourmandise spirituelle, luxure spirituelle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1993), 6.
91 Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge, 34–40.
92 Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (New York: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), 6.62 and 6.55, pp. 274 [translation modified] and 269.
93 Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, Books I–VII, trans. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 6.21, p. 455; Jerome, Contra Jovinianum, Patrologia Latina 23, 2.8, p. 297.
94 Paulinus of Nola, Letters, 2:218.
95 I follow Courtray, “Une exégèse des cinq sens chez Jérôme.”
96 Ibid., 204.
97 Augustine, sermon 159 (Epistle to the Romans 8:30–31), in The Works of Saint Augustine: Sermons III/5 (148–183); On the New Testament, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1992), 122; cited in Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 64.
98 Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 10.33, vol. 2, p. 155.
99 Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 65.
100 According to Palazzo, Gregory’s pessimistic or at least ambivalent vision vis-à-vis the senses was not prevalent in the Carolingian period.
101 George E. Demacopoulos, “Gregory the Great,” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71–85, here p. 71.
102 Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 73.
103 Demacopoulos, “Gregory the Great,” 84–85.
104 Gregory the Great, The Homilies of Saint Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson, 2nd ed. (Etna: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), 2.2.2, p. 280.
105 Gregory of Tours, “The Miracles of Bishop Martin,” in Lives and Miracles, ed. and trans. Giselle de Nie (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 1.4, p. 441.
106 Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25.
107 Charles Mériaux, “Qui verus christianus vult esse. Christianisme et ‘paganisme’ en Gaule du Nord à l’époque mérovingienne,” in Le problème de la christianisation du monde antique, ed. Hervé Inglebert, Sylvain Destephen, and Bruno Dumézil (Paris: Picard, 2010), 359–73, here p. 372.
108 Demacopoulos, “Gregory the Great,” 85.
109 There is a certain analogy between the mission of the hagiographers and that of acoustic designers, who “may incline society to listen again to models of beautifully modulated and balanced soundscapes such as we have in great musical compositions. From these, clues may be obtained as to how the soundscape may be altered, sped up, slowed down, thinned or thickened, weighted in favor of or against specific effects.” Schafer, The Soundscape, 237–38.
110 Makis Solomos, De la musique au son. L’émergence du son dans la musique des XXe–XXIe siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes), 7.
111 On the different aspects of Schaeffer’s biography and the evolution of his relationship to Christianity, see Martin Kaltenecker and Karine Le Bail, eds., Pierre Schaeffer. Les constructions impatientes (Paris: Cnrs Éditions, 2012), especially the article “Jalons,” 9–65, here pp. 9–20.
112 Kaltenecker relates that Schaeffer arranged four phrases in the shape of a cross at the bottom of a sheet of scrap paper, suggesting an equivalence between the modes of listening and four attitudes before God: “I understand You”; “I take You”; “I reach out to You”; “I hear You”: Kaltenecker and Bail, Pierre Schaeffer, 198. On the theological dimension of listening according to Schaeffer, see Martin Kaltenecker, “Théologie de l’écoute,” Droit de cités, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20101207082542/http://droitdecites.org:80/2010/10/15/kaltenecker.
113 Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines [1966], trans. Christine North and John Dack (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 75.
114 Ibid., 74.
115 Ibid., 10.
116 Ibid., 75.
117 Ibid., 76.
118 Ibid., 78–79.
119 Umberto Eco, Le signe. Histoire et analyse d’un concept (Brussels: Éd. Labor, 2002), 23.
120 Schaeffer, lecture at the Conservatoire de Paris, January 22, 1969, cited in Kaltenecker, “Théologie de l’écoute,” n. 112.
121 Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel 2.5.9, p. 340.
122 Fortunatus tells the story of a man that “stole a bell of the kind that customarily hangs on the necks of cattle.” Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, ed. and trans. Michael Roberts (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 2.16, p. 111.
123 Jordanes, Romana et Getica, ed. Theodor Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 5.1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1882), 4.27, p. 60.
124 Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards 2.4, p. 57.
125 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1974), 3.13, p. 178.
126 Sulpicius Severus, “The Second Dialogue,” in Niceta of Remesiana, Writings; Sulpicius Severus, Writings; Vincent of Lerins, Commonitories; Prosper of Aquitaine, Grace and Free Will, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Bernard M. Peebles, Rudolph E. Morris, and Reginald O’Donnell (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1949), cap. 9, p. 216.
127 Vita Genovefae virginis Parisiensis, MGH, SRM 3, cap. 22, p. 224; Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, MGH, SRM 1.2, cap. 86, p. 96; Ionas, Vita Iohannis abb. Reomaensis, MGH, SRM 3, cap. 16, p. 514.
128 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum 36, p. 61.
129 Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards 3.23, p. 127.
130 At the end of the Middle Ages the exact opposite was true—the whinnying of horses was recurrent, and birdsong became a marker of the passing seasons: Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 33–34.
131 Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, MGH, SRM 2, 1.36, p. 375; “Radegund, Queen of the Franks and Abbess of Poitiers (ca. 525–587),” in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 60–105, here p. 84.
132 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman (New York: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 1.9, p. 37.
133 Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Gaudentius, and many others rejected instrumental music because it might draw attention away from the sacred. All references to cymbals in Christian literature are gathered in James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
134 Henri-Irénée Marrou, “Une théologie de la musique chez Grégoire de Nysse ?” in Christiana tempora. Mélanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et de patristique (Rome: École française de Rome, 1978), 365–72.
135 Cymbals were also used by the Hebrews to set the tempo for their worship: Joachim Braun, Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources [1999], trans. Douglas W. Stott (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 108. For John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Psalm 149, the use of instruments indisputably indicated the Hebrews’ weakness of spirit: see McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 83. See also Marrou, “Une théologie de la musique,” 366.
136 David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).
137 In his letter “To Agricola,” in Poems and Letters 1.2, vol. 1, p. 345, Sidonius Apollinaris described Theodoric’s musical tastes: “In any case, no hydraulic organs are heard there, nor does any concert-party under its trainer boom forth a set performance in chorus; there is no music of lyrist, flautist or dance-conductor, tambourine-girl or female cytharist; for the king finds a charm only in the string music which comforts the soul with virtue just as much as it soothes the ear with melody.”
138 Caesarius of Arles, Sermons 1–80, trans. Mary Magdeleine Muller (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1956), 6.3, p. 40. Regarding the condemnation of popular song and dance, see Catherine Dunn, The Gallican Saint’s Life and the Late Roman Dramatic Tradition (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989).
139 Baudonivia Pictaviensis, Vita Radegundis, MGH, SRM 2, 2.18, p. 390.
140 Jacques Le Goff, “Le christianisme médiéval en Occident du concile de Nicée (325) à la Réforme (début du xvie siècle),” in Histoire des religions, vol. 2, La formation des religions universelles et des religions de salut dans le monde méditerranéen et le Proche-Orient. Les religions constituées en Occident et leurs contre-courants, ed. Henri-Charles Puech (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 749–868, here p. 749.
141 Dimitri Nikolai Boekhoorn, “Bestiaire mythique, légendaire et merveilleux dans la tradition celtique. De la littérature orale à la littérature écrite” (PhD diss., Université Rennes 2/University College Cork, 2008), 202; Liliane Bodson, “Les oiseaux dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. Choix de textes avec introduction, traduction, commentaires et passages parallèles,” supplement to Bulletin de l’Association des professeurs de langues anciennes de l’Académie de Lille 15 (1991): 13–17.
142 Boekhoorn, “Bestiaire mythique, légendaire et merveilleux,” 229–30.
143 Sulpicius Severus, “Third Dialogue,” in Writings, cap. 4, p. 230.
144 In another episode, Sulpicius Severus recounted how Martin exercised his authority over a pack of ferocious hounds by ordering them to stop chasing a frightened hare: “Second Dialogue,” in ibid., cap. 9, p. 216. See also Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 118.
145 Luc Charles-Dominique, “Anthropologie historique de la notion de bruit,” Filigrane 7 (2008): 33–55.
146 Umberto Eco, “The Dog that Barked (and Other Zoosemiotic Archaeologies),” in From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation [2007], trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 171–222, here p. 173.
147 Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, “Des païens comme chiens dans le monde germanique et slave du haut Moyen Âge,” in Impies et païens entre Antiquité et Moyen Âge, ed. Luc Mary and Michel Sot (Paris: Picard, 2002), 175–87.
148 Banniard, Viva Voce, 111, employs the term “phonic ministry” to refer to the oral/aural transmission of the divine message and “iconographic ministry” to describe a learning process that required figuration.
149 Following the work of Fritz, the anthropomorphization of sonic material is apparent. Within the framework of hagiographical narrative, sounds, especially voices, became one of the ways to immerse the faithful in a sacred world.
150 Schafer, The Soundscape, 273; Schafer, “I Have Never Seen a Sound,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology 172 (2006): 10–15.
151 Marc Van Uytfanghe, “La Bible dans les Vies de saints mérovingiennes. Quelques pistes de recherche,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 62, no. 168 (1976): 103–11.
152 Isidore of Seville, On the Nature of Things, trans. Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016).
153 Gregory of Tours, “The Miracles of the Martyr Julian,” in Lives and Miracles, chap. 15, p. 339.
154 For more details on Agrestius, see Bruno Dumézil, “L’affaire Agrestius de Luxeuil. Hérésie et régionalisme dans la Burgondie du viie siècle,” Médiévales 52, no. 1 (2007): 135–52.
155 Jonas de Bobbio, Vie de Saint Colomban et de ses disciples, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé (Brégolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1988), 200. See also Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast, trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 201.
156 Jonas de Bobbio, Vie de Saint Colomban, 219.
157 Ibid., 135.
158 “An acousmatic sound is a sound that is heard without the hearer seeing what caused it”: Michel Chion, Glossaire, 2006, www.lampe-tempete.fr/ChionGlossaire.html.
159 Vita Eligii 1.18.
160 Gregory the Great, Dialogues 1.11, pp. 49–50.
161 Vita Sadalbergae abb. Laudunensis, MGH, SRM 5, 5.21, p. 62; “Sadalberga, Abbess of Laon (ca. 605–70),” in McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 176–94, here p. 190.
162 Vita Sadalbergae 5.22, p. 62; “Sadalberga, Abbess of Laon,” 191.
163 Specialists of Merovingian hagiography have already noted that the Devil no longer occupied the central position reserved for him in late antique hagiography: Marc Van Uytfanghe, “Pertinence et statut du miracle dans l’hagiographie mérovingienne (600–750),” in Miracle et Karâma. Hagiographies médiévales comparés, ed. Denise Aigle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 67–144, here pp. 101–3; Martin Roch, L’intelligence d’un sens. Odeurs miraculeuses et odorat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge (v e–viii e siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 201.
164 Sulpicius Severus, Vie de Saint Martin, vol. 7, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1967–1969), 2, p. 299.
165 Gregory of Tours, Liber vitae patrum, MGH, SRM 1.2, cap. 11, p. 260; Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985), 89.
166 Gregory the Great, Dialogues 3.30, p. 165.
167 Ibid., 3.4, pp. 117–18.
168 Gregory of Tours, Liber vitae patrum 1.2, cap. 17, p. 279; Life of the Fathers, 116.
169 Michael Tangl, ed., S. Bonifatii et Lulli epistolae, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Selectae 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916), 8–15; cited in Claude Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la littérature latine (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994), 195–96.
170 Valerio of Bierzo: An Aescetic of the Late Visigothic Period, ed. and trans. Consuelo Maria Aherne (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1949), 59.
171 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price and R. E. Latham, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), 5.2, pp. 285–89.
172 Ibid., 286.
173 On the notion of silence in the writings of the Venerable Bede, see Olivier Szerwiniack, “Le silence dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique du peuple anglais de Bède le Vénérable,” Micrologus. Natura, scienze e società medievali 18 (2010): 29–46, here pp. 30–33.
174 For a definition of the genre, see Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme, 4–5.
175 Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 184–85 and 408; Charles-Dominique, “Anthropologie historique de la notion de bruit,” 13–14.
176 Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 184.
177 Here I adopt the conclusions of Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 409.
178 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion [1964], trans. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1958), 13.
179 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational [1917], trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
180 Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 91.
181 Schafer, The Soundscape, 10–11.
This is a translation of: Le silencement du monde: Paysages sonores au haut Moyen Âge et nouvelle culture aurale