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The Articulation of Virginity in the Medieval Chanson de nonne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lisa Colton
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Abstract

The chanson de nonne presents stereotypical images of young women whose bodies and voices are trapped within the confines of a nunnery. Close examination of the architectural metaphors used to describe virginity and chastity in the Middle Ages allows comparisons to be made between the structures — metaphorical, musical and textual — that held fictitious nuns within the frame of the clerical imagination at the centre of thirteenth-century motet production.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 133 , Issue 2 , 2008 , pp. 159 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2008

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References

1 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A. XXV, fol. 140v; edited in The Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene (Oxford, 1935; repr. 1977), 51, no. 95, verse 6.Google Scholar

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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/jrma/fkn001Google Scholar

3 Pierre Bec, ‘Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution à la connaissance du lyrisme féminin au moyen âge’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 22 (1979), 235–62 (pp. 235–6). On more selective criteria than those offered by Bec for the identification of chansons de femme, for example excluding lyrics with a male narrator or where the sex of the protagonist is ambiguous (chansons de toile, chansons de rencontre, pastourelles), see Eglal Doss-Quinby, ‘Introduction to the Poetry: Genres and Forms’, Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer and Elizabeth Aubrey (New Haven, CT, 2001), 33–5.Google Scholar

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7 Ibid., 5–6.Google Scholar

8 The history and development of the motet genre is far from straightforward, and its description lies outside the purpose of the present study. For consideration of these issues, see Everist, Mark, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre (Cambridge, 1994), 5–7, 15–42. On the restrictions that prevented women from participating in the composition of polyphonic music in Latin, and the opportunities presented to them by the development of vernacular song, see Grimbert, ‘Women as Poets and Musicians’, 24–5.Google Scholar

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11 Huot (Allegorical Play, 9) concludes that the vernacular motet, as a ‘learned genre’, would have been ‘cultivated in the same clerical milieu’ as Latin motets, and performed predominantly ‘for a sophisticated audience of fellow clerics and members of the university and at ecclesiastical and aristocratic courts’. The women trouvères are the best-documented group of female musical and lyrical composers, though their biographical details are often as vague or ambiguous as those preserved in the vidas and razos of the trobairitz and of many male troubadours and trouvères; see Eglal Doss-Quinby, ‘Introduction to the Authors: What We Know, What We Can Surmise’, Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Doss-Quinby et al., 26–33 (p. 32). On the implications of ‘legends’ for the reception of the troubadours and trouvères by subsequent historians, see Haines, John, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2004), esp. pp. 33–8 and 52–6.Google Scholar

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14 On the evidence for female performance of chansons de femme, see Boynton, Susan, ‘Women's Performance of the Lyric before 1500‘, Medieval Woman's Song, ed. Klink and Rasmussen, 47–65.Google Scholar

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17 Grimbert, ‘Women as Poets and Musicians’, 25.Google Scholar

18 Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Musical Culture in Medieval France (Oxford, 1997), 83. The social context of motets is also discussed in Christopher Page, ‘The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 147–64 (pp. 147, 149).Google Scholar

19 On a particularly interesting example, Domna, tant vos ai preiada (attributed to Raimbaut de Vaqueiras), in which a man and a woman speak in different dialects, see Gaunt, Simon, ‘Sexual Difference and the Metaphor of Language in a Troubadour Poem’, Modern Language Review, 83 (1988), 297–313.Google Scholar

20 Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, WI, 1984), 20.Google Scholar

21 Christopher Page's argument that the sonic properties of textual material were more important than the seemingly impossible task of understanding two or more simultaneously performed texts (explored in Discarding Images, 85–6) has been contested by Suzannah Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16 (2007), 31–59. Clark argues that textual and musical elements could be combined to convey textual meaning, foregrounding the sense of the lyrics via musical means.Google Scholar

22 Scribes within motet codices used various arrangements of the written space; in French motets vocal lines were copied adjacent to one another, rather than in score.Google Scholar

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24 On medieval virginity, see especially Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (London, 1999); Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001); John Arnold, ‘The Labour of Continence: Masculinity and Clerical Virginity’, Medieval Virginities, ed. Ann Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff, 2003), 102–18; Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (London, 2000); R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991), esp. pp. 97–109.Google Scholar

25 Phillips, Kim M., ‘Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman's Life’, Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis, Noel James Menuge and Kim M. Phillips (New York, 1995), 1–24 (p. 5).Google Scholar

26 The ‘siren'-like nature of women's voices is described in a number of recent publications. Thomasin LaMay describes how female throats were both the source of ‘extraordinary aural pleasure’ and ‘tantalizing sites of direct access to their body’ in the sixteenth century; ‘Composing from the Throat: Madalena Casulana's Primo libro de madrigali, 1568’, Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. LaMay (Aldershot, 2005), 365–98 (p. 368). Leofranc Holford-Strevens notes that sirens were known for tempting men to laziness, or to false, trivial or lewd behaviour, by their sweet voices; ‘Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 16–51 (p. 21). Judith Peraino outlines the important link between sirens and aural pleasure; Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2006), 16. See also Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘“The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly While the Fowler Deceives the Bird”: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages’, Music and Letters, 87 (2006), 187–212.Google Scholar

27 Everist, French Motets, 131. Marcia Jenneth Epstein has edited and translated the devotional trouvère songs, which account for approximately one tenth of the trouvère repertory, in ‘Prions en chantant’: Devotional Songs of the Trouvères (Toronto, 1997).Google Scholar

28 Rosenberg and Tischler made their edition from the interpolated version of Le roman de Fauvel, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 146, fol. 37r–v; The Monophonic Songs in the Roman de Fauvel, ed. Samuel Rosenberg and Hans Tischler (Lincoln, NE, 1991), 143–7. Another analogy was commonly made between virginity and the parable of the sower (Matthew xiii. 8), in which wives, widows and virgins were described as receiving thirtyfold, sixtyfold or a hundredfold reward in heaven; see Clarissa W. Atkinson, ‘“Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass”: The Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983), 131–43 (p. 134).Google Scholar

29 Phillips, Kim M., ‘Bodily Walls, Windows and Doors: The Politics of Gesture in Late Fifteenth-Century English Books for Women’, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Kiddy ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout, 2000), 185–58 (p. 191).Google Scholar

30 On this analogy, see Warren, Nancy Bradley, ‘Pregnancy and Productivity: The Imagery of Female Monasticism Within and Beyond the Cloister Walls’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28 (1998), 531–52. On sexual metaphor in medieval literature see Whitehead, Christiania, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff, 2003), 230–60.Google Scholar

31 This passage cited and translated in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), 128. Full text edited in Li romanz de Dieu et de sa mère de Herman de Valenciennes, ed. Ina Spiele (Leiden, 1975).Google Scholar

32 Montpellier, Faculté de Médecine, MS H 196 (hereafter Mo), fol. 376v; this motet is built upon a section of the Gradual for feasts of the Virgin, Benedicta. Virgo dei genitrix. See The Montpellier Codex, ed. Hans Tischler, with translations by Susan Stakel and Joel C. Relihan, 4 parts (Madison, WI, 1985), where the translation is at pt iv, 112 (no. 326). Text in italics quotes the liturgy. The translations of French and Latin texts in this article are those found in the cited editions, with minor adjustments.Google Scholar

33 Epstein, ‘Prions en chantant‘, 34.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 33.Google Scholar

35 Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives, 131.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1987).Google Scholar

37 Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, ed. Adrian James McCarthy, Studies in the English Mystics, 1 (Salzburg, 1981), 120–1.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 124.Google Scholar

39 Bradley Warren, ‘Pregnancy and Productivity’, 539.Google Scholar

40 Salih, Versions of Virginity, 16.Google Scholar

41 Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives, 41.Google Scholar

42 Chapter 5 of the Compileisun des dis comandemenz, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 654 (fol. 1371); cited in Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives, 42.Google Scholar

43 Terms in use in this repertory include ‘virginitas’ (virginity) and ‘castitas’ (chastity) in Latin items, and ‘virginité’, ‘chastité’, ‘pucelage’ (maidenhood), ‘filette’ (young girl) and ‘pucelete’ (young maiden) in vernacular texts.Google Scholar

44 Kathryn Gravdal argues that the pastourelle was part of a discourse of violence against women as entertainment; see Gravdal, Kathryn, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, PA, 1991), 104–21 (Chapter 4: ‘The Game of Rape: Sexual Violence and Social Class in the Pastourelle'). Coyne Kelly notes that ‘a woman could retain her chastity even if her body is violated, so long as she did not consent to the sexual act'; Performing Virginity, 5.Google Scholar

45 The plainchant on which the motet is based could also be used on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The motet is found in Mo, fol. 176v; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. fr. 13521 (hereafter Cl), fol. 386v; Bamberg, Staatliche Bibliothek, MS Lit. 115 (olim Ed. IV. 6; hereafter Ba), fol. 29r; an edition of the version in Ba can be found in Cent motets du XIIIe siècle, ed. Pierre Aubry (Paris, 1908), no. 48. The text is quoted from The Montpellier Codex, ed. Tischler, pt iv, 50. This motet is also discussed in Huot, Allegorical Play, 27. The alternative reading ‘captive’ is for the word ‘chetive’, whose definition was ‘captive’ or ‘prisoner’ in the later Middle Ages, but could also mean poor or unfortunate one; both definitions carried implications of captivity within sin or at the mercy of one's passions.Google Scholar

46 Mo, fol. 268r–v; Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, MS 1099 (olim Helmst. 1206; hereafter W2), fols. 224v–225r; edited in The Montpellier Codex, ed. Tischler, pt iii, 58 (no. 249), and Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Doss-Quinby et al., 190–1. The legal implications of rape, treated by the courts in a manner akin to theft rather than injury, are explored in Corinne Saunders, ‘A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus’, Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge, 2000), 105–24.Google Scholar

47 Edited and translated in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966), ii, 357–8. Dronke dated the lyric to the twelfth century on account of the handwriting in the manuscript, but later revised the date of composition to the previous century; see Dronke, Peter, ‘Profane Elements in Literature’, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable and Carol Dana Lanham (Cambridge, 1982), 569–92 (pp. 573–4).Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 573–4.Google Scholar

49 ‘Nam super instabile fundamentum stabile edificium construe non potest, sic nec instabilem tenorem, vix sine dissonantia discantus pronunciari potest’; anonymous theorist, possibly English, cited in Page, ‘The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets’, 162.Google Scholar

50 Everist, French Motets, 43.Google Scholar

51 Ardis Butterfield, ‘The Language of Medieval Music: Two Thirteenth-Century Motets’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 1–16 (p. 5).Google Scholar

52 Cl, fol. 374r; Mo, fols. 152v–154r; W2, fol. 207r-v. The same three-part piece is found with alternative texts, Celi domina quant sanctorum agnina venerantur / Ave virgo virginum ave lumen luminum in Ba, fol. 3; Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas, MS without shelfmark, fol. 115; and fragmentarily in Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, MS 3471, fol. IIIv. The motetus melody also appears independently of the triplum, with the text Nouvelement m'a souspris nouvele amours qui m'a pris, in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 12615 (Chansonnier de Noailles), fol. 181v. Regardless of the order in which the specific combinations of voice parts and text appeared, the present reading takes the stance that the motet Nonne sans amour represents a subtle and inventive combination of elements. My transcription excludes information about ligatures, plicae and editorial B♭s (as do Examples 2 and 3); for a critical edition see The Montpellier Codex, ed. Tischler, pt ii, 119.Google Scholar

53 Butterfield, ‘The Language of Medieval Music’, 15.Google Scholar

54 On similar types of melodic borrowing in the motet Joliement en douce desirree / Quant voi la florete / Je sui joliete / Aptatur, see Clark, “‘S'en dirai chançonete”‘.Google Scholar

55 The word ‘perfection’ is used to denote beats through the piece, here transcribed as dotted crotchets. Mid-point reference was a crucial tool for drawing attention to important textual and musical meaning in texted music, as well as in literary products. On mid-point reference in manuscript production, see Brownlee, Kevin, ‘Authorial Self-Representation and Literary Models in the Roman de Fauvel’, Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford, 1998), 73–103. The combined significance of textual and musical features at midpoint was demonstrated in Margaret Bent, ‘Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut's Motet 15’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), 15–27; and eadem, ‘Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet Tribum que non abhorruit / Quoniam secta latronum / Merito hec patimur and its “Quotations”’, Hearing the Motet, ed. Pesce, 82–103.Google Scholar

56 Page, “The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets’, 153. Nus ne mi pourrait is found in Ba, fols. 45v–46r. For a critical edition, see Cent motets, ed. Aubry, ii, 157–8, and Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Doss-Quinby et al., 128–9.Google Scholar

57 For Susan Stakel's translation of Mo 110, see The Montpellier Codex, ed. Tischler, pt iv, 43.Google Scholar

58 Though not a refrain, the image of a girl with a bright face is common in secular and Marian devotional song; Epstein, ‘Prions en chantant‘, 34.Google Scholar

59 I am grateful to Elizabeth Eva Leach for suggesting this plausible musical allusion to chiming.Google Scholar

60 The use of sexually suggestive metaphor was commonplace in the secular lyrics of the period, as well as in the corpus of fabliaux. For a recent discussion of one of the best-known examples, Arnaut Daniel's Lo firm voler q'el cor m'intra, which puns on the word ‘verga’ (used interchangeably to mean rod, branch, sceptre, virgin and penis), see Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 63–4. On an English carol in which the ringing of a bell is a metaphor for the sexual climax of a clerk who has seduced a maiden, having had sex with her between evensong and prime, see Bennett, ‘Ventriloquisms’, 188–9.Google Scholar

61 Mo, fols. 55v–58r (all four parts); Ba, fols. 29v–30r (triplum, motetus, tenor); Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 11266 (Pseudo-Aristode), fols. $6r–37r (triplum, motetus and tenor); motetus part only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, fol. 243v (fol. 256v), opening ‘Trop suix ioliette, doucette plaixans’; two quotations of the triplum in Magister Lambertus's thirteenth-century treatise (triplum), verses 7 ('S'en dirai chançonete') and 24 (Trop use ma vie'). On Douce 308, see Atchison, Mary, The Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308: Essays and Complete Edition of Texts (Aldershot, 2005), 539; and Leonard E. Arnaud, ‘The Sottes Chansons in MS Douce 308 of the Bodleian Library at Oxford’, Speculum, 19 (1944), 68–88. Editions of the four-part version of this motet can be found in The Montpellier Codex, ed. Tischler, pt i, 66–9, and Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Doss-Quinby et al., 242–5.Google Scholar

62 The poetic text can be found in Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen, ed. Karl Bartsch (Leipzig, 1870), 28–9; Bartsch's edition is taken from two sources: Bern, Stadtbibliothek, MS 389, and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 20050; Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen, ed. Bartsch, v–vi. The translation is taken from Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Doss-Quinby et al., 241–7. For a more recent description of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 20050, see Parker, Ian, ‘Notes on the Chansonnier Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Music and Letters, 60 (1979), 261–80. A discussion of the lyric within the context of nuns' songs can be found in Philip Schuyler Allen, ‘Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, Part I’, Modern Philology, 5 (1908), 423–76, esp. pp. 433–5; and Graciela S. Daichman, Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature (Syracuse, NY, 1986), 70. Daichman's book suffers from her inference that lyrics provide evidence of medieval nuns' authentic experience and behaviour. See also Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France (Paris, 1904), 190.Google Scholar

63 Clark speculates that the quadruplum was a later addition by a separate poet-composer. ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”‘, 43.Google Scholar

64 Suzannah Clark, ‘Refrain’, Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23058>, accessed 20 March 2008); Eglal Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York, Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1984). Refrains are numbered according to the catalogue by Nico H. J. Van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe: Collationnement, introduction, et notes (Paris, 1969); some were identified by their appearance in more than one text, others by their interruption of a lyric's overall poetic metre, or by other factors, and not all identifications are universally accepted. For further discussions of refrains and criticism of Van den Boogaard's classification of them, see Butterfield, Ardis, ‘Repetition and Variation in the Thirteenth-Century Refrain’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 1–13; Mark Everist, ‘The Refrain Cento: Myth or Motet?’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1989), 164–88; Everist, French Motets; Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”’, 44–54; Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002), 75–86 ('Chapter 4: The Refrain').Google Scholar

65 The age of nuns taking the veil in England is discussed in Bagnali Yardley, Performing Piety, 181–5. Wogan-Browne (Saints' Lives, 48–9) notes that Archbishop John Pecham forbade the veiling of women under the age of 15. Other lyrics that focus on the young age of a nun in the convent include the fourteenth-century song Sugando sola sul mio leto, in which the nun complains ‘Ancora non avea deze ani / che fu’ serata e strera in quela mura' (‘I was barely ten years old when I was locked up within these walls‘); see Casini, Tommaso, Studi di poesia antica (Città de Castello, 1913), 157, no. 22, cited in Daichman, Wayward Nuns, 75.Google Scholar

66 The motetus of De ma dame vient / Dieus, coument porroie / Omnes (Mo 279, fol. 313r) is a chanson de femme about the frustrations of a woman whose belt still carries the scent of her lover from whom she is parted; both poetic texts are attributed to Adam de la Halle. Though it is not a chastity belt per se, the unbuckling of the belt in order to send it to the lover causes her physical and emotional distress.Google Scholar

67 Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”‘, 49.Google Scholar

68 Deliberately altering the gendered inflection of a text would be an unusual scribal practice, though one motet would suggest that ambiguity of sex was sometimes a feature in the corpus. Onc voir par amours n'amai (Mo, fol. 268v) is an example of a chanson de femme that expresses love for a female beloved, as revealed by the feminine endings within the text for both characters. As Peraino has noted, in Mo, Onc voir par amours n'amai is adjacent to another chanson de femme, the ‘abduction’ motet Cil brun[e]s ne me meine mie. Peraino considers the gendered endings of Onc voir par amours n'amai as possibly corrupt, but also typical of the playfulness at the end of the fascicle of Mo in question, which explores ‘regional, gender, codicological, and musical peripheries’; Judith Peraino, ‘Monophonie Motets: Sampling and Grafting in the Middle Ages’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 644–80 (pp. 663–4).Google Scholar

69 Huot remarks that ‘citations of sacred text are sometimes incorporated into secular compositions, where they acquire an unexpected and often humorous new meaning’; Allegorical Play, 56. I am grateful to Elizabeth Eva Leach for offering ‘revels’ as a viable, and more secular-sounding, translation, deriving from the Middle English ‘sollempnitee’ for festival or celebration. The term appears in the Vie de Philippe III by Guillaume de Nangis, a monk of St Denis, in relation to a ‘feste grant et solempnel’ in 1275, in which members of secular Parisian society including ‘les dames et les pucelles’ sang ‘diverses chançons et diverses motès’. This intermingling of songs and motets performed by women and young girls was evidently a part of the elaborate ‘solemnity’ of the day; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 228, n. 41.Google Scholar

70 Salih, Versions of Virginity, 109.Google Scholar