Public seminar: Matthew P. Thompson (University College Dublin)

A public musicology seminar in which Matthew P. Thompson examines thirteenth-century clerical and literary thinking on the control of music and sexuality.

Matthew P. Thompson, Assistant Professor in Early Music at University College Dublin, gives a public seminar on music and sexuality in thirteenth-century legal, doctrinal and literary discourses. Starting from William of Auxerre's Summa aurea, the paper argues that clerics treated the regulation of musical behaviour as closely analogous to the regulation of sex, since both offered social utility while producing morally perilous sensual pleasure. It then examines how vernacular French authors such as Henri de Valenciennes and Gerbert de Montreuil engaged with, satirised and undercut these clerical narratives through their songs and storytelling.