Name: Michael Bigley

Title: "This laughable dissipation of the voice is called religion": Musical Performance and Religious Discourse in The Canterbury Tales.”

Abstract: In the massive and varied corpus of Chaucerian scholarship, only occasional attention has been paid to the issue of music and musicality within the Canterbury Tales, and very little of that scholarship has been concerned with the interpretation of the text, much less with musicality itself as an interpretive category that may help us to hear resonances between characters and across tales. Close reading of the various appearances of music and musicality in the text, in both narrative and metaphoric contexts, can help not only to sound questions of interpretation that might otherwise go unnoticed, but to reveal broader trends in the work as a whole and its status as a new kind of literary project. Music never rises to the level of a major theme in the way that sexual relations, ecclesiastical corruption, lay religiosity, and tension between social estates can be read as important concerns spread over and between several tales, but its near-ubiquity allows it to serve as a way of touching on all of those themes, acknowledging their connectivity, and extending their local concerns to a consideration of the Canterbury Tales as a single text. Clearly it is beyond the scope of this paper to give a detailed reading of any one tale, much less of several; my intent instead is to pursue the theme of music in religious practice through the larger structure of the Canterbury Tales, comparing the various instances with other evidence of late medieval musical performance and religious attitudes, and to show a pattern of contradictory attitudes and practices, a tension that is central to Chaucer’s technique in this continually astounding text. In particular, the various musicians in the text and their attitude towards their performance touch in unexpected ways on two major and intertwining debates of the period: the efficacy of affective piety and the dangerous sensuality with which it can be continuous, and the relative values of simple faith and learned doctrine. These debates and their relationship to musical performance carry implications that extend well beyond the field of literary studies; their influence on Christian thought of the period was enormous, and strong echoes of that influence can still be heard in contemporary religious practice.