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Home > Resources > Interdisciplinary > Historical Studies Discerning Voices of Late-Medieval Women: Women and Religious Song in the Pre-Reformational Period
Hermina Joldersma
Calvin College
March 2006
In an early fifteenth-century chronicle written by a Brother of the Common Life in Doesburg, now the Netherlands, we find described a situation in which Dirc van Herxen, rector of the House, was moved to compose a song. The chronicle reports:
It happened that near our House a maid often sang a frivolous Dutch song that sounded somewhat scurrilous, as the laity tend to do. This made the venerable father indignant. He seized the opportunity to write a very devout Latin song in praise of virginity and purity, using the melody of the secular song. When he had finished it, he gave it to Master Livinus, at that time rector of the pupils, so that Livinus might teach it to them in place of the song they knew. Many people were moved by that song so elegantly and piously composed, and inspired by affection for the poet, became inflamed with a love for purity. The song was spread and copied and sung endlessly with devotion by pupils and the religious. On urging by devout sisters and girls, our father translated his song into the vernacular, quite elegantly and on the same melody.This incident is marvelous for the snapshot it provides us about the composition of late-medieval religious song. It is also marvelous because we can trace all of the elements it mentions: Van Herxen's Latin text; his Dutch translation; the music; and very likely also the vernacular song.
As you can imagine, this episode is quite well known to scholars. Especially in literary histories that concentrate on authors, Dirc van Herxen is the only hero of the piece. The maid is sometimes mentioned as singer of a "frivolous" or "dishonorable" vernacular song. At least one interpreter extrapolates from her song to characterize her person as "a certain woman of loose morals." The religious women are generally invisible.
Nevertheless, the episode is very rich for what it tells us about "women and song in the pre-reformational period." This becomes apparent when we embark on an analysis with an alert eye for gender issues. Such an analysis would shift the focus away from author and ask about function, about the functional role of women in conception and transmission. The chronicle report might then be analyzed as follows.
The seminal moment in the entire episode is this: a woman sings from the secular oral tradition. A male voice might have given equal affront, but one can imagine that the combination of female voice and worldly song particularly offended the rector. The singer's name is unknown, and it takes some ingenuity to reconstruct the text of her offending secular song: both are ephemeral details in the genesis of the written, and therefore traceable, work which resulted.
The woman sings while she works, 'as the laity tend to do.' It is unlikely that she wrote the song that she sang; more probably she learned it from an oral tradition. If she was at all literate, knowing 'letters' in either Latin or Dutch, we have no record of it. We do know that as a maid she performed classic unimportant 'reproductive work' (to use a Marxist category anachronistically); her work enabled others - in this case males - to devote themselves to 'productive work' such as devotion and learning, which leaves a more traceable written record.
Other women are equally anonymous. We know that religious women requested Van Herxen to write a Dutch translation of his Latin song. Were they not literate enough to do such a translation themselves? Were they deferring to the known poetic skill of the Rector? Was this something women did not do? What was the function of that Dutch song in their community? The Latin chronicle calls these women 'sisters and girls.' This suggests that the Latin and the vernacular version had a similar function, that of edifying pupils: the brothers used the Latin song for boys, the sisters used the vernacular song for girls. A second version of the Dutch song, not mentioned in the chronicle, comes from a manuscript compiled by a later group of women, also anonymous. Characteristically, their manuscript provides musical notation, so that we know the melody through women; the music, in turn, provides us with a trail to the secular song.
Silhouetted against this anonymity, of the laity, the worker, the women, the girls, are three literate religious named men with important administrative functions: chronicler Jacobus de Voecht, Rector Dirc van Herxen, and teacher Livinus. We see that Van Herxen's first goal was not to reform the maid or to inspire women, but to edify boys. Only through women's urging do we have a vernacular religious song at all.
The concrete details of this episode are characteristic for the often very different roles women and men play in late-medieval song. Women have traditionally been the more reliable carriers of songs even into modern times; and singing has often functioned to lighten the burden of their manual labor. The church has consistently disapproved of the secular tradition, but it was primarily men who voiced and acted on such disapproval; meanwhile secular song continued as an undercurrent in women's singing and their repertoire even in religious institutions. Men more often possessed the learning necessary for text and musical composition, women played a major role in transmission. Especially in the later middle ages, religious women were the primary audience of vernacular literature for devotional purposes, including song.
The episode raises the question: whose song is it, to whom should credit be given? The anonymous woman who functioned as the (negative) muse? The named man who composed the Latin contrafact and the Dutch translation? The anonymous sisters who requested that translation? The later religious women who transmitted music as well as text in their song manuscript? These are the some of the complexities inherent in seeking women's voices in late-medieval religious song.
In the remainder of this essay I want to do three things. I will briefly sketch the nature of the sources that provide us with this fascinating body of material. I will then discuss three specific songs, chosen among many to illustrate both the complexities of the question, and the way that women's voices might be discerned. Finally, I want to ask, briefly: "why song?" Let me begin, however, by clarifying a few concepts that are key to the discussion.
I use the term "late-medieval" to mean the period from 1400 to 1600. While of course this includes the Reformation, certain aspects of medieval Catholicism continued well past that time; the songs I study are one of those aspects. At the same time, the songs are intimately connected with 15th-century religious reform movements. For the Low Countries and North Germany this means particularly the Modern Devotion. Another characteristic of this period is the manuscript, not yet the printed book. The transition from manuscript to print is fluid; especially song manuscripts continued to be compiled for centuries despite the existence of printed song books. With regard to literature, song is part of a general explosion of smaller genres and anonymous authors.
I use the term "song" to refer to a text, secular or religious, that has multiple stanzas set to a tune which can be sung without musical training. Both secular and religious song are 'popular' in the sense that text authors are most often anonymous, and the songs themselves transmitted with a strong oral component. The term "folksong," as in "religious folksong," is misleading; while there is a "folk" element in reception and transmission, for composition an individual poet must be presupposed, as was evident in Doesburg. The term "hymn" is also not correct: that refers either to Latin "hymns" and their translations that were part of medieval worship, or to post-Reformation congregational singing as we know it today. The songs I study do not fit these categories. They are best defined neutrally as "vernacular multi-stanza para-liturgical texts."
Musically, the songs are contrafacts: as in Doesburg, a religious song was written to the existing melody of a secular song. Two well-known examples: "twinkle twinkle little star / abcdefg"; and Haydn's imperial tribute "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" used for the German national anthem "Deutschland Deutschland über alles" and the hymn "Glorious things of thee are spoken." I come from a tradition where we used to create our own entertainment at weddings; contrafacts were always great fun, and I just made up a quick verse for my brother and sister-in-law, which I won't sing here. Contrafact compositions make sense, socially: it is much easier to compose a poem than a melody, and a poem composed to a popular melody can be sung immediately by all.
Especially in the Low Countries, contrafacts were extremely popular. The resulting flood of songs, both secular and religious, is now available in the wonderful Repertory database. As you can see, the ratio of texts to melodies is about seven to one. How it might have worked is illustrated by the example provided: for a set of songs the compiler suggests four different melodies, though ultimately any four-line song form will do.
I also want to set off what I am talking about against what I am not talking about. I am not talking about Latin religious music as it was used for official worship, such as the mass or the canonical hours. In this image you see nuns, likely from the order of St. Clare, seated in choir stalls and singing what is presumably the Latin mass. They each have books, and if you look closely you can see the musical notation. In most compilations associated with official worship, texts would be in Latin, and music and words would follow a fairly proscribed pattern.
I am not talking renaissance polyphony, also a 15th-century phenomenon: multiple voices singing complex harmony in which words and music bounce off each other. In the songs that interest me, "simple polyphony" is as complex as it gets: at most two voices, such as soprano and alto, singing the same words at the same time in direct harmony. Here is an example of a Dutch/Latin Christmas song with music for first and second voices, with additional stanzas sung to the same melody.
I am also not talking about secular popular song, such as these musicians might have been singing. Still, secular song does play a role because of the contrafact relationship - we remember that in Doesburg the impulse for the sacred song was umbrage taken to a secular one. "Secular popular song" is of course fascinating, but not the topic of this talk.
What I am talking about here are songs from religious song manuscripts compiled in the 15th and early 16th centuries. These are collections dedicated to songs which are primarily contrafacts, with melodies from popular secular songs adopted to carry texts composed for religious purposes. Astonishing about these manuscripts is their connection to women's institutions. To be sure, there are songs in manuscripts associated with men's institutions, but no manuscripts with only songs. While such manuscripts could have existed, it seems too coincidental that relatively speaking, so many are extant from women's domains, and none from men's.
These manuscripts [Editor's Note: ThePowerPoint slides used for this portion of the lecture are not available for public distribution] are unique to the Low Countries and Northern Germany: on the slide you see bolded in green institutions which have been positively identified. They run the gamut from full-fledged nunneries such as Ebstorf and Wienhausen, through the semi-lay tertiary institutions of particularly the Franciscans, and at least one sister house of the Modern Devotion. The song corpus shows some commonalities but also texts unique to an individual manuscript. And the manuscripts vary considerably in material quality and the provision of musical notation. This page is from the Utrecht manuscript: for this Dutch Christmas song, you can see that stanzas have been added by a later hand; also from Utrecht is this page which shows you a song without musical notation, though above the song here, in red, is a reference to the secular melody on which this song could be sung. Some manuscripts, such as this one, have no musical notation at all; it could be that the songs in it were not sung but read for silent personal meditation; note the more beautiful decoration resembling the very popular Books of Hours. Corresponding to the "book of hours" look is the inclusion of full-page miniatures, something no other song manuscript has. More typical is Wienhausen, which suggests someone hastily writing down a song that she wanted to remember. Sometimes the music has not been completed, as on this page; like others, Wienhausen does not always have musical notation, and for this song particularly, the writing is not beautiful.
Work on this flood of material has concentrated primarily on describing, inventorying, and editing. All of these are important steps in making the material available, and I myself am member of an editing team working on the Utrecht manuscript. What I want to do here, however, is move to interpretation: can we reconstruct how these songs were meaningful enough to late-medieval women that they would spend precious time and material resources in writing them down, and what can we learn about late-medieval women in the process? The three examples that I will discuss next will - I hope - provide a glimpse of an answer to this question.
My first example comes from the Dordrecht manuscript. A song addressed to "my esteemed sisters" anticipates the heavenly joys which await those who have suffered here on earth as it echoes the description of the Heavenly Jerusalem found in Revelation - the pearly gates alone merit one full stanza. The song goes beyond Revelation, however, with the theme of "maidens dancing the heavenly dance." Heaven is pictured as a pleasure garden with a riot of color and aroma; pure maidens weave coronets of heavenly flowers as head decoration for their dance with Jesus. The coronet has a double meaning: in song generally it is the attribute par excellence of the bride, and its use here alludes to the mystical "Christ as bridegroom / soul as bride" image in the Song of Songs. The coronet also signifies victory, the maidens' victory in their earthly struggle. The image of dancing maidens is relatively prominent in the manuscript: 7 of the 68 songs have some reference to it. In this one, for example, the soul's lament of longing for her "sweet love" in heaven is answered by a voice describing her heavenly reward: praising angels provide the music as Mary leads her retinue of crowned maidens in their heavenly dance.
It is of course the case that the "mystical bride" stands for the saved regardless of gender, and that the word "soul" in both Latin and Middle Dutch is grammatically feminine. Therefore, one cannot extrapolate without further ado from these images to a biologically female person. Certainly the second song expands the circle of heavenly rejoicers into "priests and monks, sisters and canons." In this broader understanding the song follows the use of the "heavenly dance" in mystical texts, particularly in the earlier German tradition. According to art historian Jeffrey Hamburger, the mystical "heavenly dance" is universal in its reference to "the beatific state of the soul in heaven" and "to the rapture of the soul during mystical union" (58). Two of the exquisite miniatures in the Rothschild Canticles, a Latin devotional from the Lower Rhineland from around 1300, visualize this heavenly dance: in the first, ecstatically dancing virgins adore the Lamb, in the second virgins dance the heavenly dance. Still, especially this last image conflates the soul as both generally human and specifically female by contextualizing the dance in the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. While these Virgins are allegorical for the human condition, there is also in them an explicit tie to women as gendered beings. Similarly, the song in the Dordrecht manuscript expands the heavenly retinue to include both genders, but its emphasis remains on "maidens," mentioned six times in five stanzas, representing at the same time the beatified soul generally and the maidenly soul specifically.
The "heavenly dance" image raises another issue, still under debate. Are these texts "mystical," or: how mystical are these texts? This question is related to the question of mysticism in the Modern Devotion, for it is a fact that the explosion of religious vernacular song is tied to that movement. The Modern Devotion started relatively modestly around 1400 in the Hanseatic town of Deventer; its intention was to provide pious people with an avenue for living as religiously as possibly without becoming a monk or a nun. The principle appealed to the population, and it is no exaggeration to say that "houses" belonging to this movement sprang up like mushrooms in the Low Countries and the north half of Germany. The movement appealed particularly to women, and there were far more Sisterhouses than Brotherhouses. In the course of the 15th century there was a tendency for houses to become increasingly encloistered. A typical pattern saw a group start as a Sisterhouse, move to Franciscan Tertiary or semi-cloistered status, and finally become a nunnery, often Augustinian, sometimes under considerable outside pressure and internal resistance.
The piety espoused by the Modern Devotion focused on strengthening the individual's relationship to God especially through meditation on Christ. In this regard it was mystical, providing a framework that encouraged an individual bond with God. At the same time, the Modern Devotion was group-oriented and suspicious about any practices that were highly individualistic. Moreover, it attracted adherents from all walks of life, including the quite poor and sometimes illiterate; the resulting "democratization of religious life" into something practiceable by all would have been threatened by highly individual mysticism. In other words: the Modern Devotion adopted the basic principle of mysticism, an ever closer relationship of the individual with God and especially Christ, but discouraged any one individual from mystical experiences that could not be shared by the group.
This "democratized" late-medieval mysticism has been variously assessed. Some scholars definitely lament the descent of "older German mysticism, particularly . Dominican, from the dizzying heights of philosophical speculation and from the raptured regions of ecstasies and visions down to the solid ground of good Dutch level-headedness." But it could be argued that there is also beauty, if of a different kind, in the products of this process. Particularly fascinating is how the democratization process contributes in its turn by taking something very concrete and investing it with mystical import of considerable piety and beauty. This is at the heart of my second example.
The late-fifteenth-century song collection of Anna of Cologne contains a number of songs which share as central image that of Jesus pouring wine, most often for the patrons of his tavern. Here, for example, one verse celebrates Christ's pouring of himself as an image of his generous sacrifice, while a second in that song more explicitly equates Jesus with the wine vat from which all of the soul's desire may be taken. There are two versions of a song which explicitly uses the inn and innkeeper image, heightening affect with a refrain. A fourth text is a drinking song found also in secular sources. In a fifth song Christ offers a nun wine from the wound in his side after she has retired to her chamber following a cleansing bloodletting.
Unusual in this collection is the concentrated use of this image: five such songs out of 80 texts altogether. Unusual is also a loose grouping, two pairs of two, with the fifth text not far away; and unusual is the varied concretization of the image, such as in blood-letting. But the image itself is hardly unique: in the entire song corpus I am discussing here, well over thirty use the vocabulary of wine, drinking, feasting, taverns, and inebriation to capture some aspect of spiritual joy. It was obviously an image which spoke to the times.
My first reaction to it was one of incredulity - what on earth could these religious women have been thinking as they included these texts in their song manuscripts, what was on their minds as they used them in devotion? The usual secondary literature was minimally helpful. The major 19th-century compendium by Ludwig Erk and Franz Böhme was the first to label the image "Christ as Innkeeper." They included one Cologne song in the section devoted to "Drinking and Carousing Songs;" by this they tied it to drinking songs generally. Both grouping and title, despite the word "Religious," emphasize the song's alcoholic dimension: it differs from its secular counterparts only through religious veneer and monastic provenance.
The great Dutch scholar Johannes Knuttel, on the other hand, strove to consider these songs as genuinely religious despite his patent unease with them. He saw in them a naive imagination that could jump perhaps too easily from a concrete image - the generous innkeeper - to its abstract counterpart - Jesus as generous giver of salvation. But the accompanying drunkenness - for where wine is poured, inebriation is not far behind - bothered him. He sought to excuse the image by positing a difference between medieval and 19th-century drunkenness, for him the difference between genuine joie de vivre and a base lower-class vice. For him, high-mystical use of the image demonstrated the medieval ability to use concrete images to capture abstract concepts, but the 15th-century attempt to do the same thing was so unsophisticated and so hackneyed that higher abstraction was lost in the process. As to even later, 16th-century versions, Knuttel is harshly indignant: "a joke by self-satisfied monks" demonstrating "a dulling of true pious sentiment." He concluded: "For a truly pious mind, regardless in which time they live, this kind of religious toast can be nothing but a profanity."
My breakthrough came when I saw the "Christ as Innkeeper" image not in verbal but in visual form, again from the Rothschild Canticles. This Latin devotional was intended for a woman, likely a nun or canoness, in any case "a reader much of whose life was predicated on a daily round of devotion intended to reinforce her identity as the Sponsa, the bride of Christ." Particularly instructive is a sequence of three images from "the mystical union" miniature series. The first shows the onset of mystical union: "Christ emerges from the heavens with the energy of a cosmic explosion. The Sponsa looks up from her bed, her arms raised in ecstasy." The second is a set of two: in the upper register the bride, covered with sprigs of vine and sick with love, is unable to rise from her bed. In the lower register, "Christ draws the Sponsa into [a] chamber and offers her a goblet, presumably filled from the cruet that rests on the wine cask by the fireplace," a rare early visual depiction of the mystical wine cellar.
The third image in the sequence pictures the result of mystical union: the Sponsa sleeps in contemplative stupor under the midday sun. She is not drunk - at least not literally so, but in a state of "mystical inebriation... an ideal vehicle with which to describe the mystic's foretaste of heavenly joys." Taken together, these sequential miniatures place "Christ as Innkeeper" not in the secular drinking realm but squarely in the religious tradition of "mystical union" between Christ and the soul.
Let me briefly sketch the impeccable religious pedigree of the "Christ as Innkeeper" image. It is rooted in Song of Songs chapter 2:4: "he led me into the cellar of wine" - obfuscated in modern English translations by euphemisms like "feasting house" or "banqueting house." The medieval Latin is unequivocal in calling it a "wine cellar." The Song of Songs came into its own in the 12th century as key text for the bridal mysticism which began then and continued until well into the 16th-century and beyond. Particularly influential for all vernacular traditions was Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on this book, though his fulsome 17-year exegesis of it is disappointingly cursory on the "mystical wine cellar." In "high" medieval mysticism the image is frequently present, if often cursorily, but particularly the 13th-century mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg devotes an entire chapter to it and its role in spiritual inebriation.
The image in late-medieval song is quite different from, for example, Mechthild's text. Its literary context is not exclusively mystical, for the song collections include texts with a variety of topics and styles. The relationship with the secular tradition is constitutive, not allusive. Mechthild uses the entire Song of Songs to structure her work, while popular song picks and chooses images from that book. Finally, Mechthild's work clearly describes a personal mystical experience and only incidentally provides a practical introduction to mysticism. In contrast, we are not at all yet sure what these song texts "do." All this has led to questions as to whether these songs merit the term 'mysticism' at all.
I believe that they do. In this I follow those who argue that "the great line of ... [medieval] mysticism was not interrupted in the fifteenth century, but rather takes on another form." That other form is "a complex of monastic literature ... thematically, conceptually, and terminologically related" to previous mysticism and flowing together with it. Sociologically and intellectually this "complex of monastic literature" served a "literary offensive" with an urgent practical goal: to facilitate the transition of the throngs who turned to various forms of religious life under the influence of the Modern Devotion. The Modern Devotion stressed literacy and writing as devotional tools. Under its influence its adherents created rapiaria, compilation manuscripts with miscellaneous devotional texts that spoke personally to the users. Especially in the last quarter of the fifteenth century - the time of a good number of the song manuscripts - women were increasingly active compilers of all kinds of compendia, including song manuscripts. Goal of all these compilations: to make available to a larger and especially socially more heterogeneous group than ever before, texts which would assist in learning the religious life. While research on these compiled manuscripts as 'genre' is in infancy stage, it is nevertheless apparent that the texts included were not intended to appeal first of all to the intellect. Rather, they served as "a kind of springboard for emotional experience, for ardent and passionate personal devotion." In this context particularly songs, in which mystical themes, images, and vocabulary are carried by music, emerge as uniquely suited to the task of assisting the learning of the religious life. The songs comprise images - verbal but through words also visual - "that serve as vehicles of mystical devotion; they 'transport' the reader, structuring experience" and "lead the reader toward contemplative union with the Godhead."
As we saw in Doesburg, the Modern Devotion did not hesitate to adapt secular tools to train its many and varied adherents. In fact, it seems that the secular and the sacred stood in a different relationship to each other than might be the case for us today. Johannes Janota has argued that the relationship between religious and secular song goes beyond expedient convenience to its very heart. Transforming the secular song model to its religious counterpart is in itself a model experience, "an expression of the conversion of the secular to the religious." By themselves modelling conversions, songs seamlessly demonstrated how "everyday objects and behaviour" could be transformed in analogy to the soul and to the body inhabited by the soul, how earthly, finite, secular substances and events undergo the transformation to the heavenly, the infinite, the spiritual. The "worldly world" present in the religious songs concretizes the religious reality present behind the "secular reality." The late-medieval, pre-reformational imagination seems to have had no difficulty with this contextual slide. When one sets beside one another the visual image of "Christ as Innkeeper" and the verbal image of the song, both appear equally profoundly spiritual.
Palpable in almost all of the songs, including the ones I have been discussing, are strong emotions expressed as yearning. Yearning can be seen as a standard feature of Christianity - the next world is to be preferred to this one in every respect. In Knuttel's sympathetically Marxist reading of these songs, they compensated for the life of material deprivation that most of these women are thought to have led; hence, for example, the emphasis on heavenly feasting. I propose another possibility: that they give voice to, and channel, latent emotions that were constantly being suppressed. For not only the physical but also the emotional environment of the Modern Devout was deliberately sparse to the point of depravation. While we cannot simply apply modern standards for emotional well-being to the late-medieval world, I find again and again that people then were more like us than we suppose. Particularly the songs, deliberately appealing to affect, can be read as compensating - possibly unconsciously - for what was a harsh emotional environment.
My third and final example investigates this point. Among the songs in women's manuscripts, a considerable number tell stories. These are narrative songs; if one places the stories they tell on a continuum from what we might call "sacred" to "secular" we see that many are highlight aspects of Christmas, such as the annunciation, the stable, Herod's slaughtering of the innocents. Others describe events related to Easter, while some retell episodes from saints' lives, most often female; closer in historical time are host desecration narratives; finally, some songs come from the secular tradition, such as the death of queens. It is a fact that such narrative songs are found almost exclusively in women's manuscripts - an intriguing phenomenon that I have not yet been able to explain.
Two song texts retell an episode from the life of St Gertrude, 7th century abbess of the Benedictine monastery of Nivelles in today's Belgium. Among other things she was patron saint of travellers, including pilgrims; it was customary in Germanic Europe "to drink a stirrup-cup" "to the love of St John and St Gertrude" just before setting off on a journey. The song tells a story also sketched in these frescoes from St Gertrude's chapel in Oldenburg: a knight loves the Abbess Gertrude; over time, because of this love, he gives her all his silver and gold. She returns his love, but chastely, "for the love of our dear God, so that he might save the knight." Having given her everything, the now penniless knight despairs; in his despair he falls prey to the devil and signs a pact, in blood, to give up his soul in exchange for more possessions. When seven years have gone by, the knight, now truly despairing at the certain prospect of losing his soul, returns to the original pact site. On the way, St Gertrude meets him, inquires about his sorrow, and offers him a drink; he empties the goblet to its very dregs. The devil, as a result, is rendered powerless and must return the pact; he sees St Gertrude riding behind the knight on his horse. Finally, the knight has a radical change of heart and enters a Dominican monastery.
An exciting tale, especially for a group of religious, semi-cloistered women! Courtly love, great wealth, deep despair, devilish pact, miraculous salvation, happy end. The narrative offers points of intersection with their lives: a saint; an abbess; a cloister; a miracle; a decision for the cloistered life. But it arranges these elements into a story of exceptional drama and intrigue. Its milieu is the knightly class from which the women themselves certainly did not come; its premise is the very secular passion of medieval courtly love, unrequited love for an unattainable lady; the knight's forbidden passion leads to fortunes lost and gained and lost again; in the dark forest, symbolizing his mortal sin of despair, the devil offers him, and he accepts, the usual easy solution for the usual ultimate price. It is a cliff-hanger: how can such a sinner be saved, will St Gertrude's drink prove efficacious, how will the devil react? But in the nick of time all turns out well, and the audience breathes a sigh of relief when this saved sinner lives out the rest of his life in an affirmation of their own choice.
If we look at this story as a story, through the lens of narrative theory, interesting insights emerge. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for example, sees the function of stories "to set before the imagination and meditation situations . which make up thought experiments." Through these thought experiments, he says, we learn to join the ethical aspect of human behaviour to happiness and unhappiness, to fortune and misfortune." His notion of the "act of plotting" or "emplotment" describes how humans create meaning: plotting structures disparate and jumbled elements into a temporal unity characterized by beginning, integration, culmination and ending. Both "thought experiments" and "emplotment" are helpful concepts in trying to understand the function of narrative songs such as the story of St Gertrude. If we set it against the very abstract, general, infinite story of salvation which was the only focus of these women's lives, it gains profile as a very concrete, specific, and bounded case that has measurable time, carefully configured actions, a beginning, a culmination, and an end. The women who sang these songs lived in communities in which all of their "real" life stories were reduced to just one: birth, struggle to subdue the mortal self in a spartan religious life, death. But the song provides more than just a concrete example of the salvation story at work: it does so through a "thought experiment" which provides a vicarious experience of passionate love, abject despair, terrifying alternative, ultimate peace. To quote Ricoeur again: "The great difference between life and fiction is in part abolished through our capacity to appropriate in the application to ourselves the intrigues we receive from our culture, and our capacity of thus experimenting with the various roles that the favourite personae assume in the stories we love best." (131). The St Gertrude song is deeply religious, but at the same time it answers the human need for a dramatic story through which to understand and shape life.
One final question: what difference does "song" make - that is to say: song instead of prose? I am currently fortunate to have a graduate student, a singer and voice teacher, writing an M.A. thesis on the remarkable Anabaptist use of song in the troubled sixteenth-century. She stresses that in one form or another "song" - music with words or words with music - is a universal human phenomenon and has been so through the ages. In a chapter on "The Power of Song," she discusses how the combination of word and music creates a unique dimension that elicits a profound response: music loads words with evocative meaning, words articulate emotional, spiritual and psychological needs. While the original meaning of a song may lie with the composer, in its reception singers and listeners imbue songs with their own meaning, and a song becomes popular insofar as it speaks to their needs. This is ultimately why religious song is such an intriguing source for the voices of late-medieval women - through it we can catch a glimpse of some of their innermost concerns. The songs lend to the voices of these women "a warmth and a glow which bare facts in themselves.do not have" and "reveal a world which, without these songs, would remain for us a closed book."