Sic ego te dilegebam: Music, Homoeroticism, and the Sacred in Early Modern Europe1

Modern readers of the motet Planxit autem David face a musical text rich with challenges.² One of a handful of Renaissance motets to set David's lament on the death of Saul and Jonathan,³ it was attributed to Josquin by Heinrich Glarean on the basis of its rhetorical virtuosity.⁴ If that attribution is problematic⁵, Glarean's assessment of the music was accurate: the motet stands apart from other motets by Josquin, indeed, from other motets appearing around 1500, in its highly rhetorical treatment of the text.⁶ The rhetoric of the music is more than matched by that of the text itself. The lament is a brilliant speech in which the young warrior-musician publicly declared his respect for the fallen king of Israel and thus ensured his rise to the kingship of Israel. But the lament is even more notorious for David's forthright declaration of love for Jonathan, a declaration that has struck readers, both ancient and modern, as markedly homoerotic. Perhaps the central challenge raised by Planxit autem David, quite apart from the issue of authorship, is understanding how it negotiates the tensions between the sacred and secular worlds, and how it conflates the erotic and the divine.