ABSTRACT

Romance and related lyric types furnished valuable affective latitude for some aristocratic women by offering imaginative contexts for the articulation of feminine desire. The relationships between musical texts and chivalric romance can be construed in several complementary ways. For sixteenth century audiences, chivalric romance could supply motives and stories for the emotional situations in which women singers find themselves, stories that licensed the vocal representation of female sexuality in particular modes and styles. Scholars have been much slower to look to romance as a tool for understanding the place of song in early modern France. Romance appears as a potentially powerful tool for interpreting the cultural role of French song at an important juncture in its history. Many of the pieces in the song books present lyric meditations on the stereotypical situations of romance, employing the same vocabulary and language as well as position.