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Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jeanice Brooks
Jeanice Brooks*
Affiliation:
University Of Southampton
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Abstract

This study examines the musical writings of the occult philosopher Jacques Gohory, particularly his musical additions to his version of book 11 of the serial romance Amadis de Gaule. Although music and romance were often treated by contemporaries as, at best, trivial occupations for leisure hours, Gohory saw both as potential triggers for beneficial self-transformation: music and romance fully participate in the therapeutic and spiritual goals that motivate his more overtly philosophical and medical works. His use of romance as a vehicle for occult philosophy was an important means of disseminating concepts of music as natural magic beyond intellectual circles into the wider milieu of the French court, where occult understandings of music gained substantial currency by 1600.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 1207 - 1256
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the British Academy for funding toward this research. I thank Leofranc Holford-Strevens and John Griffiths for help with Latin and Spanish translations. Thanks also to Rosanna Gorris-Camos and Virginia Krause for advice and references; and to Penelope Gouk, Marian Rothstein, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Richard Freedman, Linda Austern, and an anonymous reader, for comments on early drafts.

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