Review of 'Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages' by Elizabeth Eva Leach: Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2007. [xiii, 345 p. ISBN-10 0801444908; ISBN-13 9780801444913. $55.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographical references, index, appendices.

Abstract

Leach's text demonstrates a cross-disciplinary approach that develops contextual readings of musical culture and its artifacts through the examination of not only music and music theory but also close readings of contemporary literature, both theoretical and literary, that she injects with approaches from gender and sexuality studies. While the overriding principle of 'harmonia' forms a part of both major Western philosophies (namely Platonism and Aristoteleanism), there exists the capacity to discuss music as a rational process, although the means by which that rational basis is derived or determined shifts from immanent number to rational deduction as exemplified by the concern of many fourteenth-century theorists discussing alternative divisions of the tone.