Song, Dance, and Sex: The Social Role of the Carole in Thirteenth-Century Clerical Thought and Vernacular Literature

In the thirteenth century, the carole dance and its refrain songs simultaneously delighted the characters of vernacular French literature, troubled the morals of clerics, and engaged the analytical powers of music theorists. Revising existing scholarship that stresses the differences between these three accounts, this article demonstrates their interlinked uses of caroles to explore musical and sexual ethics. First, clerical authors employed caroles as microcosms of their wider attempts to control sexual and musical behaviour, as expressed both in marriage reforms and a broad range of music-theoretical, confessional, and homiletic texts. Second, the ethical associations that clerics established for caroles allowed vernacular literary authors like Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil to use these dances to undercut and satirize clerical attempts at social control. Finally, these ethical discourses enabled music theorists to produce layered analyses of the social role of caroles, as in this article’s closing rereading of Johannes de Grocheio.