Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England, by Tekla Bude

The history of music is deeply entwined with the history of the human body. As Tekla Bude argues, cultural understandings of sound and the body have affected how we have shaped and experienced our social world over many centuries. The perception and interpretation of sound are contingent on our human bodies, a fact that alone presents a clear rationale for Bude’s book, in which the properties of “sonic bodies” are defined as “mutually dependent, relational, historically contingent, and co-emergent processes that rely on dialectics of materiality” (p. 3). Bude’s source materials are represented by a variety of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that invoke sound, including the work of English mystics and also extending to wider literature. The theoretical basis of her arguments relates her work to that of such musicologists as Katherine Zieman, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Bruce Holsinger, Emma Dillon, Andrew Hicks, and Anna Zayaruznaya, all of whom revel in...