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St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Music discusses the history of medieval love songs

Spring is the season of love, and St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Music, Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach, discusses her research into the way people used to sing about their relationships in the Middle Ages and how this has continued throughout history right through to today’s expressions of love.

Professor Leach was interviewed by Danielle Cybulskie on ‘The Medieval Podcast’, during which she explained that there were two main drivers to her project, ‘I’d been working on the Middle Ages for a while and there’s this thing which typically gets called courtly love, which is either when a man loved a woman and he either didn’t tell her, or he’s told her and she’s rejected him and he’s very sorrowful, or he’s full of the joy of love, or he goes out into the woods and listens to the birds and they remind him of his lady. These familiar tropes have come down to the modern day in various kinds of forms, but it seems to have been a staple of poetry from probably the eleventh century right the way through to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and as I say, beyond in some form to the present. I really wanted to understand why this kind of love poetry had been such a thing for such a long time. Societies change, people change – why did the fashions for this kind of poetry not change? And I felt it must have been answering a specific need that was present in that kind of society.

‘Secondly, I came across a book, a manuscript book in the Bodleian Library, written by hand in the early fourteenth century, that collects together over five hundred of these songs and organises them into genre categories, from the very high style love songs right the way through to these really quite scurrilous songs that almost parody the high style love songs and sort of talk about I love my lady because she farts and it smells delightful, or I love my lady, and by the description of the lady, you understand by the end of the poem that he’s not really describing a human lady, but he’s describing his cow.’

To listen to the full podcast please click here.

Please click here to order Professor Leach’s new book, Medieval Sex Lives