A Voice in the Cow Stall: Aesthetic Creatures of the Renaissance

This essay tracks the fate of the voice (the nakedly material side of language, an object of sense perception, a field of sonic play) across emerging strains of Renaissance natural philosophy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their reformations of the human as a social and scientific category. I begin with magical songs, arguing that Marsilio Ficino’s aesthetic rationale for the voice’s therapeutic function overturns medieval linguistic models, replacing the voice’s “sign” with sensation and life. I then turn to the human body, whose custody was handed over from classical sources to the practices and codes of anatomical analysis, to show how the anatomical experiments of Andreas Vesalius and his colleagues at the University of Padua inquired into the voice’s disruptive aesthetic element at the same time that they channeled it into new forms of textual authority. My final framework is that of the text as a site of discursive, affective, and social control. I reflect on the anxious relationship between music’s materiality, grounded in animal and vegetal life, and the discursive and technical operations for which the music of the early Renaissance is best regarded, and I conclude with some thoughts about the way premodern aesthetics of voice ramify in the modern imagination.