Song in space and space in song: physical and conceptual boundaries in English devotional music, 1250–1500

This essay highlights the permeability of the walls that bounded devotional music, and will identify the complexity of interactions between space and song. Just as physical spaces were designed to house song but could not fully contain it, so were musical genres and structures capable of reflecting and testing those spatial boundaries. In this chapter, I consider music in relation not only to the sacred architectural spaces designed for formal performance of liturgical song, but also (and more provocatively) the spacial metaphors of the body – simultaneously devotional song’s most ubiquitous subject and the performance vehicle for those ideas – and the gendered nature of texted song itself.