Elizabeth Eva Leach Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2023, 299 pp.

Elizabeth Eva Leach’s Medieval Sex Lives offers a bold rethinking of Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 (D 308, probably 15th century), a chansonnier without musical notation but rich in lyric repertory. Leach argues that the manuscript circulated “sexual scripts” – patterns of words, gestures, and scenarios through which aristocratic audiences could learn, rehearse, and embody erotic roles (Chapter 2). Even without notation, she demonstrates that the manuscript preserves traces of a “sounding culture” in which song, memory, and bodily performance were inseparable from intimacy. Her method blends close reading, codicology, and performance theory with selective use of psychoanalysis and queer theory.