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This chapter explores the supermusical effect of the repertory of devotional motets in light of the evidence for sound in prayer. It illustrates the close affinity between the sounds associated with prayer and the aural effect of the motet, and argues that the ethical meanings of prayer sound offer a new context in which to understand the sound of the motet. It also argues there were material affinities between prayer and motets, illustrating how the Montpellier Codex, the largest compendium of the ars antiqua motet, derived certain design features from Books of Hours. It culminates with a close reading of the devotional motet in situ, showing how audiences made sense of motet sound via a range of activities including singing, listening, reading, and meditating.

Chapter 3 explores the systematic observation and experimental manipulation of animal eating that got underway in eighteenth-century natural history and physiology. Naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Lazzaro Spallanzani sought insights into human appetite and eating by studying ingestion and digestion in animals, posing questions about differences and similarities in human and animal eating and about the relative significance of learning and instinct in ingestive patterns and habits. Physiologists concentrated on ingestive and digestive processes in human beings, distinguishing appetite as desire from hunger as need. Competing physiological theories reflected broad divisions between mechanists like Albrecht von Haller, who sought specific structures and somatic causes of appetite, eating, and digestion, and vitalists such as those of the Montpellier school, who regarded these phenomena as the work of an over-arching principle of life or specific vital forces. While mechanists focused on bodily movements they saw as responsible for hunger, vitalists regarded deep-seated organismic desires as the essential determinants of vital action. As experimental methods gained in prestige, the search for concrete mechanisms of ingestion and digestion rendered the role of appetite problematic.

The years around 1830, as just described, were a turning point in the movement to create a more systematic and uniform approach to the training of doctors. For the next quarter-century, a battle royal raged in the transatlantic countries between those seeking to create a common standard of medical training for all practitioners and those who defended the many-tiered systems of preparing healers that prevailed in most of them. At stake were such important issues as the care of the rural populations, largely unserved by university-trained physicians, the ever larger role claimed for science and academic study in educating doctors, the place of organized medical groups in decision making about professional training, and the role to be played by government in setting standards of medical education. In Great Britain, the conflict over change centered on the efforts of reformers, mainly liberal Whigs, apothecary-surgeons, and Scottish teachers and practitioners, to gain a larger measure of recognition for the rights of general practitioners to ply their trade freely throughout the nation. Ranged against them were the royal colleges, the traditional universities, and other defenders of the status quo. Particularly sensitive in Britain was the entrenched power of the royal colleges of medicine and surgery— “the most conservative bodies in the medical world,” S. W. F. Holloway called them—which continued to defend the importance of a liberal, gentlemanly education for medicine, as well as their right to approve the qualifications for practice of all other practitioners except apothecaries. Members of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the most elite of all the British medical bodies, were divided by class into a small number of fellows, almost all graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, and a larger number of licentiates, who, though permitted to practice, took no part in serious policy discussions and could not even use such college facilities as the library or the museum. “The Fellows,” claimed a petition signed by forty-nine London physicians in 1833, “have usurped all the corporate power, offices, privileges, and emoluments attached to the College.”

Despite the gathering momentum for a single standard of medical education, the portals of access to medicine remained remarkably open at the middle of the nineteenth century. From this time forward, governments and professional associations—in the name of science and clinical knowledge and the protection of the public’s health—steadily limited further entrance to medicine to those with extensive preparatory education and the capacity to bear the financial and other burdens of ever longer periods of study. But in 1850, alternative (and cheaper) paths to medicine, such as training in a practical school or learning medicine with a preceptor, were still available in the transatlantic nations. Not only were the écoles secondaires (or écoles préparatoires) and the medical-surgical academies still widely open to those on the European continent without a university-preparatory education, but British and American training schools for general practitioners, offering schooling well below the university level, were also widely available to students and growing at a rapid pace. “The establishment of provincial medical schools,” for those of modest means, declared Joseph Jordan of Manchester in 1854, was an event “of national importance. . . . Indeed there has not been so great a movement [in Britain] since the College of Surgeons was established.” A decade before, probably unknown to Jordan, a New York professor, Martyn Paine, had voiced similar views about America’s rural colleges when he told students that “no institutions [are] more important than the country medical schools, since these are adapted to the means of a large class of students . . . [of] humble attainments.” In both Britain and America, according to Paine’s New York contemporary John Revere, the bulk of practitioners “are generally taken from the humbler conditions in society, and have few opportunities of intellectual improvement.” The social differences between those who followed the university and the practical routes to medicine were nearly as sharp as they had been a halfcentury before. Even when a medical degree was awarded after what was essentially a nonuniversity education, as it was in the United States, Paine distinguished between graduates of country schools, “where lectures and board are low,” and “the aristocrats of our profession, made so through the difference of a few dollars.”

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, despite (or perhaps because of) the inroads of laboratory science, uncertainty still hung heavy over the future shape of the medical curriculum. Although currents of change now flowed freely through the medical schools and conditions of study were shifting in every country, agreement was far from universal on such primary questions as the place of science and the laboratory in medical study, how clinical medicine should best be taught, the best way to prepare for medical study, the order of studies, minimal requirements for practice, and the importance of postgraduate study. “Perturbations and violent readjustments,” an American professor told his audience in 1897, marked the life of every medical school in this “remarkable epoch in the history of medicine.” Similar to the era of change a century before, students were again confronted with bewildering choices. Old questions long thought settled rose in new form. Did the practical study of medicine belong in a university at all? Was bedside instruction still needed by every student in training, or was the superbly conducted clinical demonstration not as good or even better? Should students perform experiments themselves in laboratories so as to understand the real meaning of science and its promise for medicine, or was it a waste of valuable time for the vast majority? And what about the university—now the home of advanced science, original research work, and the scientific laboratory—was it to be the only site to learn the medicine of the future? What about the still numerous hospital and independent schools, the mainstay of teaching in Anglo- America in 1890—did they still have a place in the teaching of medicine? Amidst the often clamorous debates on these and other questions, the teaching enterprise was still shaped by strong national cultural differences. In the final years of the century, the Western world was experiencing a new sense of national identity and pride that ran through developments in science and medicine as well as politics. The strident nationalism and industrial-scientific strength of a united Germany, evident to physicians studying there, thoroughly frightened many in the rest of Europe.

Georges Auric was born in 1899 in Lodève, France, to a family of hoteliers. Three years later, his family moved to nearby Montpellier, the principal city of the Languedoc region in southern France. The year 1907 would prove to be transformative for the Aurics. During the Viticulture Revolt, the largest demonstration of Third Republic France took place virtually on the Aurics’ doorstep, launching his father’s brief political career. Meanwhile, Auric began studying piano at the Montpellier Conservatoire with Louis Combes, who introduced the young musician to modernist music and literature in addition to facilitating Auric’s acceptance into the Paris Conservatoire in 1913.

This chapter traces the story of three convents caught up in the religious wars that devastated Montpellier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The southern city fell into Protestant hands on the eve of France’s Wars of Religion and remained largely under Protestant control until 1622. Catholic religious life was thoroughly undermined by the repeated expulsions and destruction of property that resulted from the conflicts. This was especially hard on nuns, who, having lost their homes and income, also lost the prestige and sanctity of religious enclosure. Living under wartime conditions that made it difficult to observe their rule, they were unable to recruit new members, much less to enact reforms needed to raise the standards of community life. At the wars’ end, the bishop established convents of Visitandines and Ursulines, reformed orders then gaining popularity elsewhere in France, instead of helping the old orders to reform and rebuild.

Distinctions of social class were very strong in the Europe of earlier centuries. Musicians were considered to be in the lower classes of people who worked with their hands (or voices). People in these lower classes were not welcome in the new type of universities pioneered in nineteenth-century Germany. So musicians went to conservatories and the youth of the upper classes went to universities or received private academic instruction. The decline of conservatories in the United States has led to aspiring musicians attending universities instead of conservatories. In the process they receive an amateur curriculum developed originally for European dilettantes.

This chapter details the predicament of observation as it became most acute in the ambitious program of the French “science of man” derived from Montpellier vitalism (Barthez) and its further proponents in Paris (Moreau de la Sarthe, Gerdy). In this context, practices of observation were often opposed to forms of experiment, following a well-known opposition within the disciplinary development of anatomy and physiology. The chapter asks whether the new experimental physiology championed by Magendie was successful in opposing the larger cultural framework of the anthropological physiologies of locomotion. The tension between a semiotic approach to walking and a new mechanics grounded on animal experiment played out in several polemical discussions among Paris physicians. At the end, Balzac’s “Theory of walking” is presented and discussed in this context. His conception of a “social pathology” of the gait lead to the skeptical conclusion that there may be no such thing as the “natural gait.” The flâneur-observer, then, is left with the task of seizing the entire spectrum of culturally shaped manifestations and deformations of walking: an endless project, doomed to failure. Balzac’s essay can serve as a cultural index of the epistemological predicaments of the human sciences of this period.