Music played a vital role in his project, and added song poems and elaborate scenes of musical performance constitute a significant difference between Gohory's versions and their sources. Music is a point of synthesis for Gohory's seemingly disparate interests in medicine, alchemy, the occult, and romance, bridging problematic gaps between the masculine domains of knowledge, science, and the intellect, and a feminized world of fantasy, recreation, and sensuality. An approach to Gohory's work through music can reintegrate aspects of his career often treated separately, demonstrating how both music and romance participate in the therapeutic goals that inform his more overtly medical, scientific, and magical writings. At the same time, such an approach can address a thorny problem in the history of early modern concepts of music, medicine, and natural magic. The most-often-studied Latin tracts of Neoplatonism and occult philosophy make few explicit or implicit links with identifiable musical repertories, and are frustratingly vague about details of performance practice. Connections with extant music must be constructed by the modern scholar, and generally the move has been a textual one--from philosophical, medical, and occult literature to musical scores and questions of compositional technique--that leaves connections to potential performance contexts unexplored. Related to this, there has been relatively little work on how magical concepts may have spread beyond learned circles into the wider culture to condition contemporaries' experience of music and musical performance. (4)
Gohory's work is particularly valuable in addressing these issues. Unusually among occult philosophers of his generation, his interests in practical music-making have left traces both in imaginative fiction and in contributions to printed music books. In the context of his other writing on natural magic and medicine, reading Gohory's musical prefaces against his adaptations of Amadis provides a unique window onto how a writer steeped in alchemical and medical thought imagined performance situations in which musical magic might be used, and how it might accomplish its effects. Though his Amadis adaptations stop short of providing notated music or citing specific pieces, they nevertheless demonstrate strong links with music prints, the chanson repertory, and its performance practices in French courtly circles of the mid-sixteenth century. Unlike the discussions of music in treatises of Neoplatonic philosophy or in the medical literature, the novels work to establish connections between occult understandings of music and the performance of music at court. At the same time, the success of the Amadis series, which reached a larger and more diverse readership than any of Gohory's more erudite writings, contributed to the vernacularization of concepts of musical magic and helped foster their dissemination into these same courtly circles.
Gohory's advocacy of music coalesces most effectively in book 11 of the French Amadis, with its elaborate scenes of musical courtship. (5) Its main plot concerns a pair of adolescent princes who disguise themselves as Amazon lute singers to gain access to a beautiful princess. The story allows for plentiful descriptions of musical performances, in which the boys' beauty and skill in singing as women inspire such universal admiration that both men and women fall hopelessly in love with them. The novel's gleeful exploitation of the plot's erotic potential, its relatively unabashed treatment of both same-sex eroticism and heterosexual sex, and its evocation of the seductive powers of music are characteristic of the middle volumes of the Amadis series, and are among elements that shaped the novel's popular appeal. Many of the scenes of song performance draw not only on precedents from the French romance tradition, but on medieval and contemporary Italian literature--both in the vernacular (Boccaccio) and in Latin (Colonna)--in which such episodes are common. (6) Yet in Gohory's adaptation, such descriptions of music-making are embedded in a rich web of astrological and alchemical symbol that harnesses this aspect of romance to his broader intellectual program. His musical additions both contribute to his project of converting the romance into a vehicle for Hermetic wisdom, and duplicate its effects in another field, by endowing the performance of secular love songs--like romance reading, an activity often dismissed in the Renaissance as a trivial occupation of leisure time--with profound importance. A close reading of the scenes of musical performance in this book can act to restore the imaginative leap between magical principles and musical repertories and performance contexts to a place in early modern mentalities, demonstrating how the erotics of musical performance and audition could be attached to wider occult meanings in mid-sixteenth-century France.
2. GOHORY, MUSIC, AND THE FRENCH AMADIS
Gohory's work has long been known to historians of early modern medicine and magic. An intellectual omnivore whose sources included all of the principal Hermetic texts then circulating around Europe, the major Italian works of Neoplatonic philosophy, and a large body of Italian and Spanish literature, he was the author of original poetry and prose in Latin and French as well as of numerous translations. (7) He was among the first and most influential French Paracelsians, instrumental in bringing Ficinian Neoplatonism into dialogue with new concepts of chemical healing. (8) His readings of Marsilio Ficino's (1433-99) De vita and of Francesco Colonna's (ca. 1433-1527) Hypnerotomachia Poliphili have been particularly useful to historians of occult philosophy. (9) And Gohory's French adaptations of Amadis de Gaule have begun to attract attention as part of a general renewal of interest in sixteenth-century prose romance. (10) But one aspect of Gohory's life and work--his lively interest in music as both idea and practice--has never been examined at all. (11) His prefaces to music prints have never been completely identified, much less studied; and his musical additions to Amadis, in the form of songs and performance descriptions, have been treated as texts without sonic implications. (12) Though these writings occupy relatively little space in his large oeuvre, they are more important than a simple page count might suggest.
Born to a Parisian family with a tradition of royal service, Gohory followed the court from 1543 at the latest, was employed as secretary to a series of influential nobles, and accompanied French diplomatic missions to Flanders (1544), England (1546), and Rome (1554-56). He quickly established himself in courtly humanist networks, forming ties with Pleiade poets and other literary figures, as well as with physicians who shared his interests in occult remedies. He probably spent much of the 1560s on the family estate in Issy, where he concentrated on chemical experiments and on furthering his knowledge of Paracelsus. (13) Alchemical concepts were the principal focus of his influential Theophrasti Paracelsi Philosophiae et Medicinae utriusque universae, Compendium (1567), in which Gohory draws comparisons between Paracelsus, the magical philosophy of Ficino, and the work of occult philosophers such as Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) and Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535). (14) Occult inclinations also shaped his involvement with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, his contributions to a volume of engravings depicting the story of the Golden Fleece (1563), and his annotated edition of the medieval poem Le livre de la fontaine perilleuse (1572), all of which he considered as carefully disguised alchemical allegories. (15) In his Instruction sur l'herbe petum (1572), the first full-length treatise on tobacco, Gohory is largely concerned with methods of distillation for therapeutic use. Around 1570, shortly before the publication of the Instruction, he created his Lycium Philosophal, a botanical garden and learned academy, at Saint Marceau on the outskirts of Paris. There he continued his work with plant distillations, and experimented with practical magic involving talismans as well as with more orthodox medical cures. (16) Though he seems rarely to have attended court himself during this period, his academy received visits from influential courtiers and he apparently renewed efforts to gain recognition for his work in courtly circles. (17).
Gohory's engagement with the Amadis romances began in 1543, when he wrote a Latin liminary poem for book 4, by the much-admired Nicolas Herberay des Essarts, the French series' first adapter (appendix 1). (18) Their friendship may have motivated Gohory to tackle Amadis himself when Herberay abandoned the project in 1548 after book 8: Gohory was responsible for books 10 and 11, printed in 1552 and 1554. Fifteen years later in 1571 Gohory returned to translate book 13 at the behest of Catherine de Clermont, Comtesse de Retz (1545-1603). His final contribution to the Amadis enterprise was a lengthy preface to Antoine Tiron's version of book 14 in 1574. Gohory's involvement with the romance thus corresponds to two moments in his life when he was moving in court circles and trying to garner patronage from powerful courtiers. He no doubt hoped for the kind of potentially lucrative appointments sometimes enjoyed by alchemists and occult philosophers: he must certainly have been aware that Agrippa, a writer he particularly admired, had held such a post at the French court in the 1520s. (19) Although by his own account Gohory was never successful--laments over his failure to receive recognition at court regularly punctuate his later writing--he believed that using a popular novel to diffuse his ideas would increase his work's appeal for his target audience, particularly for its female members. Unlike earlier Amadis volumes, Gohory's romances were dedicated to prominent court noblewomen: the king's sister, Marguerite de France (1523-74); his mistress, Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566); Catherine de Clermont; and Henriette de Cleves, Duchesse de Nevers (1541-1601). These women were all celebrated by contemporaries for their own intelligence and learning as well as for their active support of men of letters, so that the dedicatees figure as feminized icons of knowledge as well as consumers of fashionable recreation and likely sponsors at court. (20)
In contrast to Amadis, Gohory's musical prefaces appeared only late in his life. In his Instruction sur l'herbe petum, Gohory described how visitors to the Lycium Philosophal would perform together in a specially decorated gallery, showing that music-making figured in the academy's program in the early 1570s. During the same years he contributed to several books produced by the royal music printers Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard (appendix 2). In his preface to Le Roy's lute instruction (1570), Gohory claims that his own love of music fostered a longstanding friendship with the book's author. (21) Though there is no reason to doubt him, it was also true that both the reigning king, Charles IX (1550-74), and Catherine de Clermont, dedicatee of Amadis book 13, were keenly interested in music. Nearly all the prefaces introduce music by Charles IX's favorite composer, the celebrated Orlande de Lassus (1532-94). (22) Catherine de Clermont was the dedicatee both of Le Roy's lute instruction and of the Musique of the royal keyboard player Guillaume Costeley (which carries a main dedication to Charles IX and a secondary dedication to Catherine). (23) There are echoes across the prefatory material: Gohory's preface to Le Roy's lute book refers to his forthcoming translation of Amadis book 13, while Charles IX's love of music is mentioned in the preface to the romance. (24) Gohory also sent a copy of Lassus's Mellange to Marguerite de France with an autograph dedication. Marguerite had been the dedicatee of Gohory's first Amadis translation two decades earlier; and, as in the case of Catherine de Clermont, she was the recipient of both a romance and a music collection from Gohory's hands. (25) This suggests that for Gohory music, like romance, seemed a promising way to the hearts of courtly patrons.
Gohory's prefaces repeatedly allude to music's recreational capacities: in dedications to Renaud de Beaune and Jacques Amyot, he underlines how both men listen and sing to "sooth and assuage the tedium of grave cares." (26) Addressing Charles IX, he claims that kings above all need the pleasure of music to counteract the burden of their heavy responsibilities. (27) At the same time he encourages readers to understand this music as potentially more than a simple pastime. His arguments rest upon Neoplatonic concepts of celestial harmony and macrocosm-microcosm correspondence that pervaded contemporary French literary production, in which the unity wrought from the interplay of disparate elements is regulated by laws of harmonious proportion imagined as music. (28) Harmony's role as regulatory principle in both planetary and human contexts underpins Gohory's understanding of music's ethical and therapeutic value. In Lassus's Mellange, Gohory links music's capacity to foster moral behavior and restore mental health in humans to its role in controlling the motion of celestial bodies. (29) In the composer's second book of motets, Gohory more explicitly compares the harmony of the spheres, composed of the varied pitches generated by planetary motion, to the concord between human bodily parts and intellectual faculties that produces physical health and mental acuity. (30) Taking pleasure in music serves as proof of the individual's own healthful harmony, of mental and physical alignment with the cosmos. In Gohory's preface to Le Roy's lute tutor, Le Roy's personal worth is confirmed precisely by his excellence at music: for "it is a token of a person well borne, that his spirite hath been alwayes so inclined to Musicke, as beinge compounded of proportion and temporative harmonic call." (31)
Gohory's praise of Lassus offers a further refinement: "I do protest unto you that if the songes of other Musitians do delight mee, those of Orland do ravish me." (32) Here Gohory posits two categories of musical response, the lower delight and superior ravishment. Ravish is an English rendition of ravir--or possibly of transporter--in the lost French original: both words convey notions of ecstasy and elation as well as the idea of movement, potentially against one's will. This vocabulary resonates with other French courtly writing about music, in which ravishment is closely allied to the Neoplatonic conception of the furors. (33) Thus Pierre de Ronsard begins his preface for a 1560 musical anthology by claiming that the virtuous man reacts to music with joy, quivering from head to foot "as if sweetly ravished, and I know not how stolen away from himself," because his soul retains a memory of its divine origin. Those indifferent to music are "mired in the body," having lost all connection with the "celestial harmony of the heavens." (34)
Among the sources for Ronsard's preface were Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier, ou discours des muses et de la fureur poetique (1552), which examines music in the context of the divine furors, and Solitaire second, ou prose de la musique (1555), devoted entirely to music. (35) A second edition of the Solitaire premier appeared in 1575 with a new dedication to Gohory's own sometime patron, the music-loving Catherine de Clermont, assimilating her to the author's muse Pasithee. Pasithee begins the book by singing an ode to the lute; the resemblance of her music to celestial harmony triggers an episode of transport in the Solitaire, which acts as prelude to his explanation of how the soul may achieve union with the divine through love. In the Solitaire second, Tyard describes the effects of a lute performance by the virtuoso Francesco da Milano on an audience at a Milanese banquet, and here the account emphasizes how celestial inspiration empowers the performer to impose the trance state on listeners. Francesco first ravishes himself and his audience, then with superhuman force returns to the world and restores the souls of the auditors, leaving them astonished as if awoken from a divinely-inspired trance. (36)
These oft-cited images of the well-tuned soul and of musical ravishment testify to the currency of Neoplatonic conceptions of music in Gohory's immediate circles. However, in addition to confirming his allegiance to widespread understandings of harmony, his preface to Le Roy's instruction also makes a much more unusual connection in a passage praising the lute: "I will no further dilate the common prayses therof, but onley by the great singularitie of agreement and disagreement which by experience is shewed in it, in this, that if one Lute be sounded neere unto an other that is tuned in the same tune: it is a strange thing and in a manner marvellous, that the stringes of the other Lute will move at the sound and will shake not being at all touched, by an effect of correspondence wonderfull. Which the Poet Augurall in his Chrisopeied: nor other authors of secret Philosophie have forgotten." (37) This is the only French musical preface of the period to make an explicit reference to the alchemical literature: Gohory's authority, the "Poet Augurall," was Giovanni Aurelio Augurelli (ca. 1456-1524), whose Chrysopoeiaie libri III was a lengthy poem on making gold. In the passage Gohory has in mind, Augurelli uses the image of sympathetic string vibration to underline the extraordinary powers of consonance in the natural world: "For think that everything rejoices in its like, and even that everything is assisted externally by its like; especially since nature seeks nature, and, embracing its peer, refuses all contraries. Thus too, though not struck with fingers or plectrum, a string may be moved, as if it sounded in concordance with [other] strings to which it is tuned, so much power has the concord of things in everything." (38)
Though hierarchically organized, the universe is a unified organism in which manipulation at one level could achieve effects at others. Likeness is the conduit that opens channels between objects and beings at different positions and allows them to act upon one another. The sympathetic vibration of strings demonstrates this principle in nature, an illustration repeatedly taken up in early modern occult literature. (39) In the Lassus preface Gohory singles out the lute as model for the discordia concors--the "great singularitie of agreement and disagreement"--a harmonious interplay of difference through similitude, demonstrated by the sympathetic vibration of two instruments whose status as distinct entities is transcended by likeness. The adjectives strange, marvellous, and wonderfull emphasize the occult aspects of the operation.
Another way of thinking about sympathy is love. Eros can then function as a mode of understanding the attractions that bind the universe into a harmonious whole. Since love, whether between astral bodies or between humans, is the connecting energy of the cosmos, it follows that the person who can control these attractions--channelling the desires of substances and beings and directing them at will--is the most powerful of magicians. (40) For example, by manipulating the love of substances for one another, the alchemist can effect the desired transformations in his materials. In Augurelli, the sympathetic vibration of strings thus not only illustrates the general principle of sympathy, but demonstrates the kind of operation the alchemist wishes to perform. And this is the same type of operation that musicians themselves were believed to exercise when they used the invisible power of sound to affect the bodies and spirits of listeners. In occult literature, music is more than the archetype of healthful equilibrium: it is a dynamic agent of change, a means of manipulating substances and beings through the channelling of eros. Orpheus, musician and lover, is the model of the Renaissance magus. Gohory's prefaces consistently assimilate Lassus with the magus figure, casting the composer as a powerful producer of extraordinary effects: as Orpheus was able to move stones with the sound of his cithara, so Lassus moves human spirits. (41)
Though the Le Roy and Ballard prefaces date from late in his career, Gohory's musical interests already mark his early adaptations of Amadis. The music is striking in part through its sheer quantity: Gohory's volumes contain more interpolated song poems than had ever figured in previous instalments of the French series. (42) Though some are loosely based on counterparts in the books' Spanish sources, the majority have no precedent. One song uses a poem by the royal librarian Claude Chappuys, whose poetry figures in many midcentury chanson anthologies, and whose 1543 court panegyric the "Discours de la court" mentions the composers Claude de Sermisy and Pierre Sandrin. (43) All the other texts were apparently Gohory's own work. Many are huitains and dixains of the kind favored by poets of the Marot generation, and set to music by composers such as Sermisy and Clement Janequin. Gohory also wrote strophic poems of the type associated with the incipient air de cour, often set by slightly younger musicians such as Sandrin and Pierre Certon. Several poems are particularly reminiscent of lyrics by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, the leading court poet of the 1540s: one text is particularly closely modeled after Saint-Gelais's well-known song "O combien est heureuse." (44) Saint-Gelais's lyrics often had Italian antecedents: this too is the case for Gohory's "La jeune vierge est semblable a la rose," an accomplished French version of "La verginella e simile alla rosa" (Orlando furioso, canto 1, stanza 42). "La verginella" could be sung to one of the widely-circulated musical formulas used for Ariostan stanzas in Italy, some of which were employed by Saint-Gelais for musical performances of his own poetry in French: Gohory and his courtly readers were certainly aware of the practice, and may have been familiar with specific formulae used to sing "La verginella" and other Ariostan verse. (45) His adaptation of Amadis book 11 features one sung sonnet, echoing the preoccupation of Gohory's friends in the Pleiade with the genre from the late 1540s onward. Though printed sonnet settings with music from this period are scarce, Gohory would have known of the musical supplement to Ronsard's Amours of 1552, which included a piece by his friend Marc-Antoine de Muret as well as sonnet settings by professional court musicians. (46)
Gohory's biographer W. H. Bowen was perplexed by these song texts, remarking that the Amadis poems can seem inconsequential when compared to Gohory's other verse. (47) But Bowen was contrasting the poems with the most high-flown literary production of Gohory and his Pleiade contemporaries, while Gohory's romance additions generally adopt the less ambitious stylistic register of much contemporary poetry destined for song. In fact, Gohory's songs in Amadis represent a helpful overview of the most common types of chanson poetry from midcentury, consistent with the (often anonymous) texts found in contemporary music prints. Gohory also alters musical descriptions to bring them into line with French practice, most obviously by replacing the harps of the Spanish text with lutes. Though relatively few prints of lute song have survived, there is ample testimony from other sources to indicate that singing to the lute was a valued skill among French courtiers. (48) Here Gohory's profession of lengthy friendship with Adrian Le Roy is particularly resonant. Le Roy was himself a virtuoso lutenist who spent the early part of his career in the service of Catherine de Clermont's father, and may have been Catherine's own teacher on the instrument. Some of the first prints he produced after he and Robert Ballard founded their music-publishing firm in 1551 reflect this background, containing lute and guitar arrangements--as both solo instrumental pieces and as accompanied songs--of chansons composed or arranged by court musicians such as Arcadelt and Certon, and that were simultaneously issued as polyphonic vocal pieces in other anthologies the firm produced. Le Roy's books are exactly contemporary with Gohory's first Amadis adaptations, demonstrating how pieces today better known as vocal polyphony were performed by sixteenth-century lute singers: the lute books for which Gohory wrote prefaces in the 1570s contain similar arrangements. (49)
Gohory's descriptions sometimes include other useful scraps of performance practice information. In book 11, for example, Daraide performs the song "Nonobstant qu'Amadis esprouve," first in a highly ornamented solo lute version, and then adds the voice on the second time through. (50) Sources for lute music regularly include plainer and more ornate versions of the same pieces, providing models for the addition of rapid passagework and other ornaments to a song's basic framework. The lute songs in Attaingnant's Tres breve et familiere introduction (1529) are each prefaced with ornamented solo lute versions of the same piece, which could be used as preludes to vocal performance. Nearly all of Adrian Le Roy's volumes of song arrangements for lute and guitar feature such doubles. (51) Thus in addition to their strong idealizing elements, Gohory's musical interludes intersect convincingly with evidence from musical sources about chanson performance practice in courtly circles at midcentury.
Gohory's performance descriptions and song texts evoked music familiar to his courtly readership: the musical additions fostered immediacy and enhanced the homology between the romantic world of Amadis and the court's own social practice. This is in keeping both with Gohory's evident knowledge of practical music-making and the role that Amadis had come to occupy as primer for elegant behavior, and follows a well-established pattern of French rewritings of Amadis as a mirror of the royal court. (52) Yet descriptions of song performance also serve a larger purpose, as Gohory intended the entire novel to do. In his dedication of book 10, Gohory employs the same tactics he would later use for music books, alluding to romance's recreational use while simultaneously alerting the competent reader to the secret wisdom it conceals. He offers the book to Marguerite de France as a pleasant diversion from her study of serious works in Greek and Latin, but says that her patronage will make the book attractive to other aristocrats who do not have her intellectual gifts. For these readers, the romance can serve to sweeten moral instruction just as honey is used to make bitter medicine more palatable to children: "your name by its lustre will make [the book] seem more agreeable to gentlemen and ladies who do not have the stomach to digest more serious and stronger reading: for whom these romances were written for good reason, to furnish them an example and model of chivalry, courtesy, and discretion, that might raise their hearts to virtue, teaching the actions they should imitate or avoid. Which they would not consume so willingly in plain moral instruction, any more than children (as Lucretius says) would take a medicinal drink if the edge of the vessel were not spread with honey: such is for them the lure of the merry tales of strange adventures and love affairs scattered through such stories." (53) These appealing aspects of romance not only serve as bait to attract otherwise reluctant readers, but become a means of encoding sacred mysteries for those capable of piercing the cloak of fable to understand the author's purpose. Gohory claims authority for his procedure in classical myth (the Minotaur, the Golden Fleece, the Twelve Labors of Hercules), medieval romance (tales of the Round Table, the search for the Holy Grail, Merlin's spells), and medieval and contemporary Italian literature (Boccaccio, Colonna), all of which were used to communicate wisdom in the guise of fable. He asserts that readers of "good understanding" will immediately suspect the magical episodes in Amadis of concealing some mystical meaning conveyed through symbol. (54)
Amadis is assimilated to the group of texts that Gohory understood as Hermetic allegory, a claim he would reiterate in his prefaces to subsequent volumes: his image of children lured into drinking medicine presents romance reading as a potentially therapeutic exercise leading to virtuous self-transformation. For some this process may happen unawares, though Gohory's prefaces paradoxically forestall the kind of literal reading, completely innocent of romance's potential moral and mystical aspects, that he posits as typical of the common reader. Instead, he carefully prepares a reading practice for an elite who can appreciate simultaneously the recreational, sensual, and philosophical dimensions of the book: as he says in book 14, good minds "are delighted by reading [romances] for the marvels they contain, preserved [confittes: literally, "pickled" or "conserved"] in the sweet voluptuousness of tales of valorous deeds and amorous exploits." (55)
Gohory's musical additions figure centrally in his project, fulfilling different functions according to textual register and performance context. One category consists of songs of entertainment, with mock-rustic, humorous, or encomiastic texts, performed generally by lower-class characters, often during banquets or festivities. The other main category consists of serious love lyrics, and represents the majority of Gohory's departures from his Spanish models. These are sung by aristocratic characters to their own accompaniment on the lute or harp and generally performed in small gatherings or in intimate settings where the singer is with the beloved or completely alone. Characters react to songs of entertainment (often described as "joyous" or "pleasing" in the text) with amusement and pleasure, a response easily assimilated to Gohory's category of delight. In contrast, performers and listeners of love songs are ravished: they undergo transcendent experiences whose descriptions carry the main weight of Gohory's music-philosophical arguments. Familiar elements of courtly musical practice are thereby attached to a more abstract intellectual discourse that imbues such practices with occult significance. The effect is clearest in book 11, where musical episodes consistently act as fictional elaborations of the Neoplatonic and alchemical principles later expounded in Gohory's prefaces for Le Roy and Ballard.
3. L'ONZIEME LIVRE D'AMADIS DE GAULE: IN PURSUIT OF THE MUSICAL IDEAL
Virtually all of the love songs in book 11 of Amadis arise from the principal plot, what the title calls the "noble deeds of Agesilan de Colchos, in the lengthy pursuit of the love of Diane, the most beautiful princess in the world." Diane is the daughter of Sidonie, Queen of Guindaye, who was seduced and abandoned by Diane's father, Florisel. Sidonie constructs an enchanted palace in which she locks her daughter away from all men: she has Diane's portrait sent out with her own vow that the knight who can bring her the head of Florisel will have Diane's hand in marriage. Florisel's nephew, the adolescent prince Agesilan, is smitten by the portrait. Hoping that a dose of reality will cure Agesilan of his obsession, his cousin Arlanges proposes a ruse that will allow them to see Diane herself: they will masquerade as Amazon lute singers and gain employment in her service. Using the names Daraide and Garaye, the boys successfully present themselves to Sidonie in feminine disguise, producing musical performances so persuasive that she hires them on the spot for her daughter's entourage. When Agesilan meets Diane he becomes ever more hopelessly enamored, and the attraction is mutual: but it is too dangerous for Agesilan to reveal his identity, and Diane is disturbed by her love for someone she believes to be a woman. The narrative also introduces a subplot involving the love of Arlanges-Garaye for a visiting queen, Cleofile.
In the book's dedication to Diane de Poitiers, Gohory explains that the story is properly hers because of her resemblance to the heroine Diane de Guindaye. Both are manifestations of the "Idea," an imagined perfection whose contemplation is incitement to love: "this story of Diana is especially addressed to your greatness, as properly destined by the sameness of its name. Which signifies an Idea of all perfection of beauty and grace, representing your own similar excellence: which is an imaginary form of harmony of proportion, color and lineament, ravishing the heart in natural admiration, and there igniting an ardent desire for possession, that we call Love." (56) The earthly beauty of the two Dianes mirrors a pure form with the explicitly musical quality of harmonious proportion: it ravishes the beholder and inspires an ardent yearning to experience the divine intelligence that conceived it. Agesilan's "lengthy pursuit" of Diane is at the same time both a pursuit of knowledge and a quest for the divine union through love that was the ultimate goal of Neoplatonic philosophy.
Agesilan receives an appropriate princely education that includes music as an antidote to weightier affairs: sent to Athens at age six, he learns "some practice of the lute and musical singing, so that one day he could use it to sweeten the handling of grave and serious matters: in which he showed an extraordinary dexterity in understanding everything." (57) Like Charles IX and other recipients of Gohory's Le Roy and Ballard dedications, Agesilan's musical ability marks him as exceptionally virtuous in a larger sense. Diane too is trained in music so that by the age of twelve "[she] thought only of taking her ease and pleasure in the delicious abode of her palace with her damsels, strolling through the lovely orchards, gathering flowers there to weave bonnets and bouquets, sometimes going to refresh herself at the fountain, other times sitting on the grass amid her girls like the goddess Diana among her nymphs, taking up a lute and sounding it so melodiously that there was not a listening ear that did not remain enchanted by the harmony, as were people at sea long ago by the song of the Sirens." (58) Gohory continues with a description of Diane's beauty which similarly emphasizes its entrancing effects on the beholder: like the siren qualities of her music, her visual attractiveness is so powerful as to transcend the normal structures of gender relations. (59) This depiction of Diane's graces expands a single sentence in the Spanish model into an account of the audible and visible qualities of the Neoplatonic figure of perfection wrought by nature, the "Idea" of Gohory's preface. (60) Agesilan's own musicality--like that of the courtly patrons to whom Gohory's later writings are directed--predisposes him to appreciate the transcendent qualities of his beloved's song and prepares his spirit for the series of transformations he will undergo in his quest.
Agesilan's first step is to adopt feminine disguise, a partial becoming of the ideal he seeks. Cross-dressing is a regular feature of Renaissance romance, and the Amadis series is no exception. (61) Here the cross-dressers are boys rather than adult men, and the text emphasizes their slenderness, absence of beards, and high voices as contributions to the success of their female impersonation. Since much medical thinking of the time regarded both women and youths as imperfect or as-yet-undeveloped males, the gender identity of adolescents such as Agesilan and Arlanges could be seen as already fluid even before the adoption of their scheme. And musical boys provided one of the most legible instances of transvestism in Renaissance culture, in that singing boys in feminine dress were regularly seen on stage. As Richmond Barbour has observed, boys' sexual indeterminacy formed an important basis of early modern theater's erotic play. (62) This too is the function of the transvestite singers in Amadis, whose interactions in and out of disguise with other characters of both sexes generate a catalogue of potential sexual combinations and furnish readers with a wide range of erotic identifications. Music thus figures prominently in a world where gender confusion functions to stimulate the erotic imagination, rendering novel reading itself an erotic activity--one of the qualities Amadis' detractors condemned. Gohory insistently foregrounds this aspect of the plot by his use of language, referring to the boys as "she" in feminine garb but frequently shifting to "he" when describing their thoughts or motivations. He playfully juxtaposes the opposing gendered pronouns and adjectives in a way that invites, or even forces, reader attention and contributes to the potency of the "transvestite effect," a term used by Marjorie Garber to evoke the power of cross-dressing not only to disturb gender categories but to challenge the stability of all such oppositional binaries. (63) Gohory consistently calls on this capacity in constructing the relationships between his principal characters.
Amadis' transvestite youths provide erotic force, not only in the sense of sexual stimulation, but also in the wider terms embraced by occult understandings of eros, for they offered Gohory scope to emphasize notions of resemblance and sympathy through images of androgyny. The androgyne was a significant figure in Neoplatonic philosophy and in occult and alchemical thought: both traditions are active here. The androgyne exhibits characteristics of both doubleness and incompleteness, both in its original form as a creature combining both sexes, and in its yearning for its absent half following its division. (64) Agesilan can thus not only stand for a failure of stable, gendered oppositions, but can serve to evoke the mutual longing of like for like in nature. His character also suggests the Ficinian use of the androgyne image to symbolize the soul's desire for reunion with the divine essence. In alchemical literature, the androgyne represents the union of the passive feminine principle associated with the moon with the active, masculine solar principle. While the resemblance of Agesilan's adolescent voice and body to a girl's is heightened by feminine dress, the web of allusions attached to Diane's name projects her in turn as virile woman, the huntress goddess Diana of classical myth, and associates her with the moon, icon of instability and mutation; her pursuit of the masculine occupation of the hunt also involves a form of cross-dressing. (65) In the preface to book 11, Gohory further links transvestism and gender ambiguity to divine ceremonies of the cult of Diana: the heroine Diane de Guindaye is urged to pay tribute to her twin Diane de Poitiers, accompanied by her Agesilan "disguised as a damsel, as long ago in a certain country men sacrificed to the goddess of that name in women's clothing, and women in men's." (66)
The interchangeability of Diane and Agesilan as unstable, bigendered figures is enhanced by Gohory's exaggeration of their likeness to each other. (67) Similarity also connects the other pair of lovers, Arlanges and Cleofile, and in their case the resemblance is explicitly linked to the androgyne image when Arlanges exclaims "Because [we are] so similar in body and soul, they join in a perfect union, almost of two in one, that the ancients called homfenin." (68) Agesilan not only looks exactly like Diane but sounds like her: his transvestism is a musical impersonation as well, for he must sing convincingly as a woman. When Sidonie first hears him, she immediately likens the performance to her daughter's, and claims that Daraide was destined to serve Diane, "to whom your exclusive service is due more than to anyone else, given the excellence in music you will find in her, answering your own." (69) In fact Agesilan and Arlanges sing only as Daraide and Garaye, never as men, so that their musicianship is an essential component of their androgynous identities, confirming music's power to transcend, or even efface, difference. (70) Agesilan and Diane, Arlanges and Cleofile are set up as ambiguously gendered pairs whose mutual desire is a manifestation of the natural principle of sympathy, the yearning of like for like; the visual and sonic correspondences between them construct avenues through which eros may invisibly course to create sympathetic effects. Gohory does not make an explicit comparison to sounding lutes as he had done in his translation of Amadis book 10, but the analogy with sympathetic vibration seems clear. (71)
