petits jeux, combat doux und fleurs écloses: Sexualität und ihre Kodierung im französischen Renaissancelied

Abstract

Abstract Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generally appears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthology representing a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses the excerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the images that describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizes them according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and further subdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as flora and fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear, instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, the article shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content. The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followed by metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, as the dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and female body parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluation of common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeper understanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of the early use of sexual euphemisms in French.