| Summary: | The figure of the siren in the Renaissance and later has attracted a good deal of attention, especially from scholars interested in the history of gender. but the role of sirens in the Middle Ages has received much less consideration, at least from musicologists. The siren serves as a metaphor for human singing and musical femininity in a number of texts ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. In particular, her medieval hybridism as part bird - as opposed to her subsequently more familiar fishy form - places her among a number of bird species used metaphorically and literally to discuss the non-linguistic component of song, its effects, and their dangers. Comparisons with birds serve as a means of discussing a mismatch between positive musical features (attractive song, singer, and sound) and negative ethical features (sweetness as a form of gluttony or lechery), a dichotomy that seems to have been felt acutely in the later Middle Ages. The central part of this article focuses on a striking comparison with sirens in a music theory treatise of the fourteenth century and argues that only by considering the range of meanings for the siren can this reference be understood. The last part traces further bird-like features of both listener and singer in medieval accounts of musical hearing.
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