ABSTRACT Using well-known texts by Augustine, Jacques de Liège and Guido of Arezzo, this article tries to show that, despite prior misunderstandings, medieval authors of music theory considered it a given that sensuous pleasure was the ultimate goal of music. Only by way of anachronistic readings of the sources have historians constructed an aesthetics that blended aesthetics with mathematical and theological ideas. A close reading of the sources, taking into account their cultural contexts, reveals the intentions of the authors that are at the root of the texts. Those intentions, it is argued, were not aesthetical, and any attempt to interpret them from such a perspective would be misleading. Yet careful consideration of those intentions opens the view for remarks that are truly aesthetical as well as for hints suggesting that aesthetical judgements, while self-evident, were not considered matters for written discourse but for orality.
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