Abstracts


9:30 – 10:30 Keynote

Naturally International: French Song in the Early Thirteenth Century

Sarah Kay (New York University)

The success of French as a supralocal idiom is attested by its use as a language of international diplomacy and commerce, and by the wide-scale diffusion of French literature across linguistic frontiers. The most traveled manuscripts from around the turn of the 13th century seem to be those of narrative works like the Troy romances, especially their prose renditions; these manuscripts’ trajectories through Italy and the Crusader States have been widely studied. This paper follows a thread of a different kind: the diffusion through performance of poetry and song that also enabled lyric to function supralocally, albeit in a different way. Many lyrics, narrative works containing inset lyrics, and their manuscripts, originate in the contact zone between French and Dutch or German, including in French-speaking areas outside the boundaries of France, and the plots of several draw attention in various ways to the multilingual context and boundary-crossing capacities of song. In this paper, I will start out from the short early 13th-century tale known as the “Lai d’Aristote,” seemingly composed in Valenciennes around 1215, according to which the Greek philosopher is so overwhelmed by French songs performed by an Indian woman at a Greek court in India that he completely changes the focus of his philosophical teaching to concentrate henceforth on natural philosophy. This tongue-in-cheek account of French song’s appeal as “natural” across this mind-bogglingly international plotline is elaborated and justified in ways that deserve to be taken seriously, both within the “Aristote” and beyond it.

10:45 ­– 11:45 Birds & Desire:

The Wings of Desire

Eliza Zingesser (Columbia University)

“The Wings of Desire,” is about how birds supply certain erotic drives and affects in medieval French and Occitan literature. I argue that erotic desire and pleasure in medieval poetry are frequently both mimetic, in the sense that the human subject has to learn them from a bird, as well as interspecial—interspecial since both are staged as contingent on certain conditions (the hearing of birdsong) and on a certain set of relations (between the human poetic subject and the bird). Although the characters in these texts do not orient their desire towards the same object as the bird, they nevertheless learn how to desire, and that they should desire, through an encounter with birdsong. I argue that troubadour love songs, especially, rely on birds as a motor for erotic emotions, a trait that the trouvères reacted against by professing their indifference to birdsong. The fact that such alleged indifference became a topos in its own right and, in this sense, expected, represents another type of reliance on birds. I show, further, that this affective dependence is often coterminous with a strange spatiality, where inside and outside blur and the distinction between human and avian subjects becomes difficult to determine.

Imagining Nightingales in Old French Narrative and Song: Sound and Image

Morgan Dickson (Université de Picardie)

The symbolic importance of nightingales in Old French and Occitan texts has been clearly demonstrated. This paper examines nightingales as corporeal as well as symbolic creatures, focusing on both the importance of the sound of the nightingale’s song as well as the visual representation of nightingales in manuscript images, which appear in a variety of generic contexts, including Psalters, fables and romance. Yet, how do static images of birds convey sound? This question is particularly worth examining as the natural habits and habitats of nightingales are reflected, or are bound up in the visual representation of the animals, who tend to appear in a marginal space slightly outside the scope of human activity, just as – from a human perspective – nightingales themselves keep to hedges and thickets beyond human reach, while remaining well within the range of human hearing.


One of the most striking manuscripts providing the visual representation of nightingales is Paris, Bibliothèque National de France, MS Français 2186, which contains an illuminated copy of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Poire. This example of the text provides space for musical notation, suggesting the importance of the song sequences in the conception of the work, even if most of the music has not been included in this unfinished manuscript. The figure of the nightingale, clearly familiar to the author and their audience as a marker of problematic romantic love or of love-longing, combines textual symbolism with visual representation in this hybrid work.

12 – 1 Performing Desire:


Music, Dance, and Desire in Thirteenth-Century French Narrative and Society

Matthew P Thomson (University College, Dublin)

Desire is never far from the surface of thirteenth-century discussions of music for dancing, especially the communal round or line dance known as the carole. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on one of two discourses, attending either to clerics, who consistently cautioned their listeners about the danger of carole participation leading to sexual sin, or to authors of vernacular narrative romans, for whom caroles represented a courtly sexuality that was at times praiseworthy and at others more morally ambivalent.

I argue that the connections between these clerical and vernacular discourses become clear when they are both linked to the discussions of the social role of sex that accompanied marriage reforms of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These discussions presented lay people, through sermons and the newly compulsory sacrament of confession, with complex and contradictory discourses about sex and desire both within and outside marriage.

This paper first demonstrates the connections between discourses about the social place of sexual desire and narratives (clerical and vernacular) about caroles and their music. Then, it uses this newly enriched background to re-evaluate the depictions and discussions of caroles found in thirteenth-century narrative romans including Le Roman de la Violette by Gerbert de Montreuil and Guillaume de Dole by Jean Renart. In these accounts, I show, authors draw from numerous different discourses about caroles, music, and sexual desire to present nuanced and morally complex pictures of the way that communal singing, dancing, and sex could interact in thirteenth-century French culture.

Singing ‘en haut’ in the thirteenth-century crusades

Joseph W. Mason (University of Oxford)

In one passage of Philippe de Novare’s Chronicle of the War in Cyprus, the narrator relates that, after being wounded in the arm, Philippe ‘made two couplets in song and had himself carried in front of the castle onto the rock and and sang them loudly [les chanta en haut et dist]’. The two couplets are interpolated into the narrative and appear to be the first two stanzas of a virulent serventois directed against Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and his representatives on the island. The passage thus provides unusually detailed information on the performance of trouvère song; this is important given that evidence for performance practice is scant, especially for crusade songs of the serventois type.

In this paper, I examine what Philippe meant by the phrase ‘les chanta en haut et dist’ from two angles. First, I survey the use of the term ‘en haut’ in the Old French chronicle of the First Crusade, the Chanson d’Antioche, which was written down not long before Philippe’s battlefield performance, some time in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Although ‘en haut’ can simply mean ‘out loud’, I show that the term also carried connotations of high audibility, extreme vocalisation, intense emotion and bloody violence. Second, I demonstrate the tendency of crusade serventois melodies towards high levels of declamation. Together, these two bodies of evidence suggest that crusade songs were performed in a way that pushed the human voice to extremes and blurred the boundary between speech and song.

1:45 – 2:45 Song in Literature

Translating the Bible as French Romance or Geste: Performance as a Mode of Cultural Mediation

Laura Chuhan Campbell (Durham University)

Translating the bible into French in the thirteenth century involved both linguistic and cultural mediation. Translators invariably incorporated material from patristic writing and biblical exegesis into bible stories, while also editing, compiling, and abbreviating the source text. Often, these editorial acts engaged directly with vernacular literary genres, which served the purpose of not only providing an entertaining and accessible format for the French bible, but also establishing a framework for the editorial work itself and the way in which it was received by readers and/or audiences. This paper will examine Old French and Franco-Italian bible translations that take the form of romance and/or chanson de geste, focusing on the use of formal features that are associated with oral delivery and song, references to performance contexts and potential audiences, and intertextual engagements with other orally-delivered genres. In particular, I will examine evocations of oral performance within the translations that point to the amalgamation of priest and jongleur in the introduction of a biblical narrator, while situating these within the parameters of the artes praedicandi and the role of performance in vernacular preaching and lay devotion. It will argue that oral performance operates as an essential modality of thirteenth-century bible translation, which shapes the source text through engagements with particular audiences and performative contexts.

« le primer vers noter par chant »: Gaimar, Davit and Sung Narrative in the Early 12th c.

Tricia Postle (University of Cambridge)

Geoffrey Gaimar, in his Estoire des Engles (c. 1137 C.E.) describes a work by his literary rival Davit as both a livre and a chancon: Davit’s work is made into a large book with (as frequently translated) ‘the first vers notated with music’. Gaimar tells us that, if he had a commission, he could write a better work about the same material: a life of King Henry I, with elements neglected by Davit ‘of which a man should well sing’. This description is frequently quoted in Gaimar scholarship, as it occurs within a larger passage often cited in discussions of patronage, vernacular literacy, and book networks, but the musical implications have been discussed only in passing. Another aspect of Gaimar’s work, almost entirely hidden, is that two out of three manuscripts that preserve the beginning of the text invite the audience to pay attention to a chancon. In this paper I will consider the musicological questions raised by Gaimar’s work. This will include an exploration of possible interpretations for the primer vers passage (all unequivocally musical), and discussion of a much more frequently examined passage, in which Gaimar’s patron, Custance, is described ‘reading in her chamber’, in the light of recent scholarship. Lastly, I will consider the Estoire as a possible chancon, and the implications for our understanding of ‘oral’ and ‘written’ works.

3 – 4 Reception of French Song

‘si videlte ir stampenîe, leiche und sô vremediu notelîn...in franzoiser wîse’: French fiddles and German leiche c.1200 – c.1300

Richard Robinson (University of Cambridge)

The impact of the troubadours and trouvères on the lyric produced by German courts, especially in the decades either side of 1200, is well known. One interesting musicological aspect of this influence that seems to have been overlooked, however, concerns occasional references one finds in Middle High German literary works to ‘French fiddles’ or ‘fiddlers’ (‘wälscher gîgære’), which were evidently admired by several of their German contemporaries. This evidence raises important questions concerning instrumental traditions, practices and localities. These issues will be addressed via key literary case studies, such as the Arthurian romance Daniel von dem blühenden Tal (c.1220) by Der Stricker (active 1215–1250), plus also relevant iconography, including from the Codex Manesse (c.1300–c.1340) (which is of direct relevance to the question at hand, despite its relatively late date).

The second half of the paper will then focus on the related issue of the repertory associated with these instruments. Chief amongst these seems to have been the enigmatic leich, one of the genres which Isolde (the Fair) played on her fiddle ‘in the French style’ (‘in franzoiser wîse’) in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (c.1210). After attempting to define the leich more precisely, plus also its relationship to the French lai, attention will then turn to other relevant Middle High German literary sources in which both instrument and genre are named together. The collective results of these two separate investigative areas will be brought together with the aim of clarifying current thought on medieval fiddle practices.

Listening to Therapy: The Remède de Fortune, Embodied Performance and Structure

Uri Smilansky (University of Oxford)

The love-story of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune (early 1340s) is regularly interpreted through a didactic lens. Its Boethian undertones have variously been presented as providing an art of love; rhetoric; wellbeing; memory,or of poetic and musical composition. Each such analysis results in a different concept of the dit’s structure, and by implication, the process of its intended consumption. What unites them all is their imagining of a creative individual as this text’s target audience, modelled either on Machaut’s own figure, or on idealised versions of ourselves as scholars or performers. My paper approaches the Remede the other way around: taking as its point of departure the way it was consumed, not the abstracted intentions of its author. This involves a short overview of courtly practices relating to communal textual consumption, and an exploration of their implications when applied to this specific story. Importantly, this story is considered both as a performed text, and as a material, luxury book. I argue that both these acts of embodiment—alongside the environments within which they take place—had a crucial impact on how the narrative was perceived and engaged with. The practicalities of reading it at court provided consumers with a pre-determined structural arrangement into which to pour content. In turn, the expectation of this performance shaped both literary and material design.

4:15 – 5:15 Chansonniers and Lost Songs

Empty Staves as Traces of Lost Vernacular Songs and Sources

Nicholas Bleisch (Universiteit Leuven)

Empty staves are a poorly explained feature of nearly every troubadour and trouvère chansonnier. The meaning of such lacunae holds important implications for how we imagine the act of collecting and copying songs into the notated chansonniers that preserve them. Yet the sources containing such staves and the songs they accompany are often ignored in favour of those for which there is complete notation. Recent work has offered a corrective to this habit by paying increased attention to completely un-notated sources, such as trouvère chansonnier I and the only vernacular song source containing staves but no notation, trouvère C. But explanations for the blank staves in the book remain uncontextualized. Is the situation underlying this enormous musical lacuna unique, or typical of the blank staves found in other collections? Did the growing number of notated chansonniers make it easier to locate and copy melodies by the end of the 13th century? My paper traces a diachronic survey of staves left intentionally or unintentionally blank from the earliest chansonnier, trouvère U (troubadour X), to the later 13th-century trouvère sources R and V. This focused history reveals the differing situations facing music scribes attempting to compile melodies at different times. By asking in individual cases why music went missing, we can begin to answer the question of how scribes came to know and interpret melodies in the process of copying. Instead of encoding songs, scribes encoded their own stories.


A poet between two homelands: the vernacular tradition of Philippe de Rémi's songs in 13th century France and Britain

Anna Arató (Ecole normale supérieur, BN Paris)

Philippe de Rémi, seigneur de Beaumanoir (c. 1210 - 1265) is one of the most innovative poets of 13th-century Northern France. Although his two immense novels (some 16,000 verses) have been published and extensively commented on, his fundamental contribution to poetic literature remains largely unexploited. Philippe de Rémi was nevertheless an inventor, both in the lyrical forms he reused and renewed and in those he invented.

In my paper, I would like to present a sequence of eleven lyrical pieces, preserved in the ms. Paris, BnF, fr. 24406, fol. 52r - 57r (chansonnier "V"), attributed to this exceptional author, which raise numerous generic and stylistic questions. Although these songs have been reported by their publishers, neither their formal and thematic particularities, nor the potential intertexts that the metrical repertoires allow to identify have been studied until now. However, the systematic analysis of their analogies invites us to reconnect these pieces to contemporary works, particularly those in English, dating from a period when Philippe de Rémi himself spent a long time in Britain. The majority of the melodies accompanying these pieces are entirely unique, which allows us to assume that Philippe de Rémi, inspired by contemporary melodies, composed both the text of the songs and the music that accompanies them. By exploring these textual interrelationships, I would like to bring some new elements to the reflection on the circulation of authors, texts and manuscripts between Northern France and Britain in the 13th century.

5:30 – 6 Towards Performance

Imagining the rhythms of French medieval narrative and song: What some notationless musical traditions of today can tell us

Warwick Edwards (University of Glasgow)

Writing around 1300 about a perceived distinction between ‘unmeasured’ and ‘measured’ music, Johannes de Grocheio acknowledges that most think the former to be ‘free’, at least in respect of plainchant. And it is this view that remains prevalent among those who perform medieval songs today. But Johannes considers them wrong (deficiunt!) to conclude that, rhythmically speaking, unmeasured music is uttered ‘totaliter ad libitum’. Song rhythms are subject to rules, then, but significantly neither Johannes, nor anyone else of the period, ever attempts to formulate what they are.

‘Why?’, we ask ourselves. For me, at least, the very absence of explicit rules is itself revealing. It suggests adopting a cognitive approach that enquires how, when sung, words and syllables are characteristically articulated and grouped around points of orientation in time in diverse notationless cultures past and present. And what factors determine whether and how aspects of their temporal properties – which may or may not feature quantitative patterning – are to be captured if in due course they come to be notated.

I will illustrate my findings with two recordings made in Romania in the 1950s. First, a private performance of a lyric song; second, a public performance of a narrative tale.