Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado

Gallica Volume 5

CULTURAL PERFORMANCES IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE ESSAYS IN HONOR OF NANCY FREEMAN REGALADO

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

Already Published 1. 2. 3. 4.

Postcolonial Fictions in the ‘Roman de Perceforest’: Cultural Identities and Hybridities, Sylvia Huot A Discourse for the Holy Grail in Old French Romance, Ben Ramm Fashion in Medieval France, Sarah-Grace Heller Christine de Pizan’s Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos, Douglas Kelly

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Portrait of Nancy Freeman Regalado Frances Hume Weatherill

CULTURAL PERFORMANCES IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE ESSAYS IN HONOR OF NANCY FREEMAN REGALADO

Edited by Eglal Doss-Quinby Roberta L. Krueger E. Jane Burns

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2007 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978–1–84384–112–8

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Printed from camera-ready copy supplied by Eglal Doss-Quinby Published with the assistance of Smith College New York University Hamilton College

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

List of Illustrations Contributors Introduction Roberta L. Krueger and Eglal Doss-Quinby Nancy Freeman Regalado, Curriculum Vitae

PART I

xi xiii xv xxiii

POETIC AND MUSICAL PERFORMANCES

La poésie comme récit Michel Zink

3

Colin Muset and Performance Samuel N. Rosenberg

15

Subtilitas and Delectatio: Ne m’a pas oublié Edward H. Roesner

25

“Flables couvertes”: Poetry and Performance in the Fifteenth Century Jane H. M. Taylor

45

PART II

PERFORMING SEXUAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITIES

Intimate Performance: An Ivory Writing Tablet Cover at The Cloisters Mark Cruse A Cultural Performance in Silk: Sebelinne’s aumousniere in the Dit de l’Empereur Constant E. Jane Burns Acting Like a Man: Performing Gender in Tristan de Nanteuil Kimberlee Campbell

57

71 79

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CONTENTS

Amorous Performances: The Aventure de l’espee vermeille in Perceforest Sylvia Huot Historicizing Performance: The Case of the Jeu de Robin et Marion Ardis Butterfield The Protean Performer: Defining Minstrel Identity in Tristan Narratives Marilyn Lawrence

PART III

91 99 109

DEVOTIONAL PRACTICE AND TEXTUAL PERFORMANCE

Performing Vernacular Song in Monastic Culture: The lectio divina in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame Kathryn A. Duys

123

Performative Reading: Experiencing through the Poet’s Body in Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn

135

The Anglo-Norman Office of the Cross in the Lichtenthal Psalter Lucy Freeman Sandler “Laver de ses pechiés une pecheresse royale”: Psalm Collects in an Early Fourteenth-Century Devotional Book Elizabeth A. R. Brown

PART IV

153

163

PERSUASIVE PERFORMANCES

Dramatic Troubles of Ecclesia: Gendered Performances of the Divided Church Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski Preaching the Sins of the Ladies: Nicole Bozon’s “Char d’Orgueil” Laurie Postlewate

181 195

Making Names, Breaking Lives: Women and Injurious Language at the Court of Isabeau of Bavaria and Charles VI Helen Solterer

203

Performing the Nation: The Play Performed at the Great Feast in Christine de Pizan’s Biography of Charles V Lori J. Walters

219

CONTENTS

PART V

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RE-ENACTMENTS AND LEGACIES

Variegated Performance of Aucassin et Nicolette Evelyn Birge Vitz

235

Late Medieval Representations of Storytelling and Story-Performance Kathleen A. Loysen

247

Paratextual Performances in the Early Parisian Book Trade: Antoine Vérard’s Edition of Boccaccio’s Nobles et cleres dames (1493) Cynthia J. Brown “Resuscitating” Medieval Literature in New York and Paris: La femme que Nostre-Dame garda d’estre arse at Yvette Guilbert’s School of Theatre, 1919–24 Elizabeth Emery The Pitfalls and Promise of Classroom Performance Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

255

265 279

« Dunc chante haut et cler » : remarques sur l’interprétation de la musique médiévale Anne Azéma

289

Tabula Gratulatoria

301

List of Illustrations

Portrait of Nancy Freeman Regalado Frances Hume Weatherill

frontispiece

Ne m’a pas oublié / IN SECULUM Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H 196, fol. 246r

41

Ivory plaque, double-sided, ca. 1325–50, front New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.131.3a,b

68

Ivory plaque, double-sided, ca. 1325–50, back New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.131.3a,b

69

Christ as Pilgrim and the Poet-Dreamer in a garden Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 159r

144

Adam’s fall; the Poet-Dreamer regards the world Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 159v

145

The Poet-Dreamer blinded by the light of two angels conversing above his head Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 160r

146

Two angels speaking with Adam’s angel; the Poet-Dreamer sees a circle of gold in the sky; the Poet-Dreamer sees the circles of heaven Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 160v

147

The Poet-Dreamer questions and lectures Mary Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 170v

148

The Poet-Dreamer sees God in heaven and addresses a poem to him Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 182v

149

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Poet-Dreamer has a vision of predatory birds Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 204r

150

The Poet prays to Christ Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 229r

151

Matins, Arrest of Christ Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 160r

160

Prime, Christ before Pilate Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 160v

160

Terce, Christ bearing the Cross Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 161r

160

Sext, Crucifixion between Thieves Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 162r

161

None, Crucifixion with Witnesses Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 162v

161

Vespers, Descent from the Cross Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 163v

161

Compline, Entombment of Christ Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 164r

162

Ecclesia snatches away Synagoga’s crown Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 342, fol. 11v

194

The Bal des Ardents, Paris, 1393. Jean Froissart, Chroniques Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 2642, fol. 176

217

French Miracle Play Revived by Yvette Guilbert Theatre Magazine (April 1921): 239

276

Guibour, Neighborhood Playhouse Production, 1919 Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

277

When the Church of the Middle Ages Overcame the Law Literary Digest (1 March 1919): 29

278

Contributors

Anne Azéma is a leading interpreter of early music, heard regularly with The Boston Camerata, Camerata Mediterranea, and her own Ensemble Aziman. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski is Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh. Cynthia J. Brown is Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth A. R. Brown is Professor Emerita of History at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner is Professor of French at Boston College. E. Jane Burns is Professor of Women’s Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ardis Butterfield is Reader in English Language and Literature at University College London. Kimberlee Campbell is Professor of French at Harvard University. Robert L. A. Clark is Associate Professor of French at Kansas State University. Mark Cruse is Assistant Professor of French at Arizona State University, Tempe. Eglal Doss-Quinby is Professor of French at Smith College. Kathryn A. Duys is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of St. Francis. Elizabeth Emery is Associate Professor of French at Montclair State University. Sylvia Huot is Reader in Medieval French Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Roberta L. Krueger is Burgess Professor of French at Hamilton College. Marilyn Lawrence is Visiting Scholar at New York University. Kathleen A. Loysen is Assistant Professor of French at Montclair State University. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer in French at Barnard College.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Edward H. Roesner is Professor of Music at New York University. Samuel N. Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of French at Indiana University, Bloomington. Lucy Freeman Sandler is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor Emerita of Art History at New York University. Pamela Sheingorn is Professor of Theater and History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Helen Solterer is Associate Professor of French at Duke University. Jane H. M. Taylor is Professor of French at Durham University. Evelyn Birge Vitz is Professor of French and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Religious Studies at New York University. Lori J. Walters is Harry F. Williams Professor of French at Florida State University. Michel Zink is Membre de l’Institut (Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres) and Professeur au Collège de France.

Introduction Roberta L. Krueger and Eglal Doss-Quinby

This collection of essays recognizes the accomplishments of one of the pathbreaking senior women in the field of medieval French literature, Nancy Freeman Regalado, who has been on the faculty of New York University since 1968. Nancy Regalado has distinguished herself as a specialist of the Middle Ages, with work ranging widely from literary to cultural history and, more recently, staging and performance. Her publications include such seminal studies as Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1970); Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain, in collaboration with Edward H. Roesner and François Avril (Broude Brothers, 1990); Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, a special issue of Yale French Studies, co-edited by the late Daniel Poirion (1991); and Performing Medieval Narrative, with Evelyn Birge Vitz and Marilyn Lawrence (D. S. Brewer, 2005). She has given more than seventy-five invited lectures, scholarly papers, and presentations around the world, and is a regular presence at the International Congress on Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In addition, she has convened dozens of conferences, symposia, and workshops, including the ongoing Faculty Colloquium on Orality, Writing, and Culture, co-organized with Evelyn Birge Vitz at New York University since 1987, and Storytelling in Performance, co-organized with Vitz and Martha Hodes since 2004. The awards and honors she has received – in particular, the insignia of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (1992) as well as fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (1979 and 1988), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1993), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1979, 1984, and 1992) – attest to her merits as a scholar. Her merits as a teacher have twice been formally recognized by New York University: she received the Distinguished Teaching Medal in 1996 and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2003. Nancy Regalado has directed seventeen doctoral dissertations and served as primary reader for thirty more, working with students at New York University, Yale, and Columbia – in French, Spanish, Comparative Literature, History, Music, and Art History. Having Nancy Regalado as a thesis advisor is an immense privilege. Not only is she a meticulous reader, who offers copious comments, she is an unfailingly encouraging, caring, and patient guide. Nancy has demonstrated that she is fiercely loyal to her students,

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intent on seeing them succeed at every step in their academic careers; she is generous with her time and attention, using her considerable networking skills to their advantage. Her brilliant intellect and exacting standards, added to the warmth and support she demonstrates for all, are some of the reasons you will always find her with a doctoral student or two under her wing. Nancy brings the same passion and rigor to the classroom. Simply put, she is an exceptionally effective and demanding teacher, with a knack for getting students to rise to the challenges she puts before them. She never gives in to the temptation to abandon a somewhat difficult line of analysis; instead, she firmly leads her students to the end of the effort she has demanded of them. A lively and passionate teacher, Nancy Regalado is especially gifted at conveying to students her own fascination with medieval French literature and culture. Nancy Regalado has been a driving force in medieval studies at New York University (having co-founded the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, which she directed from 1994 to 2002), in New York City (within the Medieval Club of New York), and beyond, both nationally (having held committee positions in the Medieval Academy of America and the Modern Language Association) and internationally (through fruitful collaborations forged with academics abroad). Her skill at bringing together scholars of all sorts around shared intellectual interests, whether at lectures, conferences, or simply over a glass of wine, is extraordinary. Just as important (for many of us, at least) has been her tireless and enthusiastic commitment to mentoring women in the field, and her support in this regard extends well beyond her own students. Her appointment in 1986 as the first president of the Women’s Faculty Caucus, an advocacy group in the School of Arts and Science at New York University – which she co-founded and on whose Executive Board she continues to serve – speaks to her interest in promoting the advancement of women in academia. The articles in this volume reflect the depth and diversity of Nancy Regalado’s scholarship, as well as her collaborations and friendships with literary critics, philologists, historians, art historians, musicologists, and vocalists, in France, England, and the United States. From her study of noncourtly modes in Rutebeuf’s poetry, to her analysis of the dynamic juxtaposition of text, music, and image in the Roman de Fauvel, to recent publications, classes, and workshops devoted to the performance of medieval narrative and drama, Nancy’s scholarship has always pushed beyond disciplinary boundaries, interrogated critical categories, highlighted the interrelationship of genres and of aesthetic forms, and has brought to the page and the podium a keen appreciation for the sensorial delights and intellectual pleasures of medieval culture. It is not surprising that her companions on this journey should have chosen to explore diverse aspects of medieval culture. Their essays are tied together by a single question, rich in ramifications: How does performance shape our understanding of medieval works, whether the nature of that performance is visual, linguistic, theatrical, musical, religious, didactic, socio-political, or editorial? The notion of performance is one that crosses genres and invites us to look afresh at the interrelationship of audience,

INTRODUCTION

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author, text, and artifact, to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the transmission and reception of medieval literature, music, and art. As befits a volume dedicated to a scholar whose work has focused on medieval France and has embraced both theory and practice, the book begins and ends with essays in French, one by a literary critic and one by a performer, both of them invitations to imagine more than meets the eye or mind on the page. The intervening chapters are arranged in groupings that highlight the interplay of cultural performances inscribed by lyric, narrative, dramatic, devotional, and didactic works. I. Poetic and Musical Performances Michel Zink’s inaugural essay pays homage to Nancy Freeman Regalado’s first book, Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf. For Zink, as for Regalado, the opposition between medieval lyric poetry and narrative, “poésie” and “récit,” is not as stark as twentieth-century formalist theory would have us believe. The conception of medieval verse as a play of poetic conventions voiced by a lyric subject devoid of personal history falters, for example, in the face of Rutebeuf’s impoverished, yet clever persona. Zink argues that song and story, lyric and narrative, are often – and perhaps necessarily – more connected than it appears, perhaps especially when the song tries to skirt its own story. “A song is a story that refuses to be told,” suggests Zink. For Samuel N. Rosenberg, performance is central to understanding the lyrics of Colin Muset, a trouvère with a relish for portraying himself as a musical and vocal performer playfully exploring, for example, amusing variations of his sobriquet. Furthermore, a tendency toward prosodic “irregularity,” once disturbing to some philologists, reflects the reality that Colin’s songs were intended first and foremost to be performed. Rosenberg argues that the “elasticity of performance” can accommodate lines with unmatched meters, or stanzas that are apparently too long or too short. His “performance-minded approach” to editing may be profitably applied to other Old French lyrics, especially songs of a more popular or jongleuresque type. In “Subtilitas and Delectatio: Ne m’a pas oublié,” Edward H. Roesner examines a two-voice French motet in manuscript Montpellier H 196 to find the kind of sophisticated integration of words, music, illustration, and mise en page that anticipates the complexities of a later medieval work blessed by Nancy’s critical attention, the Roman de Fauvel. His analysis of the amorous and devotional motifs of its motetus text, the implications of the choice of “IN SECULUM” for its foundation, its musical and textual design, and the motet’s presentation on the page, where it is enhanced by two illuminations, reveals a hybrid creation, “half motet, half accompanied song,” skillfully using colores to bring “intellectual and sensory pleasures” to the audience. Reflecting on medieval French lyric in the fifteenth century, Jane H. M. Taylor considers its function as a form of entertainment in which socially ambitious men and women might themselves actively participate not only as performers but also

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as composers. Although historical evidence about the production and performance of lyric verse is scant, Taylor demonstrates that fictional works such as the Cour amoureuse and the Pastoralet can reveal much about the skills deemed desirable by the audience, and the varied capacities that professional poets and aspiring amateurs might have demonstrated. II. Performing Sexual and Social Identities Recalling Nancy Regalado’s Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, Mark Cruse revisits the vibrant intersection of art and literature, analyzing an exquisite ivory cover, used to hold wax writing tablets, whose meticulously carved images depict an amorous knight and his lady. This luxury object, which must have fostered the transmission of personal messages and may have been exchanged as a love token, evokes singing, dancing, and writing as elements of courtship, echoing scenes from the Roman de la Rose, the Jeu de Robin et Marion, and Machaut’s Voir Dit. A different sort of finely wrought object is shown to fashion social identities in surprising ways in E. Jane Burns’s “A Cultural Performance in Silk: Sebelinne’s aumousniere in the Dit de l’Empereur Constant.” In the hands of the savvy heroine, a richly worked alms purse conveys a letter that rewrites her fate and the future of the Byzantine Empire. As the silk purse simultaneously represents French nobility, Parisian silk manufacture, and Saracen opulence, it quite literally effects a fusion of Eastern and Western identities, and subtly transforms traditional gender roles. Kimberlee Campbell and Sylvia Huot examine the problematic formation of chivalric identity in two fourteenth-century texts, the verse Tristan de Nanteuil and the prose Roman de Perceforest. In “Acting Like a Man: Performing Gender in Tristan de Nanteuil,” Campbell demonstrates how a late chanson de geste calls into question the “monologic masculinity” conventionally associated with epic by highlighting a trio of characters who perform in remarkably unconventional ways. A cowardly knight and two female transvestites who excel in chivalric exploits challenge the audience’s expectations of both gender and genre. No less intriguing is the rather baroque adventure of the “espee vermeille” in the vast Perceforest, analyzed by Sylvia Huot. “Amorous Performances: The Aventure de l’espee vermeille in Perceforest” uncovers how competing notions of chivalric masculinity are literally “tested” in the attempted seduction of knights by maidens eager to impregnate themselves with noble stock; the worthy hero resists feminine wiles, thereby affirming heterosexual love-service and faithful marriage as seminal values for the Arthurian line. The Jeu de Robin et Marion plays similarly upon the complementarities, oppositions, and displacements of gender, genre, and social context. Ardis Butterfield suggests that this dramatized pastourelle may conceal, even as it evokes, a story more profound than its delightfully entertaining surface intimates, namely, the social unrest of an impending popular revolt that would eventually unseat the French court in Palermo, and that posed a looming threat for Angevin Naples as well.

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The final essay in this section, “The Protean Performer: Defining Minstrel Identity in Tristan Narratives,” reminds us how slippery social identities can be. Marilyn Lawrence finds that “typical” minstrels are characterized by such a motley assortment of costumes and accessories, and engage in such a multiplicity of functions – playing musical instruments, acting the fool, singing, dancing, miming, fencing, hunting, standing watch at night, among others – that their “essential” nature and attributes defy simple characterization. III. Devotional Practice and Textual Performance Meditation and prayer, which can be viewed as individual and collective performances, are at the core of each study in Part III. Kathryn A. Duys shows how the monastic practice of lectio divina was applied to the concluding song of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame. Through melodic and textual citations, Entendez tuit ensamble summarizes a 150-quatrain Salus (a vernacular rosary enumerating the virtues of the Virgin Mary), leading the singer away from recreation toward contemplation and meditation, in “a trouvère-like performance with a distinctly monastic twist.” In the work studied by Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn, Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist, such contemplative meditation is fostered visually, through eleven images that portray the authorial persona’s experiential knowledge of the Divine. The poet-dreamer is visualized in various stages of spiritual discovery as he observes the life of Christ; placing the dreamer and Christ’s journey within a common frame creates a shared sense of corporeal embodiment between reader, dreamer, and Christ, and enables a “performative reading.” Lucy Freeman Sandler examines images of Christ’s Passion in another literary context, the Lichtenthal Psalter, one of the most richly illuminated late-fourteenthcentury English manuscripts. The book concludes with an exceptional Office of the Cross (usually a component of books of hours rather than psalters), here in Anglo-Norman instead of Latin. She asks whether the pictorial cycle directly responds to the text, and whether the artist was influenced by the use of the vernacular. She concludes that the images function independently, drawing upon a reservoir of cultural associations, and that they do far more than simply “illustrate” the text for the reader. Elizabeth A. R. Brown offers an edition of the collects that accompany Psalm 118 and the Seven Penitential Psalms in another exquisite fourteenth-century devotional book, manuscript Spencer 56. Remarking that many of these prayers are either voiced by a woman or on behalf of women, she presents compelling evidence that the book may have been commissioned by Mahaut of Artois for her daughter, Blanche, who was confined to prison for suspected adultery after her marriage (at age eleven) to Charles of La Marche. This manuscript, too, places special emphasis on the Passion; Brown suggests that if the owner were Blanche, she may have been especially inclined to empathize with Christ’s suffering and to seek salvation through meditation and prayer.

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IV. Persuasive Performances In the late Middle Ages, the effects of cultural performance could often extend to socio-political events beyond the literary frame, as the essays in this section demonstrate. The first two articles examine very different types of female allegorical figures in polemical texts whose authors attempt to persuade their historical audience to undertake – or avoid – certain actions. The next pair offers complementary perspectives on language and performance at the tumultuous court of Charles VI and Isabeau de Bavière. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks at a series of dramatic performances enacted by allegorical female figures within politically charged texts, whose authors sought to redress the ills wrought by various schisms within the Catholic Church. From the late eleventh century to the late fourteenth, clerics and poets frequently portrayed Ecclesia as a suffering, helpless woman who had been raped, mutilated, victimized, and betrayed by her own children. Such dramatic representations were intended to elicit more than sympathy from ecclesiastical and secular authorities; they were, says Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “a call to arms … to protect the most important woman in their lives.” In his Char d’Orgueil, the late-thirteenth-century English Franciscan preacher Nicole Bozon depicts a very different kind of female allegorical figure, one who is not a victim but a perpetrator of vice. As Laurie Postlewate explains, a digression on Pride and her extravagant entourage allows the moralist to describe vividly the gluttonous table manners, indiscreet speech, and fashionable dress of vain ladies whose excessive behavior he squarely denounces. Postlewate remarks that the dramatic first-persona performance of the preacher anticipates by several decades the promulgation of sumptuary laws in England in 1337. In the midst of civil unrest in Paris in 1413, between ten and fourteen damoiselles d’honneur of Isabeau de Bavière were charged with sedition and hauled away from court, imprisoned and mistreated in ways that remain obscure. Tracing the representation of the damoiselles in contemporary chronicles, didactic literature, and sermons, Helen Solterer clarifies how their role as symbolic backdrop to the queen made the damoiselles’ dress, language, and behavior so vital to upholding Isabeau de Bavière’s regal status – and so vulnerable to scapegoating. The prolific femme de lettres Christine de Pizan played a key role in the construction of royal ideology at the court of Charles VI. Not only did she emphasize the supportive role played by the damoiselles d’honneur in the Livre des Trois Vertus of 1405, as Helen Solterer suggests, she also attempted to bolster the role of the king as spiritual and political leader of the emergent French nation, as Lori J. Walters demonstrates in “Performing the Nation: The Play Performed at the Great Feast in Christine de Pizan’s Biography of Charles V.” Christine’s forceful use of historical biography to promote peace and national identity reminds us, as it must have reminded her readers, that not all female speech was viewed as excessive or injurious in the Middle Ages.

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V. Re-enactments and Legacies Much of Nancy Regalado’s recent work has involved bringing medieval texts into perspective as performances, inviting scholars and students to give thought to ways practical problems of mise en scène and pedagogy can share the stage with literary analysis. It is fitting, then, that we conclude with essays that evaluate the “performability” of medieval narrative, or that venture beyond the confines of the high Middle Ages, to consider late medieval and early modern manifestations of performance, that is, the legacy of medieval performance in early modern texts, the modern stage, and the classroom. Evelyn Birge Vitz invites us to imagine the myriad possibilities of song and story in performance. She analyzes the alternation and interplay of singing and speaking, storytelling and drama, dance, mime, and personification inscribed within the thirteenth-century chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette. Speculating from the literary evidence about the way this text may have been enacted by a limited cast of actors, Vitz reminds us that the sparkling dynamics of a live performance are close to the heart of this “clever and delicious work.” Storytelling pervades the conceptual framework of numerous late medieval and early modern collections of tales, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. Kathleen A. Loysen analyzes the representation of storytelling in two late-medieval French collections, both anonymous: the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the Évangiles des quenouilles. The dramatization of storytelling, with its dynamic relation between author and audiences, stages a mise en scène not only of transmission, but also of reception. In “Paratextual Performances in the Early Parisian Book Trade: Antoine Vérard’s Edition of Boccaccio’s Nobles et cleres dames (1493),” Cynthia J. Brown looks into the role of a sometimes-forgotten player in the literary world – the publisher. A comparison of Vérard’s paper and vellum editions of a French translation of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus reveals not only that the publisher has effaced the identity of the translator in both editions; it also indicates that Vérard has eliminated a flattering dedication to Queen Anne of Brittany extolling her female virtue – prominent in the paper edition – and replaced it in the luxury copy with a dedication to the king and a portrait of Vérard himself presenting the book to his royal patron. Brown suggests that such forceful paratextual performances by a publisher may explain why early modern authors such as Pierre Gringore wisely sought to protect their work by securing royal privilege. The last three articles consider the modern legacies of medieval performance. Elizabeth Emery combs correspondence, theater archives, and popular press to reconstruct the singular career of a modern-day minstrel, Yvette Guilbert, a remarkable scholar-performer of medieval drama and lyric, who also founded a theatrical school for young women in the 1920s. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner writes of her experiments in combining medieval scholarship and teaching with live performance in the classroom, as she helps her students to organize their own dramatic productions. And finally Anne Azéma, well known to readers of this volume for her vocal performances of medieval lyric, examines textual accounts

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of the story of Tristan and Iseut for keys to the composition and performance of medieval song. As she asks what a singer can learn from the tantalizingly suggestive but fragmentary evidence, she exemplifies how contemporary cultural events may be revitalized by the study of the past. To honor a scholar of medieval festivities and verbal wit – an angel many in France adore – we end this introduction on a ludic note, in celebration of many a regal ado en France.1

1

Credit is due Mark Cruse and Samuel N. Rosenberg for these anagrams.

Nancy Freeman Regalado Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION 1966 1957–58 1957 1955–56

Ph.D. Yale University Faculté des Lettres, Université de Paris B.A. Wellesley College Smith College Junior Year in Paris

TEACHING New York University, 1968–present Director, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994–2002 Director of Graduate Studies, Department of French and Italian, 1981–88 Lecturer, Université de Poitiers, Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, 1990, 2007 Visiting Professor, Columbia University, 1983 Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania, 1981, 1983 Visiting Professor, Yale University, 1973, 1986 Wesleyan University, 1965–68 Assistant, NDEA Summer Language Institute, Iona College, 1961 Yale University, 1958–65 HONORS AND AWARDS New York University Golden Dozen Teaching Award, 2003 New York University Distinguished Teaching Medal, 1996 Officer of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, awarded 1992, presented 2001 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, awarded 1992, held 1993–94 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1984 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, 1979–80, 1992 American Council of Learned Societies Travel Grant, 1979 Bourse Fribourg, Alliance Française, 1957–58 Phi Beta Kappa

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BOOKS AND EDITIONS Performing Medieval Narrative. Ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature. Yale French Studies, Special Issue, co-edited with Daniel Poirion, 1991. Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain. Ed. Edward Roesner. Introduced by François Avril, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Edward Roesner. New York: Broude Brothers, 1990. Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. R.S.V.P. Invitation à écrire. With Michel Beaujour. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1965. ARTICLES “Swineherds at Court: Kalila et Dimna, Le Roman de Fauvel, Machaut, and the Decameron.” In “Chançon legiere a chanter”: Essays on Old French Literature in Honor of Samuel N. Rosenberg. Ed. Karen Fresco and Wendy Pfeffer. Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, forthcoming in 2007. “Fortune’s Two Crowns: Images of Kingship in the Paris, BnF Ms. Fr. 146 Roman de Fauvel.” In Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Manuscript Illumination. Ed. Kathryn Smith and Carol Krinsky. London: Harvey Miller-Brepols, forthcoming in 2007. “A Contract for a Festival Book: Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem (1278).” In Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Laurie Postlewate and Wim Hüsken. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 251–69. “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308).” In Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander: Making and Meaning in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald Guest. London: Harvey Miller-Brepols, 2006. 341– 52. “Le Romant de la Rose moralisé de Jean Molinet. Alchimie d’une lecture méditative.” In Mobilité du texte et jointures. Ed. Milena Mikhailova. Orléans: Paradigme, 2005. 99–118. “Emma Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel.” Review article, with Elizabeth A. R. Brown. Plainsong and Medieval Music 14 (2005): 14–21. “Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem (1278).” In Performing Medieval Narrative. Ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. 103–19.

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“Universitas et communitas: The Parade of the Parisians at the Pentecost Feast of 1313.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. In Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 117–54. “Kalila et Dimna, liber regius: The Tutorial Book of Raymond de Béziers (Paris, BNF MS Lat. 8504).” In Satura: Essays on Medieval Satire and Religion in Honor of Robert Raymo. Ed. Nancy Reale and Ruth Sternglanz. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001. 103–23. “ ‘Conversations’ on the Web: Using a Web-based Environment to Enhance a CAS MAP Course.” With Marybeth McCartin. Connect: Information Technology at NYU 12.1 (2001): 11–12. “The Ship of Solomon and the Birth of Jean de Meun: Medieval Construction of the Modern Reader.” In Rereading Allegory: Essays in Honor of Daniel Poirion. Ed. Sahar Amer et al. Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 81–108. “Villon’s Legacy from Le Testament de Jean de Meun: Misquotation, Memory, and the Wisdom of Fools.” In Villon at Oxford: The Drama of the Text. Ed. Jane Taylor and Michael Freeman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 282–311. “Le porcher au palais. Kalila et Dimna, Le Roman de Fauvel, Machaut et Boccace.” Études Littéraires 31.2 (1999): 119–32. “The Chronique métrique and the Moral Design of BN fr. 146: Feasts of Good and Evil.” In Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146. Ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 467–94. “En ce saint livre. Mise en page et identité lyrique dans les poèmes autographes de Villon dans l’album de Blois (BN Ms. fr. 25458).” In L’hostellerie de Pensée. Études sur l’art littéraire au Moyen Âge offertes à Daniel Poirion par ses anciens élèves. Ed. Michel Zink, Danielle Bohler, Eric Hicks, and Manuela Python. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris - Sorbonne, 1995. 355–72. “Staging the Roman de Renart: Medieval Theater and the Diffusion of Political Concerns into Popular Culture.” Mediævalia 18 (1995): 111–42. “Speaking in Script: The Construction of Voice, Presence, and Perspective in Villon’s Testament.” In Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages. Ed. W. F. H. Nicolaisen. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995. 209– 23. “Le Roman de Fauvel” and “Rutebeuf.” In Medieval France: An Encyclopedia. Ed. William Kibler. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. 339–40 and 830–31. “La grant feste: Philip the Fair’s Celebration of the Knighting of his Sons in Paris at Pentecost of 1313.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. In City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe. Ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 56–86.

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“Gathering the Works: The ‘Œuvres de Villon’ and the Intergeneric Passage of the Medieval French Lyric into Single-Author Collections.” In Intergenres: Intergeneric Perspectives on Medieval French Literature. Ed. Donald Maddox. L’Esprit Créateur 33.4 (1993): 87–100. “Allegories of Power: The Tournament of Vices and Virtues in the Roman de Fauvel of MS BN Fr. 146.” Gesta 32 (1993): 135–46. “1456. I the Scholar François Villon.” In A New History of French Literature. Ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. 119–24. Translation: “1456. ‘Je, François Villon, écolier’.” In De la littérature française. Ed. Denis Hollier. Paris: Bordas, 1993. 115–21. “Introduction.” Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature. Yale French Studies, Special Issue (1991): 1–7. “Masques réels dans le monde de l’imaginaire. Le rite et l’écrit dans le charivari du Roman de Fauvel, ms. B.N. fr. 146.” In Masques et déguisements au moyen âge. Ed. Marie-Louise Ollier. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1988. 111–26. “En l’an de mon trentiesme aage: Date, Deixis and Moral Vision in Villon’s Testament.” In Le Nombre du temps. En hommage à Paul Zumthor. Ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner et al. Paris: Champion, 1988. 237–46. “Effet de réel, effet du réel: Representation and Reference in Villon’s Testament.” Yale French Studies: Images of Power 70 (1986): 63–77. “La chevalerie celestiel: Spiritual Transformation of Secular Romance in La queste del Graal.” In Romance: Generic Transformations from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes. Ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee. Hanover & London: University Press of New England, for Dartmouth College, 1985. 91–113. “Des contraires choses. La fonction poétique de la citation et des exempla dans le Roman de la Rose de Jean de Meun.” Littérature 41 (1981): 62–81. “La fonction poétique du nom propre dans le Testament de François Villon.” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 32 (1980): 51– 68. “Tristan and Renart: Two Tricksters.” L’Esprit Créateur: The Comic Spirit in Medieval France 16 (1976): 30–38. “Two Poets of the Medieval City: Rutebeuf and Villon.” Yale French Studies 32 (1964): 12–24. COLLOQUIA AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED NYU Humanities Council Workshop, Storytelling in Performance. Co-directed by Evelyn Birge Vitz and Martha Hodes, 2004–06.

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NYU Faculty of Arts and Science, Colloquium on Orality, Writing, and Culture. Co-organized with Evelyn Birge Vitz, 1987–present. Medieval Dance: A Round Table. 2 May 2003. New Perspectives on Medieval Narrative: A Round Table. 18 November 2003. Modalities of Performance in the Middle Ages. 25–26 March 1993. Memoria: The Memory Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 10 November 1991. The Status of the Word: Discursive Expansions of the Bible in the Middle Ages. 6–7 April 1989. Octo: The Old French Octosyllable and the Oral Tradition. 2 May 1987. NYU Faculty of Arts and Science, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. Nota Bene: Why the Classics Were Neumed in the Middle Ages. Co-organized with Edward Roesner, 1 November 2001. Johannes Reuchlin, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn All Jewish Books: A Classic Treatise Against Anti-Semitism. Co-organized with Peter Wortsman, 27 March 2001. Degrees of Truth: Current Controversies Concerning Aquinas. Conference in Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the NYU Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. Co-organized with Siobhan Marshall, 30 April 1999. French Farce in Action: Performances from the Early Comic Repertory. Coorganized with Donald Perret (Emerson College), 4 January 1995. Performance. Thirty-fourth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Five sessions and plenary speech by Christopher Page (University of Cambridge), 6–9 May 1999. Style et valeur. Art et littérature du Moyen Âge. Co-organized with Daniel Poirion, Yale University, 27–29 October 1989. SERVICE New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Board Member, 1993–present NYU Faculty of Arts and Science, Women’s Faculty Caucus, co-founder, 1986 LECTURES, PAPERS, AND PRESENTATIONS “The Reader in the World: Democratizing Interpretation in Medieval French Literature.” The Aldo S. Bernardo Lecture, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 18 November 2005. “Why Tell the Stories of Arthur?” NYU Humanities Council Workshop, Storytelling in Performance, 4 March 2005.

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“Medieval Celebrations: Modes, Moods, and Mise en texte.” Keynote for “Celebration!” Romance Studies Colloquium, co-sponsored by Montclair State University and the New Jersey Council on the Arts, 14–16 October 2004. “Setting Standards for ‘Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase’.” With Jennifer Vinopal. Thirty-ninth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 9 May 2004. “Women’s Dance Games and the Story of Chivalry in Jacque Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency (Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 308).” Medieval Dance: A Round Table, NYU, 2 May 2003. “A Late-blooming Rose: Jean Molinet’s Romant de la Rose moralisé.” The Written Word: Writing and Culture in the Middle Ages, Rhode Island School of Design, 12–13 October 2002. “L’alchimie de la glose. Le Romant de la Rose moralisé de Jean Molinet.” Mobilité de l’œuvre et jointures. Du manuscrit au texte médiéval, Centre de Recherches Sémiotiques, Université de Limoges, 21–23 November 2002. “Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem (1278).” Public Performance/Public Ritual, Seventeenth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, 2 December 2000. “Monuments of Chivalric Performance: Le Tournoi de Chauvency in Mons, MS 330-215 and Oxford, Bodleian, MS Douce 308.” Medieval Manuscripts in the Vernaculars: Patrons, Readers, Cultural Contexts. Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford University, 7–9 July 2000. “Molinet’s Moralization of the Roman de la Rose: Bad Allegory or Good Reading?” Medieval Club of New York, 4 February 2000. Presented also at the University of Kansas, 12 November 1999, and at the Colloque du Moyen Français, McGill University, Montréal, 5–7 October 1998. “Intertextes transformés et cachés dans Le Roman de la Rose.” University of Kansas, 11 November 1999. “Swineherds at Court: Kalila et Dimna, Fauvel, Machaut and Boccaccio.” New Arts? New Age? Sounds and Images in Fourteenth-Century France, The Johns Hopkins University, 5 April 1999. “Courtly Dance Games and the Story of Chivalry: Women in the Tournoi de Chauvency (1285).” Symposium on Ritual and Spectacle, University of California at Santa Barbara, 30 March 1998. “Fortune’s Twin Crowns: Moral Choice and Kingship in the Roman de Fauvel.” Medieval Academy of America/Medieval Association of the Pacific, Stanford University, 28 March 1998. “Lire est noble chose: Pleasure Books for Noble Readers, 1250–1350.” Round Table, Reading the Middle Ages: Book, Object, Image. Eighth Annual Medieval Guild Conference, Columbia University, 1 November 1997.

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“Swineherds at Court: Fauvel, Kalila et Dimna, Machaut, and the Decameron.” A Focus on Lyric: Crossing Language Boundaries, Thirty-second International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 8–11 May 1997. “Monuments of Thirteenth-Century Provincial Courtly Performance: Picardy and Lorraine.” Seminar on Court Culture of the Middle Ages, University of Washington, May 1997. “Monumentalizing Performance: Written Re-Presentation of Two ThirteenthCentury Tournaments.” International Conference on Medieval “Theater” in a Culture of Performance, Yale University, 27 April–1 May 1996. “Villon’s Legacy from the Testament de Jean de Meun.” Francois Villon: The Drama of the Text, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, 22–25 March 1996. “Renart et le Roi. La naissance du théâtre parisien.” Alliance Française de Greenwich, 28 November 1995. “Inscribing a Tutorial Performance in a Primer for Princes: Raymond of Béziers’ Kalila et Dimna (Paris, BN MS Lat. 8504, 1313).” Thirtieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 4 May 1995. “Figura et descriptio: Paintings of the Parisian Pentecost Feast of 1313 in BN MS Lat. 8504.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. Medieval Academy of America, Boston, 31 March 1995. “Feasts of Good and Evil: The Chronique métrique and the Moral Design of Paris, BN MS Fr. 146.” The Roman de Fauvel: Chronicle, Allegory, Music and Image in Paris, BN MS Fr. 146, Paris, 11–13 July 1994. “Figura et Descriptio: Visual and Verbal Performances of the Parisian Pentecost Celebration of 1313 in BN MS Lat. 8504 and BN MS Fr. 146.” The Book in Performance: Rethinking Codicology, University of California at Santa Barbara, 25–26 February 1994. “Les fesses des prophètes: Orality and Poetic Identity in Villon’s Testament.” Oxford University, 25 January 1994. “Royal Feasts and the Moral Design of Paris, BN MS Fr. 146.” Oxford University, 26 January 1994. “Church and State in the Roman de Fauvel of BN MS Fr. 146.” Twenty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 6–9 May 1993. “From Procession to Presentation: The Parisian Pentecost Feast of 1313.” Modalities of Performance in the Middle Ages, New York University, 26 March 1993. Presented also at the Twenty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 6–9 May 1993. “Performance and the Construction of Common Political Culture or What’s on the Mind of the Body Politic?” Interrogating Medieval Theatricality, University of Pennsylvania, 11–13 December 1992.

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“Meanings in Motion: The Parisian Parade of 1313.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. Public Structures: Shaping the World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Thirteenth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, 5 December 1992. “Fausse musique: Lyric and Non-lyric Insertions and the Moral Structure of BN MS Fr. 146.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. Oxford University, 20 November 1992. “Parades, Politics, and Poetry in the Court of Philip the Fair: Paris BN MS Lat. 8504 and BN MS Fr. 146” and “Multi-Media and Medieval Chancery Art: The Erato Fauvel Video.” International Courtly Literature Society, Amherst, Massachusetts, 29 July 1992. “The Fox at the Feast: Dramatic Stagings of the Roman de Renart in the Parisian Pentecost Celebration of 1313.” Drama and Other Ludi as Popular Culture, Twenty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 7–10 May 1992. “En ce saint livre: Villon’s Reading and Writing in the Album of Blois.” Modern Language Association, San Francisco, California, 28 December 1991. Presented also at Oxford University, 20 December 1992. “The Fox at the Feast.” Phi Beta Kappa Speaker, 133rd Initiation Exercises, Beta Chapter of New York, 3 May 1991. “Les membres et le chief. La grande fête parisienne de Philippe le Bel (1313).” Alliance Française de Greenwich, 23 April 1991. “Feste: The Account of the 1313 Celebration of the Knighting of the Three Sons of Philip the Fair in the Chronique métrique in BN MS Fr. 146.” With Elizabeth A. R. Brown. City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, University of Minnesota, 28 February–2 March 1991. Presented also at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 21 March 1991, and at Boston College, 20 November 1991. “Gathering the Works.” Intergenres: Intergeneric Perspectives on Medieval French Literature, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 9–10 November 1990. “Medieval Construction of the Modern Reader: The Ship of Solomon.” La chose médiévale?/The Medieval Thing? Louisiana State University, 3–6 October 1990. Presented also at the University of Pennsylvania, 8 April 1991. “Poetry and Politics at the Court of France (1317).” NYU, 20 March 1990. “Style and Value: An Introduction.” Medieval Art and Literature: Style and Values, Yale University, 27–29 October 1989. “Writing Song: Poetry and Music in the BN MS Fr. 146 Roman de Fauvel.” Modern Language Association, December 1988. “Speaking in Script: The Re-Creation of Orality in the Poetry of Francois Villon.” Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, October 1988.

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“False Notes: Music and Morality in the Roman de Fauvel.” The Roman de Fauvel: A Mirror of Society and the Arts in Late Medieval France, Rutgers University, 17 February 1988. “Du rite à l’écrit: Le chalivali si parfaiz du Roman de Fauvel du ms. BN fr. 146.” XIIIe Colloque de l’Institut d’Études Médiévales de Montréal, May 1987. “Grafting Verse to Music: Two Semi-Lyric Pieces in the BN MS Fr. 146 Roman de Fauvel.” Medieval Academy of America, Toronto, April 1987. “Songs in Verse: Contextualizations of Medieval French Lyric.” National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Workshop, Poetry and Music in Perspective, Directed by Margaret Switten, May 1986. “The Fauvel chalivali and the Festive Decorum of BN MS Fr. 146.” The Roman de Fauvel, University of North Carolina, November 1985. “Saying Your Prayers: Poetic Expression of Secularism in Villon’s Testament.” Twelfth Annual Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium, The University of the South, April 1985. “Vos paroles ont mains et piés: Woman’s Wary Voice in Li Response du Bestiaire maistre Richard de Fournival.” Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 1985. “Signs on the Wall: Images, Morality, and History in the BN MS Fr. 146.” Eco’s Rose and the Fourteenth Century, Medieval-Renaissance Studies Symposium of the Central Pennsylvania Consortium, Dickinson College, March 1985. “Effet de réel, effet du réel: Representation and Referentiality in Villon.” Raymond Guthrie Conference in Medieval Studies, Dartmouth College, September 1983. Presented also at the University of North Carolina, March 1984, and at Rutgers University, April 1984. “Les fesses des prophètes: The Function of Body Talk in Fifteenth-Century Poetic Diction.” Columbia Colloquium on Poetics, November 1982. “La chevalerie celestiel: Spiritual Transformation of Secular Romance.” The Dartmouth Colloquium, Fall 1982. “Horseplay: Songs in Satire, Satirical Songs. The BN MS Fr. 146 of the Roman de Fauvel.” Form as Function: Melodic and Poetic Shapes in Medieval Song, Modern Language Association, December 1981. “Blood Ties: Incest, Parricide, Infanticide, and Other Transgressions of Kinship in Medieval French Literature.” New England Medieval Conference, University of Connecticut, October 1980. “Des contraires choses: Illustrative Exempla and Citations from Ancient Authors. Intertextuality and Meaning in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose.” Colloquium on Intertextuality and Medieval Romance, Columbia and Princeton Universities, December 1979.

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“Les fonctions poétiques du nom propre dans le Testament de François Villon.” Congrès de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, Paris, July 1979. “Names in Villon’s Testament.” South-East Modern Language Association/ Medieval Academy of America, Vanderbilt University, April 1979. “Transformations of Meaning in Thirteenth-Century Literature: The Bestiaire d’amour of Richard de Fournival and the Response de la Dame.” North-East Modern Language Association, March 1978. “Choice and Indeterminacy in Fifteenth-Century Narrative: The Quinze joies de mariage and Antoine de la Sale’s Petit Jehan de Saintré and His Paradis de la Reine Sibylle.” Modern Language Association, December 1976. “Fictional and Social Reality in Gautier d’Aupais.” Class and Wealth in Medieval Texts, Colloquium on Social Criticism and Literature, Brandeis University, March 1976. “Tristan and Renart: Two Tricksters.” Tenth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1975. “Transformation of Lyric Metaphors in Provençal vidas and razos.” Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 1973. DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS DIRECTED Bratu, Cristian (Diss. NYU: French, in progress). “L’émergence de l’auteur dans les chroniques médiévales en prose en langue française.” Georgi, David (Diss. NYU: Comparative Literature, in progress). “Language Made Visible: The Invention of French in England after the Norman Conquest.” Wright, Elizabeth (Diss. NYU: French, in progress). “Manuscript Meanings: Compilation, Transmission, and Reception of Berte as Grans Pies.” Cavitch, Elizabeth (Diss. NYU: French, 2006). “The Value of Wealth in the Roman de la Rose.” Cruse, Markus (Diss. NYU: French, 2005). “Le Roman d’Alexandre in MS Bodley 264: Text, Image, Performance.” Loysen, Kathleen (Diss. NYU: French, 2002). “Hearing Voices: Representations of Storytelling and Conversation in Collections of Fifteenth- and SixteenthCentury French Nouvelles.” Published: Conversation and Storytelling in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century French Nouvelles (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). Magallanez, Michelle (Diss. NYU: French, 2000). “Mirrors of Glory: Spectacles of Chivalry and Aristocratic Identity in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Romance, Chronicle, and Chivalric Biography.”

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Denizot-Ghil, Michele (Diss. NYU: French, 2000). “Poétique du fragment dans l’œuvre lyrique d’Eustache Deschamps.” Cochis, Simonetta (Diss. NYU: French, 1998). “Antoine de la Sale’s Delightful Teachings: Literature and Learning in His Late Medieval Books for Princes.” Duys, Kathryn (Diss. NYU: Comparative Literature, 1997). “Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci.” Muterspaugh, Susan (Diss. NYU: French, 1994). “Prologues in Medieval French Literature.” Roffé, Mercedes (Diss. NYU: Spanish, 1993; co-directed with Sylvia Molloy). “La cuestión del género en Grisel y Mirabella de Juan de Flores.” Second Place, Triennial Prize for the Best Dissertation 1990–93, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Published: La cuestión del género en Grisel y Mirabella de Juan de Flores (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1996). Perret, Donald (Diss. NYU: French, 1990). “Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576–1620.” Dean’s Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities, 1990. Published: Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576–1620 (Geneva: Droz, 1992). Leblanc, Yvonne (Diss. NYU: French, 1990). “The Late Medieval Verse Epistle: The Changing Faces and Fortunes of a Poetic Genre during the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.” Published: Va Lettre Va: The French Verse Epistle (1400–1550) (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa, 1995). Gravdal, Kathryn (Diss. Columbia: French, 1984; co-directed with Michael Riffaterre). “Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Justin O’Brien Award for the Outstanding Dissertation of 1984–85. Published: Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Doss-Quinby, Eglal (Diss. NYU: French, 1982). “Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe.” Published: Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York: Peter Lang, 1984). Nelson, Ida (Diss. NYU: French, 1975; co-directed with Michel Beaujour). “La sottie. Jeu du gay vouloir.” Published: La Sottie sans souci. Essai d’interprétation homosexuelle (Paris: Champion, 1977). Heller, Sondra (Diss. NYU: Comparative Literature, 1975). “The Characterization of the Virgin Mary in Four Thirteenth-Century Narrative Collections of Miracles: Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame, and Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa María.”

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Carasso-Bulow, Lucienne (Diss. Yale: French, 1974). “The ‘Merveilleux’ in Chrétien de Troyes’ Romances.” Published: The Merveilleux in Chrétien de Troyes’ Romances (Geneva: Droz, 1976). Farrell, Alice (Diss. NYU: Comparative Literature, 1970). “Socio-Economic Issues Revealed in Medieval Poetry.” DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS DIRECTED, AS PRIMARY READER Russakoff, Anna (Diss. NYU: Institute of Fine Arts, 2005). “Representations of Miraculous Images in the Manuscripts of Gautier de Coincy.” Director: Jonathan Alexander. Leo, Domenic (Diss. NYU: Institute of Fine Arts, 2005). “Authorial Presence in the Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts.” Director: Jonathan Alexander. Erickson, Michelle (Diss. NYU: French, 2005). “Witness: Trauma, Aesthetics, and the Transmission of Memory in French Literary and Videotaped Holocaust Testimony.” Director: Denis Hollier. Webster, Catherine (Diss. NYU: French, 2004). “The Remains of the Play: The Playwright as Filmmaker – Pagnol, Guitry, and Cocteau.” Director: Charles Affron. François, Anne (Diss. NYU: French, 2003). “The Return to Africa Revisited: Voices of Three Guadeloupean Women Writers.” Director: Sylvie Kandé. Shapiro, Stephen (Diss. NYU: French, 2002). “Plotless History: Historical Representation in Frondeur Memoirs.” Director: Michel Beaujour. Petkov, Kiril (Diss. NYU: History, 2001). “The Kiss of Peace in Medieval Europe.” Published: The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Director: Jill Claster. Roche, Isabel (Diss: NYU: French, 2001). “A Study of Character in the Novels of Victor Huto: Appearance, Reappearance, Disappearance.” Director: Charles Affron. Lawrence, Marilyn (Diss. NYU: French, 2001, with Honors). “Minstrel Disguise in French Medieval Narrative: Identity, Performance, Authorship.” Director: Evelyn Birge Vitz. Trigian, Gina (Diss. NYU: French, 2001). “Livrets de mise en scène from Nineteenth-Century Productions of Romantic Drama: The Staging of Violence in Alexandre Dumas’ Henri III et sa cour and Victor Hugo’s Marie Tudor.” Director: Charles Affron. Saveau, Patrick (Diss. NYU: French, 1999). “Le double ‘je(U)’ dans les autofictions de Serge Doubrovsky.” Director: Eugène Nicole. Dahlinger, James, S. J. (Diss. NYU: French, 1999). “Etienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France and the Ethics of Majesty.” Director: Michel Beaujour.

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Guynn, Noah (Diss, Yale University: French, 1998). “Allegory and Transgressive Desire: The Inscription and Erasure of Nonnormative Sexualities in Allegorical Discourses of the Middle Ages.” Published: Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Directors: Daniel Poirion and Lynne Huffer. Christopher, Tracy (Diss. NYU: French, 1998). “Molière’s Dévots de la Médecine: Doctors and Faux Dévots Viewed through the Lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s Oracle.” Director: Bradley Rubidge. Emery, Elizabeth (Diss. NYU: French, 1997). “Reconstructing the Cathedral: Social and Aesthetic Crisis in the Fin-de-siècle Novel (Zola, Huysmans, Proust).” Published: Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-desiècle French Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Director: Claudie Bernard. Haddad, Gabriel (Diss. Columbia University: French, 1996): “Scatology in Old French Literature.” Director: Kathryn Gravdal. Gillespie, Maureen (Diss. NYU: French, 1996). “Conversion in Old French Literature.” Director: Evelyn Birge Vitz. Postlewate, Laurie (Diss. NYU: French, 1996). “The Works of Nicolas Bozon.” Director: Evelyn Birge Vitz. Kennelly, Brian (Diss. NYU: French, 1995). “Unfinished Business: The Posthumously Published Plays of Jean Genet.” Published: Unfinished Business: Tracing Incompletion in Jean Genet’s Posthumously Published Plays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Director: Thomas Bishop. Kovacs, Susan (Diss. NYU: French, 1995). “Poetic Collections of Lyons in the Sixteenth Century.” Director: Michel Beaujour. Steinberger, Deborah (Diss. NYU: French, 1995). “From Place Publique to Lieu Clos: Molière and the Domestication of French Comedy.” Director: Gabrielle Verdier. Bold, Stephen (Diss. NYU: French, 1993). “Pascal Geometer.” Published: Pascal Geometer (Geneva: Droz, 1996). Director: Michel Beaujour. Raycraft, Mary Beth (Diss. NYU: French, 1993). “Flaubert’s House of Fiction: Furnishing New Spaces.” Director: Richard Sieburth. Wolfgang, Aurora (Diss. NYU: French, 1993). “Furiously Female: Constructing the Feminine Voice in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction.” Published: Gender and Voice in the French Novel: 1730–1782 (Aldington: Ashgate, 2004). Director: Anne Deneys-Tunney. Morin, Joseph (Diss. NYU: Music, 1992). “The Genesis of Manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Français 146, with Particular Emphasis on the Roman de Fauvel.” Director: Edward Roesner. Lebec, Leah Koncelik (Diss. NYU: French, 1985). “Resistance and Resolution: Reading Reverdy’s Les Ardoises du toit.” Director: Eugène Nicole.

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Campbell, Kimberlee Anne (Diss. NYU: French, 1984). “Doon de la Roche and Enrrique, fi de Oliva: The Changing Face of Legend.” Published: The Protean Text: A Study of Versions of the Medieval French Legend of “Doon and Olive” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988). Director: Jindrich Zezula. Dickinson, Richard (Diss. NYU: French, 1983). “The Animal Metamorphoses of André Breton.” Director: Anna Balakian. Rodriguez, Max (Diss. NYU: Spanish, 1983). “Las obras de Rodriguez del Padrón.” Director: Salvador Martinez. Talarico, Kathryn (Diss. NYU: French, 1980). “Oculus carnis: Characterization in Late Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century French Narrative.” Director: Jindrich Zezula. Rathbun, E. Brinton (Diss. NYU: French, 1978). “Patterns of Death in Medieval French Epic Poetry.” Director: Jindrich Zezula. Arden, Heather (Diss. NYU: French, 1974). “Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie.” Published: Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Director: Jindrich Zezula.

PART I

POETIC AND MUSICAL PERFORMANCES

La poésie comme récit Michel Zink

La poésie dans son essence entretient avec le langage une relation qui n’est pas de l’ordre de la succession discursive. Elle n’est en elle-même le produit ni d’un récit ni d’une argumentation ni même d’une description. Elle est un raccourci dans l’usage et l’effet des mots, qui suscite une forme de présence immanente et immédiate de l’être même. Des considérations de ce genre accompagnent confusément dans notre esprit la notion de poésie. Car il n’est pas de conceptions si difficiles et si tendues qui ne finissent par se vulgariser au prix du flou et de l’aplatissement. La révolution de la poésie moderne commencée avec Baudelaire, poursuivie par Rimbaud, radicalisée par Mallarmé,1 repensée par Valéry, formalisée par l’idée de poésie pure, reprise par les surréalistes et jusque par Sartre,2 la relation du poète à l’être selon Heidegger : tout cela flotte dans notre esprit et baigne d’un flot paresseux ce que nous croyons entendre par poésie. Nous reconnaissons, certes, sans peine que la poésie du passé est pour une large part narrative et que le premier poète de notre civilisation est Homère. Mais nous admettons implicitement qu’un poème narratif ne relève pas de la poésie en tant qu’il est narratif. Nous cherchons à dégager comme une gemme de sa gangue les éléments de poésie qu’il charrie. Nous les goûtons comme une série d’instantanés : Pour que l’état poétique s’ébauche en nous, nul besoin … d’avoir pris d’abord connaissance du poème tout entier… Trois ou quatre vers, rencontrés au hasard de la page ouverte, souvent même quelques lambeaux de vers ont suffi… L’action que produisent sur nous certains vers, ainsi détachés de leur contexte, est … immédiate, soudaine et dominatrice. On est tout comblé ; on n’éprouve pas le besoin d’aller plus avant. C’est là même ce qui rend difficile la lecture continue de tels poètes, parmi les plus hauts, Dante, par exemple. Nous leur dirions volontiers : mais arrêtez-vous ; de ce beau vers au sens suspendu 1

2

« Tout se passe, par raccourci, en hypothèse ; on évite le récit », Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard, « Observation relative au poème », Cosmopolis 6 (avril–mai 1897) : 417–27, à la p. 418. La remarque, dans son contexte, s’applique à la mise en page et à la disposition typographique du poème. Voir les citations rassemblées par Dominique Combe, Poésie et récit. Une rhétorique des genres (Paris : José Corti, 1989), chap. 1, « L’exclusion du narratif », et chap. 2, « La poésie pure ».

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Laissez-nous plus longtemps savourer les délices, tandis que nous crions à la prose : marche ! marche ! Ad eventum festina. Et si le dénouement tarde trop, ou de la démonstration ou du récit, nous brûlons les pages.3

De telles vues ont besoin d’être atemporelles. Elles ne sont valides que si la poésie et « l’état poétique » sont des réalités incontestables et universelles. Elles cherchent donc volontiers confirmation dans une enquête historique, tout en lui imposant comme préalable l’hypothèse que la poésie existe et qu’on doit pouvoir la déceler à toute époque et dans toute civilisation. Dans le monde occidental, une telle enquête conduit jusqu’à l’Antiquité classique, mais le Moyen Âge y joue un rôle essentiel, puisque c’est l’époque où apparaissent les littératures écrites dans les différentes langues de l’Europe. Aussi, du romantisme à l’époque actuelle, de Herder, des Grimm, de Hegel ou de Percy et McPherson à Aragon, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Cingria, Benedetto Croce, Robert Guiette, René Nelli ou Paul Zumthor, les savants soucieux des implications historiques de l’esthétique et les poètes curieux des résonances passées de leur vocation, les savants ayant une activité poétique et les poètes ayant une formation de savants, ont cherché une sorte de preuve par le Moyen Âge des conceptions qui étaient les leurs. Les romantiques, n’ayant ni théorie de la poésie pure ni oukase excluant la narration de la poésie, ont jugé poétiques les légendes médiévales sans en être autrement troublés. Il en est allé différemment, comme on peut le penser, des auteurs plus récents, marqués par la révolution poétique de la fin du XIXe siècle. Obéissant, de façon délibérée ou spontanée, à la nouvelle classification des genres, certains (curieusement plus nombreux parmi les médiévistes que parmi les poètes) ont considéré que ce qu’ils entendaient par poésie devait être cherché dans les formes lyriques médiévales, leur nature, leurs lois, leurs effets étant supposés définir de façon privilégiée l’idée que le Moyen Âge se faisait de la poésie. Un argument philologique objectif paraît au reste soutenir cette hypothèse. Les manuscrits littéraires médiévaux sont souvent disparates. Or, les chansonniers constituent au contraire des anthologies cohérentes, exclusivement réservées aux pièces lyriques. Bien plus, ceux d’entre eux qui dérogent à cette règle semblent par là même confirmer de la façon la plus éclatante qu’aux yeux du Moyen Âge même la poésie est à chercher dans ce qui échappe au narratif. Certains chansonniers occitans, comme L et N, mêlent en effet aux chansons des ensenhamens ou des novellas, voire des extraits de romans, en particulier de Jaufré, qui est, comme on sait, le seul roman arthurien en langue d’oc. Mais ces extraits ne font guère de place au récit et consistent systématiquement en passages consacrés à des considérations ou à des effusions sentimentales. On dira qu’on est loin avec cela de la poésie mallarméenne. C’est indubitable. Cependant, au regard de l’accumulation d’aventures merveilleuses, sanglantes, haletantes, qui constitue la trame de Jaufré, ce choix paraît bien impliquer une idée de la poésie qui exclut la narration.

3

Henri Brémond, La poésie pure (Paris : Bernard Grasset, 1926), 16–17.

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5

Laissons provisoirement en suspens cette question, dont la réponse est peutêtre moins claire qu’il semble. De toute façon, disais-je, Mallarmé est bien loin. C’est ce qu’ont pensé aussi les médiévistes du XXe siècle les plus marquants dans ce domaine. Et c’est, je crois, leur désir d’appliquer plus radicalement au lyrisme médiéval la notion moderne de poésie qui les a conduits à en donner l’interprétation aujourd’hui prévalente. Nul n’ignore l’immense retentissement qu’a eu parmi les médiévistes un court essai du poète et philologue belge Robert Guiette, intitulé « D’une poésie formelle en France au Moyen Âge »,4 ni les prolongements que lui ont donnés, entre autres, les travaux de Roger Dragonetti et de Paul Zumthor.5 Le lyrisme médiéval déconcerte souvent le lecteur moderne par sa monotonie, son caractère convenu, son indifférence à l’originalité, et aussi par sa tendance à l’abstraction et à la généralité. Constatant que tous les poèmes se ressemblent sur le fond et ne diffèrent que faiblement les uns des autres dans la forme, Guiette s’est attaché à ces faibles divergences formelles, seules aspérités qui retiennent l’attention, et a supposé que tout l’art des poètes de ce temps et tout le prix qu’ils attachaient à leurs propres compositions résidaient dans ces infimes variations au sein d’un ensemble totalement codifié. Pour un poète de la mouvance surréaliste comme Robert Guiette, cette hypothèse permettait de dénoncer comme une illusion romantique l’idée que les poètes médiévaux auraient pu viser à l’effusion de sentiments personnels, en montrant que, si telle était leur intention, ils avaient échoué de la façon la plus lamentable, et qu’on pouvait donc leur faire le crédit d’une autre lecture de leur œuvre. Mais elle avait aussi un versant positif. Car cette autre lecture prêtait à la « poésie formelle » du Moyen Âge les caractères mêmes de la poésie moderne, en en faisant une poésie sans locuteur, naissant seule de la relation entre les mots. Une poésie à laquelle pouvaient s’appliquer les considérations de Mallarmé dans Crise de vers : L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés ; ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries, remplaçant la respiration perceptible de l’ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase.6

Que l’hypothèse de la « poésie formelle » ait largement dû son succès aux rencontres qu’elle supposait entre les conceptions du Moyen Âge et celles de notre époque, qu’elle ait été utilisée comme une preuve par le Moyen Âge de la validité 4 5

6

Dans Questions de Littérature, Romanica Gandensia 8 (1960) : 1–23, et dans Forme et senefiance (Genève : Droz, 1978), 9–32. Roger Dragonetti, La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise. Contribution à l’étude de la rhétorique médiévale (Bruges : De Tempel, 1960). Paul Zumthor, Langue et technique poétiques à l’époque romane (XIe–XIIIe siècle) (Paris : Klincksieck, 1963) ; Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris : Seuil, 1972 ; nouv. éd. avec une préface de Michel Zink et une postface, Points Seuil, 2000). Dans Divagations (Paris : Fasquelle, 1897) ; cité ici d’après Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Mallarmé. Poésies et autres textes (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 2005), 358.

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de théories contemporaines, c’est ce qui apparaît clairement quand on voit les sauces auxquelles, dans les décennies qui ont suivi l’essai de Guiette, elle a successivement été accommodée : linguistico-structurale (tout est affaire de variations et de rapports), lacanienne (« ça parle »), foucaldienne (critique de l’intériorité et mort de l’auteur). Au demeurant, la monotonie répétitive du lyrisme médiéval, qui nous frappe tant (mais guère plus que celle des chansons de geste ou des romans) et qui fonde la théorie de la « poésie formelle », est-elle vraiment l’effet d’un choix esthétique et d’une conception poétique plutôt qu’une illusion dont nous sommes les victimes à cause de l’éloignement du Moyen Âge dans le temps ? S’agissant même d’époques plus proches, mais qui s’éloignent de nous rapidement, ne commençons-nous pas, de façon analogue, à trouver que toutes les pièces de Corneille se ressemblent, qu’il n’y a pas entre Rotrou et lui tant de différence qu’on a dit, que tous les romans 1900 ont un air de famille, etc. ? À l’inverse, quand on prend la peine de lire les trouvères de près,7 des différences de ton, de manière, de personnalité, se font jour. Car au fond, s’agissant d’une époque lointaine, dont les sensibilités, les impalpables résonances verbales et sentimentales, les sous-entendus, les allusions, les réseaux de connivence, nous sont largement inaccessibles ou ne peuvent être reconstitués que péniblement et partiellement, il est inévitable que l’armature formelle des poèmes nous frappe d’abord, accapare notre attention et nous paraisse avoir, plus que tout le reste, retenu celle de leurs auteurs. Parmi les travaux inspirés par l’hypothèse de la « poésie formelle », les plus importants et ceux qui ont exercé, à juste titre, l’influence la plus profonde sont ceux de Paul Zumthor. Après avoir mis en évidence dans le grand chant courtois l’équivalence entre les propositions « j’aime » et « je chante », Zumthor montre que l’idéalisation de l’amour comme du chant les condamne l’un et l’autre à la généralité et leur interdit les accidents du particulier. Il interdit ainsi toute lecture biographique des poèmes, ce qui était le grand souci de ces années-là. Mais en même temps, du point de vue qui nous occupe ici et auquel nous revenons enfin, il ancre le grand chant courtois dans la poésie pure en estimant qu’il exclut toute narration, qu’il s’agisse d’un récit des circonstances de l’amour ou de confidences du poète. Ainsi, l’assimilation spontanée, dans les lettres médiévales, de la poésie au lyrisme était renforcée par la conviction que ce lyrisme se fonde sur le jeu verbal et rejette le récit. Tout cela serait parfaitement satisfaisant sans l’obstacle que constitue le mot de poésie lui-même. Pour le mot lyrisme, les choses sont claires : le Moyen Âge l’ignore totalement. Les termes les plus généraux dont il dispose, ceux de vers, de chanson, de chant, de son, de sonet, ne sont ni aussi englobants ni aussi spécialisés. Aucun ne couvre spécifiquement l’ensemble du domaine lyrique et certains le débordent : chanson a des emplois qui échappent au lyrisme (chanson de geste), en même temps que le mot peut désigner un type lyrique particulier ; son peut 7

Comme a su le faire, par exemple, Marie-Geneviève Grossel pour les trouvères champenois : Le milieu littéraire en Champagne sous les Thibaudiens, 2 vols. (Orléans : Paradigme, 1994).

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désigner soit la mélodie seule, soit l’ensemble du texte et de la mélodie. La notion de poésie lyrique ne semble cependant pas être tout à fait étrangère au Moyen Âge, comme le montrent la spécialisation des chansonniers, déjà mentionnée plus haut, mais aussi les efforts un peu embarrassés de Guilhem Molinier pour exclure les autres formes littéraires de ses Leys d’Amor.8 Quant au mot poésie, c’est une autre affaire. Il est connu, même s’il est tardif et peu usité. Mais, loin de se confondre avec la notion de lyrisme, il s’y applique particulièrement mal. Il ne désigne jamais les formes lyriques. Le Moyen Âge parle des chansons des troubadours, mais l’expression « la poésie des troubadours » lui aurait été incompréhensible. De même que, jusqu’au XIVe siècle, le mot « poète » ne désigne que des personnages sacrés de l’Antiquité païenne ou des prêtres du paganisme et est à ce titre associé, comme le fait Isidore de Séville, à des mots comme « mage » ou « philosophe »,9 de même le mot « poésie », qui n’apparaît guère en français avant cette date, s’applique avant tout à la fable mythologique. Autrement dit, le Moyen Âge français, contrairement à la latinité, ne désigne pas sous le nom de poésie l’art de composer en vers ou l’ensemble des compositions en vers. Il applique le mot « poésie » à des récits. Des récits hérités de l’Antiquité païenne, et à ce titre à la fois prestigieux et suspects : exemplaires et mensongers, les deux caractères de la fable. Les associations implicites du mot poésie renvoient à l’invention ou au sens de ces récits, autant ou plus qu’à une composition versifiée. À preuve, l’usage que fait du mot Christine de Pizan au début de L’avision Christine, qui est un ouvrage en prose : Pour ouvrir la voie a declairier les choses soubz figures dictes en la premiere partie de ce livre, laquelle appert aucunement obscure, se aucun le temps a venir au gloser plus estanduement vouloit entendre, est asavoir selon la maniere de parler des pouetes, que souventesfois soubz figure de methaphore, c’est a dire de parole couverte, sont muciees maintes secretes sciences et pures veritez. Et en telle parolle dicte par poisie puet avoit mains entendemens, et lors est la poisie belle et soubtille quant elle puet servir a plusieurs ententes et que on la puet prendre a divers propos.10

Le propre de la poésie, à ses yeux, est de procurer une glose, un sens moral, mais surtout d’être polysémique, de « donner à penser » de façon indéfinie, comme le symbole selon Paul Ricœur. Elle conçoit la poésie comme un récit au 8

« En la diffinitio de trobar havem pauzat en romans fi, be conpassat, per la quals paraulas dizem que d’aquest saber non es degus romans ni degu dictatz sin non es be conpassatz e mes per rimas, o de sillabas non havia cert compas. Quar novas escrichas en comtans, can que sian noblas e bonas, ayssi col romans del sant Grazal e d’autras grand re, no son d’aquesta sciensa, per so quar no teno compas, ni mezura de sillabas, ni de rims » (éd. M. Gatien-Arnoult, Las flors del gay saber, estier dichas Las leys d’Amors. Fleurs du gai savoir, autrement dites Lois d’Amour [Toulouse, 1841], I :12). 9 Voir Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 80–90. 10 Christine Reno et Liliane Dulac, Christine de Pizan. Le livre de l’advision Cristine (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2001), 3, l. 4–12.

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sens inépuisable. Autrement dit, elle appelle poésie ce qu’en gros nous appelons mythe. Nous pourrions en rester là et conclure que le Moyen Âge français entend par poésie quelque chose qui n’a rien à voir avec ce que nous mettons sous ce mot. Mais est-ce que cela n’a vraiment rien à voir ? Après tout, il n’ignorait pas le sens du mot latin transposé du grec poiesis. Il lisait Horace. Le Moyen Âge latin a produit des arts poétiques dans lesquels apparaissent ce mot même ou ses dérivés : ainsi la Poetria nova de Geoffroy de Vinsauf. Grâce à la continuité de cette tradition latine, c’est bien ce mot, et non pas celui de chant, de chanson, de carmen ou de dit, qui a fini par prendre le sens qui est le sien aujourd’hui. C’est bien par le mot poésie que nous désignons la poésie. On peut le dire autrement. Le latin, qui a conscience de la prose et de la différence entre le vers et elle, désigne par poiesis la composition poétique. La langue vulgaire, qui ne découvre qu’avec retard la prose littéraire et ne la définit guère alors que négativement par l’absence de la rime,11 définit d’abord la poésie par un contenu, qui est un contenu narratif rapporté au modèle antique, et par son sens. Mais elle n’emprunte ce mot au latin qu’au moment où elle-même pratique la prose et en a conscience, ce qui semble impliquer que l’opposition du vers et de la prose n’est, malgré tout, pas absente de sa compréhension du mot poésie. Au reste, ce sont essentiellement des œuvres latines en vers, au premier rang desquelles celle d’Ovide, qui transmettent la fable antique. Le vers, la fable et le sens : l’ouvrage du Moyen Âge français qui mérite le plus exactement d’être qualifié de poésie est l’Ovide moralisé. De même que nous ne pouvons goûter les textes du passé que par un va-etvient entre ce que nous sommes et la reconstitution érudite de l’époque qui les a produits, de même il n’est donc pas absurde, devant une situation aussi complexe, de partir de ce que nous appelons poésie pour nous demander en quoi consiste la poésie de ce que le Moyen Âge appelle poésie. Et puisque ce qu’il appelle poésie, c’est la fable, la question devient la suivante : y a-t-il une poésie du récit qui ne soit pas une poésie malgré le récit ? C’est l’ensemble de la littérature médiévale qu’il faudrait alors écouter comme si nous l’entendions pour la première fois, c’est le cadre tout entier dans lequel nous la plaçons et nous la lisons qu’il faudrait examiner à nouveau et peut-être briser. Un tel programme n’est pas celui d’un essai de quelques pages. Tout au plus peut-on énumérer ici quelques angles d’attaque par lesquels il pourrait être abordé. Le premier serait peut-être de cerner le narratif présent dans la poésie non narrative et de montrer qu’elle est portée par lui. On ne ferait là que se fonder sur une intuition d’Yves Bonnefoy :

11

Voir la citation de Guilhem Molinier, ci-dessus, n. 8. Comme on le sait, dérimer ne signifie probablement pas « transposer de vers en prose », mais simplement « composer en prose, sans rimes », la prose se définissant négativement comme ce qui n’est pas en vers.

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Tout poème recèle … en sa profondeur un récit, une fiction, aussi peu complexes soient-ils parfois.12

Ce récit où le poème s’enracine, mais qu’il élude ou qu’il refuse, on le décèle partout, et il serait aisé de montrer comment il modèle chaque forme du lyrisme médiéval. Même les brefs rondeaux à danser. Ils sont enroulés, repliés sur euxmêmes. Ils ne comptent que cinq vers, un refrain de deux vers et un couplet de trois. Ce couplet voit son minuscule élan brisé par l’insertion, dès après son premier vers, du premier vers du refrain, qui reste alors lui-même en suspens. Ce qui donne un sens nouveau, un sens débordant, inépuisable, aux quelques mots si simples de ces chansons si simples, c’est qu’ils appartiennent à une histoire qui refuse de se dire. Une histoire toujours identique, mais que la dissonance entre le refrain et le couplet rend infiniment variée. La belle Aélis ne cesse de se lever de bon matin et de se faire belle pour aller danser. On ne l’accompagne jamais au-delà de ces préparatifs. Le chœur des danseurs vient interrompre le soliste, le refrain vient interrompre les velléités narratives du couplet. Il vient les interrompre en les accomplissant dans un autre ordre que celui de la poursuite d’un récit : il les interrompt en faisant vibrer un émoi indifféremment rapporté à la belle Aélis elle-même (« Dormez, jalous, je vos en pri » et « Dormez, jalous, et je m’envoiserai »), à un auditeur qui s’intéresse à elle (« Cui lairai ge mes amors, / amie, s’a vos non ? »), à des danseurs ou des danseuses occupés par les gestes de la carole (« Remirez vos braz »), à un amoureux qui rapporte tout ce qu’il entend à son propre amour (« Vos ne sentez mie les maus d’amer / si com ge faz ») – les deux derniers exemples étant fournis par le dernier vers d’une strophe et par le refrain qui la suit.13 Autrement dit, le récit ébauché ne fait pas que s’interrompre : il se métamorphose en un érotisme intersubjectif. Qu’attendre d’autre d’une chanson à danser ? La nature de cet effet poétique est si claire que lorsque Baude de la Kakerie consacre une chanson de soixante-dix vers environ à la belle Aélis, il n’en profite nullement pour poursuivre ou développer son histoire écrasée dans les cinq vers du rondeau, ou plutôt de la version du rondeau qu’il retient.14 Chaque strophe de son « pot-pourri » approfondit un de ces vers en donnant la parole au rossignol conseiller d’amour, dont les propos sont eux-mêmes constitués pour une bonne part d’une agglutination de vers empruntés à d’autres chansons. L’amant, auteur impliqué du poème, puis la jeune fille, implicitement confondue avec Aélis, sans toutefois que cette identification soit strictement nécessaire, finissent par entamer avec lui un dialogue qui se rapporte à leurs propres amours et à leur propre histoire, mais qui, constitué par les membra disjecta d’autres chansons, ne prétend 12 13

La présence et l’image (Paris : Mercure de France, 1983), 35. Félix Lecoy, Jean Renart. Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (Paris : Honoré Champion, 1962), 10–17, v. 311, 322, 536–37, 317, 518–19 ; voir aussi Nico van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains. Du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris : Klincksieck, 1969), 27–29, n° 2, 3, 7, 5. 14 Karl Bartsch, Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen (Leipzig : Vogel, 1870 ; réimpr. Genève : Slatkine, 1973), 93–95, I, 71.

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MICHEL ZINK

pas davantage conter cette histoire et se réfugie dans un intertexte amoureux et poétique. Un récit où le poème s’enracine, mais qu’il élude. C’est à cette condition que la poésie est dans le récit. L’esthétique ainsi mise en œuvre est celle du fragment, de l’allusion faite d’un ton entendu à ce qui n’existe pas en dehors de l’allusion ellemême, mais à quoi elle donne une réalité puissante dans l’appréhension poétique du monde. C’est un effet fondateur de la poésie médiévale. C’est typiquement celui des chansons de toile.15 Il permettrait peut-être de jeter une lumière nouvelle sur la relation entre lai narratif et lai lyrique. Il permettrait certainement de mettre en relation les deux grandes formes de l’esquive qui font de Chrétien de Troyes un poète : celle du tableau d’ensemble et de l’histoire globale du monde arthurien, constamment supposés connus et ainsi maintenus dans l’inexistence ; celle du raccourci stylistique, de la brisure, qui n’est pas seulement celle du couplet, et du fondu enchaîné d’un épisode à l’autre. Cet effet revêt probablement une importance toute particulière dans les chansons des troubadours, alors que leur lecture à travers la grille de la poésie formelle le fait nécessairement disparaître. Qu’elles visent à une perfection idéale de l’amour et du chant, qui entreraient ainsi en parfaite coïncidence,16 et que cette ambition les pousse à la généralisation, au détriment de l’anecdotique et du particulier, cela ne fait guère de doute. Là n’est peut-être pas pourtant le dernier mot de leur poétique. Car ces chansons si peu anecdotiques le sont en même temps à l’extrême. Elles mentionnent constamment des lieux et des personnes réels ou y font allusion. Elles s’adressent à un destinataire nommément désigné et s’insèrent dans un jeu continu d’échanges sociaux. Que faire de ces caractères très visibles, et dont l’importance n’est nullement méconnue, puisqu’ils sont bien évidemment précieux pour l’attribution et la datation des poèmes, comme pour la compréhension de l’interminable dialogue qu’entretiennent les unes avec les autres les 15

Michel Zink, Les chansons de toile (Paris : Honoré Champion, 1978). Voir aussi Le Moyen Âge et ses chansons ou un passé en trompe-l’œil (Paris : Éditions de Fallois, 1996), où des observations analogues sont faites dans une autre perspective. 16 Faut-il citer une fois de plus les chansons si connues de Bernard de Ventadour ? Non es meravelha s’eu chan melhs de nul autre chantador, que plus me tra˙l cors vas amor e melhs sui faihz a so coman.

Il n’est pas étonnant que je chante mieux que nul autre chanteur, car mon cœur m’entraîne plus vers l’amour et je me soumets mieux à ses commandements.

Chantars no pot gaire valer, si d’ins dal cor no mou lo chans ; ni chans no pot dal cor mover, si no i es fin’ amor coraus. Per so es mos chantars cabaus qu’en joi d’amor ai et enten la boch’ e˙ls olhs e˙l cor e˙l sen.

Chanter ne peut guère avoir de valeur si le chant ne vient pas du fond du cœur ; et le chant ne peut pas venir du fond du coeur s’il ne renferme pas un amour parfait, venant du cœur. Là est la supériorité de mon chant : à la joie d’amour je voue ma bouche, mes yeux, mon cœur et ma raison.

Et :

Carl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn. Seine Lieder (Halle : Niemeyer, 1915), 31, v. 1–4, p. 188 et 15, v. 1–7, p. 85.

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chansons des troubadours ? Au Moyen Âge même, leur interprétation ne s’est-elle pas fondée sur eux, puisqu’ils alimentent le contenu des vidas et des razos ? Il y a vingt ans, j’avais cru pouvoir soutenir que vidas et razos offrent une lecture déjà anachronique des chansons, correspondant à une poétique nouvelle, celle du dit, qui s’impose dans le courant du XIIIe siècle, une poétique marquée par la mise en scène du moi et l’affectation de la confidence.17 Aujourd’hui, ces vues me paraissent sommaires. Chansons d’une part, vidas et razos de l’autre, n’appartiennent pas à des époques si distinctes, et il est toujours hasardeux de supposer des mutations brutales de la sensibilité et du goût. Il me semble, au contraire, que l’aspiration du chant à une idéalisation généralisatrice n’est nullement incompatible avec le récit larvé qu’il recèle dans ses profondeurs et autour duquel il se cristallise comme la perle autour de la poussière. L’usage du senhal est à lui seul un moyen d’attirer l’attention à la fois sur l’histoire et sur la nécessité de l’enfouir. Il n’y a, de la part des razos, ni naïveté ni grossièreté critique à choisir de mettre au jour ce récit caché : c’est une démarche de type exégétique naturelle à la pensée médiévale. Aussi bien, comme Elizabeth Poe l’a montré,18 les razos ont précédé les vidas. Autrement dit, la lecture critique du poème sur la base du jeu entre le récit et sa dissimulation a été première. La construction biographique autosuffisante et indépendante de l’enracinement dans la matière poétique n’est venue qu’ensuite. Même si elle est fondée, une telle interprétation ne remet pas en cause les perspectives nouvelles ouvertes par la poésie du dit telle qu’elle se développe à partir du XIIIe siècle. L’histoire, fictive ou rêvée, mais toujours affichée, du moi invite à une réflexion particulièrement aiguë sur le récit en poésie. Cette réflexion, Nancy Regalado a été une des premières à en mesurer l’importance dans son livre fondateur sur Rutebeuf.19 Qu’il me soit permis, en signe de l’admiration et de l’affection que je lui porte, de clore ces quelques remarques à la fois trop ambitieuses et trop sommaires en tentant de montrer que la Griesche d’hiver se constitue en poème, non seulement en se fondant sur l’histoire supposée de son auteur, mais aussi en changeant le sens même du mot histoire et sa relation au poète. Contre le tenz qu’aubres deffuelle, Qu’il ne remaint en branche fuelle Qui n’aut a terre, Por povretei qui moi aterre, Qui de toute part me muet guerre, Contre l’yver, Dont mout me sont changié li ver, 17 18

Au temps où l’arbre s’effeuille – sur la branche il ne reste feuille qui n’aille à terre –, comme la pauvreté me terrasse et de partout me fait la guerre, au temps d’hiver (voilà bien une autre chanson !),

Michel Zink, La subjectivité littéraire (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 49–50. Elizabeth Poe, From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal (Birmingham, Alabama : Summa, 1984) ; « Vidas and Razos », dans A Handbook of the Troubadours, éd. F. R. P. Akehurst et Judith Davis (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995), 185–97 ; Compilatio : Lyric Texts and Prose Commentaries in Troubadour Manuscript H (Vat. Lat. 3207) (Lexington, Kentucky : French Forum, 2000). 19 Nancy Freeman Regalado, Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf : A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century (New Haven et Londres : Yale University Press, 1970).

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Mon dit commence trop diver De povre estoire. Povre sens et povre memoire M’a Diex doné, li rois de gloire, Et povre rente, Et froit au cul quant byze vente : Li vens me vient, li vens m’esvente.

je commence mon dit lamentable : une pauvre histoire ! Pauvre cervelle, pauvre mémoire m’a données Dieu, le roi de gloire, et pauvre rente, et froid au cul quand bise vente : le vent me frappe, le vent m’évente.20

L’approche de l’hiver s’accorde avec la misère du poète, que le froid rend plus cruelle. Le dénuement des arbres est aussi le sien : les deux poèmes de la griesche montrent que c’est surtout du froid que souffre le misérable, qui joue et perd ses vêtements aux dés. Ce poème divers (lamentable), qui est aussi un poème d’hiver, ce poème « de pauvre histoire » est l’œuvre d’un poète peu doué, à qui Dieu a donné « pauvre sens et pauvre mémoire » – ce poème ne se donne pas pour un beau poème sur un sujet misérable, mais pour un poème misérable sur un sujet misérable. Le temps d’hiver, le dit divers, l’échec ailleurs triomphalement annoncé par la griesche en réponse aux dents qui claquent de froid :21 tout est à l’unisson. On comprend alors que le poème « de pauvre histoire » n’est pas un poème qui conte une histoire sans intérêt ou l’histoire d’un pauvre, mais un poème dont l’arrière-fond est une telle histoire et dont l’identité poétique est d’être un poème indigent de l’indigence. D’où une aporie : comment ce misérable poème atteindra-t-il à l’exactitude ? Il n’y atteint pas. Il prétend au contraire jouer de la similitude entre l’indigence poétique et l’indigence matérielle autant que morale de son auteur. Le poète courtois, en gage de sa sincérité et de la vérité de son propos, excipe de la perfection de son poème, qui répond à la perfection de son amour. Rutebeuf fait à la fois la même chose et l’inverse. La faiblesse de son poème et de son talent, la facilité bavarde et geignarde des tercets coués, témoignent de la réalité de sa misère et de son vice. Témoignage négatif, certes. Réduit à ses propres forces, le poète est incapable de rendre la vérité.22 Mais une telle humilité recèle en soi un autre principe poétique, celui d’une poétique de l’imperfection et de la fêlure, que l’éternelle plaisanterie de Rutebeuf sur son nom, ou sur son sobriquet, ne cesse de rappeler. Le poète indigent ne dit la vérité que de l’indigence. Sur tout le reste, il ne peut que mentir. Mais voici que son indigence, qui le pousse à ne donner de lui qu’une image caricaturale et dévalorisante, voici que sa misère et son vice, qui lui imposent un genre de vie en contradiction avec le cycle de la nature, principe d’harmonie pour toute la poésie de son temps (il dort à l’heure où les autres travaillent, il va se coucher ivre mort), voici que sa maladresse, qui lui interdit l’exactitude de l’expression, le servent, 20

Griesche d’hiver, v. 1–14, éd. et trad. Michel Zink, Rutebeuf. Œuvres complètes (1989), nouv. éd. revue et mise à jour (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 2001), 196–97. 21 « La dent dit : ‘Quac’, / Et la griesche dit : ‘Eschac !’ » (La dent dit : « Claque » / Et la grièche dit : « Échec ! »), Griesche d’été, v. 21–22, éd. citée, 204–5. 22 C’est ce que dit explicitement la fin du Miracle du sacristain, au terme d’un jeu de plusieurs vers sur le nom de Rutebeuf : « Rutebuez huevre rudement, / Souvent en sa rudesce ment » (v. 759–60, éd. citée, 630).

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jusqu’à lui donner l’inspiration de la vérité, dans le monde décalé, inversé, qui est celui du rêve et qui est le sien : ainsi dans la Leçon d’Hypocrisie et d’Humilité et dans la Voie d’Humilité (Voie de Paradis). Le pitoyable Rutebeuf, qui « souvent dans sa rudesse ment » et à qui le sommeil de l’ivresse enlève jusqu’à ses pauvres facultés, peut alors s’égaler à l’auteur du Roman de la Rose et s’abandonner à un songe « qui puis ne fu mie mensonge ».23 Entre les fumées de l’ivresse, les illusions du rêve, celles des misérables qui, en quête d’un instant de répit, se prennent à leurs propres rodomontades, les mensonges du poète trop malhabile pour dire vrai, il n’y a certes aucune place pour un récit assuré qui fonderait le poème. Mais le poème naît de ces impossibles récits.

23

Leçon d’Hypocrisie et d’Humilité, v. 20, éd. citée, 296.

Colin Muset and Performance Samuel N. Rosenberg

More than is commonly the case in the trouvère repertory, the songs attributable to Colin Muset ask to be understood in terms of performance. Nothing is more banal than a poem that begins, Chanter m’estuet (Gace Brulé, Blondel de Nesle, et al.), and even incipit expansions such as Onques maiz nus hom ne chanta / En la maniere que je chant (Never before has any man sung as I sing [Blondel de Nesle]) and J’ai souvent d’Amors chanté; / Oncore en chant (I have often sung of Love; I still sing of it [Gillebert de Berneville]) abound in the repertory. These references to singing, however, are effectively expressions of amorous sentiment rather than evocations of a performative activity, and the lyric persona that they project is far more clearly a lover than a musician. The case of Colin Muset is different. It is hard to read through the corpus of Colin’s compositions without repeatedly sensing the primacy of the music-maker. The texts portray an itinerant entertainer; he is one who sings, moreover, not only about singing but also about playing instruments. There seem to be irregularities in his versification, but if we find the meter and homophony somewhat problematic, it is only until we have matched text to melody and recognized the reality of a vocal rendition; likewise, the freedom of live performance explains apparently missing or supernumerary lines of poetry. My intention is to examine various traits of Colin’s lyrics that point to the essentiality of performance. The very name Muset, of course, a sobriquet, suggests nothing less. It is the witty outcome of an historically unclear intertwining of two or three etymological strings, one from Latin mus, another also from Latin but ultimately from Greek mousa, a third perhaps of Celtic origin.1 Together they come to produce in Old French both a cluster of words that evoke pleasure and amusement and a family of terms having to do with music. The form muset itself evidently means a tune played on the instrument known as a musette and, by extension, a song, or the words set to that tune. That is what Colin seems to mean in the phrase, Si li ai

1

See Alain Rey et al., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 vols. (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992), s.vv. muse, museau, muser, musette.

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chanté le muset / Par grant amour (And out of great love I sang her the song).2 At the same time, the word carries resonances of lightness and gayety. Applied to the performer himself, it identifies the poet-singer with the product of his art and suggests a (public) persona at some remove from the grave practitioners of the high lyric form called le grand chant. And note that it is Colin himself who calls himself Muset;3 he is what he does, and what he does makes him what he is; he absorbs into his very identity the activity that earns him his livelihood; he is Colin “Songster.” The same poem that furnishes this identification, the first of four that include Colin’s full name within the text itself, fills out the image of its apparent creator with a first-person presentation of his musical endeavors. Like the birds in May, he sings, but he also fiddles, and the words denoting his dual performance recur in every stanza of the composition: the nouns muse, vïele, archet; the verbs vïele[r], chant[er], muse[r]. The song – Volez oïr la muse Muset? (RS 966) – turns out to be not simply a celebration of spring and love, but a performance about a celebratory performance. It may be the most strikingly and thoroughly self-reflexive of Colin’s works, but hardly the only one in which his jongleuresque activity is an essential component of the very text. Indeed, of the twenty-two songs attributable to Colin with some degree of justification,4 no fewer than seventeen evoke the composer’s life as a musical entertainer. In another of the internally “signed” pieces, En mai, quant li rossignolez (RS 967), the singing of the birds inspires the je of the text to fashion a flajolet, a flageolet, or little flute, out of a willow twig and then use it to play tunes about love, d’amors flajoler. A further “signed” song (RS 74) begins with an announcement of itself – En ceste note dirai (I shall speak in this song) – and then concludes with the announcement, Ceste note est fenie (This song is finished); the performance is thus embedded in the text. In a number of pieces, we hear the speaker proclaim that his singing is occasioned by love. Une novele amorette que j’ai / Me fait chanter (A new love of mine makes me sing), begins RS 48, and RS 1313 comes to the point in its first three words: Or veul chanteir (Now I want to sing). The first stanza of Bels m’est li tens (RS 284) presents a program: Con fins amanz / Chanterai por la plus bele (As a true lover, I shall sing on account of the most beautiful woman), and in RS 989 Colin opens his performance with a lack of love in mind: Je chantasse d’amorettes / S’en eüsse l’aquoison (I would sing of love if I had the grounds to do so). On one occasion (RS 922), love is again the force motivating the perform2

3

4

Volez oïr la muse Muset? (RS 966), line 2.3. The RS number denotes the place of the song in Hans Spanke’s inventory of trouvère compositions, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösichen Liedes (Leiden: Brill, 1955). The first line of the song in question – Volez oïr la muse Muset? – includes only the sobriquet. In the incipit of the final stanza, however, the poet “signs” his composition with his entire name: Or a Colin Muset musé. See Introduction to Les chansons de Colin Muset, Textes et mélodies, ed. Christopher Callahan and Samuel N. Rosenberg (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005a).

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ance, though here it is a harmful one: Je chante conme desvez, / Com cil qui est guilez / D’Amors (I sing as a madman, like a man duped by Love). This level of incorporation of singing into the song text, however, is fairly commonplace in the trouvère repertory. One has only to glance at the incipits, let alone any other lines, of trouvère songs in a broadly representative anthology to have some notion of the extent to which the mere announcement of singing formed part of the poets’ texts. Among the 130 attributed pieces in one such collection, we find over a score of opening lines such as: Chançon legiere a entendre / Ferai (I shall compose / perform a song easy to understand) Par amors ferai chançon (I shall compose / perform a song out of love) Chanter m’estuet de recomens (I must sing yet again) Iriez, pensis, chanterai (Vexed, worried, I shall sing) Chançon legiere a chanter / … Ferai (I shall compose / perform a song easy to sing).5

In Colin, however, the performance in the song goes beyond such formulations. We have already seen a few examples. Others include specific evocations not only of performance but of the poet’s status as a professional jongleur. In one such composition (RS 476), he begins by complaining to a patron that his fiddling has gone unremunerated: Sire cuens, j’ai vïelé Devant vous en vostre ostel Si ne m’avez riens doné Ne mes gages aquité. (Sir count, I have fiddled before you in your home, but you have given me nothing and haven’t paid my wages.)

In other manorial settings, recalled in Devers Chastelvilain (RS 123), the entertainer is delighted with the reward of good clothes et maint bel don (and many a fine gift). One handsomely crafted heterostrophic piece (RS 1302), a love song, proceeds for a long while with no such self-consciousness. Suddenly, in the sixth stanza, the song turns back upon itself: Douce riens por cui je chant, / En mon descort vos demant / Un ris (Sweet creature for whom I sing, in [this] my descort I ask you for a smile); and then, two stanzas later, the text reveals that the whole work is simply a fiction designed for the self-entertainment of a patroness: Mon descort ma dame aport, / La bone duchesse, por chanter (I offer my descort to my lady the good duchess for her to sing). The bele to whom the “I” of the poem has

5

The incipits are all cited from Chansons des trouvères, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, with Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1995). Trouvère names and RS numbers are, in the order followed above: Conon de Béthune, RS 629; Richard de Semilly, RS 1860; Gontier de Soignies, RS 636; Andrieu Contredit, RS 69; Raoul de Soissons, RS 778.

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been addressing his words of love thus turns out to be a fantasy, while a living duchess emerges, who will now have a new descort to enjoy performing. Then, there are songs that, without explicitly stating the jongleur’s activity, depict the festive circumstances in which he enjoys his work; he sings in RS 582: … quant j’oi lou flaihutel Soneir aveuc la tabor; Damoiselles et donzel Chantent et font grant rivel. (… when I hear the reed pipe played along with the drum, [and] young ladies and men sing and have a merry time.)

In RS 1298 he evokes the martial and patronly sides of such exuberance: … tornoier Et behordeir Et grosses lances brisier Et bial josteir Et joie rancomensier Et tout doneir Et despandre sans dongier Et fors geteir. (… tourneying and tilting and splitting heavy lances and fine jousting and partying again and giving and spending unstintingly and being wasteful.)

But Colin’s repertory includes as well reflections not of the excitement of the itinerant entertainer’s life but of a reality that is darker and meaner; he laments in RS 1693: Se g’iere Deus, je feroie Lo siecle tot altrement Et meillor gent i metroie, Car cist n’i valent neient. Kant plus ont or et argent, Vair et gris et dras de soie, Tant sont moins largemetant. (If I were God, I would shape the world differently and put in better people, for these are worthless. The more gold and silver they have, the more furs and silken fabrics, the less generous they are.)

Thus the body of work more or less attributable to Colin Muset is striking for the salience it gives to the singer-player and to the depiction, whether explicit or merely suggested, of melodic and verbal performance.6 The essentiality of performance in this corpus, however, emerges yet more tellingly, if less visibly, in a quite different fashion. A tendency toward prosodic irregularity seems to characterize our poet’s style. Joseph Bédier, responsible for the long-standard critical edition of Colin Muset, provides an extensive inventory of these textual anom6

For further elaboration of such remarks, see Callahan’s introductory essay in Christopher Callahan and Samuel N. Rosenberg, Les chansons de Colin Muset, traduites en français moderne (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005b).

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19

alies,7 and other philologists have over the years remarked on them as well, often in an attempt to emend, to regularize, to (re)produce a verbally perfect text – and sometimes not.8 Bédier suspects that some of these anomalies – wrong syllablecounts, stanzas of uneven length – are related to music, but he does not explore the possibility, simply writing, “La musique rend compte souvent des licences apparentes énumérées ci-avant: ce sont de ces vers ou de ces couplets que Ronsard aurait dits ‘accordés à la lyre’ ” (1938: xix). The most widely anthologized of Colin’s songs, Volez oïr la muse Muset? (RS 966), an isostrophic composition, shows an anomaly of each sort – syllable count and stanza length – and each instance is understandable in terms of performance. The first line, just quoted, contains nine syllables of text and nine notes of music. The second line, En mai fu fete un matinet, with only eight syllables, is set to the same nine-pitched melodic phrase; this holds as well for the first and second verses of each of the subsequent three stanzas, all octosyllabic and all sung to the same nine-note phrase. If we consider text alone, the incipit of the song is, to be sure, metrically irregular. However, if we broaden our view to include the other, the musical, facet of this composition, we see that there is no irregularity at all, merely the fact that in seven of the eight lines in question there is one syllable that is sung to two notes. Nothing could be more frequent or even commonplace in a song. The hypermetric line is certainly not an error that calls for emendation. What is true of the metrical problem in Volez oïr suggests a response, too, to the exceptional brevity of the initial stanza of the same work, the text of which, compared with the text of the succeeding stanzas, is missing one line. It is clear, in this poem of four 18-line strophes, that the first stanza has a lacuna where line 16 should be. Where the following stanzas have five concluding lines, stanza 1, in all the manuscript sources, has only four: Qui me rapele: “Vien ça! si vïele .......... Ta muse en chantant Tant mignotement.” 7 8

Joseph Bédier, Les chansons de Colin Muset, 2nd ed. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1938), xviii– xxi. See, among others, Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1889); Alfred Jeanroy, Louis Brandin, and Pierre Aubry, Lais et descorts français du XIIIe siècle. Texte et musique (Paris: Welter, 1901); Alfred Jeanroy and Arthur Långfors, Chansons satiriques et bachiques du XIII e siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1921); John H. Marshall, “Textual Transmission and Complex Musico-Metrical Form in the Old French Lyric,” Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T. B. W. Reid, ed. Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984), 119–48; Madeleine Tyssens, “Chansons hétéromorphiques?” Cultura Neolatina 48 (1988): 113–41, and “Colin Muset et la liberté formelle,” Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen. “Farai chansoneta novele” (Caen: Université de Caen, 1989), 403–17; Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Poétique de Colin Muset,” Perspectives Médiévales, L’expérience lyrique au moyen âge, supplément au no 28 (2002): 79–94; as well, of course, as Dominique Billy, L’architecture lyrique médiévale (Montpellier: Section Française de l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes, 1989).

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SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG

([a lovely maiden] who calls back to me: “Come here! and fiddle and sing your tune oh so sweetly.”)

Sense and syntax mask the omission, for the text is semantically and grammatically complete as it stands. Furthermore, the music – supplied, as always in the case of isostrophic songs, only with this, the first, stanza – shows the same deficiency. The versification of the following stanzas, however, makes it evident that there is a gap in the text and that it occurs at line 16, and, more precisely, that the line should be a four-syllable feminine verse ending in -ele. Recourse to the reality of performance provides a more than plausible solution to the problem: We face not an example of the “versification … négligée” that Bédier attributes to Colin (1938: xix), but, quite likely, an inadvertent scribal leap over a performance-grounded echo of line 15, an echo due to the poet-musician himself. Let us, then, read – and hear – Qui me rapele: “Vien ça! si vïele [– Ça! si vïele –] Ta muse en chantant Tant mignotement.”

The reprise sounds natural and justified, moreover, in a context presenting a voice qui rapele, that “calls back.” Such a performance-minded approach to editing Volez oïr is the one adopted by Christopher Callahan and myself in our new edition of the songs of Colin Muset, where we have of course extended it to all the compositions showing similar problems.9 Ancontre le tens novel (RS 582), for example, preserved in only one manuscript and without music, is a five-stanza piece whose stanzas are clearly meant to show the same prosodic structure. Each comprises four blocks of three heptasyllabic verses, rhymed aab, and includes, as the tenth of its twelve lines, the syntactically independent refrain, Triboudainne et triboudel! – that is, each stanza except the final one, which has two extra lines before the refrain appears: … boivre a la grant chalor. Muels m’i ain k’en un baitel En la meir en grant poour! Triboudainne et triboudel! Plux ain le jeu de praiel Ke faire malvaix sejor!

5.9

(… drink in the great heat. I prefer being there [i.e., in the garden] to being in a boat on the sea in great fear. Triboudainne and triboudel! I prefer garden amusement to being in an inhospitable place.)

The extra lines could easily be regarded as evidence of unwelcome meddling by a copyist, awkwardly anticipating the general sense of the stanza’s final verses.10 9 10

Callahan-Rosenberg (2005a). See, for example, Tyssens (1989), 415.

COLIN MUSET AND PERFORMANCE

21

That view could be used to justify regularizing the text through excision. If, however, we bear in mind the centrality of performance, we see not two lines too many but one too few, the missing line, no doubt a scribal omission, being the refrain. Supplying the refrain in its normal place, i.e., after line 9, we gain a normal stanza of twelve verses followed by an extra block of three. The extra block entails a repetition of the refrain and a restatement of the poet’s closing notion, that he enjoys being where he is. The song should thus end as follows: … boivre a la grant chalor. [Triboudainne et triboudel!] Muels m’i ain k’en un baitel En la meir en grant poour! Triboudainne et triboudel! Plux ain le jeu de praiel Ke faire malvaix sejor!

5.9

The emendation, which Christopher Callahan and I adopted in our edition of Colin, expresses the decision of the poet-singer to reinforce the conclusion of his song. It is a willed repetitive device, a mark of closure such as has very often been found in vocal and instrumental performances right through the centuries to the present day. In terms of the Old French lyric repertory, our solution offers a final reprise analogous to, and structurally identical to, the envoi found in numerous other trouvère compositions.11 The song Il me covient renvoisier (RS 1300) is another piece presenting problems best resolved by remembering the fundamental importance of performing. As indicated by the evidence of melody and prosody in the sole manuscript source of this work, its strophes are meant to be metrically identical; yet they are not identical. The first stanza provides the regular structural model: 7a 4b 7a 4b 3b 11b 3b 11b. Stanza 2 lengthens this pattern by three lines, stating the penultimate 3b (with different words) four times rather than once. Stanza 3, on the other hand, lacks the final pairing of 3b and 11b. Though Bédier, having accepted Colin’s versification as “à la fois raffinée et négligée” and acknowledged the availability of melodic iteration (1938: xix and 60), pays no further attention to the strophic unevenness of Il me covient, other scholars have been considerably more concerned by such irregularity.12 The fact is that nothing in the music bars the performer from repeating a significant phrase. In stanza 2, the context of exuberance leads the poet-singer to expand the seventh verse into a string of differently worded, trisyllabic exclamations: Or maingons! Solaçons! Deportons! Bons poissons! 11

2.7

See Samuel N. Rosenberg, “The Envoi in Trouvère Lyric, Especially in the Songs of Gace Brulé,” Romance Philology 58 (2004): 51–67. 12 See Jeanroy (1889); Jeanroy, Brandin, Aubry (1901); Jeanroy-Långfors (1921); Hendrik van der Werf, Trouvères-Melodien II (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979); Marshall (1984); Tyssens (1988 and 1989).

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SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG

Vins poignanz et bons rapiaux et venoisons!

2.8

(Now let’s eat! Let’s have a good time! Let’s enjoy ourselves! Fine fish! Sharp wines and good turnips and game!)

For all their textual differences, the extra lines remain identical in versification and musical phrase. (Note that the fifth stanza of Sire cuens, j’ai vïelé [RS 476] presents a parallel instance of expansion through the introduction of verses which, while lexically new, are still iterative in the formal terms of syntax, prosody, and melody.) In the third, the final, stanza of Il me covient, the quiet resolution of lines 5 and 6 is readily followed by a repetition of the same verbal material. The melody (given, as said, with stanza 1) explicitly concludes with such a repetition, and there is no reason for the performer not to let it accommodate a reprise of his concluding words: S’ele me done un baisier En receley, Je n’avroie pas si chier Une cité; J’en pri Dey. Lors avrai quanque je quier a point mené. [J’en pri Dey. Lors avrai quanque je quier a point mené.]

3.4

3.8

(If she gave me a kiss in secret, I would consider it more precious than a whole city; I pray God for it. Then I’ll have everything I want, just as I want it. [I pray God for it. Then I’ll have everything I want, just as I want it.])

It is thus the elasticity of vocal performance that allows us to understand how both a stanza that is apparently too long and one that is apparently too short can be contained within the regular structural confines of an isostrophic song. In truth, performance is a recurrent and defining reality in the lyric corpus attributable to Colin Muset. It is manifested in several ways and, most strikingly – at least from an editorial point of view – goes far in explaining the prosodic anomalies that seem to be characteristic of his style. The foregoing discussion is illustrative rather than exhaustive; the treatment of stanza length, for example, might well be complemented by consideration of the songs Mult m’anue d’iver ke tant ait dureit (RS 428) and Quant je voy yver retorner (RS 893).13 It is no doubt not venturing too broad a claim to say that a performance-minded approach to other Old French lyrics with similar problems can prove enlightening. Paul Zumthor was surely not wrong to speak of “la prédominance de l’interprétation vocale sur le maintien strict du modèle, et cela à tous les niveaux de formalisation: anisosyllabisme du vers, mais aussi bien irrégularité des strophes dans tel texte où on les attendrait égales” (the priority of vocal performance over strict maintenance of the [compositional] model, a priority obtaining at every level of structure: not only 13

For all the pieces in question, see our comments on the individual compositions in CallahanRosenberg (2005a).

COLIN MUSET AND PERFORMANCE

23

unevenness in the syllable count of verse-lines, but also irregularity in the length of stanzas in poems where we would expect regularity).14 It is the recognition of this predominance that results in a keener understanding of Colin Muset’s poetry and that can elucidate the workings of other medieval lyrics, too. If this is perhaps not true of the grand chant courtois, which is so sharply focused on the finelywrought, intricate verbal text, it is assuredly the case of songs of a more popular or jongleuresque type. The edition of the anonymous ballettes in the trouvère songbook Oxford, Bodleian, MS Douce 308 has already been guided by such respect for the importance of performance,15 and the same principle may be fruitfully applied elsewhere as well.

14

Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix. De la “littérature” médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 204. My translation. 15 The Old French Ballette: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, ed. and trans. Eglal DossQuinby and Samuel N. Rosenberg, music ed. Elizabeth Aubrey (Geneva: Droz, 2006).

Subtilitas and Delectatio: Ne m’a pas oublié Edward H. Roesner

The later medieval motet has long been known for its technical virtuosity and intricate design, and for verbal and musical content of extraordinary subtlety. It is only relatively recently, however, that scholars have begun seriously to look for evidence of comparable sophistication in the large and diverse corpus of motets surviving from the thirteenth century, when the motet emerged as a distinct genre. This essay will contribute to the exploration of the thirteenth-century motet, focusing on a single two-voice composition to make its points: Ne m’a pas oublié / IN SECULUM, known from a single source, the motet manuscript Montpellier H 196, fols. 246r–v (see the facsimile in Fig. 1, and my transcription in Ex. 1).1 This work is unlikely to have had a wide circulation: It may never have existed in more than a handful of copies. And, there is no reason to suppose that it is significantly older than the Montpellier manuscript itself, or that it originated far from the place where that book was copied – that is, that it was written any earlier than the 1260s or 1270s, and anywhere other than in Paris.2 1

2

Numbers in the edition refer to long “beats” (the dotted quarter note). The longa recta and brevis altera are rendered as quarter notes, the brevis recta as an eighth note, the semibreve as a sixteenth note. Notes in ligature are bracketed; the unwritten plica note appears as a small note slurred to its note of origin. The tenor and motetus disagree at b. 124–25; both alternatives are given. Other editions include Georg Kuhlmann, Die zweistimmigen französischen Motetten des Kodex Montpellier, Faculté de Médecine, H 196, in ihrer Bedeutung für die Musikgeschichte des 13. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch, 1938), no. 207; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle, 4 vols. (Paris: Oiseau-Lyre, 1935–39), no. 207; and Hans Tischler, The Montpellier Codex, 7 vols. in 4 (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 1978–85), no. 207. The text is in Gaston Raynaud, Recueil de motets français des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881–83), no. 163; and Gustav Jacobsthal, “Die Texte der Liederhandschrift von Montpellier H 196,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 3 (1879): 526–56, and 4 (1880): 35– 64 and 278–317, no. 207, at 280. Recordings include “Music of the Middle Ages, vol. 7: The French Ars Antique (13th Century),” Russell Oberlin et al. (originally issued on Expériences Anonymes, most recently re-issued on Lyrichord, LYRCD 8007), 3; and “Love’s Illusion: Music from the Montpellier Codex, 13th Century,” Anonymous 4 (Harmonia mundi, HMU 907109 ), 26. Regarding this manuscript see Mary Wolinski, “The Montpellier Codex: Its Compilation, Notation, and Implications for the Chronology of the Thirteenth-Century Motet” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis, 1988); eadem, “The Compilation of the Montpellier Codex,” Early Music History 11 (1992): 263–301; and Catherine Parsoneault, “The Montpellier Codex: Royal Influence and Musical Taste in Thirteenth-Century Paris” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001).

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With its motetus setting a poem in French and its tenor borrowed from plainchant, the two voices of Ne m’a pas oublié constitute a “typical” motet in most respects. Nevertheless, its use of a single vernacular text places it close to the boundaries of what we might understand a “motet” to be, as something of a hybrid, half motet, half accompanied song. Such works were not carefully transmitted on the whole, perhaps because the kinds of manuscripts in which they were often collected, chansonniers and the like, were likely to be unused to the precision and technical expertise required for the writing down of musica mensurabilis. The skillfully notated fascicle of two-voice French motets in Montpellier H 196 is something of an exception, therefore. And Ne m’a pas oublié enjoys a rather exceptional position within that collection: Although it is situated in the middle of the Montpellier corpus of two-voice French motets, it appears at the beginning of a gathering. This strategic location suggests that it may represent the start of a self-contained libellus within the larger collection, a possibility strengthened by the elaborate illuminations that grace the motet. (The only other appearance of an historiated initial in the interior of a fascicle, on fol. 5v, marks the beginning of the collection of organa tripla.) The opening work in a collection is likely to be special in some way, either because it is widely disseminated or because it is of unusual interest in its own right, displaying striking technical features or significant poetic content. There may be more to Ne m’a pas oublié than its modest dimensions imply at first glance. We begin with a look at the text of the motet.3 Motetus 1. Ne m’a pas oublié 2. cele dont j’atent 3. l’asouagement 4. des maus que je sent, 5. quant si doucement 6. m’a douné 7. son cuer et son cors a faire ma volenté. 8. Jamés autrement 9. n’eüsse un jour santé 10. du mal qui tant m’a duré, 11. qu’ai buer enduré, 12. puis qu’aseüré 13. m’a loiaument et juré 14. que sans fauseté 15. s’amor ai. 16. Mes de ce ne sai 17. que je ferai, 18. quant si malement 19. m’ont novelement 20. mesdisant corucié 3

She has not forgotten me, she from whom I await the assuaging of the woes that I feel, for so gently she has granted me her heart and her body, to do with as I will. Never otherwise would I ever recover from the woe which has lasted so long [and] which I have luckily endured, now that she has assured me, loyally, and has sworn that without any falsity I have her love. But I do not know what I will do about this, since so grievously have slanderers lately stirred up against me

Irregularity in line length and the play of rhyme within lines make it difficult to map the structure of this text. My reading reflects the rhyme and the treatment of the poem in the music (presumably, poet and composer are one and the same). I am grateful to Evelyn Birge Vitz, Eglal Doss-Quinby, and Samuel N. Rosenberg for their assistance with the translation.

SUBTILITAS AND DELECTATIO: NE M’A PAS OUBLIÉ

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

a son dolent mari maleüré. Mes se felon de ce l’ont mis a raison, trop ont fait grant traïson.

27

her sorry, wretched husband. But if scoundrels have spoken to him about this, they have committed exceedingly great treachery.

Tenor IN SECULUM.

The tenor ordinarily provides the overall foundation for the design, musical content, and “message” of the motet. Usually drawn from plainchant, the tenor carries within its melody and text the liturgical and Scriptural connotations of the chant, informing the content of the upper voice or voices. IN SECULUM is a snippet from the verse of the gradual of the Mass for Easter Sunday, Haec dies quam fecit dominus. The Scriptural source of the tenor text is a phrase from the first verse of Ps. 117: “Confitemini domino quoniam bonus, quoniam in saeculum misericordia eius” (O praise ye the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy is for ever); the gradual respond is taken from v. 24 of the same psalm, “Haec est dies quam fecit dominus, exultemus et laetemur in ea” (This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us be glad and rejoice therein). The psalm concludes with words identical to those of its opening verse. Thus “in seculum” links the tenor and the motet to the psalm as a whole, evoking both its message and the occasion, Easter, on which it would have been heard. (Despite the significance of the tenor text, it is not clear that the words “in seculum” were intended to be actually sung. There is no obvious way to sing them, given the manipulation of the chant melody by the motet composer that we will discuss presently. It may be that the text is included in the manuscript purely as an identifier, to make sure the reader recognizes the source – and hence the “content” – of the melody. If this is so, it is one of several clues hinting at the way the manuscript was intended to be used, suggesting that the motet was to be “read” as well as “heard.”) Through its Biblical and ritual associations IN SECULUM suggests the idea of God’s enduring mercy and the promise of salvation. Sylvia Huot has observed of it that, “the tenor…, which refers to everlasting, divine mercy[,] might in its new context be a comment on undying love or on the erotic ‘mercy’ that an amorous lady affords her lover.”4 This is surely the case with our motet – or, rather, the motet offers an ironic dialectic between the two kinds of “mercy,” divine and amorous. Further, its paschal associations ironically link the suffering and triumph of Christ with the ordeal of the lover and his recovery through the love of his lady. By orienting the motet’s “love” theme towards Christ specifically, IN SECULUM evokes Christ as the Bridegroom in the allegorical wedding recounted in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Mt. 25), where Christ is united with his

4

Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 16, also 22.

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Bride, the Church, and the individual Christian.5 This network of associations might bring additional layers of dialectic to mind: the contrast between the pure marriage of Christ and his Church, on one hand, with the failed marriage and the extra-marital affair of the motet, on the other, and the betrayal of Christ by his false disciple, the lover by the “mesdisant,” and the “mari” by his friend and his wife. The motet is complemented by two illuminations, both of them seemingly conventional. Each appears to be part of a larger iconographic cycle, concerned with the quest of love, that runs through much of the manuscript, but both are also closely linked to our specific motet.6 In the scene depicted in the initial “N” at the top of the page, an amorous young couple stands caressing before the half-open door of a house, the man’s hand stroking the lady’s chin, his other arm around her shoulder, one of her hands at his waist. The house is presumably where the lady resides with her husband; the lovers are outside the house, suggesting the extramarital nature of their relationship. Above the lovers to the right a second pair stands watching at a window, engaged in conversation and pointing to the amorous couple. On the right is an old man, on the left a younger woman; these are presumably the unhappy husband and one of the “mesdisant.” The lovers’ heads are uncovered, those of their observers are covered, suggesting intimacy and formality, respectively. The picture is a close rendering of the motetus poem, underscoring and adding nuance to the lover’s words. The scene at the bottom of the page is more complex. From left to right a lively hunt unfolds across the page in a forest suggested by three trees. A young nobleman on horseback, bearing a lance and blowing a horn, chases a young stag or hart. The hart is harried by two rude varlets on foot, each with a drawn bow aimed at it, and the hunter’s dogs, one by his side, two running ahead in the chase, and the lead dog already tearing at its back. Two birds perch in the trees and frame the scene, on the leftmost tree an owl who observes the hunt, on the rightmost tree a songbird, perhaps a nightingale in concinnity with the owl, looking up at the drawn bow of one of the varlets. The presence of the owl suggests that this scene is unfolding at night. Both pictures are rich with sound. But if the picture at the top of the page is filled with the sound of “speech” (the lovers talking to each other, the “mesdisant” and the “mari” in conversation), the sounds in the hunting scene are more specifically “musical.” The hunter’s horn emits a specifically musical pitch, a “son,” and it is probably no coincidence that it is placed directly below the motet 5 6

Huot, 80f. and 173f. explores the Easter themes implicit in I N SECULUM. Cf. the iconographic essay by Jean-Pierre Suau, partly included on the CD-ROM produced by the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, “Cantor & musicus: La musique dans les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire Médecine de Montpellier,” which offers a color reproduction of fol. 246r. I am grateful to Mary Wolinski for drawing my attention to this document (and for numerous other helpful suggestions) and to Mireille Vial for sending me a complete copy. The cyclic aspects of the Montpellier illustrations are discussed in Parsoneault, “Montpellier Codex,” 199–211.

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29

tenor. It may be emblematic of the tenor or even of the motet as a whole, the hunter then becoming the singer, in fact the lover himself. The animals in the picture also make music. The dogs are surely barking, generating a “chant” or “motet” of their own. Indeed, a century later, in Gace de la Buigne’s Roman des deduis, Amour de Chiens describes the barking of dogs thus: “… chiens ont vois si flexible, / qu’il ne puissent chanter motés / et rondeaux et faire hoqués / plus plaisans” (dogs have voices so flexible that they are capable of singing motets and rondeaux, and of making most pleasant hockets); and he characterizes the “melodie” they sing while pursuing a stag as a kind of polyphony: les uns vont chantans le motet, les autres font double hoquet. Les plus grans chantent la teneur, les autres la contreteneur. Ceulx qui ont la plus clere gueule chantent le tresble sans demeure, et les plus petis le quadrouble en faisant la quinte sur double…7 (Some go singing the motetus, others make double hocket [out of it]. The biggest sing the tenor, the others the contratenor. Those with the most ringing growl sing the triplum without hesitation, and the smallest, the quadruplum, reaching the octave and fifth [i.e., the interval of a 12th above the tenor].)

The two birds, the owl and the nightingale, are also likely to be singing – but their songs are very different from each other. The nightingale conjures the singing birds mentioned in so much spring and summer imagery in the thirteenthcentury lyric, its song evoking secular love and the pain and poignancy that come with it.8 As for the owl the twelfth-century Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy observes of its call that “os ex abundantia cordis loquitur, nam quod cogitat mente profert voce” (its mouth speaks with a fullness of heart, for it reveals with its cry what it reflects upon with its mind), and describes the bird as a filthy creature dwelling amidst its dung and lingering among tombs; hating the songs of small birds, its ominous call evoking fear and portending death.9 Unlike the songbirds represented by the nightingale the owl was infrequently depicted in medieval art apart

7

8

9

Gace de la Buigne, Le roman des deduis, ed. Ake Blomqvist (Stockholm: Almqvist & Vixell, 1951), ll. 10632–35, 8081–88 (see the whole passage, 8073–92). This text was brought to my attention by Elizabeth Eva Leach, who is preparing a comprehensive study of such “music” and related topics. Gace speaks of “le son du cor” just before this passage, in l. 8059. See Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100– 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 208 n. 7. For an example see Tischler, Montpellier Codex, no. 45. The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium, ed. and trans. Willene Clark (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1992), 216–19; Gaston DuchetSuchaux and Michel Pastoureau, Le bestiaire médiéval. Dictionnaire historique et bibliographique (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 2002), 52–54. Much of this lore goes back to Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), XII, vii, 40.

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from Bibles and liturgical books.10 Even the hart contributes to the “musicality” of the scene: it was widely believed that the stag liked to listen to music.11 On one level this hunt scene is a visual representation of the love chase, the lover pursuing and conquering his beloved.12 In the mid thirteenth-century Dis dou cerf amoreus the observer muses: Et pensai, par cele aventure, ke li femme est d’autel nature k’autant i a bien a cacier, ains c’on puist s’amour pourcacier. Dont, ki aime d’amour coreus, dame ki est ciers amoureus, il doit et atendre et souffrir (And I thought, as a result of this event [the hunt], that woman is of such a nature – that she is just as fine to hunt in such a way that one can pursue her love. Thus, whoever loves with a heartfelt love the lady who is the stag of love, he must wait and suffer).13

In this allegory the very dogs are agents of Amour, and are presented as extensions of both the hunter and the quarry: the lead hound is Bonne Amours; the others work in pairs, Pensers and Souvenirs, Volentés and Desirs, Pitiés and Humilités. But the hart in our picture is surely the lover himself rather than the lady. That is, the hunting scene is not linear: The lover is both the mounted hunter and the harried stag, beset by both his amorous suffering and his quandary. Underscoring this reading are the churlish varlets – no Cupids or Gods of Love, they. The archer on the right directs his arrow both at the hart and at the nightingale, emblematic of the pangs of secular love, and also at the word “mal” in the motetus, hence at the suffering that the lover bears. We recall the common medieval image of the harried stag as signifying wretched man, beset by ills, sorrows, and death, his soul stirred by sin.14 But the allegory in this picture is also Christological. The hart brings to mind the “caprea vel hinulos cervorum” of the Cantica canticorum: “Vox dilecti mei, ecce iste venit saliens in montibus, transiliens colles. Similes est dilectus meus capreae hinuloque cervorum” (Ct 2.8–9: The voice of my beloved, behold he cometh leaping on the mountains, skipping over the hills. My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart). Throughout the middle ages Christ was identified with the 10 11

Brunsdon Yapp, Birds in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 1981), 35–41, at 36. T. H. White, trans., The Bestiary, a Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954), 38. See also Isidore, Etymologiae, XII, i, 19. 12 On the hunt as an allegory of the love chase, see Marcelle Thiébaux, The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), especially chap. 3–4. 13 Ed. in Marcelle Thiébaux, “An Unpublished Allegory of the Hunt of Love: Li Dis dou cerf amoreus,” Studies in Philology 62 (1965): 531–45, ll. 53–59, at 537; trans. in eadem, Stag, 149. This text is found in the Adam de la Halle manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 25566 (in a second source, the thought in l. 56 is completed in two additional lines, “ne que la dame en face otroi, / k’a prendre .i. cerf si come je croi”). 14 Thiébaux, Stag, 44f.

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young stag. Thus, Alan of Lille: “Cervus, proprie, dicitur Christus, vel humana Christi natura”15 (The stag, specifically, the nature of Christ). And, Honorius of Autun, on the Sponsus of the Cantica: “Sponsus ergo venit saliens in montibus, quia Christus per quosdam saltus venit in mundum, ut praedictum est in prophetis. De coelo quippe saltum dedit in uterum virginis, de utero in praesepium, de praesepio in crucem, de cruce in sepulcrum, de sepulcro in coelum” (The Bridegroom, therefore, came leaping on the mountains, because Christ came into the world through a certain leap, as was foretold in the Prophets. Indeed, from Heaven he directed the leap into the womb of the Virgin, from the womb to the manger, from the manger to the cross, from the cross to the tomb, from the tomb to Heaven); and, flatly, “hinnulus cervorum est Christus filius patriarcharum et prophetarum” (the young stag is Christ, the descendent of the patriarchs and prophets).16 This image of the hart as Christ the Bridegroom is colored by the fact that the animal is harried, indeed is at the point of death. It is also inflected by the presence of the owl. As a dweller in darkness the owl symbolized those who refuse to accept the light of truth. “Owls are symbolical of the Jews, who repulse Our Lord when he comes to redeem them, saying: ‘We have no king but Caesar’.”17 Furthermore, the owl connoted thievery, deceit, betrayal.18 Thus the theme of resurrection, renewal, and salvation implicit in the tenor is broadened to encompass, as in Honorius’s commentary, the Passion. Here too there is irony: the suffering of Christ, betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter, and pierced by the Roman soldier’s spear, the suffering of the lover, betrayed and pierced by the pangs of love and uncertainty, symbolized by the varlet’s arrow. The hunt picture thus expands and explicates the relationship between the tenor and the motetus built upon it. The motet and its illustrations constitute an intertextual package of materials that complement and interpret each other. Each relies on the others to reveal its full meaning. Neither the content nor the design of the motetus text seems especially remarkable. The poem does not appear to incorporate “refrain” material, but many of its turns of phrase are familiar. Moreover, it draws on traditional motifs, commonplaces ubiquitous in lyric and narrative texts alike. If the motetus poem is unremarkable, it is not without nice touches. It divides neatly into two sections, ll. 1– 15 and 16–25, each further divisible into two smaller units. The first section concerns the lover and his lady’s healing balm, with the second part explaining 15

Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalum, PL, 210, col. 737a; see also Alan’s discussion of caprea, col. 731a–b. 16 Honorius Augustodunensis expositio in Cantica canticorum, PL, 172, cols. 389d–90a; see also Honorius’s interesting discussion of the entire passage, cols. 389a–91c. For an analysis of his commentary in the context of the wider medieval reception of the Cantica, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 58–85. 17 White, Bestiary, 134. Quoting Hrabanus Maurus, Hugh of Fouilloy remarks, “Bubo … in tenebris peccatorum deditos, et lucem iustitiae fugientes significat” (The owl signifies those delivered into the darkness of sins, and those fleeing the light of righteousness); Book of Birds, 218–19. 18 See the references cited in nn. 9 and 11, above.

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the first (ll. 1–7, 8–15). With the first word in l. 16, “mes,” introducing the second section, the direction of the poem pivots to the speaker’s dilemma and the slanderers who have betrayed the lovers, with the second part presenting the lover’s reaction to their treachery (ll. 16–22, 23–25). The two parts of the first section are introduced by negatives (“ne,” “jamés”), the two parts of the second section by “mes.” These two sections complement the two pairs of figures in the upper miniature and the two birds in the hunt scene. The two sections are nicely balanced: 15 lines for the first, 10 for the second, standing in a “harmonious” sesquialtera ratio. As set to music, they are nearly identical in length: 63 longs in the first section, 61 in the second (62, if the notation at the end of the motetus is read literally). Throughout the poem rhyme is used both to link and to articulate the sequence of ideas. The first division, ll. 1–7, is laid out in a closed rhyme design, a for ll. 1 and 6–7 (the important statements, “Ne m’a pas oublié” and “m’a douné / son cuer et son cors a faire ma volenté”), b for the “interior” lines, 2–5. The second thought, ll. 8–15, uses the same two rhymes, a and b, in an irregular sequence, but then closes itself off at l. 15 with a new rhyme, c, to conclude the crucial summarizing statement, “s’amor ai.” This sets the stage for the change of mood, beginning with “mes” in l. 16, and the uncertainty and betrayal that dominate the rest of the poem. The first two lines, 16–17, present the lover’s dilemma using the c rhyme. The defining thought of the first section of the motet, “s’amor ai,” and the quandary of the second section, “Mes de ce ne sai / que je ferai,” are thus ironically linked. The cause of the dilemma is revealed in ll. 18–22, using the “standard” a and b rhymes. When the final division of the poem is introduced in l. 23, it is profiled through a new rhyme, d, used for the rest of the poem. There are other ear-catching instances of verbal linkage through sound and sense as well: “duré” and “enduré” in ll. 10–11, and perhaps “santé” and “aseüré” in ll. 9 and 12; “juré” and “fauseté” in ll. 13–14, the latter juxtaposed thematically with “loiaument,” also in l. 13. Further, the three d-rhyme words in ll. 23–25: “felon,” “raison,” “traïson.” The lady commits her love “sans fauseté” and swears “loiaument” in the first section of the poem, while the “felon” commit “trop grant traïson” in the second. “Ce” (the affair) in l. 16 has its parallel in “ce” (again, the affair) in l. 24, linking the beginning and closing of the second half of the poem, as the repeated “mes” defines the parallel character of its two clauses. Also noteworthy is the rhetorical schema employing internal rhyme in ll. 16–17 to throw the lover’s quandary into relief (“mes de ce ne sai / que je ferai”) and similarly, if more briefly but nonetheless with telling effect, in ll. 23–24 (“mes se felon / de ce l’ont mis a raison”; we shall see that these examples of verbal music are set to correspondingly striking musical schemas). These two passages, of course, launch the two parts of the second section of the poem. The musical setting injects a striking break in the lover’s speech mid phrase in l. 19, at “[si malement] m’ont * novelement [mesdisant corucié a son … mari]” (b. 81–89, at 84). This hiatus has been prepared by a break in both voices at once at the beginning of the thought (b. 80) and by a speed-up in the pace of declamation (b. 81). The break in l. 19 is defined musically by a strong cadence

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on “m’ont” followed by a remarkably long pause, stretching over a full three longs (b. 84–86). When the poem resumes at b. 87, it is, appropriately enough, with “novelement.” Apart from the verbal/musical pun that this tactic generates, emphasizing “novelement” in this fashion highlights the immediacy of the mischief wrought by the “mesdisant.” But the treatment of “novelement” is also apt for purely musical reasons, the protracted silence in the motetus throwing a crucial feature of the musical design into relief: The tenor melody is stated twice; the second cursus begins mid way through the pause, at b. 85. Thus tenor design and musical/verbal content in the motetus coordinate to promote each other. This is a significant moment in the work both musically and textually, but for the tactic to be effective, the repeat of the tenor must be noticed for what it is. The long pause attracts the listener’s attention, but she must be familiar with the tenor melody itself if she is to realize that it is being repeated. This passage brings to the fore the fact that the tenor possesses not only built-in liturgical and Scriptural content, but also purely musical features that are primary agents of the musical/rhetorical design and sonic spectrum through which the “idea” of the motet is projected. The platform that the tenor provides controls the overall length, pacing, and tonality of the motet, and, as its “given” pitches follow each other in orderly, organized succession, it constrains where and how the voice or voices built upon it can move. The musical attributes of the tenor shape the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic fabric of the work at every level. Medieval writers discuss the motet tenor in terms of rhetorical organizatio and color. In a chapter on “color in musica” the fourteenth-century Libellus attributed to Johannes de Muris asserts that color is to be found in melodic repetition, on one hand, and rhythmic patterning, on the other, and associates color specifically with the tenor of the motet.19 In the late thirteenth century Anonymous IV implies something similar when he writes of melodic lines laid out “iuxta ordines et colores.”20 Musical color is a loaded concept in the middle ages, and it will be useful for us to examine it briefly here.21 Color could connote the character of a pitch, defined through its position relative to other pitches, a concept rooted in the ethical quality ascribed to different tunings promulgated in Antiquity. In the middle ages this notion of color could be extended to the character of a mode or melodic line, as the quality or agent that gives a melody its particular “flavor,” indeed its identity. The melody itself might be considered a color, and in turn the small and larger gestures that define it might themselves be regarded as colores with fixed melodic and/or rhythmic profiles. By extension so could the representation of this melody or its component elements in notation. (Note and nota are terms that might 19

Ars practica mensurabilis cantus secundum Iohannem de Muris: Die recensio maior des sogennannten “Libellus practice cantus mensurabilis,” ed. Christian Berktold (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), XII, 2. 20 Fritz Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1967), I, 27. 21 This summary draws heavily on the article “Color,” Lexicon musicum latinum medii aevi, ed. Michael Bernhard, fasc. 5 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), q.v. for bibliographical references.

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refer to a gesture or melody, even a specific piece, as well as to the signs of notation used to write it down.)22 Along similar lines (literal) color could be deployed as in a rubric, to alert the reader to a change in character or in the pattern of flow, or even to a change in the rhythmic value or pitch of individual notes. One version of the treatise of Johannes de Garlandia, perhaps dating to the 1270s, defines color in sensual terms: “Color est pulchritudo soni vel obiectum auditus, per quod auditus suscipit placentiam” (Color is the beauty of [musical] sound, that is, of the object of the sense of hearing, through which the sense of hearing takes pleasure”; XVI, 10).23 Color could be introduced in both composition and performance, shaping the work but also enhancing or beautifying it, making it more interesting or memorable. Johannes describes various ways through which color could be achieved, among them sonus ordinatus, florificatio soni et vocis, and repetitio eiusdem vocis vel diversae (XV, 10–25: systematically ordered pitches, embellished pitches and notes, repetition in the same or in different voices). Most of these tactics are built on familiar, “noted,” or stereotypical material. Sonus ordinatus appears to entail the systematic manipulation of a single melodic cell or gesture (a color in its own right). Related to this is repetitio, which achieves its effect by “faciens ignotum sonum esse notum, per quam notitiam auditus suscipit placentiam” (making unfamiliar musical elements familiar, by means of which familiarity the sense of hearing takes pleasure). Johannes makes it clear that pleasure comes through familiarity: “pone colores loco sonorum proportionatorum ignotorum, et quanto magis colores, tanto sonus erit magis notus, et si fuerit notus, erit placens. Item loco coloris in regione cuiuslibet pone cantilenam notam copulam vel punctum vel descensum vel ascensum alicuius instrumenti vel clausam lay” (Set colores in place of unfamiliar musical elements that are in proportion [i.e., of comparable size]; the more the colores, that much more familiar will be the music, and if it becomes familiar, it will be pleasing. By the same token, in whatever part of the work you wish, set a familiar song copula in the place where color obtains, or a punctum, or a descent or ascent of some instrument, or a verse of a lai; XVI, 16–17). Color, then, might be achieved through the deployment of a familiar “cantilena copula,” a familiar or stock copula (that is, a well known nota, or a section of one, a punctum), or a quasi-instrumental flourish, or a strophe of a lai. For Johannes, copula connotes a particular polyphonic idiom – or, rather, two related idioms, one of which uses paired and complementary musical phrases, while the other uses hocket (“quae fit in abscisione sonorum”; XV, 24: which is made in the cutting up of sounds). Hocket is itself a color, one often set out in stereotypical patterns. To these devices Johannes adds the placement of dissonance in positions that would ordi22

See the data collected in Friedrich Gennrich, Grundriß einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes, als Grundlage einer Formenlehre des Liedes (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1930), 167–74 (which, however, are used to make a very different argument). 23 Ed. in Erich Reimer, Johannes de Garlandia: De mensurabili musica, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972), vol. 1. References to Garlandia’s treatise will cite chapter and sentence numbers after this edition.

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narily be consonant, injecting a harmonic “spike” into the work and thereby catching the listener’s attention (“causa coloris sive pulchritudinis musicae”; X, 22: on account of the color or the beauty of the music). We will see several of these devices at work in Ne m’a pas oublié. Color is an apt term for the tenor of a motet: It is a familiar melody, its recognizability enhancing the listener’s pleasure and understanding; and its musical and textual attributes inform and flavor the voice or voices fitted to it. The color that is intrinsic to the tenor could be complemented by other colores overlaid onto it through rhythmic patterning and melodic manipulation, as well as by colores in the other voice or voices. IN SECULUM was one of the most often used colores of the thirteenth century. By mid century it had become a nota, a stock tune, quite independent of its parent chant. It was one of the most frequently tapped sources for a motet tenor; there are at least 58 motets extant in some form that use it.24 It is found especially often in French motets. In addition, it was drawn upon repeatedly by musicians indulging in technical experiments of one sort or another, producing numerous works that explore the limits of the rhythmic system and its notation. IN SECULUM was particularly favored by composers working with hocket, some of them in motets, some in other genres, some without a clearly defined generic identity but capable of being plugged into larger works as colores themselves. Whatever its other connotations, it is in this context of familiarity, compositional artifice, embellishment, and association with a vernacular corpus that we should understand the choice of IN SECULUM for our motet. The familiar melody of IN SECULUM has indeed been manipulated by the motet composer. It is presented twice, both times laid out in what is perhaps the most ubiquitous rhythmic design, or ordo, of the thirteenth century, a series of threenote gestures, each made up of three longs followed by a long rest. In an unusual move the first cursus repeats each gesture immediately, except for the last one, which is stated only once. The second cursus goes straight through the melody without internal repetition, but at the end it eliminates half the final ordo as it had been presented in the first cursus. The reason for the abbreviation would seem to be structural: The lack of internal repetition in cursus 2 reduces the overall duration of the melody to half the length of the first cursus, in effect imparting a sense of diminution to the tenor. The resulting temporal relationship of cursus 1 to cursus 2 is 2:1, but it is only by shortening the second cursus that an exact duple ratio is achieved (83 longs and a long rest after the last note in cursus 1, 41 longs and the [theoretical] rest after the last note in cursus 2). The final ordo was the logical one to abbreviate, since it had only been presented once the first time around, in cursus 1.

24

See the listing in Hendrik van der Werf, Integrated Directory of Organa, Clausulae, and Motets of the Thirteenth Century (Rochester, NY: Published by the author, 1989). Thirty are found in Montpellier H 196. For an overview of these motets see Klaus Hofmann, Untersuchungen zur Kompositionstechnik der Motette im 13. Jahrhundert, durchgeführt an den Motetten mit dem Tenor IN SECULUM (Neuhausen: Hänssler Verlag, 1972).

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Thus structural concerns were paramount in the planning of this motet. The composer was willing to modify his familiar nota to achieve the design he had in mind. Its very familiarity facilitated his tinkering with the chant; he knew his audience would notice what he had done and engage with it. Indeed, he went out of his way to make certain that the audience would be aware of the structural foundation provided by the tenor. The lack of repetition of the final three-note module in cursus 1 signals that something is afoot. So also does the pause separating the “cliff-hanging” “m’ont” from the continuation of the poem with “novelement,” a pause written as a double long rest, like a finis punctorum depicting the silence of “infinite” length that follows the end of a work. During this pause the only music we hear is the beginning of the tenor melody in its new cursus. (The analogy to a finis punctorum is particularly appropriate because the pause lasts for three longs, not the two suggested by the notation; the figure must be read as connoting a pause of extended but not specified length.) Example 2 compares this tenor color with the original chant as transmitted in most French graduals of the period and as found in most other polyphonic treatments. Brackets mark off the three-note gestures deployed in the tenor; for comparison I apply them to the original chant melody as well. The tenor differs from the original chant at only two points. In the final ordo an extra g is introduced to allow for a phrase of the proper length (both it and the original g are omitted in cursus 2 for reasons already discussed). The other variation is more significant: Two notes have been omitted from what would be its third ordo. This modification is telling, having the effect of bringing back the opening melodic gesture, c c b, several times over the course of the tenor – nine times in all when the internal repeats in cursus 1 are taken into account. The result is a kind of free ostinato. It makes the exposed appearance of the gesture at the beginning of cursus 2 all the more forceful, since the listener will already have encountered it six times. In addition the motto and the regrouping of pitches that engenders it work to constrain and shape the harmonic character and the melodic motion in the motetus through the repeated pitch c that falls at either the beginning or end of many ordines, in 22 all told, imparting a particular flavor to the motet overall. We are reminded of Johannes de Garlandia’s comment on achieving color through repetitio eiusdem vocis, on one hand, and sonus ordinatus, on the other. Both are at work here on several levels. That we are to understand the c c b gesture as a motto, as a color within a color, is confirmed by the way it is treated in the polyphonic texture: Although tenor and motetus phrases overlap to create a seamless polyphonic fabric in most of the composition, the motto tends to be treated differently. At its second appearance, when we first realize that this gesture is indeed a motto, there are simultaneous rests in both voices (b. 16); at its third appearance there is a hocket introduced by simultaneous rests in both voices (b. 64); at the fourth, marking the start of cursus 2, we encounter the extended pause in the motetus (b. 84); at the sixth, the second half of the final hocket is introduced (b. 117). These musical elements highlight what are especially significant bits of the motet poem: the opening phrase, “Ne m’a pas oublié,” sung over the first appearance of the motto; “quant si doucement

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m’a douné son cuer et son cors”; “mes de ce ne sai”; “novelement”; “corucié a” (over the fifth appearance of the motto, b. 92); and “raison trop.” The motetus line is striking for its use of repeated pitches, usually two or three but several more than that on two occasions, resulting in a melody that is almost declamatory, speech-like, an impression enhanced by the generally narrow compass and overall stepwise motion, and syllabic declamation. The line flows in the tight, even stiffly measured iambic cells associated with the second and third rhythmic modes (mode 2: brevis recta-longa recta, and so forth, the values standing in a ratio of 1:2; mode 3: longa ultra mensuram-brevis recta-brevis altera, and so forth, the values standing in a ratio of 3:1:2). Within this rhythmic idiom pitch repetition is deployed according to a consistent strategy: when the flow is in the second mode, the pitch is repeated twice; when it is in the third mode, it is repeated once. The overall temporal effect is similar, since both cells take up the same amount of mensural time, two ternary long “beats.” This contributes further to the sense of unity already strongly in place on account of the strictures on the movement of the motetus imposed by the design of the tenor. An exception to the rhythmic/melodic practice just described (or, rather, an extension of it) occurs at the phrase beginning at b. 39, setting l. 10. This starts on a higher pitch than anything heard thus far, indeed on what will prove to be the highest pitch in the work overall. It comes by surprise: the previous phrase had ended on c a 6th lower. The high note is repeated five times before dropping one step and then eliding with the setting of the following lines, 11–12, to reach a cadence in a more lyrical mode at b. 51. Thus l. 10, “du mal qui tant m’a duré,” is thrust into striking, even histrionic relief. The same histrionic phrase returns in the next passage, setting ll. 13–15, beginning at b. 53, to cadence in b. 63 in what is essentially the same way as before. (The difference in length between the two passages is attributable to the different number of syllables in the two groups of lines.) Each of the two phrase groups is set off from what follows it by a simultaneous pause in both voices, imparting a sense of self-containment that enhances their character as self-sufficient melodic colores. Indeed, they remind one of Johannes de Garlandia’s repetitio and sonus ordinatus. This example of color through the repetition of a striking melodic figure links ll. 10–12 with ll. 13–15. As we have just seen, the beginnings of these two groups are related melodically. But so also are the last lines, which fit together semantically (“puis qu’aseüré … s’amor ai”) and use what is essentially the same music. Each is sung over a different segment of the tenor melody, that is, over a different harmonic foundation, however, and begins at a different point in the underlying tenor rhythmic ordo, the first on the second note of the ordo, the second on the first, these differences flavoring, “coloring” the linkage between the two groups. Thus although the lines are related through their musical setting, each is given its own distinctive harmonic and rhythmic character. Repetitio and sonus ordinatus combine to provide a flavoring that is more subtle than either could individually generate. These two motetus phrase groups, nearly identical in their melodic and rhythmic content, effectively form a balanced antecedent/consequent pair. In fact,

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b. 39–63 should be understood as a large color in its own right. It is interesting in this regard that one of the colores mentioned by Johannes de Garlandia is the cantilena nota copula, a closed (coupled) group of phrases from a familiar song, perhaps, as Johannes’s use of the word cantilena rather than cantus might suggest, a vernacular one. Earlier in his treatise Johannes describes the copula as having a pair of phrases of equal length and like melodic/rhythmic content (XII, 4–8). Copula also suggests a coming together, closure, cadential motion.25 Melodic colores, like other enhancements of the musical fabric, are most likely to be deployed at important points in a composition, such as the beginning and end, and before a major cadence or other structural break. It is therefore no coincidence that this pair of phrases occurs just before the sense of the poem turns in a different direction at “mes de ce me sai / que je ferai” (ll. 16–17). The new direction taken by the poem at l. 16 is given a new kind of musical treatment; it is set as a series of detached pitches, each separated from the others by a long rest, highlighting the speaker’s uncertainty (b. 65–72). Over the steadily moving series of tenor ordines the effect is that of hocket, another in the arsenal of colores available to musicians. The uncertainty illustrated graphically in the motetus line is matched by a measure of harmonic ambiguity: The vertical sonorities are 4th-4th-unison, and then b/f, a diminished 5th on the word “ne” (b. 71). This interval is as remote from consonance as it could be in the musical language of the period; in the gamut based on Boethius’s tonal system the pitches are in a ratio of 729:512. This dissonance can be remedied in performance by altering one of the pitches, but to do so has consequences of its own: if one flats the b, creating the harmonic ratio 3:2, the tenor motto is destroyed – this alternative would be especially troublesome, since this is the second of two successive statements of the motto. If one instead sharps the f by applying musica falsa, again yielding a 3:2 ratio, the result is a melodic line progressing from f-natural down to c and then up by a tritone leap to f-sharp. This would be unsatisfactory to modern ears, and most likely to thirteenth-century sensibilities as well. This dilemma was doubtless created deliberately: the composer could just as easily have written e instead of f; had he done so, the result would have been a perfect 4th, 4:3, a consonance that is preferred throughout the motet (and that prevails in many other settings of IN SECULUM). In the end, the diminished 5th should probably be accepted. Expressing the lover’s dilemma, it is another flavoring device or color.26 After the hocket is “resolved” at “que je ferai” (l. 17), the following line resumes the hocket, but only momentarily. The opening word of l. 18, “quant” (b. 79), is treated like the detached syllables in the preceding hocket; then the following words, “si malement,” are rushed (b. 81), the only time in the motet that 25

See Fritz Reckow, “Copula,” Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrect et al. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972); and the article, “Copula,” Lexicon musicum latinum medii aevi, fasc. 6 (2003). 26 This dissonance is not the result of a copying error. Another like it, also probably introduced to add harmonic spice to the image evoked by the text, occurs over the motto in b. 23, on “son cuer [et son cors].”

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we encounter a sequence of three text-bearing recta breves, leading to an abrupt leap up to a cadence on “m’ont” (b. 82–83) and the long pause separating it from “novelement.” That cadence is itself noteworthy: Throughout the motet the two voices tend to stay close together (perhaps because of the relatively high tessitura of the tenor color as it is notated), coming to rest most often on a 4th or unison. Here, however, the two voices close on a different consonance, the octave. The leap up to “m’ont” can be heard as almost a shout, setting the stage for the start of the second tenor cursus at b. 85 and “novelement.” Thus, hocket is again deployed, however fleetingly, both to underscore a point of major articulation and to enhance the affective presentation of the text. At b. 98–100 note the dissonant crunch on “mari” and the leap down of a 5th to “maleüré.” There is no compositional need for this awkward and uncharacteristic progression; both nuances are introduced to draw attention to the words. For the same reason “felon” (l. 23, b. 105–7) is given a melismatic setting, uncharacteristic in this motet, stretching the word out over three longs, lingering on it as though savoring it, and then setting it apart from what follows with a long pause in both voices. (It is interesting that the length of this “felon” is the same as that of the long pause between “m’ont” and “novelement” discussed earlier; it is, of course, the “felon” who have “novelement” betrayed the lovers.) “Felon” is followed by another hocket passage (b. 108–15), one not unlike the hocket that introduces the change of mood at l. 16, differing from it in length (since it sets a shorter line) and pitch (in keeping with the tenor, it is a step lower) but not in the position of the hocket grid formed by the two voices. In fact, apart from these variations and the second hocket’s ending safely on a consonant 4th rather than a diminished 5th, the two hockets have identical motetus lines and vertical frameworks. Like the earlier hocket, too, the hocket that follows “felon” is succeeded by a line, the concluding one in the poem, that opens with a musically isolated syllable, “trop” (l. 25, b. 119), another momentary hint of hocket. Unlike the burst of speed on “si malement” that follows the feint at hocket on “quant” in l. 18, though, this one continues in the opposite way, with a written-out slowdown and a bit of melodic flourish on “ont fait grant traïson.” Musical rhetoric works on multiple levels to delineate the content of this motet. A striking copula and an elaborate hocket articulate the two sections of the poem while the repeated tenor color binds them together by overlapping from one to the other. That color is the musical and aesthetic foundation of the work; it is laid out in such a way that it will further the affective delivery of the motet. The use of hocket to close both statements of the tenor is but one of the tactics that throw it into relief. Because of its prominence in the musical fabric and because it is itself crafted from a nota, a stock tune, the tenor will engage and tease the savvy listener or reader, keeping the work’s foundation securely anchored. Many questions surrounding Ne m’a pas oublié must be postponed for now. For example, were the motets that accompany the larger iconographic program in the manuscript meant to be read together? And, might groups of motets that use the same tenor melody be intended to be read against one another, their common tenor acting as a focal point for intertextual relationships of all sorts? A few

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decades after the copying of Montpellier H 196 this sort of intertextuality would be cultivated in a striking way among the works brought together in the Roman de Fauvel. The strong profile afforded the tenor in our motet would abet the perception of any such relationships. There may indeed be a broader dimension to this work than what can be found in the piece taken by itself. The integration in Ne m’a pas oublié of words, music, illustration, and mise en page into an expressive whole in the lone manuscript that preserves it looks ahead to the virtuoso displays in Fauvel that Nancy Regalado has discussed with such cogency. Writing ca. 1300, Johannes de Grocheio remarked of the motet that “cantus autem iste non debet coram vulgaribus propinari eo quod eius subtilitatem non advertunt nec in eius auditu delectantur sed coram litteratis et illis qui subtilitates artium sunt quaerentes. Et solet in eorum festis decantari ad eorum decorationem, quemadmodum cantilena quae dicitur rotundellus in festis vulgarium laicorum” (This kind of music should not be set before vulgares, for neither do they take in the fine points of its design nor are they pleased to hear it, but rather before litterati and those who are inquirers into the refinements of the [Liberal] Arts. It is customarily performed at their gatherings to grace them, just as the sort of song called rondeau [is performed] at the gatherings of lay vulgares).27 Ne m’a pas oublié illustrates Grocheio’s subtilitates and hints at the sorts of intellectual and sensory pleasures the motet brought to its learned audience.

27

Ernst Rohloff, Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio (Leipzig: VEB Deutsche Verlag für Musik, 1967), 182–83; cf. Christopher Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2 (1993): 17–41, at 36.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. Ne m’a pas oublié / IN SECULUM. Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H 196, fol. 246r. Photograph: Service photographique de la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Ex. 1. Ne m’a pas oublié / IN SECULUM.

SUBTILITAS AND DELECTATIO: NE M’A PAS OUBLIÉ

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Ex. 2. The IN SECULUM melody as used in Ne m’a pas oublié.

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“Flables couvertes”: Poetry and Performance in the Fifteenth Century Jane H. M. Taylor

The late medieval lyric is, says Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “une pratique sociale”; everyone agrees that in the fifteenth century anyone with the remotest pretensions to social standing – anyone, that is, who aspired to being thought of as joyeux, joly, and gracieux – was expected to be able to turn a neat rondeau or a witty ballade.1 The adjectives I have just used come from the account in his biography of Boucicaut’s social education: he was, it says, trained in the art of composing balades, rondeaux, virelais, lais et complaintes d’amoureux sentement.2 Charles d’Orléans, on Saint Valentine’s day, could call his court to the composition of rymes en françoys ou latin3 with every confidence that they could respond to the call; when the Duke of Suffolk was sick in Paris, the best remedy was for his courtiers to compose diz amoureux for his delectation;4 Queen

1

2 3 4

Poetry, she says, is “une activité ludique ouverte aux amateurs comme aux poètes professionnels. Sa composition ne signe pas le partage des conditions. Le rondeau est pensé comme une activité facile et gracieuse” (a courtly diversion open to amateurs as well as to professionals. To be able to compose poetry is not the preserve of any particular rank in society. The rondeau is considered to be an activity both undemanding and graceful); Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Le rondeau,” in La littérature française aux XIVe et XVe siècles, ed. Daniel Poirion, Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, vol. 8 (Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitätsverlag, 1988), 55. The translations here and throughout are my own. Jean Boucicaut, Histoire de messire Jean de Boucicaut, ed. J.-F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat, vol. 6 (Paris: Éditeur du Commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1836), 21. Charles d’Orléans, Rondeau CCXLVIII, in Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, 2 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1923–27), 432. “En le reconfortant lui lisoie de Garancieres et d’autre diz amoureux, tant que pour alegier son deuil, je lui fey venir Binchoiz qui, par son command, fist ce rondel: ainsi que a la foiz my souvient, etc. et ot ledit Binchois, pour ce, iic aunes d’escarlate que je lui delivray” (To bring him comfort, I read him verses by Jean de Garancières and other courtly verses, and then, in order to alleviate his grief, I commissioned Binchois [the leading composer at the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century] who, at his command, composed the following rondeau, and other pieces I remember; and for his pains Binchois received from my own hand 200 ells of scarlet cloth); see A. Desplanque, “Project d’assassinat de Philippe le Bon par les Anglais (1424–26),” Mémoires couronnés et mémoires des savants étrangers publiés par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts en Belgique 33 (1965–67): 70.

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Margaret of Scotland is said to have spent long nights composing rondeaux;5 and a couple of bourgeois, having competed in one of the characteristically louche seductions in which the Cent nouvelles nouvelles take such questionable pleasure: “mesmes firent de tres bons rondeaulx, et pluseurs chansonnettes, qu’ilz manderent et envoyerent l’un a l’autre, dont il est aujourd’uy bruit, servant au propos de leur matere dessus dicte…” (were able to put together rather good rondeaux, and a number of chansonnettes, which they exchanged one with another and which dealt with the events described above; these poems are still remembered).6 Often, this is taken to mean that the composition of rondeaux and ballades was something undemanding and facile – and this is an image that late medieval accounts of the production of verse often seem to encourage. Froissart’s Meliador, for instance, projects lyric-making with airy carelessness:7 many of the fixed-form lyrics that he weaves into this long romance are, the fiction pretends, thrown together by some knight riding cheerfully across the countryside (“Melyador fist… / Sus le chemin qu’il chevaucoit, / Une balade…” [As he rode along, Meliador composed a ballade; 15667–69]), or drinking at a spring (“Melyador se rafresci / De l’aigue, car moult faisoit chaut, / Et puis si commença en hault / A chanter…” [Meliador drank at the spring, because the weather was very hot, and then he began to sing aloud; 23213–16]), or are casually, breezily, inspired by some passing thought of the beloved (“Sentemens nouviaus li approce / Et, encores en chevaucant, / Mist la .i. rondelet avant…” (He was struck by a new thought, and as he rode along, he composed a little rondeau; 4352–54]).8 The fact that we are so sadly short of descriptions of real-life evenings spent composing rondeaux and ballades makes it difficult for us to judge how far this airy carelessness is a fiction – the “poets” presenting themselves, like Victorian cricketers, as gentlemen-amateurs rather than the despised professionals – or whether in fact poetry was thought of as an accomplishment, like the piano for a well-brought-up young woman in a Jane Austen novel, which merited real commitment. What I want to present in this essay are two scraps of evidence, themselves subject to some caution, which might seem to argue for the latter view:9 that is, that these verses could be used to demonstrate, for a sophisticated audience, true cultural 5 6 7 8

9

Thomas Basin, Histoire de Charles VII, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Picard, 1881–91), 309. Nouvelle 33, in Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Franklin Sweetser (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 240. Jean Froissart, Meliador, ed. Auguste Longnon, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1899); references are to line numbers. There is often a pretence that poetry is the spontaneous outpouring of feeling; see, for instance Le Romans de la Dame a la Lycorne et du Biau Chevalier au Lyon, ed. Friedrich Gennrich (Dresden and Halle: Niemeyer, 1908), ll. 925–26: “Unne chanson, que tost ot fete; / Car vraie amour du tout l’afete” (a chanson that he composed off the cuff, because love gave him the necessary training; my italics). For similar examples, see in particular Maureen Boulton’s The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); see also John Stephens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961). These are points I enlarge on in my forthcoming book, The Making of Poetry (Turnhout: Brepols).

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sophistication and real rhetorical mastery. How conscious of their medium therefore were the poets? How far had audiences been “trained” to grasp how the poets were playing with the rich cultural resources of late medieval poetry? My first piece of evidence is the so-called Cour amoureuse of the early fifteenth-century royal court.10 There is, it must be admitted, considerable dispute as to its authenticity.11 Did it ever exist other than on paper, was it ever more than a pretty conceit with only a minimal relationship to historical reality? Certainly, it seems unlikely that the highly elaborate ceremonials that it describes were ever realized. Did the twenty-four ministres, all of them possessing “experte congnoissance en la science de rethorique” (expert knowledge of rhetoric; 36), ever really take up office; were the poems indeed performed in the public forum of the Cour (“lire ou faire lire,” read or had read; 40); were the prizes so carefully prescribed – a silver crown to the best of the poets, a silver chaplet to the runner-up – ever awarded; were the ballades recorded, as prescribed, in “noz amoureux registres” (our amorous records or logbooks; 40); were the registres ever confided to the safekeeping of some trustworthy abbeye? What I want to draw attention to, however, is the role imagined for the adjudicators on these occasions: the ladies who are, says the deviser of the documents, Pierre de Hauteville,12 to be possessed of “noble avis” (well-bred opinions) and “bonne discrecion” (easy discrimination; 40), and able therefore to weigh the entries against each other, alert to “vice de fausse rime, reditte trop longue ou trop courte ligne” (faults such as false rhyme, excessive repetition or too short lines; 40).13 Now, regardless of the historicity or otherwise of the Cour amoureuse, these little remarks suggest that Pierre expected, quite pragmatically, that members of an audience would plausibly possess the trained responses of the connoisseur. The ladies are presented, with no particular surprise, as discriminating, able to recognize stylistic expertise and control of form. They should be able to pick up false sonorities,14 incongruities of meter – that is, hypo- or hypermetric lines15 – and repetitive rhymes (redittes) not

10 11

12 13

14

15

La Cour amoureuse dite de Charles VI, ed. Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982); references henceforward in the text. See Arthur Piaget, “La Cour amoureuse, dite de Charles VI,” Romania 20 (1891): 417–54. For skeptical views, see Richard Firth Green, “The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), 87–108; and Theodor Straub, “Die Gründung des pariser Minnehofs,” Zeitschift für romanische Philologie 77 (1961): 1–14. A minor poet himself; see Pierre de Hauteville, Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. Rose Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1982). I am not convinced by the punctuation of this phrase, which I quote [sic] from the edition by Bozzolo and Loyau; I am unable to understand what could be meant by reditte trop longue. I would propose punctuating “… fausse rime, reditte, trop longue ou trop courte ligne.” See for instance the Instructif de seconde rhétorique (later fifteenth century), published in facsimile in Le Jardin de Plaisance, ed. Eugénie Droz and Arthur Piaget, vol. 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1910–14). On rhyme, see aiiiv– aiiiiv; note that the leaves containing the Instructif are not paginated. Again, the Instructif is scathing about incongruities of meter; see for instance aiiiiv.

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differentiated by change of grammatical function.16 These are not minor matters; on the contrary, they are distinctly technical, and would seem to demand an expertise that one would expect to be beyond the capabilities of the sort of careless amateurs that we tend to imagine the court poets to be. Pierre, in other words, imagines an audience surprisingly well trained in the technicalities of the rondeau and the ballade. I pointed out earlier that there are no surviving records of the Cour amoureuse in session – even if any such sessions actually took place. I want to turn therefore to a fictional account of something rather comparable (recognizing of course that it is always a tricky business to weigh up the historicity of fiction) that seems to suggest that technical expertise in the lyric conventions was indeed a cultural asset worth effort.17 Le Pastoralet18 is a bit of an oddity. It is, if not the first, then certainly one of the earliest, of political romans à clef – and hence the flables couvertes (parables) of my title: the anonymous writer, who calls himself Bucarius,19 is a passionately committed Burgundian writing somewhere around 1422, in the middle, that is, of the internecine struggles between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions, who tells us in his prologue (1–36) that what he is offering is a pastoral fictïon with a political message. His are flables couvertes designed for political purposes, which will enlist our admiration for the loiaux (the Burgundians) and our condemnation of the faulz desloiaux (the Armagnacs, or adherents of the house of Orléans). A number of the major political players of the time appear in the guise of Arcadian shepherds, under appropriate names: Charles VI himself is Florentin, his queen Isabeau of Bavaria is Belligere, Louis duke of Orléans appears as Tristifer, and Jean sans Peur, duke of Burgundy, as Lëonet. The overall story is rather convoluted; what I want to focus on here is just one little episode towards the beginning of what “Bucarius” calls his traittié (treatise), an episode in which the rather dilettante shepherds gather to celebrate the feast of Venus. The author reassures us, hastily, that we are not to think that these are pagan shepherds; no, no, no, on the contrary, they are undoubtedly “pastours 16

According to Pierre Fabri, les anciens faicteurs (poets of the olden days) sanctioned redictes provided there was a change of grammatical function; Pierre Fabri, Le grand et vrai Art de pleine rhétorique, de Pierre Fabri, ed. M. Héron, vol. 2 (Rouen: Imprimerie E. Cagniard, 1889–90), 121. Presumably, a redicte de sens here is condemned because the meaning and function are unchanged; cf. also the Instructif, aviv. 17 Given sufficient space, I might also have adduced a further fictional example from laisses 30– 51 of Le Parfait du Paon, ed. Richard Carey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); for an interesting analysis, see Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 255–56; see also my The Making of Poetry. 18 Le Pastoralet in Chroniques relatives à l’histoire de la Belgique sous la domination des ducs de Bourgogne, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: Hayez, 1873), 573–852, now replaced by Le Pastoralet, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); references in the text, by line number, are to the latter. For an interesting study, see Joël Blanchard, La pastorale en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Recherches sur les structures de l’imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1983), 260–67. 19 On the identity of “Bucarius,” see Le Pastoralet, ed. Blanchard, 24–25; he concludes merely that the writer was Picard, and probably from the circle of the counts of Saint-Pol.

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crestïens” (Christian shepherds; 32), and the feast of Venus is merely local color, “pour estrangier ma Muse” (to add a bit of exoticism; 30). The event, says the poet-narrator, is memorably “gracïeux” (pleasant; 125) – a little light flirtation, dancing, singing. Then, after a while, the revellers retire under a May tree to rest, and Florentin proposes a light-hearted competition: a prize, a beautifully embroidered belt, will be awarded to whichever of the shepherds produces the most accomplished “rondel ou le plus loera / S’amie” (rondeau in highest praise of his lady; 442–43). The shepherds withdraw for a while into poetic solitude, to concentrate, “pour miex faire et estre quois” (so as to be able to concentrate in quiet; 447), and then return to the company to recite their rondeaux in front of the judge, Belligere (Queen Isabeau of Bavaria), “qui fu sage / De rime” (who was well versed in rhyme; 496–97). The first of the rondeaux is by Florentin himself, Charles VI: La tres belle beaulté m’amie Ne diroit pas uns aultres Tulles; Sens et valour n’abaissent mie La tres belle beaulté m’amie. Elle est de grant douchour garnie, Et sy n’est pas des plus entulles…

507–12

(Another Cicero could not describe the very beautiful beauty of my lady; good sense and valour merely enhance the very beautiful beauty of my lady. She is of the sweetest disposition, without being among the least flirtatious…)

This is, of course, a rather pedestrian piece, with its lamely pleonastic belle beaulté and its unambitious rime pauvre amie/mie/garnie. It has just one saving orotund little touch, that single ingenious rime riche Tulles (M. Tullius Cicero)/ entulles (coquettish, flirtatious); scarcely enough, one would have thought, to inspire applause (but the lackluster poet is Charles VI… and he is applauded). A second shepherd, Lëonet, the duke of Burgundy, is the next to offer up a rondeau: M’amie est Hester et Helaine, Et Hero et Penelopé, Et de Vergy la Chastelaine; M’amie est Hestor et Helaine, Car humble est et belle et certaine Et chaste et celans son secré…

527–32

(My lady is Esther and Helen, and Hero and Penelope, and the châtelaine de Vergy; my lady is Esther and Helen, for she is both beautiful and true, both chaste and discreet…)

This time, the poet’s stock-in-trade is the string of proper names: proper names that are all, of course, those of women who are bywords for beauty (Helen) or for constancy (Esther, Hero, Penelope, the châtelaine de Vergy). The names are, however, a list, no more: Lëonet, the duke, has made no attempt to embroider on them or to draw out any particularity that might make them especially appropriate comparators. And he is no stylist. His rhymes are poor (Penelopé/sacré) – unlike

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those of the next of the shepherd-poets, Pompal,20 whose knowledge of mythologies and skill with rhyme are clearly considerably more sophisticated: Pymalïon a m’amie entaillie Et Phebus l’a freschement coulouree; Zephirus lui a grant doulchour baillie, Pymalïon a m’amie entaillie, Paris d’amours l’a duite et consillie, Et Orpheüs a sa voix acordee…

561–66

(Pygmalion has sculpted my lady and Phoebus has lent her his fresh color; Zephir has given her great sweetness, Pygmalion has sculpted my lady, Paris has trained and advised her in matters of love, and Orpheus has tuned her voice…)

This third shepherd not only has the trick of richer rhyme (entaillie/baillie/ consillie); he is also able to use classical references with a certain knowing deftness. He has created a conceit, not just a list, whereby he imagines that Pygmalion, Phoebus, Zephir, Paris, Orpheus have jointly created and molded his amie: the sun, Phoebus, has colored her cheeks; the soft breeze, Zephirus, has lent her his freshness; Pygmalion has sculpted her; Orpheus has given her the gift of music. His lady, gratified, is impressed enough to dance an approving little pirouette (“ung saultet fist…”; 270–71). The fourth of the poets, Lupal, embarks on a rather different challenge: M’amie est belle, blanche et bloie, Courtoise et coulouree a point, Et doulce, debonaire et quoie. M’amie est belle, blanche et bloie Et plaisans et plaine de joie. De biens deffault en ly n’a point…

577–82

(My lady is pretty, pale and polished, courteous and colored as she should be, and desirable and delicate and quiet. My lady is pretty, pale and polished, and merry and mirthful. There is in her no lack of anything good…)

This time, the rondeau starts off with a rather dogged alphabet-game: adjectives beginning with bs in the first line, cs in the second, ds in the third … the fifth ps. Except, of course, that the sequence is imperfect, broken by the intrusive quoie in the third line, and, surely, by the sixth line where the poet seems to have fallen back, disheartened, on the clumsy syntactical inversion which makes the negative particle point into a rather inadequate rhyme-word. Which brings us to the last of the shepherds, Tristifer, Louis d’Orléans, who – to the scandal of the poetnarrator – produces not the rondeau that the shepherds had been set, but a ballade: Plus plaisant bergiere n’a pas De Colette, de Rains a Roye. Son corps est tailliés a compas Miex que dire je ne porroie; 20

Pompal is Clignet de Bréban, Lupal (see below) is Bernard VII, count of Armagnac: both are prominent political players; see Le Pastoralet, ed. Blanchard, 270, notes to lines 234 and 242, and Blanchard’s La pastorale en France, 151.

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Car el est parmy la corroie Gresle, par les rains large et plaine, Hault a point, et s’a toujours joie: C’est des aultres la souveraine. Soubz son chainse de canevas Sa char plus que la noif blanchoie. Delis dois a et longs les bras, Dont miex en musette notoie. Doulz regard a la simple et coie; Cler chante comme une seraine. Bien scet houler en la saulchoie: C’est des aultres la souveraine.

599–614

(There is no more charming a shepherdess than Colette, from Reims to Roye in northern France. Her figure is more gracefully shaped than I can describe: her waist is slim, her hips nicely rounded; she is just the right height, and always agreeable: she is the queen of all. Under her shift of coarse linen, her flesh is whiter than snow. She has slim fingers and long arms, the better to play the pipes. Her artless face has a welcoming gaze; she sings as sweetly as a mermaid. She knows just how to use her shepherd’s crook: she is the queen of all.)

This is a far more accomplished – even flamboyant – piece. In the first place, Louis’s shepherdess, unlike the insubstantial figures of the previous pieces, is precisely imagined: narrow-waisted, broad-hipped, slim-fingered… studiedly seductive. In the second, formally speaking, Louis is not just a competent, but also a rather impressive poet: here are the deft alliterations (Plus/plaisant; Rains/Roye; delis dois; miex/musette), the pleasingly rich – but unforced – rhymes (pas/ compas, seraine/souveraine), the rather ingenious use of enjambement (“parmy la corroie / Gresle”). He uses syntactical inversion emphatically rather than when rhyme fails him; he can marry a deft chiasmus to a neat alliteration (“Delis dois a et longs les bras”), and, unlike the earlier poets, whose vocabulary is rather hackneyed, his is concrete and inventive (corroie, a compas, rains) – so much so, in fact, that one of his words, houler, “to use a [shepherd’s] crook,” appears nowhere else in French. Not surprisingly, it is his poem that wins the prize, as having, says the judge, “mieudre saveur” (the greatest zest; 641) – although this is to our poet-narrator’s distinct annoyance, because whatever the merits of the poem-as-poem might be, it remains a ballade, and not a rondeau. By this time, I fear, the reader may be wondering what can possibly justify spending so long on, and quoting so extensively from, a set of fixed-form lyrics none of which – with the possible exception of the last – could conceivably be called poetic jewels. But what is interesting is what the little competition tells us about the practice of poetry in the fifteenth century, and how it counters that critical cliché that paints the late medieval court as a place where courtiers simply, effortlessly, uncritically, produce strings of competent rondeaux and adequate ballades to order. The fiction of the Pastoralet, on the contrary, paints verse not as a saccharine, ornamental game, but rather as competitive and strategic, a way of expressing relationships in verse. And it does it in ways that, as with the Cour amoureuse, suggest it is plausible to imagine not just poets, but also an audience, which are sophisticated and technically adept.

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Let us look again, first, at the range of poetic manoeuvres that “Bucarius” lends his poets. The first, Florentin (Charles VI) had only one trick up his sleeve: the single, rather histrionic rhyme Tulles/entulles. The second (Lëonet, the duke of Burgundy) apparently had at his fingertips – because, by implication and convention, poets are said to extemporize – a convenient set of references: no need to do more than allude, perfunctorily, since the allusions will be so familiar that readers can be relied on to supply their own frame of reference. The third poet (Pompal) did a bit better than this; he too specialized in allusion, but with, in his case, a degree of learning: he exploited the allusive commonplaces at the service of a quite elegant conceit. The fourth (Lupal) attempted a phonetic game whereby he selected lexemes alphabetically. And the fifth (Tristifer, the duke of Burgundy), the eventual winner of the tournament, was knowing, agile: his poetic staples include deft use of sound and rhyme and rhythm, precise and even technical vocabulary, and a nice, self-deprecatory wit. Now, what is interesting about all these stratagems is the fact that they are, quite specifically, matters of skill. They require specific competences, even what I have, anachronistically, called training. And of course, the later Middle Ages sees a proliferation of treatises that place a particular emphasis on craft and skill – that is, on what can be learnt: what are called the arts de seconde rhétorique.21 Each of the techniques displayed here by the shepherd-contestants is in fact described, and prescribed, by at least one of these treatises. Charles VI’s (Florentin’s) rather spectacular rime riche Tulle/entulle is conveniently available in Langlois’s treatise no. VII under the rubric Feminins termes en ULLE.22 The second and third poets, Lëonet (the duke of Burgundy) and Lupal, gave us strings of allusions – and there, providently supplied with the necessary details, are the lists from treatise no. II: Orpheus and Zephyrus, Pygmalion and Paris.23 The third of the poets, Pompal, of course, made his pitch out of an alphabet game – and is it not conceivable that those rather odd lists of words, all beginning with the same vowel or consonant and by which their author says he intended to teach his readers how to spell,24 might have been a 21

Seven of these are to be found in Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974); we might add the 1392 treatise of Eustache Deschamps, Art de dictier, ed. and trans. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), as well as the Instructif de seconde rhétorique and Fabri’s Grand et vrai Art de pleine rhétorique of ca. 1521, to which I have already referred. It is often assumed that the Arts de seconde rhétorique were designed for “professional” poets rather than amateurs, but Deschamps seems to have written his treatise for Louis d’Orléans; see Miren Lacassagne, “L’Art de dictier: Poetics of a ‘New’ Time,” in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier-Poet: His Work and his World, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 181–93. Molinet claims to have composed his for his “trés honnoré seigneur” (most honored lord), to enable him to win over his “partie adverse et obtenir d’elle victore glorieuse” (his dearest enemy and obtain the most glorious of victories over her); see treatise no. V, in Arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. Langlois, 214. Even if these claims are not to be taken wholly seriously, they suggest at the very least a lay, amateur interest in the mechanics of poetry. 22 Arts de seconde rhétorique, 357. 23 Arts de seconde rhétorique, 39–48. 24 In, for instance, Baudet Herenc’s Doctrinal de la seconde rhétorique, in Arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. Langlois, 104–22. Pompal’s manoeuvre was common enough in the period; see

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prompt to just such a game? I do not, of course, suggest that “Bucarius,” the author of the Pastoralet, was making use of any one of the particular treatises published by Langlois.25 But it nevertheless seems that he is using the poem as a sort of showcase for a span of quite advanced skills that amateur poem-making in the late Middle Ages might plausibly be said to require. And not only that. The competition is to be judged, says our poet, by Belligere (Isabeau of Bavaria), whose role it will be to decide “qui le mieux a fait” (who has done best), and who has produced a poem “de mieudre saveur” (with the greatest zest; 640–41), and she awards the splendidly embroidered belt to Tristifer (the duke of Orléans). “Bucarius” is peevishly resentful: the shepherds were to produce rondeaux, and not a ballade; Belligere is “pervertie … par amours et par sotie” (corrupted by love and foolishness; 649–50); this louche decision is all of piece with the corruption of the royal court (Isabeau was popularly believed to be the mistress of the duke of Orléans). But the fact nevertheless is that even as “Bucarius” has invented it, Tristifer’s ballade is far and away the most accomplished piece – and indeed, the pieces are carefully graded in expertise, technique, and craft, from Florentin’s lackluster rondeau to Tristifer’s crowd-pleasing ballade. We cannot, of course, know what lay behind this: was our poet distrustful of expertise (I go back to my Victorian cricketers…), was Tristifer’s flamboyance suspect? Either way, “Bucarius” invents amateur poets, and imagines an amateur judge, with a real sense of what constitutes compositional skill. I stressed earlier that we must be wary of treating the purely fictional as evidence of authentic historical circumstance. Professional poets, after all, have a vested interest in making poetry important, and a competent poet may have difficulty in writing poorly. But this caveat should not, I suggest, prevent our exploring, and taking account of, the assumptions about the literary process and the social experience of verse which are articulated in their work by the poets or the writers of fiction. In this regard, it is surely legitimate to take seriously the assumption adumbrated in the statutes of the Cour amoureuse and in the political fiction of the Pastoralet: that the poets and the audiences of the later Middle Ages were alert to formal intricacies, that craft was admired and rewarded, and that to possess particular word-skills was to be socially included – and presumably, to acquire courtly favor.

Ballade CCCCXVII, Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. Le Queux de Saint-Hilaire, vol. 3 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–1903), 220; see also Paul Zumthor, Le masque et la lumière. La poétique des Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 74–75. 25 We cannot, for instance, know how many rhyme-lists existed in fifteenth-century France, and how many of them might have contained lists of rhymes in –ulle; the lists of goddesses and mythical figures exist – with very much the same dramatis personae, in a number of different treatises.

PART II

PERFORMING SEXUAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITIES

Intimate Performance: An Ivory Writing Tablet Cover at The Cloisters Mark Cruse

… cilz est folz qui fait message Dont on a courrous ou damage, Especialment en amours. Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit

Nancy Regalado has devoted her career to one of the most important chapters in the history of writing in the West, the centuries between 1100 and 1500, which witnessed the rise of vernacular culture. As the use of writing expanded from ecclesiastical precincts ruled by Latin into courts and towns, with their common tongues, the very conception of writing – who could write, what could be written, how texts should look, how they should be transmitted, who could have access to them – underwent radical transformations. Nancy’s work has reminded us time and again that while texts are crucial when we study the role and perception of writing in the Middle Ages, they are far from the only phenomena we may interrogate. Illumination, mise en page, compilation, social context, and performance practice also inform us about what it meant to write during an age when the vernacular “flood[ed] almost every discursive space,” when “writing … vault[ed] from song to book to print.”1 In the spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry represented by Nancy’s work, this essay examines what an exceptional object may tell us about perceptions of vernacular writing in a period she knows well, the first half of the fourteenth century. In 2003, The Cloisters acquired an ivory plaque measuring 9.3 x 5.9 cm that was produced between 1325 and 1350, most likely in Paris.2 The museum presents this object as the cover for a set of ivory writing tablets. Luxury instruments produced from antiquity until the sixteenth century, such tablets were rectangular plaques of

1

2

Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Introduction,” in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. Daniel Poirion and Nancy Freeman Regalado (Yale French Studies, Special Issue, 1991), 7. This article is offered with deepest admiration and gratitude to a remarkable teacher, scholar, citizen, mentor, and friend who has made the world a much brighter place. The accession number is 2003.131.3a,b.

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ivory hollowed out and filled with wax.3 The plaques were attached by cords run through a single or multiple holes drilled in the ivory.4 The wax was impressed with a stylus to make characters and could be wiped to reacquire a smooth, blank surface. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in France, the tablets holding wax were often sandwiched between two exterior covers carved with scenes of secular pastimes or literary episodes relating to courtship.5 The Cloisters ivory appears to be such a cover because it is the same size as extant examples that accompany writing tablets, and because a hole near the upper frame would allow for a cord to attach this plaque to wax-filled ones. Like other plaques made as covers, it is carved with images of secular love themes. One face of the plaque depicts the crowned and winged God of Love seated in a tree and holding in each hand an arrow; these he aims at a man (holding a bird of prey) and a woman, both of whom kneel below (Fig. 1). The scene occurs beneath a trefoil arch supported by slender columns that are topped by capitals. The other face (Fig. 2) depicts a standing man and woman; a raptor perches on the man’s right hand while he places a chaplet on the lady’s head with his left. The lady tilts her head down, points at the man with her right hand, raises her robe with her left, and appears to sweep her left leg over her right. This scene is framed by the same architectural elements as on the obverse. While the ivory plaque at The Cloisters would have enabled writing on a purely instrumental level, its iconography frames this activity by providing both an authorization and an admonishment to the one using it. Viewed in relation to analogous images and the texts that inspired them, the scenes on The Cloisters 3

4

5

On the history of ivory writing tablets and for further bibliography, see Bernard Bousmanne, “À propos d’un carnet à écrire en ivoire du XIVe siècle conservé à la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique,” in Als Ich Can. Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, ed. Bert Cardon et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 1:165–202; Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. Peter Barnet (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997); Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français, 3 vols. (1924; reprint, Paris: F. de Nobèle, 1968); Elisabeth Lalou, “Les tablettes de cire médiévales,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 147 (1989): 123–40; and Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery, ed. Richard Randall, Jr. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1985). Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, the most common form of wax tablet was made of wood plaques that were joined by hinges, parchment cords, or long pieces of parchment glued lengthwise down the plaques’ edges to form a spine (Lalou, 127). Although ivory tablets are luxury adaptations of this format, they do not appear to have invited the same diversity of binding techniques. The ivory writing plaques that have come down to us almost always have holes drilled in the upper corner, upper center, or on the sides to allow for the passage of one or more cords. A devotional booklet from 1330–40 (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) is bound with a parchment-strip spine, but it is far from certain that this tablet was ever meant as a writing instrument. Although its inner plaques are recessed, they have painted images on them, which may indicate that the ivory carver gave pieces prepared for wax to the painter, who then adapted them to his own use. It seems that writing tablets had loose bindings to allow for easy manipulation. Cords permitted plaques to be slipped one on top of the other, or untied so that plaques could be used independently. Plaques with religious scenes carved on them were intended as devotional diptychs, as the traces or survival of hinges demonstrate. See, for example, color plates 73 and 74 in Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery, 192–93.

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ivory may be understood as emblematizing both a culture of personal love correspondence, and a concomitant awareness that love discourse must respect strict norms if it is to be acceptable and persuasive. By far the most important reference for The Cloisters plaque is the Roman de la Rose, with its first-person visionary account of an amorous and poetic education that culminates in sexual fulfillment. Other works that highlight the importance of proper verbal and gestural expression in courtship, such as the Jeu de Robin et Marion, the Tournoi de Chauvency, and Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit and Remède de Fortune, also suggest that The Cloisters ivory offers a pictorial reminder that the writing of love messages is an intimate performance of desire with sentimental, aesthetic, and ethical implications. The Cloisters ivory demonstrates how the smallest artifacts can embody historical and social phenomena on the grandest scale. As Richard Randall, Jr. observes, the production of ivories carved with secular subjects emerged in thirteenth-century Europe as a result of two major historical developments: the Crusades and expanded trade with the Islamic world, which led to greater importation of both ivory objects and raw ivory; and the rise of vernacular literature, whose characters and motifs migrated into numerous visual media including ivory.6 Raymond Koechlin’s study emphasizes another major phenomenon that contributed to the production of ivory objects: the development of cities, with their specialized trades and elite consumer cultures.7 Although they were considered luxury items produced for wealthy clients, writing tablets and other ivories were not necessarily “courtly,” in the sense of items meant only for use in courts, or only for nobles. Rather, like numerous other late medieval works of art, ivories attest to the integration of courtly and urban cultures in an age when patricians appropriated noble manners, while nobles resided much of the year in cities and relied increasingly on urban artisans, bankers, and merchants to maintain their lifestyle and power.8 Most importantly, The Cloisters ivory reflects the growing space that writing occupied in French society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For centuries, scribes, bureaucrats, and accountants had written on wooden boards covered with wax to preserve, and reduce expenditures on, parchment. From antiquity into the Middle Ages, wax tablets of ivory and wood had also been used in schools, as the famous lines in the twelfth-century romance Floire et Blancheflor attest: Et quant a l’escole venoient, Leur tables d’ivoire prenoient. Adont lor veïssiez escrire Letres et vers d’amours en cire.

6 7 8

253–56

Images in Ivory, 63. See especially I:1–34. See Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1982); and Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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(And when they went to school They took their ivory tablets. Then you should have seen them write Love letters and songs in wax.)9

As luxury objects, ivory writing tablets with decorated covers likely departed from more practical uses and reflected the development of a new class of writer in the thirteenth century: the wealthy bourgeois or noble who, though not a professional scribe, nevertheless was trained to write.10 While ivory writing tablets could have served utilitarian purposes, their size, material, and decoration suggest instead that they were meant to display wealth and social status discreetly, to transmit personal messages, and to be given as gifts. The Cloisters plaque represents the high end of a large market in ivory writing tablets that arose in thirteenth-century France. Among the many covers that survive, this one stands out for its exceptional iconography and craftsmanship. In Koechlin’s vast repertory of “gothic” French ivories, only The Cloisters plaque is carved on both faces with secular motifs.11 Moreover, on all the ivories cited by Koechlin that depict the crowning of a lover, the man kneels before the lady and receives the crown. On The Cloisters plaque, however, both figures stand and he crowns her. Similarly striking is the quality of the carving, which leaves no doubt as to the care and skill that went into producing this ivory.12 For example, although it is not apparent in photographs, the raptor’s leg in the chaplet image is not a relief attached to the plaque face, but is actually carved – with extraordinary delicacy – completely in the round. The hands, faces, and drapery are all finely modeled, creating striking contrasts of light and shadow, depth and surface for such a small object. The Cloisters ivory has been ascribed to Paris on stylistic grounds, a localization that confirms the plaque’s place in an expanding graphic culture. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Paris was a principal center not only of ivory carving, but also of manuscript production. Its workshops were the source of everything from the most humble to the most elaborate books, in French and

9

Cited in Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. Eglal Doss-Quinby et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 19. 10 “Notaries and writers employed on public business, merchants at every level from retail trade to great international firms, and even some artisans” comprised a group of lay writers “that expanded between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries to include all the notables in every city in Europe. Nobles were not excluded, nor were women.” A History of Private Life II. Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1988), 549. 11 The only other plaque listed by Koechlin that is carved on both sides represents a secular “entretien galant” on one side and “la Vierge glorieuse” on the other (vol. 2, no. 1222, 429). 12 Koechlin was not willing to classify The Cloisters plaque as a writing tablet cover, but he appreciated its superior manufacture: “Quant aux plaquettes taillées sur les deux faces, nous avouons n’en pouvoir déterminer l’usage… Cette incertitude est particulièrement regrettable lorsqu’il s’agit d’objets tels que la plaquette de Maihingen [The Cloisters ivory], l’une des plus fines et des plus gracieuses de la série” (1:433).

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Latin, for all levels of society.13 Among the texts copied in Parisian ateliers, the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1225, 1270) stands out as an expression of the new attitudes that led to an increase in both vernacular manuscript production and in private forms of writing for which ivory tablets would have served. A synthesis of romance narrative, lyric subjectivity, and encyclopedic scholasticism, the Rose signals a growing appreciation of the French language’s representational and conceptual potential.14 At the same time, the great number of Rose manuscripts attests to the expanded role of written French in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.15 The Rose manuscripts not only show that the poem appealed to the curiosity, tastes, and intellectual ambitions of a broad spectrum of readers; they are also one of the most important indicators that the number of lay readers grew in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.16 The image of the God of Love on The Cloisters plaque is a small but telling indication of how the Roman de la Rose created a new discourse on writing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While the motif of Love shooting arrows into lovers is ancient, and a commonplace in vernacular love literature, it became prominent in medieval visual representation only after the Rose’s appearance.17 As Erwin Panofsky argues, this iconographic burgeoning was a response to the God of Love’s vivid presence in the Rose, where he is a visible personage with whom the Lover-Dreamer interacts directly, not an abstract force as in other ancient and medieval works.18 Furthermore, the God of Love provided a visual symbol of the Rose’s reconceptualization of amorous discourse. In the lyric tradition, love was communicated through songs whose verses were fit to “a general paradigm of love experience,” and which depended on performance for their authority.19 In the Rose, the God of Love transforms the lover not into a singer of ephemeral songs, but into a writer. The God of Love is a master of discourse, assuming the roles of teacher, narrator, and patron of the Lover-Poet, 13

14

15

16

17

18 19

Ivory was carved throughout northwestern Europe, but judging from both the archival records and the objects that survive, Paris was the main production center. On manuscript production in Paris, see Richard and Mary Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: The Paris Booktrade, 1200–1500, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000). The Roman de la Rose contributed significantly to making the vernacular – and not only French – a language for high literature, as demonstrated by its influence on the work of Dante, Petrarch, Machaut, Gower, Chaucer, and many other writers, and by the early translations of the Rose into Flemish and Italian. Meradith McMunn, who is preparing a new study of Rose manuscripts, counts over 330 extant copies, a number that is all the more impressive given that it likely represents only a fraction of the actual manuscripts produced since the thirteenth century. This is not to imply that the Rose was only read by the laity, but to underscore that evidence in inventories and in the manuscripts themselves points to a wide lay readership. See Pierre-Yves Badel, Le “Roman de la Rose” au XIVe siècle. Étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and the forthcoming study by McMunn. See Erwin Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” in Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 95–128; and Lillian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), esp. figs. 395, 396, 397, 398. Panofsky, 101. Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 85.

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who must himself master love’s expression.20 In the textualized universe of the Rose, the God of Love represents the written word’s power to mediate between subjects and bring love into being. Significantly, one of the most important fourteenth-century meditations on lyric writing, Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit (1363–64), looks to the Rose and the God of Love imagery it inspired to symbolize the process and effects of textual production. After the lady contacts Machaut for the first time to express her admiration, he exclaims: Or faisons une trinité Et une amiable unité, Que ce soit uns corps et une ame D’Amours, de moy et de ma dame!

316–19

(Now let us form a trinity And a loving unity, That we be as one body and one soul Love, myself, and my lady!)

Machaut’s metaphor, like the God of Love figured on The Cloisters plaque, integrates love and language in a corporeal image. Although the Voir Dit contains songs and letters, it is presented from the beginning not as an ephemeral exchange but as a durable monument; the “corps” Machaut evokes in line 318 may be read as both an allegory of the couple, and the written corpus they are producing together. The figure of Love not only inspires passion, but stands for the book as the medium uniting the lover-correspondents. By the same token, the God of Love seated between two lovers on The Cloisters plaque may be read as an emblem of both amorous sentiment and its vehicle, the written word, which will be inscribed on the attached wax tablets. Underlying the plaque and the Voir Dit is the transition from an aesthetic of love as ephemeral song to one of love as embodied in word, book, and object. Machaut’s tripartite image further illuminates the meaning of The Cloisters plaque by underscoring the importance of religious reference to both. The rhymes trinité::unité and ame::dame elevate to a sacred level both Machaut’s love and the book he and his lady are generating. As Sylvia Huot discusses, the melding of spiritual and erotic registers in Machaut’s trinity image borrows directly from the rhetoric of the Roman de la Rose, which presents courtly love and the French language as complementary elements within a divine scheme of physical and intellectual creation.21 Like the Rose and the Voir Dit, The Cloisters plaque integrates writing, profane love, and sacred imagery. The man’s raptor and the lovers’ costume evoke the court, while the lovers’ kneeling poses recall those of visionaries, donors, and worshippers, and the winged God of Love resembles an angel.22 20 21 22

Huot, From Song to Book, 72, 92–93. Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers, 256–57. The Roman de la Rose describes the angelic aspect of all the virtuous personifications in the garden, even noting their wings: “… il sembloient / Tout pour voir anges empenez” (They all

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The carving’s triangular composition echoes the composition of devotional images with sacred figures at their apex, so that this secular scene is endowed with religious resonance. Like the Rose and the Voir Dit, The Cloisters plaque is a testament to the assimilation of religious discourse and imagery into the representation and practice of love. In this light, the similar dimensions of devotional and secular ivories may indicate not only common sources of production, but objects intended for analogous forms of private contemplation: of sacred images on the one hand, of amorous images and words on the other. As the God of Love motif demonstrates, The Cloisters plaque is both a functional cover for writing tablets and a visual space for expressing writing’s symbolic associations. On the plaque’s opposite face (Fig. 2) is another image – the crowning of the lady with a chaplet – that may also be read as an emblem of writing. Whereas the God of Love is an allegorical and sacralizing representation of writing as an instrument of amorous union, the chaplet image is a visual metaphor that relates writing to theatrical courtship rituals. The image of the lady crowned assimilates dance and writing as complementary performances of virtue, both of which respect strict conventions of form and content. A symbol of aesthetic and ethical principles, the chaplet image evokes the amorous and social harmony that arises from the proper expression of worthy sentiments. While the God of Love symbolizes writing as the vehicle for a quasi-mystical union between writer and reader, the chaplet image stands for writing as a mannered form of social display whose object is virtuous courtship. Before we interpret the crowning scene on The Cloisters plaque, we must determine exactly what it represents. Headwreaths such as the man wears and proffers to the lady had been used since antiquity to celebrate everything from military and athletic victory, to marriage, to the arrival of spring. Over the centuries they had also been intimately connected to theatrical and festive dance, a tradition that continued into the Middle Ages and beyond. In the Jeu de Robin et Marion (ca. 1275), Adam de la Halle includes a dance song with the refrain “Bergeronnete, douche baisselete, / Donnés moi vostre chapelet” (Sweet shepherdess, / dearest little girl, / let me have your garland!), which is meant to accompany a personification dance in which the characters manipulate a chaplet. As a pre-existing and apparently well-known song that lent itself to insertion in Adam’s theatricalized version of the pastourelle, “Bergeronnete” suggests that chaplet dances were a familiar phenomenon in northern France. The Tournoi de Chauvency, a poetic account of a tournament that took place in 1285 in Lorraine, shows that role-playing dances were central to court life. In this work, chaplets are crucial props in the dance games that occur at court in the evening, after the day’s fighting is over. Surviving copies of both the Jeu de Robin et Marion and the Tournoi de Chauvency show that like performers and writers, fourteenth-century artists also appreciated the symbolism of chaplets. A copy of the Jeu de Robin et seemed truly to be winged angels, ll. 723–24). This image reappears later to describe the God of Love specifically: “Il sembloit que ce fust anges” (It seemed that this was an angel, l. 899).

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Marion in Aix illustrates the Bergeronnete song and dance with an image of Marion presenting a chaplet to Robin.23 A miniature illustrating the Tournoi de Chauvency in MS Douce 308 (ca. 1312) shows a woman dancing with two men, one of whom has a garland on his head. 24 The depiction of these dances suggests that artists and planners found chaplets particularly significant emblems of courtliness and festive performance. The initial description of the chaplet image on The Cloisters plaque in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin makes no mention of dance, but there are several reasons to interpret it as a dance image.25 As the Jeu de Robin et Marion and the Tournoi de Chauvency demonstrate, the chaplet was closely connected with dance in late medieval culture. Moreover, the ivory’s composition recalls that of the miniature in the Aix Robin et Marion, in which Marion stands to the left and raises the chaplet with her left hand, like the man on the ivory. While the man may not represent a dancer, since a raptor perches on his right wrist, this detail in no way discounts the possibility that a dance might be depicted. In the chaplet dance described in the Tournoi, only the woman dances. Furthermore, the posture of the woman on the ivory is quite suggestive of the kind of coordinated motion we find in medieval descriptions and images of dance. As her left hand hitches up her robe, her left leg appears to make a sweeping motion under the garment. Diagonal folds fall at increasingly steep angles from where she grabs the cloth, ending with one long slanted line running the length of her leg. The contour of her leg is further suggested by the relief of the carving, which creates a diagonal protrusion below her left hip, and by her foot, which projects from beneath the hem. Her pose recalls another illustration of a dance song in the Aix Robin et Marion, in which Robin similarly hitches his robe and swings his leg (though he bares much more of it!).26 With her leg in this intermediary position, the lady on the ivory simultaneously points at the man. While this could be read as a coquettish gesture, the raised index finger signifies speech or song in medieval art. It is therefore likely that the viewer is meant to understand that she is addressing the man orally – and moreover, given her dance step, that she is singing.27

23

24

25 26 27

Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque Méjanes, MS 166 (Rés. Ms. 14), fol. 3v. On this exceptional theater manuscript, see Mark Cruse, Gabriella Parussa, and Isabelle Ragnard, “The Aix Jeu de Robin et Marion: Image, Text, Music,” Studies in Iconography 25 (2004): 1–46. The entire manuscript has been put online by Jesse Hurlbut at http://toisondor.byu.edu/dscriptorium/ aix166. Fol. 113r. See Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308),” in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander: Making and Meaning in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald Guest (London: Harvey Miller-Brepols, 2006), 341–52. The description appears in the Fall 2003 volume, p. 13. This miniature appears on fol. 4r and illustrates the “tour du bras.” The lady’s mouth is not represented as the “o” normally used to depict singing in medieval art, but nor are those of the figures illustrating the Aix Robin et Marion, who raise their index fingers to signify both speech and song.

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Viewed as the depiction of a song and dance, the chaplet image becomes a testament to the expanded representation of performance in late medieval literature and visual art, a phenomenon closely tied to the valorization of the vernacular and of secular subjects.28 Descriptions and images of events including jousts, banquets, plays, processions, and dances became increasingly common in the literary, visual, and manuscript cultures of late-thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France.29 Among the many reasons for this increased emphasis on the representation of spectacle was the desire to engage readers and viewers for didactic purposes. Whether rendered verbally or visually, performance events provided ready-made frameworks for interpretation and vivid description, allowing writers and artists to display the qualities of characters and highlight key narrative moments. The ethical uses of performance explain why courtly dance came to figure so prominently in late-medieval secular literature and art: it provided a shorthand for expressing virtue and nobility. Dance displays social and ethical identity, as is made clear in the Tournoi de Chauvency: Nus ne doit aler par karole S’il n’est chevalier ou tex hom Qu’il le puis faire par raison; Si le tient on a vilonnie, A home de basse lignie

292–96

(No one should dance the carole Unless he is a knight or such a man As can do it correctly; Otherwise he will be taken for a peasant, A man of low breeding).

Writing around 1350, Geoffroi de Charny includes dancing in his Livre de Chevalerie as one of the skills a worthy knight must possess.30 The chaplet image therefore evokes not only a world of courtly performance, but more specifically the comportment by which one manifests virtue. The dance image is appropriate for The Cloisters ivory because it embodies the rapport between virtue and the proper forms of its expression, which foster social harmony and love. That dance and writing were ethically assimilated in the late medieval imagination is clear from both the Roman de la Rose and the work of 28

The importance of the growing representation of performance as a key to understanding medieval French culture has long been recognized by Nancy Regalado, who has devoted numerous articles to what she terms “performance effects.” See in particular “Allegories of Power: The Tournament of Vices and Virtues in the Roman de Fauvel of BN MS Fr. 146,” Gesta 32 (1993): 135–46; and “Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem (1278),” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 103–19. 29 This phenomenon was not limited to France. See Joan Holladay, Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel Willehalm Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century (Seattle and London: College Art Association in association with the University of Washington Press, 1996). 30 The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny, ed. and trans. Richard Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 113.

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Machaut which, as we have seen, are two of the most important loci for late medieval views about writing’s purpose. One of the first scenes in the Roman de la Rose is the carole led by Déduit and his lady Liesse, both of whom wear chaplets. More than an ornamental mise en scène of courtly festivity, the descriptions of dance and luxurious headwear establish a moral framework for the rest of the work. In the Rose, dance is discourse – the carole, which represents the harmony engendered by the proper expression of virtue, is one of the Lover’s many exemplary encounters as he pursues his path toward his beloved.31 In Machaut’s Remède de Fortune (ca. 1341), dance is a complement to the poetry and music that unite both the lover and his lady, and the poem’s larger allegorical community. Moreover, Machaut highlights dance’s correlation to poetry in a famous manuscript of the Remède (Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1586), which he himself supervised. Folio 51r combines on a single page an image of a carole occupying almost half the space devoted to text and musical notation.32 One of the most important summations of late medieval aesthetics, fr. 1586 clearly shows that dance and writing were intimately related forms of expression. Underlying the chaplet scene on The Cloisters plaque is the conceptual resemblance between dance and writing expressed in works such as the Roman de la Rose, the Jeu de Robin et Marion, the Tournoi de Chauvency, and the Remède de Fortune. As these texts and their illustrations make clear, dance and writing were understood as complementary modes of performance with similar aesthetic rules and goals. Equally important to understanding The Cloisters ivory, though, are the ethical commonalities between dance and writing that these texts underscore. A refined dance such as the one on The Cloisters plaque is an emblem of what Christopher Page calls the primaveral ethos of courtly literature and art.33 The chaplet dance is a form of normalized expression that uses the language of gesture to guarantee mutual comprehension and pleasure. It therefore stands as an admonition and inspiration to the one using the writing tablet, that the text inscribed respect courtly conventions. In this way, the encounter between writer and reader will be as pleasant and virtuous – and eventually, perhaps, as intimate – as the dance depicted on the ivory. The Cloisters plaque has much to tell us about the place of writing in the imagination and cultural practice of the Middle Ages, about changing notions of representability, and about the relationship between medieval ethics and aesthetics. Yet it tells us very little about the circumstances of its own production and 31

This is not to forget that the carole, like much in Guillaume de Lorris’s garden, is radically devalorized by Genius toward the end of Jean de Meun’s poem (ll. 20309f.). 32 This folio was recently reproduced in the catalogue for the exhibit Moyen Âge. Entre ordre et désordre (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 204. Though I cite Machaut’s manuscript for purposes of general comparison to The Cloisters plaque, which predates fr. 1586, it has been argued that manuscripts of his work directly influenced the iconography of later ivories. See Richard Randall, Jr., “Medieval Ivories in the Romance Tradition,” Gesta 28.1 (1989): 30–40, esp. 37–39. 33 Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100– 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 80.

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use. We do not know for whom, why, or exactly when The Cloisters plaque was produced. While we can be relatively certain that it was made to cover writing tablets, the rest of its existence is open to speculation. Whether writing tablets with decorated covers were used for practical note-taking, accounting, poetic composition, or sending intimate messages remains a mystery, but perhaps the most likely scenario is that The Cloisters plaque was a courtship present. In the Roman de la Rose, Ami tells the Lover that he must try to communicate with his beloved by “voiz,” “lettres,” or “tables” – wax tablets. Ami is an ally of the God of Love, and his advice resonates in The Cloisters plaque, the Voir Dit, and numerous other sources that stress the importance of gifts, both poetic and material, to amorous pursuit. The plaque’s iconography, like that of other ivory covers, makes it easy to imagine that these sumptuous objects served romantic functions.34 At the same time that the iconography of the covers conveyed the giver’s sentiments, the writing tablets within could have been used to entice or facilitate intimate correspondence of the kind Machaut describes in the Voir Dit. It may be significant that the only ivory tablet to preserve any writing dates to the late fourteenth century and contains the words “Amour me fait souvent … Désir.”35 Like the iconography of a modern Valentine’s Day card, the images on The Cloisters plaque likely signified the sender’s intent, announcing to the recipient a message offered with love.

34

Charles Little observes of another set of writing tablets carved with amorous scenes that “it is tempting to surmise that these tablets were created for a campaign of love” (Images in Ivory, 238). 35 Cited in Bousmanne, 183, and Koechlin, nos. 1161–62.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. Ivory plaque, double-sided, ca. 1325–50, front (2003.131.3a,b). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

AN IVORY WRITING TABLET COVER AT THE CLOISTERS

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 2. Ivory plaque, double-sided, ca. 1325–50, back (2003.131.3a,b). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A Cultural Performance in Silk: Sebelinne’s aumousniere in the Dit de l’Empereur Constant E. Jane Burns

If all of Proust’s world comes out of a teacup, the world of Sebelinne, a littleknown heroine in the Old French Dit de l’Empereur Constant, comes out of a silk purse. Indeed this thirteenth-century Byzantine romance about religious conversion and male dynastic succession actually turns on a small object fashioned from cloth: a richly decorated, heavily embroidered aumousniere.1 Whether damask or velvet, decorated with silk or gold embroidery, Old French aumousnieres described in romance texts and trade accounts of the thirteenth century are fashioned typically from costly silk and hung from a belt, itself often made of rich silk fabric. Although the name aumousniere suggests a pouch that might hold alms for the poor or money to be donated at pilgrimage shrines, many literary texts feature silk purses as practical receptacles for small change, herbs, unguents, and medicines, or as decorative items of attire holding anything from rings, keys, and jewels to relics and even sewing supplies. Used at times to carry holy bread, aumousnieres could also become highly symbolic gifts given as love tokens. 2 Most interestingly, however, we know from guild accounts that silk aumonières were produced in thirteenth-century Paris and that they included a category termed “aumosnieres sarrasinoises,” purses fashioned in the manner of highly decorated Saracen work on imported silk cloth or copies thereof. The very combination of the terms “aumosnieres” and “sarrasinoises” generates a network of rich cultural resonances that are staged in the Dit de l’Empereur Constant through a 1

2

The text of the Empereur Constant survives in two versions, a 630-line dit in octosyllabic rhymed couplets and a 408-line conte in prose, both in the Picard dialect and published together as La légende de l’Empereur Constant, ed. James Coveney (Paris: Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres, 1955). The dit, which is the subject of this study, exists in a single manuscript that also contains the Roman de la Rose, an untitled love poem, and Le plait de droit et de l’evesque (Coveney, 7–8). Eva Lundquist, La mode et son vocabulaire (Goteborg, Sweden: Wettergren and Kerber, 1950), 75–77. For the reference to sewing supplies see Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Felix Lecoy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1962), vv. 275–76, where “fil de filieres” rimes with “aumosnieres,” and for an important example of the aumosniere as a love token, vv. 1228, 4412, 4432. The aumousniere also plays a central narrative role in Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle, ed. Henri Michelant and Paul Meyer (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1894).

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dynamic and interactive performance between an unprepossessing heroine and a small piece of silk. Atypically, the aumousniere in this text contains not a relic, ring or coin but a sequence of hand-written messages. Indeed, this ornate purse is perhaps most significant as a material object from which the heroine scripts and fashions a brief plot of monumental proportions. Deftly manipulating a culturally charged item of silk, she executes a remarkable cultural performance. I would like to analyze that performance here in honor of Nancy Regalado’s extended scholarly commitment to broadening our understanding of medieval performances in many guises. A Conversion Story? The Empereur Constant recounts no less than the legendary transformation of Byzantium into Constantinople, ostensibly by a lowly youth, Constant, who is himself changed unpredictably in the course of the tale from a “fils de vilain” into a worthy nobleman. As this Christian convert modeled on feudal nobility replaces the former “Saracen” emperor, he is credited with giving the famed eastern city a new name derived from his own hybrid identity: “Coustant le noble” (v. 627). The city called Coustantinnoble suggests both the costly (coustant) opulence typically associated in the medieval west with Byzantine splendor and the requisite nobility (le noble) of a Christian courtly hero who might predictably perform such a daunting task. And yet, the conversion of the dazzlingly rich eastern city and the surprising creation of its new ruler are actually effected by a woman, the Byzantine emperor’s unassuming daughter, Sebelinne. Described as “celle qui moult ot science” (v. 405), Sebelinne draws on her considerable skill and knowledge to determine and orchestrate the course of events in this tale. It is she who engineers the fate of Constant, averting his murder, while simultaneously securing her own independence, enacting her desire and obtaining her every wish, we are told (vv. 380–83, 427, 599). And she does so by ably manipulating a small item of dress. When Sebelinne’s father Floriiens, hoping to dispose once and for all of the troublesome rival Constant, sends him away with a secret message ordering his death, it is Sebelinne who spies the lavish and costly purse containing the fateful message and interrupts its delivery: Tant qu’elle vit a sa çainture Une aumousniere de rice oeuvre; La pucielle le prist, se l’uevre.

vv. 354–56

(As soon as she saw a richly worked purse attached to his belt, the young maiden took it and opened it.)

Although this aumousniere is not said specifically to be made of silk, its characterization as “richly worked” situates it squarely among any number of lavish silk purses typically described in literary texts of the period as “aumosnieres … tant riches et tant chieres,” or more precisely as an “aumosniere” of “samit vermeil,”

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or an “aumosniere de soie” (such rich and costly alms purses; an alms purse of heavy red silk; a silk alms purse).3 Most importantly, for our purposes, opening that aumousniere opens Sebelinne’s future. She reads her father’s letter condemning Constant to death and acts swiftly to save him. In so doing this heroine deftly usurps the functions of Floriiens as both emperor and father. Replacing his written message with one of her own devising, Sebelinne instructs the provost not to kill Constant, with whom she is now in love, but to arrange instead for him to marry her. In a breathtaking act of ventriloquism, Sebelinne writes in her father’s place and literally in his name, inserting into the aumousniere a message that begins, “Jou, empereres de Bisence, de Griesse et de Sesille rois” (vv. 406–7, I, Emperor of Byzantium, King of Greece and Sicily). If the story of the Emperor Constant opens by asking, Who can be emperor? in terms of religion and class status (a Christian or a pagan, a “fils de vilain” or a noble), it later asks that question in terms of gender, Could the emperor, if only temporarily or in effect, be a woman? To what extent could the signature on a message bearing the name of the “Emperor of Byzantium, the King of Greece and Sicily” be penned not by a man’s hand but by a woman’s? The question resonates historically with the infamous Byzantine empress Irene who, after serving as coregent with her son, Constantine VI, took the unprecedented step of displacing him entirely and adopting for herself the title of basileus traditionally reserved only for the male emperor.4 In terms of the narrative unfolding of the Empereur Constant, the question becomes, In what sense could a female protagonist orchestrate the plot of this story, determining the course of its events and the pattern of her own future life? And by what means? Sebelinne’s very clear written instructions to the provost indicate in no uncertain terms that her orders must be obeyed. Tellingly, this incontrovertible expression of “her will,” endowed with the full force of the emperor’s words, is enclosed and transmitted in “richly worked” cloth. She puts her authoritative and ventriloquized decree “dedens l’aumousniere” (v. 429). From Paris to Constantinople Silk fashions surprising identities in this brief tale, infusing recognizable patterns of medieval French courtly coupling, displaced here to Constantinople, with new and unexpected details. In Constant’s case, the costly silk, so often associated with eastern extravagance, comes to mark the newly Christian emperor, a “fils de vilain” who has crossed lines of class as well as religious borders.5 When the boy 3 4 5

Lundquist, 76. Judith Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100. The text explains that the boy is called “Coustant” because the medical treatments necessary to heal the substantial wounds he suffered from Floriiens were very “costly” (vv. 235–36). But of course another resonance accompanies this one since Constantinople, in the medieval western European imagination, stood as one of the most extravagantly wealthy and opulent (i.e. “costly”) cities.

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called Constant is perceived as a threat to royal succession in the eastern capital, he is kidnapped and severely mutilated by the Saracen emperor of Bisence, Floriiens. Saved by a chamberlain who wraps the infant in a “vermeil couvertoir de soie” (v. 201), Constant is delivered to a Christian abbey. Not unlike the heroine Fresne in Marie de France’s lai by the same name, this protagonist is later recognized because of the lavish silk cloth which, in this instance, documents his capture and his stay in the royal household while also presaging ironically his future status as emperor (vv. 275–80).6 For Sebelinne, the transfigured contents of the purse enable her to step boldly out of gendered feudal categories of governance and marriage. In a sense, Sebelinne “works” the aumousniere much as heroines in the Old French chanson de toile work fabric, rewriting male-voiced songs of love and romance in a different key, often recasting the traditional male lament into a story of shared desire and consensual marriage. Female protagonists in the chanson de toile effect this transformation while performing clothwork: sewing, spinning, embroidering.7 Sebelinne rewrites her marriage plot by recasting the role and function of what was historically, in western Europe, often a product of such women’s work: a decorative aumousniere. Indeed, recent work by Sharon Farmer shows that thirteenth-century Paris had a lively silk industry dominated in fact by women, both as workers and entrepreneurs.8 Etienne Boileau’s thirteenth-century record of trade regulations in Paris lists women spinners (fileresses) who prepared silk fiber for weaving (lv), women silk weavers (tisserandes de soie) who produced headscarves and linings (lviv), women who worked silk as chapelieres and mercieres (lxxvii), and female tissutiers and rubaniers who wove light-weight silk cloth and silk ribbons, perhaps adding embroidered detail (lviii).9 In the narrative of the Empereur Constant, Sebelinne works her influence through a cloth object that is said obliquely to have already been “worked” or heavily “decorated” (de rice oeuvre), perhaps by other women. The text underscores this cultural resonance by rhyming the Old French term “oeuvre” (clothwork) with “uevre” (she opens) in the key passage cited above: “Tant qu’elle vit a sa çainture / Une aumousniere de rice oeuvre; / La pucielle le prist, se l’uevre” (vv. 354–56, italics mine). It is significant, however, that Sebelinne is not situated in a Parisian workshop like the women mentioned in Etienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers. Nor is she located in a household or castle in medieval France as are the protagonists in the Old French chanson de toile. Rather, this heroine’s father has enclosed her in the 6

7 8 9

See Jean Rychner, “Fresne,” in Les lais de Marie de France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1973), vv. 121–26; and E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 191–92. See E. Jane Burns, “Love’s Stitches Undone: Women’s Work in the chanson de toile,” in Courtly Love Undressed, 88–118. “Biffes, Tiretaines, and Aumonières: The Role of Paris in the International Textile Markets of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Medieval Textiles and Clothing 2 (2006): 73–88. Le livre des métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, XIIIe siècle, ed. René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879).

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company of a nurse and under the guardianship of local nobles in a castle situated cryptically at the edge of his realm (“el cief de sa tierre,” v. 89). Sebelinne is positioned, then, somewhere in the distant and geographically vague Byzantine empire, understood anachronistically in this tale as a “pagan” land. Descended from the kings of Greece on her father’s side and from Roman emperors on her mother’s, Sebelinne, who displays the hallmark beauty and nobility of the western courtly lady, also stands geographically in the position of the Saracen princess, embodying all the cultural ambiguity and complex subjectivity that both of those female stereotypes convey.10 What, then, was the cultural significance of Sebelinne’s richly embroidered purse for literary audiences in medieval France and, more specifically, what kind of cultural performance does her secretive opening and closing of that purse enact? Aumousnieres and Bourses As lavishly decorated objects of dress that often indicated the wealth and status of their wearer, medieval European aumousnieres could in many instances be distinguished from the leather money pouches or small satchels called bourses that hung from the belts of peasants and tradesmen as they are frequently described in Old French fabliaux. Leather bourses designed to carry coins such as deniers or mailles are portrayed in fabliaux as being used by merchants at fairs, customers in the marketplace, clients at the tavern, or shopkeepers and tradesmen in town settings.11 The aristocratic aumousniere, by contrast, appears in romance narratives as a costly dress accessory worn atop other articles of lavish clothing. Two surviving archaeological examples of medieval French purses, reproduced in Le quotidien au temps des fabliaux by Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, aptly illustrate the distinction.12 First, a leather bourse from the thirteenthcentury discovered in Brussels, a simple money pouch closed with a drawstring, resembles the everyday coin purse hanging from a peasant woman’s belt in the Luttrell Psalter or the “bourses et ceintures” displayed for sale in a fourteenthcentury manuscript drawing of a mercer’s stall.13 By contrast, a pouch of red silk from Chelles (Seine-et-Marne) dated between 1170 and 1180, heavily embroidered and bedecked with tassels, pompons, and decorative buttons, is an item of luxury attire, more like the highly ornamented and apparently expensive aumousnieres displayed alongside furs and precious textiles, gemstones and glassware in 10 11

Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 186–87. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, Le quotidien au temps des fabliaux (Paris: Picard, 2003), cite “Boivin” (vv. 6–19), which describes a young man disguised as a peasant with “douze deniers” in his “bourse” (vv. 17–18; p. 173); “Du pretre et des deux ribauds,” which details even poorer individuals who, without the benefit of a leather bourse, would simply tie their coins in a knot in their chemise (vv. 68–77; p. 267); and “Des braies au cordelier” (vv. 275–82), which tells of a man reaching into his “bourse” to pay his “ecot” (v. 277; p. 267). 12 Alexandre-Bidon, 279, fig. 180–81. 13 Alexandre-Bidon, 274, fig. 174; 278, fig. 179.

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a thirteenth-century miniature of “household goods.”14 However, the Old French terms bourse and aumousniere are not always distinct. We see the aristocratic aumousniere in context, for example, in the fourteenth-century Romans de Baudoin de Seburc when the Rouge Lion has his sister dressed for marriage: the lavish outfit of rich silk fabrics and cloth of gold is completed appropriately by an elegant purse, here called a “bourse ouvree” (v. 770).15 More commonly, the term bourse appears in comical and ribald fabliaux, accompanying visual images of male sexual potency and lustful gaming. The erotic connotations of the Old French bourse emerge clearly, for example, in the illustration of a merchant’s stall cited above where bourses and belts displayed for sale are juxtaposed with an image of a fornicating couple.16 A fourteenth-century courtly variation on the motif features a lady offering her heart to her lover while a husband offers his wife a more tangible bourse, the latter suggesting both monetary and sexual abundance.17 By contrast, the higher status and more costly aumousniere, linked both through its name and through archaeological finds to almsgiving, is also commonly characterized as an envelope for Christian relics. Indeed, the lavish silk purse from Chelles that survives from the twelfth century is thought to have contained symbolically powerful relics.18 An inventory of relics from Sens Cathedral lists, among the holdings of the treasury, a number of aumousnieres used for this specific purpose.19 Brian Spencer describes other aumousnieres that served as reliquaries, indicating further that miniature versions of these purses in lead – hung as necklaces or affixed to clothing as were many pilgrim badges – sometimes also functioned as reliquary pendants.20 Reliques et coilles Medieval audiences would have been familiar with the conflation of these items – the erotically charged bourse and the religiously and ritually oriented aumousniere – for they recur in one of the most widely circulated thirteenth-century narratives, the Roman de la Rose. In that text, purses perform a wide range of functions. The infamous passage in which Reason responds to the Lover’s objection to her use of “vulgar” language (vv. 6927–28) evokes precisely the linguistic dyad represented by the sexually charged bourse and the pious aumousniere, positing the potential confusion of male genitalia and relics in terms

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Alexandre-Bidon, 14, pl. XI. Cited in Francisque Michel, Recherches sur le commerce, la fabrication et l’usage des étoffes de soie, d’or et d’argent et autres tissus précieux en Occident, principalement en France pendant le Moyen Âge (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1852), 2:353. Alexandre-Bidon, 278, fig. 179. Alexandre-Bidon, 279, fig. 182. Alexandre-Bidon, 278. E. Chartraire, Inventaire du trésor de l’église primatiale et métropolitaine de Sens (Paris: A. Picard, 1897), 29–32, 41. Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges: Medieval Finds from Excavations in London (London: The Stationery Office, 1998), 7:314–15.

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of coilles and reliques. 21 Raison says, in effect, that if the names of these two objects had been switched, the lover would have considered the word “reliques” to be lowly and disgusting while understanding “coilles” as a lovely word, so esteemed in fact that he would have venerated coilles as if they were relics and kissed them in churches where they would be set in gold and silver (vv. 7107– 20).22 At the end of Jean de Meun’s portion of the romance, the courtly loverturned-pilgrim venerates not coilles at all but (in some readings at least) female labia-turned-relics. In this instance it is the pilgrim’s escharpe, yet another kind of purse, hung typically around the neck and shoulders, that functions in the metaphorical and violent defloration of the Rose. The male lover’s purse is here said to hang behind the advancing, thrusting bourdon (vv. 21609–10).23 Readers of this text will recall, however, that at an earlier narrative moment, in Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the tale, the God of Love had outfitted the Lover with a silk aumosniere, defining it as a requisite item of courtly dress, along with gloves and a belt (vv. 2153–54). Saracen Work by a Saracen Woman? In an important sense, then, Sebelinne’s very different use of the “aumousniere de rice oeuvre” powerfully counters the Roman de la Rose’s courtly account of violation parading as reverence. Although Sebelinne, too, inserts part of her body into an object made potentially to hold valued relics, along with alms and other items as we have seen, hers is not a pseudo-religious gesture, and the body part in question here is, of course, not a metaphorical male member represented by the pilgrim’s bourdon. Rather, this heroine “enters” the aumousniere with her hand in order to deposit a sealed, hand-written message claiming the Byzantine emperor’s rank and authority as her own. What is honored irreverently in the Empereur Constant are not genitalia of either gender, but the heroine’s invaluable and transgressive hands that enact a crucial trans-gendered and trans-cultural performance. Her gesture resonates with a number of literary references not only to silk worked by hand (“ouvrée de main”) but more specifically to Saracen “work,” to silk “ouvrée de mains sarrasinoises.” Francisque Michel cites, for example, a version of the Perceval story which features needlework by “une sarrasine” who exits from Queen Guenevere’s chamber where she has embroidered an image of 21

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992). 22 The scene’s key commentators are summarized by David Hult, who further reveals androgynous overtones in an expanded linguistic nexus of coilles, coillir, cueillir, Bel Acueil; see his “Language and Dismemberment: Abelard, Origen and the Romance of the Rose,” in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 101–30. 23 See examples in Marcel and Pierre-Gilles Girault, Visages de pèlerins au moyen âge. Les pèlerinages européens dans l’art et l’épopée (Paris: Zodiaque, 2001), fig. 1, 20, 24, 39, 77, 147, among others. Medieval pilgrims are most often depicted as carrying a larger, more practical escharpe or sacoche worn typically “en bandoliere” across the chest, leaving the hands free and providing more ample room to carry provisions while traveling.

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Gawain, a textile here termed “oeuvre sarrasinoise.”24 If the Empereur Constant is a conversion story recording Christianity’s supposed march and triumph moving “eastward,” it is also a story of highly prized Saracen silk migrating to the “west.” The aumousniere worked metaphorically by Sebelinne in this brief tale situates her as belonging both to the reputedly Saracen lands of her Byzantine home and to the luxury textile industry of thirteenth-century France. The aumousniere sent initially by the emperor of Byzantium, Greece, and Sicily, then carried by the fils de vilain-turned-messenger, Constant, harbinger of the new Constantinople, and finally taken over by the “fille du roi” tells a complex story of protagonists who succeed in crossing lines of class and gender through their interactions with a material object that is itself culturally situated at the nexus between east and west. In so doing, the brief tale of the Empereur Constant attests to the ability of Saracen silk and the women who deploy it potentially to configure and generate a range of alternative European identities. By opening and closing a silk aumousniere, Sebelinne hedges western European narratives of arranged marriage and paternal authority while also subtly critiquing courtly copulation and the love reputed to accompany it. Most importantly, she does so by foregrounding the power of Saracen work in medieval textile production. This, in the end, is the import of Sebelinne’s cultural performance in cloth.

24

Michel, 2:354.

Acting Like a Man: Performing Gender in Tristan de Nanteuil Kimberlee Campbell

For scholars of the Middle Ages, the old French chanson de geste has traditionally served as the benchmark for one extreme of a continuum of representation, a genre expressing the distilled essence of the medieval masculine. This reading of the epic presumes a transparent equivalence of the masculine with the body and actions of the knight, constructing the “male” as a necessary element in an ideology of chivalric caste and power. Furthermore, this definition of the masculine is, in Simon Gaunt’s words, “monologic,” meaning that “in the chansons de geste male characters are defined as individuals in relation to other men, whilst women are excluded from the genre’s value system.”1 Sarah Kay would seem to agree, seeing the chanson de geste as the literary embodiment of Georges Duby’s model of a feudal power2 that reduces “women to the status of transparent objects via which transactions between men, such as dynastic alliances and inheritance, are vehicled.”3 The feminine “other” is restricted to a transactional function, serving, in Kay’s words, as a “prop to the ideal of masculine collectivity,”4 in a system in which the indissolubility of the constituent terms of the identity of the male knight is taken for granted. However, the chanson de geste is a long-lived genre; later poets are not unaware of the tensions generated by the silencing of plurality inherent to the epic articulation of the male-as-knight. Problematizing this monologic masculinity, these poets express repressed alterity through characters who not only “diagnose what is wrong with the male order,”5 as Gaunt suggests, but more importantly 1 2

3 4 5

Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22. Sarah Kay, in her article on “Seduction and Suppression in Ami et Amile,” French Studies 54 (1990): 129–42, cites Georges Duby’s Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), but see also Duby’s linguistic discussion of the knight as male in his “Les origines de la chevalerie,” in Hommes et structures du Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1984), 331. Kay, “Seduction and Suppression,” 131. Kay, “Seduction and Suppression,” 141. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 23.

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deconstruct maleness as articulated through the lens of knighthood. One of the most interesting chansons de geste in this regard is the fourteenth-century Tristan de Nanteuil,6 in which a triptych of disruptive knightly performances ranging from the cowardly to the crossdressed restages maleness, forcing the reconsideration of gendering through social role. As we shall see, the performances of Tristan as cowardly warrior and of Aye and Blanchandine as transvestite knights disrupt conventional expectations about gender roles and unsettle the epic paradigm. The issue of crossdressing, both as a general theme in medieval literature and, specifically, in the case of Tristan de Nanteuil, in which two female characters perform as crossdressed knights, has received a good bit of critical attention in recent years. Vern Bullough has explored the social reception of both male and female transvestism through hagiography, noting that, despite biblical prohibitions, crossdressed women were rarely censured since it could be argued that “the female who wore male clothes and adopted the role of the male would be trying to imitate the superior sex.”7 However, this argument, when read against epic and romance, becomes a subversion of the dominant ideology, as Peggy McCracken has suggested: “The medieval transvestite romance presents a profoundly troubling spectacle to an aristocratic society founded and maintained by dynastic marriage and succession because ambiguous gender threatens the disruption of dynastic structures.”8 Linguistic structures are similarly dislocated, as Michèle Perret has noted: “L’extrême labilité du signe, et singulièrement le rapport problématique du signe à son référent, se révèle tout particulièrement dans ce domaine de la différence des sexes”9 (The extreme fluidity of the sign, and especially the problematic correspondence of the sign to its referent, is most clearly visible with respect to the difference of the sexes). Thus, the representation of crossdressing operates a profound disruption of mimetic structures, yet in terms of outcomes and consequences for female characters, the effect of such disruptions would seem to be momentary, since in the end, as Valerie Hotchkiss observes: “authors … integrate the characters – either as women or transformed men – into the gender hierarchy by placing them within conventional sexual relationships.”10 In fact, the significance of such episodes lies not in their conventional endings, but rather in the creation of what Peggy McCracken has termed “a privileged site from which to expose the ideological forces that maintain and enforce the opposition male/female.”11 This space is then the locus for the subversion of gender norms, 6

Tristan de Nanteuil, chanson de geste inédite, ed. Keith Sinclair (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971). All subsequent citations refer to this edition. Translations are my own. 7 Vern Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1974): 1383. 8 Peggy McCracken, “ ‘The Boy Who Was a Girl’: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence,” The Romanic Review 85 (1994), 517. 9 Michèle Perret, “Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine,” Romance Notes 25 (1985), 334. 10 Valerie Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man (New York: Garland, 1996), 124. McCracken (517) and Perret (337–38) likewise underline the return to normative heterosexual relations as the conclusion to stories of crossdressing women in epic and romance. 11 McCracken, 518.

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but which ones? Critical reactions, even as they have shifted from the strictly feminist to a more heterogeneous concern with gender identities, have focused on the female, reading episodes of crossdressing in terms of women’s sexuality, power, and place in the narrative. On the other hand, we are less aware of the narrative construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of maleness – in association with bodies of either sex – especially in genres in which maleness seems self-evident. In the following pages, then, I will examine the parameters of maleness in Tristan de Nanteuil as these are deconstructed through crossdressing and other textual performances that render knighthood an inappropriate vehicle for the expression of an ideal of masculinity. In Tristan, the issue of maleness is inscribed in the text from the beginning, through the exposition of the character of Tristan, the principle protagonist of the chanson de geste. Although the first lines of the poem have been lost, later reprises tell us about his birth and upbringing: Tristan is of the great lineage of Nanteuil, the deeds of which are celebrated as part of the cycle of Doon de Mayence. In keeping with other texts and other cycles, many of which are still well known in France in the mid-fourteenth century if we are to judge by manuscript culture, the audience would expect a hero along the lines of a Roland, or perhaps a Raoul: quick to anger, and on occasion cruel, but also and inevitably strong of arm and brave in battle. However, although the descendent of many a knight, Tristan does not naturally possess the qualities of a warrior. This is not by reason of any physical defect, as becomes obvious during his first night with Blanchandine, in the course of which, despite his near-rape of the young woman, he manages not only to cause her to fall in love with him but also to accomplish that time-honored epic function of engendering a child (Tristan, 4545–65). Tristan is biologically male; he can procreate. On the other hand, he makes a disappointing knight who cannot overcome his fear on the battlefield. When faced with a group of marauders who want to take Blanchandine, his only response is to flee into the forest, leaving her to her fate, so great is his fear of his enemies’ swords: “Mais tant doubte le cop d’une espee fourbie / Qu’i n’osoit aproucher celle gent renoÿe” (Tristan, 6229–30; But so much does he fear the blow from a shining sword / That he dares not approach those traitorous folk). Later, even as a dubbed knight, better armed, and in the presence of an entire company of fellow warriors, he remains cowardly, climbing a tree to escape from the battle (Tristan, 7047–54). Furthermore, he is so squeamish that he cannot stand the sight of blood: “Quant Tristan voit le sanc et la char entamee, / Dont se pasma .x. fois en une randonnee; / Pour mille mars d’or n’eust la plaie regardee” (Tristan, 7803–5; When Tristan sees the blood and wounded flesh / He faints ten times in a row; / Not for a thousand gold marcs would he have looked at the wound). In fact, Tristan is able to overcome his fear only when he comes into the possession of a magic horn that protects the bearer from all physical harm and allows him victory in any battle (Tristan, 8589–91); this horn is urged upon him by no less a personage than King Arthur himself. With the evocation of Arthur, and the use of such contrasting adjectives as preux and couars, the poet, counting on the cultural competence of his audience,

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sets up an intertextual contrast between Tristan – tall, strong and biologically male – and conventional knightly maleness. Cowardice is not, of course, unknown to the epic prior to this text, but it is most often ascribed to a male separated from the monologic brotherhood by reasons of religion or treason. Tristan, on the other hand, is neither Saracen nor felon. His cowardice stands in sharp contrast to his sexual virility, marking an important break with the traditional epic definition of maleness. The poet further distinguishes Tristan from medieval theological or legal texts that would read these differences as “female,” in light of the system of binary oppositions becoming, as Joan Cadden among others has noted, ever more characteristic of medieval conceptualizations of gender.12 Tristan’s cowardice is not gendered in this way; rather, the poem sets up an opposition between nature and nurture that will seem quite familiar to the modern reader.13 As it turns out, Tristan has not been brought up as a knight, with the opportunities for socialization that such an upbringing would imply. Shortly after his birth, Tristan is separated from his family during the course of a storm at sea, and raised in the wild, without reference to human cultural values. He does not even know his name, calling himself, significantly, “Sauvage” (Tristan, 6583). His first lover, Blanchandine, teaches him to wear clothes (Tristan, 4785–88); later on, his halfbrother, Doon le Bâtard, teaches him about Christianity as well as about the duties of a knight, at Tristan’s request: Mais oncques je ne fu en bataille fournier, Ne ne sceus maintenir point de chevallerie, Ne manïer le branc qui luit et refflambie; Oncques ne vi bataille, estour në arramye. Je suis sauvages homs, sans sens, plain de sotie… Compains, se dist Tristan, veullés moy enseigner Commant on se combat a loy de chevalier. 6577–81, 6590–91 (But never was I in a pitched battle, Nor did I learn the fine points of chivalry, Nor to use the shining, gleaming blade; Never did I see battle, skirmish or combat. I am a savage man, without reason, very foolish… “Friend,” said Tristan, “Please teach me How one fights according to the laws of chivalry.”)

12

Joan Cadden notes that “Many of the differences which defined the two sexes in relation to each other were directly related to warmth and coolness: male strength and hardness, contrasted with female weakness and softness.” Joan Cadden, “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 62. Joyce Salisbury comments that “The early church fathers, too, divided the world by gender, and men were defined as rational (dominated by mental activity) and stronger.” Joyce Salisbury, “Gendered Sexuality,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, 85. 13 Not to mention medieval audiences, as is clear in Silence. See Le Roman de Silence: A Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Verse-Romance by Heldris de Cornuälle, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Cambridge: Heffer, 1972).

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Clearly, Tristan’s performance is linked to his environment, his cowardice the outcome of his having been raised in the wild. A product of nurture unfamiliar with the rules of combat, he is unable to comport himself properly on the field of battle, but this lack in no way compromises his biological maleness: only his knightliness. This knightliness is a function of civilization, and can be learned through repetitive performance, or as Judith Butler puts it, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”14 And indeed, Tristan eventually learns to look and act the part of a formidable knight, but the construction of epic maleness is not, for all that, rehabilitated. Instead, Tristan’s very ability to learn these attitudes and behaviors constitutes a first and permanent rupture in the ideology of knightliness as intrinsic to maleness. If Tristan illustrates maleness expressed only secondarily or tangentially as knightliness, then Aye and Blanchandine, the two female crossdressers in the narrative, represent a complete break with the traditional epic paradigm of knighthood. Between them, these crossdressed female characters incarnate the full range of knightly activity, serving, variously, as warrior, advisor, strategist, and courtier. Female performance in Tristan de Nanteuil is carefully constructed to reflect the traditional epic representation of the (male) knight, thus highlighting the intertextually drawn contrast. As in other chansons de geste,15 the knightly persona is performed at three levels, from the concrete to the abstract. These are possession of equipment (horse, armor, weapons), ability or aptitude (physical strength, skill at arms, and talent for military strategy) and public recognition (generally taking the form of reports of deeds or worthiness as a foe). These categories apply to women in disguise just as they do to male knights. For example, Aye d’Avignon, who takes on her knightly guise (and the name Gaudïon) for survival after she has been kidnapped and shipwrecked, enacts gender in very concrete terms: she possesses all the accouterments of her new knightly status, riding astride and donning protective gear according to the rule or usage of knights, as the poet is careful to note (Tristan, 1813–14). In some battles, she wields an axe rather than a sword. In this instance, not only her equipment, but the use she makes of it, is evoked, and this in terms that recall similar descriptions of battle in other chansons de geste: she splits the enemy down the middle, exposing his backbone (Tristan, 3472–77). Her strength and ferocity are represented using the same lexicon as would be the case for a male character in the traditional epic. Aye is

14

Judith Butler, “Preface (1999),” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 15 For the laisse structure and the articulation of the various topoi, see Jean Rychner, La chanson de geste. Essai sur l’art épique des jongleurs (Geneva: Droz, 1955), as well as Joël Grisward’s very useful discussion of the qualities of the male knight in the Old French epic, Archéologie de l’épopée médiévale. Structures trifonctionelles et mythes indoeuropéens dans le cycle des Narbonnais (Paris: Payot, 1981).

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eager for battle, riding without stopping into the fray. Even Roland himself can do little better.16 Aye is skilled not only with the battle-axe and sword, but also with the lance (Tristan, 2823–28). She strikes with such strength that her lance passes through both the armor and the body of her rival, to protrude a good distance out the other side. In short, her strength and skill at arms are the equivalent of those of the (male) knights against whom and with whom she fights, and indeed, outstanding enough to earn her the leadership of the troop that goes to rescue Blanchandine, the daughter of Galafre. In this case, she gives evidence of her courage, since rather than being conscripted for this mission, she volunteers her services to Blanchandine’s father: “Se vous me baillés gens courtoise et debonnaire, / Se dedens Ermenye ne m’en vois sans mestraire / Combatre au roy Urbain; et le feray retraire” (Tristan, 1766–68; If you give me noble and knightly people, / I will go to Armenia without delay / To fight King Urban, and I will make him retreat). She is supremely confident of her abilities, since she vows that if she cannot bring back the head of Urbain, her own life will be forfeit upon her return (Tristan, 1772). But as it turns out, her confidence is not misplaced, since she also has a talent for military strategy. Before attacking the forces besieging the Tour Gayette, she sends a messenger to reconnoiter the position of the enemy, and also to verify the health of Blanchandine. Then, like any general, she rallies the sixty thousand men under her command for the coming battle, talking of the defeat they will deal the enemy: “Seigneurs, se dist la dame, or vous appareillés, Car demain assaurray les paiens renoyés; Se je puis esploiter, moult leur feray de grefz. Mettés vous en conrroy, et sy vous abillés.”

2690–93

(“Lords,” says the lady, “Now make yourselves ready, For tomorrow I will assault the traitorous pagans; If I can accomplish it, much grief will I cause them. Put your gear together, and prepare yourselves for battle.”)

During the battle itself, Aye shows her qualities as a leader, a man among men. She is out in front, leading the charge. Her enemies are not negligible; she fights King Grignart, a redoubtable warrior, as well as King Urbain himself. The poet describes the battle as a great and perilous one, during which many die (Tristan, 2759–62), but in the end, Aye’s army successfully raises the siege and liberates Blanchandine. Like many an epic knight, Aye pronounces her own encomium: “Le roy Urbain ay fait le cuer du corps crever, / Et trestous les barons dessus les 16

“Li guens le fiert tant vertüusement / Tresqu’al nasel tut le helme li fent, / Trenchet le nés e la buche e les denz, / Trestut le cors e l’osberc jazerenc, / L’oree sele e les alves d’argent / E al ceval le dos parfundement” (The count struck at him so strongly / He’s split his helmet down to the nose-plate / Cutting through the nose and mouth and teeth / Right through his body and the chain-mail of his hauberk, / The gilded saddle with silver pommel, / And deeply into the back of his horse). La Chanson de Roland, ed. Ian Short (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), 1601–6. The translation is my own.

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champs getter” (Tristan, 2886–87; I have caused King Urbain’s heart to burst / And all his barons are lying there on the field of battle). She shows little of the passive shock of an Aude, and none of the compassion normally ascribed to women; rather, she is quite proud of the killing she has done and of the military triumph she has obtained. In short, Aye’s disguise is very successful; she is able to pass as a man both in battle and at leisure, when, presumably, she would no longer be wearing the chain mail and helmet that would better serve in terms of protecting her biological identity. In fact, she is so successful as a male knight that Galafre becomes jealous of her. Although he has promised Gaudïon/Aye the hand of Aiglentine, a captive, in marriage as a reward for liberating the Tour Gayette and Blanchandine, he himself comes to desire Aiglentine, so, in an episode reminiscent of the Biblical King David’s maneuvering for Bathsheba, Galafre arranges a trap whereby Gaudïon/ Aye is captured and imprisoned. The knightly persona of Aye d’Avignon is constituted in terms of her status and accomplishments, but what of her reputation? According to Galafre, she does not come from a well-known family, but she is nevertheless a knight to be reckoned with: “On ne scet qui il est ne de quel heritier, / Fors tant qu’i scet ferir de l’espee d’acier” (Tristan, 2088–89; No one knows who he is, or from whom he is descended, / Only that he knows how to strike with his steel sword). And before the battle at the Tour Gayette, we are made aware that Aye’s reputation has preceded her, for, as a spy tells King Urbain, she is such a deadly foe that he (the king) may well get the worst of it: Gaudïon l’Espagnot est d’armes affaittiés, En bataille detranche testes et bras et piés, Or soyés sur vo garde que le pire n’ayés, Car trop est Gaudïon de vous mal fere aisiés.

2711–14

(Gaudïon the Spaniard is accomplished with arms, In battle, he cuts off heads and arms and feet, So be on guard that you don’t get the worst of it, Because only too easily could Gaudïon do you harm.)

The male-gendered nature of Aye’s activities is underscored through the alternating use of proper names and pronouns. For example, in the preceding citation, the name used for Aye is Gaudïon; this is the name she takes upon assuming her disguise as knight. Phonetically male, the name serves to underline the gender assumed with Aye’s disguise, as Michèle Perret has noted.17 For the audience, this onomastic play makes explicit the contrast between biology and socially gendered performance. In narrative passages, the poet continues to refer to Aye using the female name even after she has assumed her knightly disguise: “Dame Aye d’Avignon point le destrier lÿart; / Vers le roy sarrasin qui fut a l’estandart / Chevaucha la roÿne qui le corps ot gaillart” (Tristan, 2769–71; Lady Aye of Avignon spurs her fiery steed; / Towards the Saracen king with his standard / The 17

Perret, 332.

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gallant-hearted queen rode). Her female biology is emphasized through the use of feminized vocabulary, as “dame” and “reine,” while the narrative itself, through its use of formulaic language virtually identical to that used when speaking of a male knight, underscores the traditionally male nature of Aye’s activities. The malleability of gender categories, and the separation of these from biological identity, are further reinforced by the use of “Gaudïon” for dialogues taking place within the narrative. The use of the male name, in counterpoint to the female “Aye,” serves to remind the audience that in fact, although they may be aware of Aye’s true identity, the other characters in the story are not. In this case, Aye is taken for a man, and spoken of as a man, because she is, for all intents and purposes, a “man,” in so far as that category is socially constructed as a function of the role of the knight. Functionally male, Aye represents a rarity in terms of the traditional chanson de geste, but her situation is not anomalous in Tristan de Nanteuil. A second instance of a woman able to pass as a knight, as Blanchandine does at Clarinde’s court, makes a rule of what would have been merely exceptional if restricted to a single case. Blanchandine’s performance cements the separation of biologically determined sexuality and the socially constructed maleness of knighthood. Like Aye, Blanchandine must be disguised as a knight in order to avoid the probable rape that would ensue were her true identity known. She assumes the clothing and weapons of the knight, and in fact is dubbed by her husband, Tristan: “On lui donna uns draps dont elle fut vestie, / A loy de chevalier c’est bien appareillie, / Et Tristan l’adouba qui en fist chere lie” (Tristan, 12816–18; She was given clothing, which she wore, / By the laws of chivalry she was well equipped, / And Tristan dubbed her with great joy) and “Moult richement l’arma a loy de chevalier” (Tristan, 12821; She was richly armed according to the law of chivalry). Blanchandine is quite able to pass as a man: although she never fights a battle, she skillfully performs maleness before the assembled members of the sultan’s court. None of them are aware of her biological identity. As in the case of Aye with respect to Galafre’s jealousy, reactions to Blanchandine are predicated on her performance; in fact, the sultan’s daughter Clarinde falls in love with Blanchandine: La fille du soudant que Clarinde on nommoit Sur tous les chevaliers tengrement regardoit Blanchandine la belle qui sa cousine estoit. Germaine au roy son pere, mais ne la congnoissoit, Ainçois pour chevalier moult bien el le tenoit.

12939–43

(The daughter of the sultan, whose name was Clarinde, Looked at the beautiful Blanchandine, who was her cousin, More tenderly than at any other knight. [She was] first cousin to her father, the king, but she didn’t recognize her, Rather she took her to be a well-found knight.)

The poet is careful to emphasize Blanchandine’s transformation. She is not “known” or recognizable either as a biological woman or as a family member, even though Clarinde looks very closely, and is attracted by the young knight’s

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looks: “Qu’oncques plus belle riens a nul jour veut n’avoit / Ne sy doulz chevalier que Blanchandins estoit, / Car il estoit moult jeunes, point de barbe n’avoit. (Tristan, 12970–72; She had never seen anything more beautiful / Than was the good knight named Blanchandin, / Because he was very young, and had no beard) and “le vïaire ot cler” (Tristan, 13356; his face was unblemished). The qualities Clarinde notices are not associated with femininity, since, as both Valerie Hotchkiss and Francesca Canadé Sautman have remarked,18 the adjective bel is applied to both male and female in the Old French chanson de geste. It therefore refers not to biological identity, but rather to a fresh, androgynous youthfulness. Blanchandine makes a very “pretty” knight because her face is not marred by the stubble of a beard, nor disfigured by the scars of battle, just like other adolescent male knights. Clarinde’s reaction to Blanchandine’s gender, as opposed to her biology, precipitates the inevitable crisis because, like many young, aristocratic women in the epic, Clarinde is quite eager for sexual relations.19 Blanchandine temporarily deflects Clarinde’s advances by insisting that Clarinde convert to Christianity first, but this strategy works only as long as Clarinde’s father is alive. However, once Clarinde has assumed control of the kingdom, she wastes no time in announcing her own marriage to Blanchandine. Her nobles accept her decision without qualm or question, proof again of Blanchandine’s successful performance of the masculine, since in the chanson de geste, the same rules of genealogical transmission of power are applied to Christian and Saracen alike (Tristan, 14339–40). Blanchandine cannot of course consummate the marriage; it is at this point that the poet, in an extraordinarily detailed series of vignettes, returns to one of the primary arguments established first through the character of Tristan: that maleness resides – and may be essentially limited to – the penis, as the organ of procreation. However, as the narrative demonstrates, performance aligned with socially constructed conceptualizations of gender is powerful; only the revelation of the female body, through sight or touch, can destabilize Blanchandine’s incarnation of the male knight. Blanchandine takes precautions to prevent such a revelation, sleeping on her stomach so as not to be discovered; it is in this position that Clarinde finds her in the morning: Lors regarde entour lui, car clarté l’enlumine. Blanchandine perçoit qui a ung lez s’encline, Qui la endroit dormoit, mais pas n’estoit sovvine; 18

Hotchkiss, 119–20; Francesca Canadé Sautman, “What Can They Possibly Do Together? Queer Epic Performances in Tristan de Nanteuil,” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 225. 19 This representation of an aggressive curiosity with respect to sex on the part of young, presumably virginal woman is relatively common in the Old French chanson de geste. See my article, “Sexual Behavior and Social Consequences in the Old French chanson de geste,” in L’épopée romane au Moyen Âge et aux temps modernes. Actes du XIVe Congrès de la Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes, ed. Salvatore Longo (Naples: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria, 2001), 199–211.

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Ains fut couchee adens la gracïeuse fine: Ne veult pas c’on luy voit tastans vers la boudine. Pour ce se mist adens la dame qui fut fine.

15443–48

(Then she looks around, since daylight illuminated [the room]. She saw Blanchandine, who was lying to one side, There she was sleeping, but she was not on her back; Rather she was lying on her stomach, that clever beauty: She didn’t want anyone to feel her abdomen. For this reason, she was face down, that clever lady.)

Notably, even at this intimate moment, Clarinde does not suspect the real reason for her new husband’s reluctance to make love to her. Nothing but the appearance of a soldier from Blanchandine’s homeland, who recognizes the princess, can disrupt the performance; gossip then goads Clarinde into proposing a shared bath to her husband. At this moment, a frightened stag blunders through the palace; in the confusion, Blanchandine manages to escape before she is obliged to undress. Now wandering the woods in desperation, Blanchandine prays for a solution, and, in a remarkable scene, God takes pity on her, sending an angel to offer her a choice of biological identity: Or te mande Jhesus qui le monde estora, Lequel tu aymes mieulx, or ne me celles ja: Ou adés estre femme ainsy qu’i te crea, Ou devenir ungs homs? A ton vouloir sera. Homs sera, se tu veulx, car il te changera Et te donrra tout ce qu’a home appertendra.

16142–47

(Now Jesus who created the world asks you, Which do you prefer, do not hide it from me: From now on to be a woman, just as he created you, Or to become a man? According to your desire it will be. You will be a man if you want, for he will change you And will give you all that belongs to a man.)

Assuming that her husband Tristan has perished in battle, Blanchandine chooses to become a biological male in order to save her own life. And indeed, when Blanchandine, now Blanchandin, as the angel confirms the re-gendered name, returns to the palace, s/he can now expose herself in the bath. Her new male appendages are clearly visible: La estoit le baing fais et trestout aprestés. Blanchandins se desvest, ne s’y est arrestés, Et quant il fut tout nuz, vers la cuve est allés, Devant mainte pucelle est nuz dedens entrés. La lui paroit le membre qu’estoit gros et quarrés. (Now the bath was prepared and everything readied. Blanchandin undresses himself without hesitating, And when he was nude, he went towards the tub; Before many young maids he entered into it nude. And there was his member, large and well formed.)

16353–57

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Furthermore, he is able to father a child: “La en fist Blanchandins et ses bons et ses grés, / Et engendra la nuyt, se dit l’auttorités, / Ung corps saint debonnaires, saint Gilles est clamés” (Tristan, 16401–3; Blanchandin did all he wished and wanted with her, / And that night, as the authority states, he engendered / A noble, saintly body, called Saint Gilles).20 The performance of genealogy is thus distinguished from that of gender, Blanchandine’s adequacy as a male knight untranslatable, except by divine intervention, in a biological context. Blanchandine’s story completes the third panel of this triptych exploring the epic equivalence of the masculine with the body and actions of the knight. Argued through the ambiguous gender identity of its three main characters – the potent male who is nevertheless not knightly, the biological female who is the ultimate example of male knighthood, and the lover-knight who must undergo a radical resexualization in order to procreate – Tristan de Nanteuil stages knightly maleness as a gender performance separate from biological identity. As Judith Butler puts it, “In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.”21 In Tristan de Nanteuil, the deliberate and insistent voicing of disruptive performance crystallizes medieval debate about traditional but perhaps ever-less-pertinent ideologies of maleness, thereby calling into question both generic expectations and institutionalized models of masculinity.

20

In this iteration of the legend of Saint Gilles, he is the son of Clarinde and Blanchandin, lives as a hermit in Provence and hears the confession of Charlemagne. Tristan, 779–80. 21 Butler, 175.

Amorous Performances: The Aventure de l’espee vermeille in Perceforest Sylvia Huot

The vast fourteenth-century prose Roman de Perceforest, a fictional chronicle of pre-Arthurian Britain under Greek rule, offers a fascinating exposition of courtly ideologies.1 In this essay I will examine a single episode, that of the Aventure de l’espee vermeille, which is played out in the course of Book V.2 In this adventure, young knights are offered an easy sexual encounter with a beautiful young maiden, and given to believe that it is only through sexual “performance” that they can prove their manhood. As the adventure progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that this kind of sexual adventuring is actually antithetical to the chivalric ideals of Perceforest’s courtly society. Gallafur, the only knight who refuses sexual contact, is the one who succeeds in staging the noblest form of chivalric masculinity, proving himself worthy of marrying the princess Alexandre and founding an illustrious lineage. Spectators, in turn, can be judged according to their reading of the knights’ performance of the adventure: those with more 1

2

The text imagines a period of British history inaugurated by the arrival of Alexander the Great, who appoints his followers Gadifer and Betis (renamed Perceforest) as kings of Scotland and England respectively. The figures of Gadifer and Betis are borrowed from an earlier Alexander romance, the Vœux du paon. For background on Perceforest, see Jeanne Lods, Le Roman de Perceforest (Geneva: Droz, and Lille: Giard, 1951); and Jane Taylor, “The Fourteenth Century: Context, Text, and Intertext” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 1:267–332. On the text’s exposition of chivalric ideology, see Gilles Roussineau, “Éthique chevaleresque et pouvoir royale dans le Roman de Perceforest,” in Actes du 14e Congrès international arthurien, Rennes, 16–21 août 1984, ed. Charles Foulon et al. (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1985), 2:521–31. This portion of the text has not yet appeared in modern edition. For Book I, I quote from La Treselegante, Delicieuse, Melliflue et tresplaisante Hystoire du tresnoble, victorieux et excellentissime roy Perceforest, roy de la Grande Bretaigne, fundateur du Franc palais et du temple du souverain dieu, en laquelle le lecteur pourra veoir la source et decoration de toute chevalerie, culture de vraye noblesse, prouesses et conquestes infinies accomplies des le temps du conquerant Alexandre le grand et de Julius Cesar auparavant la nativite de Nostre Saulveur Jesuschrist avecques plusieurs propheties comptes d’amans et leurs diverses fortunes (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1528); and for Book V, the reprint by Gille de Gormont, 1532. Translations are my own. I have discussed this passage, as well as other aspects of Perceforest’s chivalric ideology, in my Postcolonial Fictions in the “Roman de Perceforest”: Cultural Identities and Hybridities (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).

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limited vision perceive Gallafur’s reticence as a sign of impotence and effeminacy, while Alexandre herself sees him as proving his fidelity to a noble love. In all, the adventure with its many participants and onlookers becomes a complex staging ground for competing ideals of gender and sexuality. The Aventure de l’espee vermeille is devised by four maidens, identified only as “filles de l’une des seurs de Morgane la Faee” (daughters of a sister of Morgan La Fay; V, 4v). Through their powers of divination, the sisters learn that the greatest of all British kings – the prophecy refers of course to Arthur – will be descended from the late Gadifer, a Greek knight crowned king of Scotland by Alexander the Great during the latter’s sojourn in Britain. Determined to do whatever they can to inscribe themselves into this Arthurian lineage, the maidens devise a rose-colored sword and display it in the forest, casting a spell that will prevent it from being taken up by any knight unless he is descended from Gadifer. The “publicity” surrounding the adventure states only that a knight who succeeds in lifting the sword must then carry it through the forest; if it loses its color, he has failed, and must relinquish the sword. The adventure is attempted by four of Gadifer’s young grandsons: Utran, Nero, Gadifferus, and finally Gallafur, heir to the Scottish throne and the knight who actually is – the reader knows – destined to be the ancestor of Arthur. As each knight in turn takes up the sword, he encounters the sisters, one of whom promptly seduces him, each sister in turn thus becoming pregnant by a knight of the royal lineage. Once the knight has had this sexual encounter, the sword turns black and is taken from him, to be returned to its place where it will await the next knight. The bulk of the narrative is focused on Gallafur; as he enters the adventure, the only sister not yet pregnant is Capraise, the youngest. Gallafur is in love with the princess Alexandre, granddaughter of Alexander the Great and of Gadifer’s brother Perceforest, the Greek king of England. He has been told that he cannot gain access to her unless he successfully completes this adventure as a prelude to exorcising the evil spirits that infest the British forests. Since he does not know what the adventure entails, Gallafur can only take up the sword and set off through the forest. To his surprise and chagrin, he finds himself repeatedly ushered into castles that are designed as veritable dens of sensual delight, plied with food and intoxicating drinks (“bruvages especials”), entertained with lascivious music, and then locked into a chamber in which the only bed is occupied by a naked, and very beautiful, girl. The goddess Venus herself – actually, one of the sisters in disguise – lectures him on the need to prove his manhood by indulging fully in the pleasures on offer.3 As Capraise, aided by her sisters, becomes increasingly aggressive in her efforts at seduction, Gallafur grows more and more bewildered, finally despairing as he is told that he will lose Alexandre forever unless he abandons himself to the dictates of Venus – yet knowing in his heart that to do so would be, in itself, an unforgivable betrayal of the maiden he loves. In the end of course he triumphs, 3

The cult of Venus is popular in the pre-Christian Britain of Perceforest.

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resisting Capraise, preserving the sword in its crimson splendor, and defeating the knights sent by the resentful sisters to wrest it from his grasp. The adventure is a strange one, in which failure – indicated by the blackening of the sword – is actually a sign that the sisters have got what they wanted. The various magical properties attached to the sword enable the sisters to recognize a knight of the lineage of King Gadifer, so that they can be confident of seducing the right man; and then to show that the “breeding” has taken place, so that the sword can be recovered and used to lure the next potential Arthurian progenitor. Alexandre’s appropriation of the adventure completely redefines its purpose, making the sisters her unwitting accomplices in identifying the knight who is both a descendent of King Gadifer and also a strict adherent to the courtly ideology of love service and sexual fidelity. As used by Alexandre, in other words, the Aventure de l’espee vermeille tests not a knight’s prowess in battle – as most of a young knight’s adventures do – but rather his commitment to a particular code of courtly heterosexuality. As it begins to unfold, the adventure presents Gallafur with two competing concepts of chivalric masculinity. According to the sisters, whose position is strongly associated with the goddess Venus, a true man is one who is always open to sexual pleasure: as one of them advises Gallafur near the beginning of the adventure, “entre … toutes dames et damoiselles, quant le cas le requiert, monstrez que vous estes homes” (in the company of all ladies and damsels, when the situation warrants it, show that you’re a man; V, 44r). Any knight whose scruples cause him to hold back is clearly deficient: “Ceulz mesmes qui en ces faitz tiennent villennie sont ainsi comme contraires a nature et tenuz pour imparfaictz” (Those who consider these acts to be base are contrary to nature and judged to be flawed; V, 45v). The opposing view, held by Gallafur and associated elsewhere in Perceforest with the God of Love, holds that a worthy knight is one who is amoureux: devoted to a particular maiden, for whom all of his exploits are performed, and on whom his sexual desire is fully and exclusively focused. Cautiously acknowledging his reverence for Venus and his desire to please the ladies, Gallafur nonetheless qualifies his every reply with “Sauf tousjours l’honneur de celle a qui j’ay mon amour donné” (always guarding the honor of her to whom I have given my love; V, 44v, 45r, 46v, etc.). Nero, Utran, and Gadifferus, happy to take advantage of an available damsel, need only see that she makes no serious resistance to their sexual advances. Gallafur alone, though sexually aroused and filled with desire, always pulls back from the brink of sexual consummation at the thought that he will be violating his single-hearted devotion to Alexandre. As the adventure continues, however, it emerges that even more is at stake than simple sexual fidelity. Gallafur’s scruples in that regard are neutralized when Capraise poses as Alexandre, drugging Gallafur with a special potion to ensure that he falls for her ruse. The two are married by what he thinks is the goddess Venus; yet still he is unwilling to consummate the marriage. The problem now is Gallafur’s feeling that he has not earned Alexandre’s love, since he has not yet accomplished the work initially stipulated as the condition for that love. He has not forgotten that she promised to receive him only once he had completed the

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Aventure de l’espee vermeille and then gone on to break the enchantments of the Forest of Darnant, and to exorcise the ghosts and demons that haunt it. Although reassured by “Venus” and “Alexandre” that this second obligation no longer applies, Gallafur balks at winning his bride so easily. The dilemma that confronts him, in short, is whether he should be granted love and sexual favors through the willing complicity of women, or through force of arms in competition with other men. As the adventure reaches its culmination, then, it stages an opposition between the sexuality of Venus, with its focus on sensual pleasure and feminine desire, and that of the God of Love. As defined here and throughout Perceforest, amour is something more than simply placing one’s heart in a single love-object; more even than the prolongation of erotic desire through endless deferral of its consummation. It is his commitment to love that affords a young knight entrance into the chivalric brotherhood, or at least into its elite upper echelons, since the knights who have achieved that status often refuse to associate with any who are not in love. For example, the knight Lyonnel refuses the company of the younger knight Troilus – his devoted follower – when he learns that the latter has not yet fallen in love: Comment, sire, dist Troÿlus, renoncez vous a ma compaignie pour ce que je n’aime pas par amours? – Certes, sire, dist Lyonnel, oÿl, car je ne porroie mie croire que bien me deust venir de chose que j’emprenisse pour honneur acquerre tant que je fusse en vostre compaignie.4 (“What, sir,” said Troilus, “are you renouncing my company just because I’m not in love?” “Indeed, sir,” said Lyonnel, “yes, because I could never believe that any good could come to me from anything I undertook to acquire honor as long as I was in your company.”)

Later, the knight Zellandin dismisses his own vassals for the same reason: “Seigneurs, dist Zellandin … vous ne me ferez jamais compaignie tant que vous amerez par amours, car du gentil au villain est trop mauvaise la meslee” (“Lords,” said Zellandin, “you won’t keep me company until you fall in love, for it is very wrong to mix the noble with the base”; ibid., 2:196). With its important component of male homosocial rivalry and bonding, amour structures a knight’s relationships with both men and women.5 This distinction between two versions of what would now be termed heterosexuality is clear in the reflections of Gallafur’s cousin Nero, as he moves through the adventure. Having taken up the espee vermeille, he soon comes upon a pavilion housing a table laden with food and drink, and a bed with a sleeping damsel. Nero needs no encouragement to help himself to the pleasures of both table and 4 5

Perceforest, deuxième partie, ed. Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 2:187. The interplay between the heterosexual and the male homosocial in medieval romance tradition has been much discussed in recent criticism; for comments on specific texts and on the theoretical background, see Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Richard Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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bed, despite some token resistance from the girl: “Touteffois demoura il au lict jusques au jour paisible, ne sçay se ce fut par dons ou par promesses, tant qu’il s’endormit” (In any case he stayed in the bed all night without argument, I don’t know if it was by means of gifts or promises, until he fell asleep; V, 28r). The following morning, however, Nero can think only of how far this night of bliss is removed from the condition of being in love, and castigates himself for not having achieved the latter: Dont vient ce que tu n’es amoureux comme les autres chevaliers qui achevent les hautes proesses? N’es tu pas homme comme ils sont?… Mais tu es lasche et de petite entreprinse dont tu acquiers tresgrant blasme quant en vaillante entreprinse tu ne scez sur quelle dame ou damoiselle recouvrer courage ou vigueur, force ne hardement (V, 28v). (How is it that you aren’t in love like the other knights who achieve great deeds? Are you not a man like they are?… But you are a coward and worth little, whereby you earn great blame, when in undertaking feats of prowess you cannot recover courage, strength, force, or boldness through some lady or damsel.)

Then and there Nero vows to fall in love with the first girl he finds that strikes his fancy, “pour mieulx valoir” (to increase his worth; V, 42v). This “sexual reorientation” does not concern the gender of his love-object, but rather a re-inscription of heterosexual desire within a male homosocial context. Nero’s self-assessment offers an important corrective to the abuse directed at Gallafur for his refusal of sex: “Partez d’icy recreant chevalier, reproche d’homme: car vous n’estes digne fors de garder la royne Hester” (Get out of here worthless knight, you miserable excuse for a man: for you are good for nothing but guarding Queen Esther [i.e., as a palace eunuch]; V, 51v); “Recreant chevalier et desnaturé, or te gardes bien” (Worthless and denatured knight, on your guard; 54v). The accusations of cowardice, impotence, and deviance recall the similar abuse heaped upon Lancelot by Morgan’s damsel when he refuses her sexual invitations, in an episode of the prose Lancelot; as well as the charge of homosexuality leveled against Lanval when he rebuffs Guenevere in Marie de France’s Lanval.6 The Perceforest author portrays such accusations as a misreading of chivalric masculinity. It is not lack of desire or bodily incapacity that stops Gallafur, but rather his feeling that the longed-for union with Alexandre has been achieved, as he tells himself, “par priere de femmes et non pas par la proesse de ton corps … car onques tes ancestres ne conquirent honneur par faict de concubines ne par grace d’acointance, mais tresbien par force d’armes” (through women’s invitations and not by your bodily prowess … for never did your ancestors win honor by having concubines nor through friendly relations, but most definitely by force of arms; V, 54r). It is military prowess that brings a knight honor, even if that very “force d’armes” must itself be underwritten by a sustained condition of heterosexual desire. 6

See Lancelot, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 1:313–26; and Marie de France, Lanval, in Les lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1973), vv. 259–86.

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As Gallafur struggles to navigate the adventure, he is embroiled in a conflict not only over the nature of chivalric masculinity, but also between two versions of courtly femininity. At stake are not only Gallafur’s role as progenitor of Arthur, but also the status of the lady within aristocratic lineage and chivalric society. Positing Venus as the ultimate authority, the sisters envelope the knights in a feminine world in which men are but tools of female desire. The sisters tell their bedazzled guests that Venus is ever ready to revoke the laws of public decency in the name of pleasure: Et quant la trescourtoyse voit commencement de soulas et de deduyt, elle tantost rappelle ses loix quant a celle foix, et commande que tous empeschemens de plaisance mondaine partent hors du pourpris. Et quant elle a ce fait, elle commande que tous deduytz et esbatemens soient du commun, car elle en prent le meffait sur elle (V, 45v). (And when that most courteous lady [Venus] sees the onset of recreation and merry-making, at once she repeals her laws with regard to that moment, and orders that all obstacles to worldly pleasure be removed. And when she has done that, she orders that all pleasures and enjoyments be available to everyone, for she takes the sin onto herself.)

But if men are being encouraged – practically forced – to indulge in sensual delights, the sisters themselves are not primarily interested in sexual pleasure, nor is their desire aimed at the knights themselves, for they have no interest in marriage or in any other ongoing relationship with the men they seduce. They exploit male sexual desire not in the interests of increasing knightly valor or testing a potential husband, nor for their own enjoyment, but simply to further their goal of motherhood.7 The sisters’ efforts are inaugurated with the resolution that “la pucelle seroit bien heureuse qui auroit enfant de luy veu qu’il viendroit a telle perfection” (happy would be the girl who could have a child from him, given that he will achieve such perfection; V, 4v). And as Capraise becomes increasingly desperate to seduce Gallafur, we are reminded that this is “non pas tant pour le plaisir du deduyt comme pour estre mere du fruyt qui devoit yssir du chevalier” (not so much for the pleasure of love-making, but to be the mother of the progeny that was supposed to descend from the knight; V, 51r). In setting up the adventure, the sisters attempt to gain control of the Arthurian lineage. And in stipulating that her future husband must succeed at the adventure, Alexandre strikes back. Confident of her own place in British royal lineage, Alexandre uses the sisters to “weed out” those descendents of Gadifer who are unworthy of Arthurian ancestry. Despite their aggressive behavior, the sisters’ view of lineage is one that accords little recognition of matrilineal descent. They will be defined by the glory of their descendent, but will contribute little of their own to his illustrious status. Indeed, we do not even know who their parents are. 7

For comments on the status of motherhood in Perceforest, and on initiative taken by various female characters to select an appropriate father for their offspring, see Christine FerlampinAcher, “Le rôle des mères dans Perceforest,” in Arthurian Romance and Gender, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 274–84.

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Offering themselves to be used and abandoned by the royal knights, eager to produce their bastard offspring, the sisters make themselves nothing more than vessels through which the royal seed can pass, producing sons whose glory will derive from their paternal ancestry. Theirs is also a view in which the personal merits of the knight are irrelevant: they demand no proof of valor, no signs of courtly propriety, but only the fact of being descended from King Gadifer. Alexandre, in contrast, represents a view of lineage as comprising both male and female lines. It is through her own mother, Perceforest’s daughter Bethoine, that Alexandre is the heiress to the English throne. And it will be thanks to Alexandre’s daughter Ygerne, who marries the subsequent conqueror of Britain, that the blood of both Perceforest and Gadifer are passed on to Arthur. The union that will produce this most illustrious lineage must be one that combines equally stellar male and female lines. And Alexandre also recognizes the power of female sexuality as a precious resource for the maintenance of chivalric culture, not simply a means of extracting desirable male seed. The maiden, with her special qualities of being available and yet inaccessible, is a force for the honing of knightly valor. Her vulnerability must foster male-male competition, not easy sexual pleasure; her power to police male sexuality must serve an ideology of chivalric prowess and lineage. The Aventure de l’espee vermeille is but one of many episodes in Perceforest that elaborate its vision of courtly heterosexuality. Perceforest’s founding act as king – a prohibition of rape – sets the tone for his entire reign, marked by a constant struggle against an outlaw clan known as the lignaige Darnant. 8 Characterized by their practice of indiscriminate rape and their scornful view of women as little more than slaves to male desire, their numbers growing exponentially through the endless production of bastard sons, the clan offers a foil against which the narrator can expound his ideology of love and marriage. Perceforest’s criminalization of rape, in fact, is portrayed as the source from which flow all the blessings of civilization: Et par ceste voye commença premier a regner en Angleterre le Dieu d’Amours, et la chevalerie commença aussi premier a faire les prouesses grandes et a emprendre les grans faitz d’armes et a eulx maintenir en tout honneur affin qu’ilz peussent avoir los et pris entre les dames et damoiselles… Et dames et damoiselles de honneur … entreprindrent a enrichir et a ediffier beaulx manoirs sur lieux delectables de boys, de rivieres, et de fontaines, et commencerent a entreprendre de subtiliser a faire nobles vestures et paremens pour donner aux preux chevaliers (I, 97r). (And in this way the God of Love first came to reign over England, and knights first began to perform great acts of prowess and to undertake great feats of arms and to behave honorably so that they could win fame and glory among ladies and damsels… And ladies and noble damsels began to construct beautiful manors in

8

For a discussion of this clash of sexual ideologies in another episode of Perceforest, the “Conte de la Rose” episode, see my “Visualizing the Feminine in the Roman de Perceforest: The Episode of the ‘Conte de la Rose’,” in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 193–206.

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delightful places with woods, rivers, and fountains, and they began to cultivate the art of making noble garments and jewelry to give the worthy knights.)

The chivalric culture of Perceforest’s Britain is grounded in sexual prohibition, and in a carefully nuanced politics of heterosexual desire. The Aventure de l’espee vermeille, in turn, stages the reaffirmation of these sexual norms in the aftermath of the Roman invasion and devastation of Perceforest’s kingdom. The four nieces of the mysterious, slightly sinister Morgan were, in effect, perilously close to a revival of the “bad old ways,” complicitous in an ethic that encourages a knight to take advantage of any damsel not protected by a male guardian. Male desire for sexual excitement, and female desire for illustrious sons, come together to sustain a distorted travesty of chivalric culture, one lacking all concept of love service, fidelity, and marriage by mutual consent. The Aventure de l’espee vermeille, as used by Alexandre, reaffirms the importance of love with its many beneficial effects; of the gender constructs that support this concept of love service and its hard-earned reward; and of marriage, in which a careful selection is made to ensure the conjoining of two illustrious lineages through the union of two individuals of outstanding excellence. Only a marriage forged in the crucible of chivalric love service, we see here, can produce a lineage worthy of the great King Arthur.

Historicizing Performance: The Case of the Jeu de Robin et Marion Ardis Butterfield

Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion is a work that raises issues of performance in both unsubtle and subtle ways. It has gained archetypal status by being not only a rare example of pre-1300 vernacular and secular “theater,” but also apparently the only dramatized version of pastourelle and bergerie in the period. Less obviously, it stands out from the bulk of Adam’s works by having a possible connection with the Angevin court at Naples, a connection that has seemed hard to make with the rest of his more directly urban, Arrageois work. The courtly context of Naples poses a conundrum that might be felt to apply more broadly to our interpretation of medieval drama. For on the one hand it temptingly provides a historicizable context for performance, and thereby a means of locating the jeu quite precisely within a certain social and cultural nexus. Yet on the other, Robin et Marion draws so directly on a highly characterizable genre that it resists such specification. It encourages us, by contrast, to think of its qualities as a work in performance in more abstract terms, ones that are posited and defined more by transhistorical generic expectations than by the singular immediacy of a particular occasion and audience. This creates stark differences in the interpretative history of the work. What does it mean to be Angevin in Naples in the thirteenth century? I will try to connect this question to certain features of Adam’s Jeu in performance. The attempt represents a case study in the complexities of historicizing performance.1 As is well known, Adam’s connection to Naples was brought about by Robert II, Count of Artois. Against the background of impending social disorder created by the Sicilian uprising in 1282, Charles, the Angevin ruler, sought literary and musical as well as martial and financial aid from his two nephews, Robert d’Artois and Pierre d’Alençon. Poets and musicians were brought over from 1

I would like to acknowledge the origin of this essay in a paper read at Napoli angioina, spettacolo e cultura di corte, an international conference held at the Centro di Musica Antica, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, May 2003, at the kind invitation of Gianluca D’Agostino and Federica Castaldo. My warm gratitude also to Nancy Regalado for many stimulating conversations over the years about performance in relation to several thirteenthand fourteenth-century French texts of mutual interest.

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France, including many from the Arras region such as Perrin d’Angicourt, Rutebeuf, Raoul de Soissons, and Adam de la Halle himself, specifically to provide a highly visible cultural profile for the displaced and newly vulnerable court. This initiative is worth further investigation on both political and literary grounds: although these poets have been individually studied, much work remains to be done on their cumulative role in defining a contemporary image of Angevin rule. The most obvious example of Adam’s contribution to the Angevin cause is his chanson de geste, Le Roi de Sicile, a work that resonates with compliments to Charles.2 The Jeu de Robin et Marion is a far less obvious example. It is still not completely clear that the work was indeed written in Naples. This is partly a matter of inconclusive and slight historical evidence; it is also partly a question of literary interpretation. There has been a tradition of describing Robin et Marion as a quintessentially charming work, one that was written to humor an aristocratic and military expatriate audience who wished to be reminded nostalgically of their French homeland.3 It seems to me that this view arises as a way of making sense of the awkwardness about the fit between the work and its supposed Neapolitan context. Often there has been an air of embarrassment about its rustic character. How is a work full of country yokels, soft cheese, and loud open-air musical instruments supposed to promote civilized Angevin values? At the same time, it is not as if it fits particularly straightforwardly in Arras either, in the sense that it contrasts markedly with the sophisticated, urban, black-comic posturings of the Jeu de la feuillée. Robin et Marion thus attracts at least two critical questions: where is it located culturally, and where is it located within the context of Adam’s other writings? One further related question concerns its genre. Part of the reason for its cultural ambivalence in French terms is its reliance on the pastourelle genre. This genre lies famously poised between two worlds, the aristocratic and the peasant, the courtly and the popular. In so doing the pastourelle genre opens up a set of opposing perspectives that make it hard to fix to any one social grouping. Robin et Marion is likewise hard to fix for the additional reason that it is not simply a pastourelle, but a genre that has caused modern readers even more uncertainty: the jeu.4 I am interested in exploring the many ways in which Robin et Marion fails to settle in one category, or location. I argue that this process of endemic, and

2

3 4

It is not clear whether the work is unfinished, and hence whether it was written before or after Charles’s death. Other poetic tributes to Charles include Jean de Meun’s remarks in the Rose (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois [Paris, 1914–24], 3:12–13, vv. 6637ff.) and numerous references in Arrageois chansons and jeuxpartis (see Jean Maillard, Roi-trouvère du XIIIe siècle. Charles d’Anjou, Musicological Studies and Documents 18 [Dallas: American Institute of Musicology, 1967]). For one of the earliest instances, see Henri Guy, Essai sur la vie et les œuvres littéraires du trouvère Adan de le Hale (Paris: Hachette, 1898), 514–15. For further comment, see Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater,” Speculum 77 (2002): 778–831, at 778.

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often uneasy, re-positioning is not only characteristic of the work, but also a way of making sense of its putative role in an Angevin court. It is important to recognize, first of all, that Adam is already a cross-cultural author even within Arras. The character of Arras strikes us now as a figure for medieval northern-French urban living: yet we are beginning to appreciate how layered such an environment might be in the middle ages, and how caught up in processes of complex re-definition.5 Writings from Arras, which poured out in profusion during the thirteenth century, convey a sense of extraordinary jostling between generic and social frameworks. Moreover, to realize that the pastourelle, in particular, is so closely associated with an urban culture means that we cannot see it as presenting a simple view of the countryside. Located in an idealized rural landscape, the pastourelle genre plays crucially on forms of displacement, on disrupting images of courtliness by isolating the aristocratic figure of the knight within an unfamiliar, and potentially hostile setting. This makes it a genre precisely apt for a displaced court in Naples. I want to offer a reading of the jeu that sees it as structured around many forms of displacement. Beginning with the first encounter between the knight and Marion, it becomes clear straightaway that a main part of Adam’s purpose is to dislodge and dismantle the expected pastourelle narrative. The work begins with the refrain Robin m’aime, Robin m’a (Robin loves me, Robin has me), sung by Marion. This is not how a pastourelle usually begins. The standard opening line is something like “L’autrier je chevauchoie/trouvai” (The other day, I was out riding/I found); in other words, the song is usually uttered by the knight in the first person. Adam gives Marion this privilege, thus pushing the knight to one side. More than this, we find that her refrain also occurs in two pastourelles, not at the beginning but (in both cases) after the third stanza. In one, it introduces the rape of the shepherdess, in the other she goes on to reject the knight. As I have argued elsewhere, Adam’s moving of the refrain to the very beginning of the jeu thus functions as an allusion to these possible outcomes: will Marion be raped or will she be able to reject the knight successfully? In fact, in a sequence in which the action is re-played three times, Adam provides us with three possible narrative endings: Marion outwits the knight, Marion sends him away, Marion is violently carried off.6 This has the effect of making the pastourelle genre – preoccupied as it already is with possession and dispossession – appear out-manoeuvred. The knight becomes an oddly vagrant character, liable to turn up unexpectedly at any moment, rather than the normally stable narrator-figure. Marion is instead the pivotal character, the one who mediates between the disparate social groups in the jeu. Adam further displaces the pastourelle by giving it only half the action: 5

6

Amongst numerous studies, two conspectus accounts by David Nicholas may be mentioned, The Later Medieval City, 1300–1500 (London: Longman, 1997) and Urban Europe, 1100– 1700 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For further discussion and references, see Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–68.

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dramatically, although the knight-shepherdess encounter is dominant at the start, by compressing it into the first half of the play, he weakens it. The encounter ends not climactically but inadvertently, and is simply superseded. A second, more specific area of displacement occurs in the famously disjunctive dialogue between Marion and the knight. It has been well demonstrated that Marion’s punning replies, with her apparent ignorance of his use of language (oisel, ane, hairon [bird, ass, heron]; vv. 25–27, 34–35, 40–41), serve to draw attention to the erotic subtext of his questions. I want to look again at this scene and comment further on the complex failures of language it presents. My argument is that the tensions in communication are in a large part provoked by the music as well as the words. Again, this is clear right from the start. The jeu opens with three exchanges in song: first Marion, who sings a type of rondeau, next the knight, who replies with the first two lines of a pastourelle, and then Marion again, with the refrain: Hé! Robin, se tu m’aimes, par amours maine-m’ent.7

vv. 11–12

(Hey, Robin, if you love me, for love’s sake, take me away.)

Neither character directly addresses the other. Instead, pastourelle elements are juxtaposed in a manner that recalls a motet more than a pastourelle or a play. Such self-enclosed singing is oddly disturbing. One reason for this disquiet is that song acts as a miniature narrative in its own right: Marion loves Robin, she is found by a knight, she calls to Robin to rescue her. Even before the knight has spoken he is thus set up as a potential threat. Adam then compounds this sense of unease by causing the knight to ask Marion about her song. She replies tangentially with a narrative paraphrase of her opening song Robin m’aime, Robin m’a (Robin loves me, Robin has me). By having the chevalier comment on Marion’s choice of song, Adam draws attention to the fact that the narrative has been fastforwarded: he also creates an atmosphere of self-consciousness. This is no ordinary dramatization of a pastourelle: it is a work that is fragmenting, re-playing, and scrutinizing the genre at every level. A further reason for unease is created by the shift from song to speech. It immediately makes us wonder at the relation between the two. This is another displacement: a sung genre is being amplified, punctuated, and glossed by speech. It is a clever structure: the scene (vv. 1–102) opens and ends in song in such a way that (as I have indicated) the opening includes the first line of a pastourelle and the closing duet incorporates the kind of refrain that is commonly found at the end of pastourelles. In between, Adam places an extraordinary sequence of misconstruction. The verbal play has been well analyzed by Rosanna Brusegan and 7

Unless otherwise indicated, citations from Robin et Marion are taken from the edition by Kenneth Varty, Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, précédé du Jeu du Pèlerin (London: Harrap, 1960). I have also made use of the edition and translation by Jean Dufournet, Adam de la Halle, Le jeu de Robin et de Marion (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1989). Translations into English are my own.

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Kevin Brownlee, amongst others.8 Here I want to draw attention to some more aspects of the dramatic, linguistic, and social implications of this dialogue of misunderstanding. Dufournet has commented on the diptych-like structure of the scene:9 alongside this symmetrical patterning of plot and dialogue is a larger dramatic outline not just of question and answer, but also of an increasing sense of cumulative failure of meaning. Again, using astonishingly concise means, Adam does not merely present this failure directly, he also finds space to allow his characters to comment on this failure. The first of these moments is when the knight says: Che n’est point che que je demant. (That’s not what I am asking)

v. 32

Marion picks up this complaint in her reply: Est ce chou que vous demandés? (Is this what you are asking?)

v. 38

And the knight is constrained to exclaim: Or sui je mout bien assenés! (That’s very informative!)

v. 39

One more retort from Marion, and the knight is temporarily silenced: Par foi, or sui jou esbaubie; N’ainc mais je ne fui si gabés!

vv. 45–46

(By my faith, now I am struck dumb; I have never been so mocked!)

Now she starts (in the other half of the diptych) to ask him questions. If anything, these are more inconsequential. With Socratic irrelevance, Marion asks him about his falcon, what it eats, why it has a head of leather, and where the knight is going. This climaxes with her eulogy of Robin, and the knight’s sudden thrust: Or dites, douche bregerete, Ameriés vous un chevalier?

vv. 57–58

(Tell me now, sweet shepherdess, would you ever love a knight?)

Her famous repulse encapsulates their stark differences with lightening economy: Biaus sire, traiiés-vous arrier. 8

9

Brusegan, Rosanna, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion et l’ambiguïté du symbolisme champêtre,” in The Theatre in the Middle Ages, ed. Herman Braet, Johan Nowé, and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1985), 119–29; Kevin Brownlee, “Transformations of the Couple: Genre and Language in the Jeu de Robin et Marion,” French Forum 14 (1989), 419– 33. Jean Dufournet, “Complexité et ambiguïté du Jeu de Robin et Marion: l’ouverture de la pièce et le portrait des paysans,” in Études de philologie romane et d’histoire littéraire offertes à Jules Horrent, ed. Jean-Marie d’Heur and Nicoletta Cherubini (Liège/Tournai: Gedit, 1980), 141–59.

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Je ne sai que chevalier sont.

vv. 59–60

(Noble sir, get back, I don’t know what knights are.)

This is the heart of the matter: the meaning of the social, sexual, and aesthetic gulf between them. Marion’s next two songs underline this, first by mocking the knight’s name (Marion uses the half-rhyme Aubert/Robert to insist on his inability to match her lover), and then by asserting a counter-definition of herself: Bergeronnete sui, mais j’ai ami bel et cointe et gai.

vv. 90–91

(I may be only a shepherdess, but I have a handsome, elegant, and lively lover.)

Their mutual refusal to co-operate in each other’s meaning culminates in the final sung exchange of the scene. The knight announces that he won’t say another word to her (“Hui mais ne vous sonnerai mot,” v. 94), and she replies with a nonsense refrain, which he also echoes: Trairi, deluriau, deluriau, deluriele, Trairi, deluriau, deluriau, delurot.

vv. 96–97, 99–100

The songs thus participate in the breakdown of communication; they form another kind of faux pas and then even turn into unintelligible babble. It is possible to see this scene as a simple instance of confrontation. However, my point is that Adam works hard to create disorientation through very simple means. The result is that powerful sexual antipathy, social contempt, and cultural misunderstanding are revealed indirectly and implicitly, yet all the more savagely, as strong currents just beneath the surface of ordinary linguistic failures. The double meanings ambiguate across these ruptures and measure, with comic but also sarcastic precision, just where people’s limits of comprehension begin. Song plays its part in this process by providing a parallel system of meaning to speech. Marion and the knight could hardly be shown as speaking nonsense to each other, so they are shown as singing it instead. Yet the function of the nonsense refrain is to express that their apparently lucid dialogue was indeed unintelligible, at least to them. In this sense, song appears to be used as a place where meaning can be exchanged more easily than it can with speech. Adam provides a cleverly simple song structure in this latter part of the scene, this time a mini triptych, where the nonsense refrain sung by Marion and echoed by the knight frames a pastourelle stanza (“Hui main jou chevauchoie / Lès l’oriere d’un bois; / Trouvai gentil bergiere, / Tant bele ne vit roys” [vv. 97–100; This morning I rode out by the edge of a wood; I found a gracious shepherdess, no king ever saw one as beautiful]). The song acts as a scene change: they each use the refrain as a parting shot. Matching the opening exchange of song, we have a corresponding sung drama in microcosm at the end, where the pastourelle story is implicitly shown to begin and end in confusion. A variety of interpretations are possible: Adam could be showing, in a kind of shorthand, how both shepherdess and knight are simply admitting to the gulf between them. On the other hand, Marion’s refrain is like a taunt, and it modulates as soon as the knight has gone

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into a new nonsense refrain summoning Robin: “Hé! Robechon, leure leure va” (v. 103; Hey! Robin, leure leure va); the knight’s echoing of the refrain as he rides off could therefore be seen as a humiliating admission of failure. But the way Adam shapes the nonsense into an orderly pattern of repetition and response, so that the singing of both Marion and the knight, and then of Marion and Robin creates a carefully constructed symmetrical whole, suggests that a certain leveling is taking place. The use of sung babble to connect all three characters, especially since the melody of Trairi, deluriau is further echoed by the last part of the knight’s pastourelle quotation, slyly effaces the differences between them.10 The extra dramatic meanings carried by song are also apparent in the dancing and game playing. The word jeuer carries a lot of weight in the work. The knight uses it with obvious sexual innuendo when he asks: Vauriés vous venir avoec moi Jeuer seur che bel palefroi?

vv. 70–71

(Would you like to come away on this horse and play with me?)

But Marion doesn’t use the word herself until the end of the scene, in her song addressed to Robin: S’irons jeuer. (Let’s go and play.)

v. 103

This marks her sexual preference; it also acts as the pivotal moment when the scene changes and Robin replaces the knight. But clearly jeuer also refers more broadly to the action of the jeu itself. It is worth pausing over the range of meanings here. The very notion of drama is untried and novel in this work. Yet Adam turns this, too, to brilliant advantage. Thus as well as displacing the pastourelle genre, he is simultaneously playing with it, that is, creating a dramatic mode for it. Returning, once more, to the opening lines of the jeu, there is yet another reason for our uncertainty regarding the nature of this work. For by mixing song and speech Adam makes the audience wonder what they are hearing and who is talking. We realize that the opening snatches of song are actually quotations; and this raises the question of whether Marion and the knight who talk are the same as the characters who sing. Strictly speaking, they are impersonating the pastourelle types; this creates a certain slipperiness about their parts, their names, and their roles. The self-consciousness in their use of pastourelle lines can therefore be understood as a self-consciousness about the jeu’s own status. It is playing at being a play. This is no truer than at the transition between the first and second scenes: the knight’s playing has been shown to be a pretence, and now, as Robin and Marion decide to play instead, the question of what this might mean becomes the new dramatic impulse of the work. Adam enables a powerful sense of hiatus to develop here as the jeu decides what form to play at next. 10

For further examples of musical repetition in the jeu, and more widely across the refrain repertory, see Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 159 n. 8.

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These many displacements – social, sexual, linguistic, musical, generic – bring us to the question of how all the cross-cultural tensions that they signify might relate to the crisis then present in Angevin Naples. It is remarkable to consider that the popular revolt in Palermo on 30 March 1282, seemingly a local affair, caused Charles’s entire empire to fall. If the Jeu du Pèlerin is to be believed, Robin et Marion was composed against this context of impending crisis, of a powerful expatriate French court in the process of collapse through a single moment of popular discontent. Robin et Marion functions as a work not of naive freshness but of sharp social comment. Adam translates the pastourelle genre into something more generically and socially dubious. He also gives it a powerfully dynamic character, reinforcing its dramatic potential by greatly extending its performative range. Amplifying the pastourelle genre in this way makes an audience ponder silence as well as noise, abrupt exchanges of speech alongside musical contours of reply and counterreply. The hiatus between pastourelle and bergerie at the heart of the jeu is particularly explosive to witness in live performance.11 If Angevin Naples is indeed the setting, then the jeu is playing on a courtly stage, which was itself under threat, attempting to adjust rapidly from a position of power to one of vulnerability in the face of hostility. We can read the dislocations and hiccups in the jeu, its many repetitions, and its self-reflexive questions as recognition, on Adam’s part, of the highly sensitive nature of the play’s putative context. Its linguistic misunderstandings speak to a situation where the cultural power of one language (French) is being questioned aggressively by a less culturally significant vernacular.12 When Marion says she does not know what “chevalier” means, the remark is one that might carry a long way in a political atmosphere where chevaliers are rapidly losing their cultural glamour. At the same time, it would be a mistake to see Robin et Marion as a straightforward mirror of contemporary social discontents. Adam does not present a play with anything like a conclusion, let alone an argument. Instead he skates between the latent generic possibilities, giving both peasant and knight a turn in the spotlight. In answer to the question of what it means to be Angevin in Naples in the 1280s, Robin et Marion turns out to be a different answer from what Robert may either have expected or perhaps wanted. Like most colonizing rulers, he presumably wanted his language and culture to be transparently dominant. Instead, Adam seems to have brought to Naples a dramatic language that is dense, punning, and 11

I would like to acknowledge here the excellent performance, the first in Naples in modern times, given by the Fondation Royaumont in collaboration with Micrologus under the auspices of the Convegno internazionale di studi, May 2003, and a recent, imaginative recording, Adam de la Halle: Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, by Tonus Peregrinus, directed by Anthony Pitts, 8.557337 Naxos 2006. 12 For a related argument, in the rather different context of thirteenth-century England and the French-speaking continent, see Butterfield, “English, French and Anglo-French: Language and Nation in the Fabliau,” special issue of Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Mittelalterliche Novellistik im europaïschen Kontext, ed. Mark Chinca, Timo Reuvekamp-Felber, and Christopher Young (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), 238–59.

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full of social and sexual tensions. The stroke of real ingenuity, however, was that he also concealed this tension just sufficiently for it to be possible to ignore. Like Marion herself, embedded in an often re-played generic role, Adam’s jeu is capable of disarming its audience with the allure of its surface simplicity.

The Protean Performer: Defining Minstrel Identity in Tristan Narratives Marilyn Lawrence

In the midnight quiet of June 8, 2004, in her French Department office at New York University, Nancy Freeman Regalado and I celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday by sealing a Federal Express box containing the manuscript for Performing Medieval Narrative, the volume we had edited with Evelyn (Timmie) Birge Vitz. Fortified by Nancy’s favorite fig cookies, we wrapped up years of work on our book dedicated to the performance of medieval stories.1 Work on this volume made me more keenly aware than ever before of the centrality of performance and the performer in medieval French culture. In this essay I examine how authors construct and define the most pivotal figure in that performance culture: the minstrel. I focus particularly on the latetwelfth-century anonymous Folie Tristan of Oxford and the “Tristan ménestrel” episode in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation de Perceval from 1226–30. 2 In both of these verse narratives an exiled Tristan disguises himself as a minstrel in order to enter Marc’s court and visit his beloved, Yseut. In the Folie, Tristan adopts the mask of a minstrel-fool and travels alone to Tintagel. There he amuses Marc’s court with a mixture of true and fictive stories in which he claims to be not Tristan, but Tantris, the minstrel-harpist as whom Tristan masquerades in other medieval narratives.3 In the Continuation, Tristan recruits Gauvain and twelve other knights of Arthur’s Round Table to join him in minstrel disguise. Together they travel to Lancïen and present themselves as minstrel-watchmen to Marc’s court where, still masked as minstrels, they fight on the king’s behalf in his 1 2

3

Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, eds., Performing Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005). All references to the Folie Tristan of Oxford, as well as to that of Berne, are from Félix Lecoy, ed., Les deux poèmes de La folie Tristan (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994). References to the Continuation de Perceval are from Gerbert de Montreuil, La continuation de Perceval, ed. Mary Williams, vol. 1 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1922); the episode of “Tristan ménestrel” is found at ll. 3309–4832. All translations are mine. See Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke (1930; Dublin: Weidmann, 1967), ll. 7275–8225; Brother Robert, “Tristrams saga,” in Tristan et Iseut. Les poèmes français, la saga norroise, ed. and trans. Daniel Lacroix and Philippe Walter (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989), 555–57.

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tournament against the Roi des Cent Chevaliers. Both Gerbert and the author of the Folie use the terms menestrel and jogleor or jugleres to refer to Tristan (and his companions) in disguise, yet their concepts of the minstrel differ remarkably.4 The disguise passages in the two narratives reveal how different authors create the same character, Tristan, and how they define the minstrel disguises he assumes. In addition, the Folie demonstrates how one author constructs two different minstrel disguises – those of the minstrel-fool and the minstrel-harpist – in a single narrative. Analysis of the signs authors use to create Tristan’s minstrel masks shows the complexity and flexibility of authorial notions of the medieval minstrel, and more generally of character. Authors construct the minstrel by mixing and matching elements from a number of figures to create a character who plays a variety of roles. The minstrel disguises medieval authors create are so varied that they possess no single element in common – with the exception that they are all, in a broad sense of the term, professional performers.5 The composite and protean nature of the minstrel figure that these two narratives represent calls into question whether it is ultimately possible – or even useful – to define the minstrel in absolute terms. Analysis of the signs that a character appropriates in order to be recognized as a minstrel, and that other characters in the narrative interpret and accept as indicators of the minstrel, reveals an author’s idea of the traits and qualities that define the minstrel figure. Both Gerbert and the author of the Folie represent the signs Tristan adopts for his disguise as unquestionably indicative of the minstrel. When in the Folie Tristan first approaches the porter at the entrance to Marc’s court, the gatekeeper instantaneously takes him to be a fool, and as soon as Tristan enters through the gate, the youths of the court do not hesitate to call him a fool and treat him as such (ll. 225–26, 247–50). Similarly, in the Continuation, the knights at King Marc’s tournament repeatedly recognize Tristan and his companions as minstrels on sight. When Perceval encounters Tristan on the field, he observes his fiddle and automatically assumes he is a minstrel (ll. 4557–59).6 Paradoxically, when Gerbert and the author of the Folie construct for Tristan minstrel disguises that other characters automatically accept without doubt or delay, they use no signs specific to the minstrel. Although they concoct an indisputable minstrel mask with their semiotic recipe, the authors in fact gather their

4

5

6

The author of the Oxford Folie uses the terms menestrel (l. 527) and jugleres (l. 563), in addition to fol or fols (ll. 181, 210, 226, etc.) to refer to Tristan in disguise. He uses jugleres in apposition with fol in Yseut’s discussion with Brangien: “cist fol, cist jugleres” (l. 563). Gerbert uses the terms menestrel or menestreus (ll. 4283, 4433, 4468, 4559, 4656, 4677) and jogleor (l. 4443), as well as gaite or gaites (ll. 3921, 4309, 4717), in reference to Tristan and his disguised companions. See Marilyn Lawrence, “Minstrel Disguise in Medieval French Narrative: Identity, Performance, Authorship” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001); and Silvère Menegaldo, Le jongleur dans la littérature narrative des XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Du personnage au masque (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 487–542. See also ll. 4278–83, 4308–11, 4430–33, 4652–56.

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ingredients from a variety of other, non-minstrel identities.7 In the Folie, Tristan decides to travel by foot because others will easily recognize him on horseback (ll. 32–33). Although Tristan’s altered mode of transport is his first step towards disguise, it does not specifically mark him as a minstrel-fool. Rather the author explicitly states that journeying on foot is a sign shared with both the poor man and the destitute messenger. The overlap between the figures of the minstrel-fool and the messenger appears again in the narrative when Brangien interprets the combination of identity indicators that so perplex Yseut to mean that the stranger is a messenger from Tristan (ll. 37–40, 597–98).8 Similarly, Tristan scavenges from other types of figures the clothes that signify his minstrel disguises. In the Folie, he trades his fine, noble garments for a fisherman’s poor quality clothing, taking from the fisherman a hooded tunic made of a rough, hairy material and lacking its bottom section (ll. 190–94, 201–2). Tristan thus dresses in clothes that, while they indicate a lower class status, are not exclusive signs of the minstrel-fool. Likewise, in the Continuation, Tristan outfits his companions and himself with attire that indicates “le quaillier,” that is, the quail hunter (ll. 3814–15). In addition to borrowing signs from figures explicitly named in the narratives, the authors also construct Tristan’s minstrel disguises using signs implicitly shared with types to whom the authors do not directly refer. In the Folie, Tristan tonsures his head in the form of a cross and thus, according to the author, resembles a fool (ll. 209–11).9 Although Tristan’s tonsure indeed indicates the fool in the Folie, his shorn scalp is by no means a signifier exclusive to, or even necessary for, the construction of the minstrel-fool mask. The tonsure, which signifies infamy, penitence, mourning, humility, or humiliation, is a sign the fool shares with clerics, heretics, and pilgrims. Even the specific cross-shaped tonsure is not unique to the fool. Rather the tonsure in the form of a cross was, at the time of the composition of the Folie, a theological and medical ritual performed on the possessed or insane and a juridical punishment for thieves, and therefore connects the fool to criminals and the possessed.10 7

I use “non-minstrel” to refer to figures whom the author does not designate a minstrel or jongleur. 8 On messengers in literature contemporary with the Folie, see Jacques Merceron, Le message et sa fiction. La communication par messager dans la littérature française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), especially chap. 4, “Vêtements, attributs, armement et qualités des messagers,” 63–82. On minstrel-messengers, see Constance Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), 53–55. 9 Later Yseut reiterates the connection between Tristan’s tonsure and his disguise as a minstrelfool in a conversation with Brangien (ll. 558–60). 10 See Jean-Marie Fritz, Le discours du fou au Moyen Âge, XIIe–XIIIe siècles. Étude comparée des discours littéraire, médical, juridique et théologique de la folie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 39–44; Angelika Gross and Jacqueline Thibault-Schaefer, “Sémiotique de la tonsure, de l’“insipiens” à Tristan et aux fous de Dieu,” in Le clerc au Moyen Âge (Aixen-Provence: CUER MA, 1995), 243–75; Philippe Ménard, “Les fous dans la société médiévale: Le témoignage de la littérature au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 98 (1977): 436–40;

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Moreover, the minstrel-fool shares his signifying stick with yet other figures. Before Tristan enters Marc’s court, he culls a club from a hedge and holds it at his shoulder (ll. 221–22). The author reiterates the signifier – “le pel el col” (l. 260, the stick at his neck) – elsewhere in the narrative. Yet, the ease with which the phrase rhymes with fol, and with which pel rhymes with menestrel, may account in part for the author’s repetition of this particular signifier (ll. 267–68, 527–28). Although an indicator of Tristan’s disguise, the stick, like the tonsure, is not a sign specific to the minstrel-fool, but rather a signifier he shares with the wild man, shepherd, peasant, and giant.11 In addition to sharing signs explicitly or implicitly with other types, Tristan uses signifiers that characters in medieval narratives often employ in disguise scenes to indicate not just the minstrel, but a variety of figures. One such sign is the blackening of one’s skin. In the Folie, Tristan uses an herb to dye his face dark (ll. 213–16). The coloring of a character’s skin is a common component of, but not particular to, minstrel disguise.12 Rather it is a literary topos found in a variety of disguise scenes throughout medieval narrative.13 A complex sign, skin coloring can alter identity on a variety of levels, including those of race, class, religion, gender, geographic origin, social status, health, and morality, and can be interpreted as the mark of such figures as the Saracen, peasant, infidel, leper, or demon.14 Moreover, such dyeing of the skin was part of the play with and inversion of identity that was a ritual part of Carnival and other festivals in the Middle Ages.15 The authors of our narratives thus represent the minstrel as a composite and multiform figure whom they piece together using a patchwork of signs more

11 12

13

14

15

and John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 49–50. Ménard, 440; Fritz, 44–45. For other examples of skin dyeing in minstrel disguise episodes, see Nicolette in Aucassin et Nicolette, chantefable du XIIIe siècle, ed. Mario Roques, 2nd ed. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1982), xxxviii, 15–16; Silence in Heldris of Cornwall, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), ll. 2909–12; Renart in Le roman de Renart, ed. Ernest Martin, vol. 1 (Strasbourg: K. J. Trübner, 1882), Ib, ll. 2313–16; Josiane in Der anglonormannische Boeve de Haumtone zum ersten Male herausgegeben, ed. Albert Stimming (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1899), ll. 2777–80; and Maugalie in Floovant. Chanson de geste du XIIe siècle publiée avec introduction, notes et glossaire, ed. Sven Andolf (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, 1941), laisse lxii, ll. 1775–77 (note that laisse lxii is incorrectly marked as lxxii in Andolf’s edition). Geneviève Sodigné-Costes, “Renart et les plantes, le motif de l’herbe qui teint la peau,” Reinardus 6 (1993): 127–38, analyzes the theme in a number of texts, including La prise d’Orange, Joufroi de Poitiers, Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’Amour, Thomas’s Tristan, and branch XIII of the Roman de Renart, as well as in Aucassin et Nicolette, Boeve de Haumtone, and the Folies Tristan of both Oxford and Berne. In addition to Sodigné-Costes, see Jean Dufournet, “Renart le noir: réécriture et quête de l’identité,” Reinardus 4 (1991): 83–99; Jacqueline de Weever, “Nicolette’s Blackness – Lost in Translation,” Romance Notes 34 (1994): 317–25; María Rosa Menocal, “Signs of the Times: Self, Other and History in Aucassin et Nicolette,” Romanic Review 80 (1989): 497–511. See E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1 (1903; London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 125, 154, 199, 214–16, 379.

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motley than the pied dress Tristan dons in the Continuation (ll. 3803–11). The minstrel disguises Tristan constructs explicitly or implicitly borrow from, overlap with, or resemble a range of other, non-minstrel identities, rendering a search for specific signs that define the minstrel as elusive as a quest for the Grail. The ultimate shape-shifter, the minstrel character is potentially the combination of elements from any character and is potentially no character in particular; he is everyone and no one at once. In addition to being derived from signs that signify a number of other figures, the minstrel masks Tristan dons in the Folie and the Continuation share no one signifier in common: no one universal sign, or even collection of signs, specifically indicates the minstrel figure. The conception of the minstrel differs from author to author, and opposing images of the minstrel can even co-exist within a single narrative. Although both authors represent Tristan’s choice of transportation as an essential indicator of his mask, they do so in contradictory ways. In the Folie, Tristan’s abandonment of his horse is the crucial first step in his disguise (ll. 33–36). Because he would be readily recognizable as Tristan were he to travel on horseback, he journeys by foot. In the Continuation, however, Tristan and his companions alter, rather than reject, this equine signifier. They camouflage their palfreys as minstrels’ horses by outfitting them with old, worn equipment (ll. 3816–19). Whereas the author of the Folie represents the horse as an indisputable indicator of Tristan’s identity, Gerbert depicts the palfrey as a flexible sign that his characters transform from an indicator of noble, knightly identity16 into a mark of their minstrel mask (ll. 3874–80). Whereas the author of the Folie constructs the minstrel-fool and the minstrelharpist as individuals, Gerbert represents the minstrel-watchman as a member of a larger group. In the Folie, Tristan purposefully keeps his project a secret and travels alone (ll. 25–28).17 However in the Continuation, Tristan, through the mediation of Gauvain, petitions King Arthur to permit him to travel with Gauvain and twelve knights whom he will assemble into a band of minstrels. With Arthur’s approval, Tristan forms a troupe of fourteen minstrel-watchmen (ll. 3767–73, 3786–94).18 Although in both narratives minstrels wear poor quality garments that generally signify their low social status, the difference in their particular clothes demonstrates that no one uniform distinguishes the minstrel. The minstrel’s outfit in the Folie consists simply of the top part of a hairy, rough tunic with a hood (ll. 190–94). However Gerbert garbs his minstrels in motley robes, poorly

16

See ll. 3396–400, where Gerbert first introduces Tristan in the Continuation as an undefeatable knight on a beautiful, sorrel mount. 17 Ménard observes that such solitary travel is typical of the fool (444). 18 See also the Roman de Horn where Horn and one hundred companions travel on foot, disguised as minstrels, to take revenge on the traitor Wikele; Thomas, The Romance of Horn, ed. Mildred K. Pope, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), ll. 5162–66.

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tailored, yet of ample material. Disheveled and unkempt, they sport ill-fitting, wide, round hoods; ripped, black caps; and folded boots (ll. 3803–14, 3882–85). A rare component that the minstrel figures in these narratives do have in common is that they serve patrons through performance. As a minstrel-watchman in the Continuation, Tristan asks Marc to employ him and his companions (ll. 3900–3902). The minstrel-fool in the Folie has worked for many a noble and seeks affirmation that he has served Marc well (ll. 488, 527–28). Yet even their service as professional performers, with the single exception of a mutual musical element, differs greatly. In the Folie, Marc asks the minstrelfool what specific services he provides (ll. 485–86). In response Tristan notes his ability to sing and to play the harp and rote (ll. 521–22). In addition, he refers to the physical antics with which he amuses the court: “Reis, ne sui je bon menestrel? / Ui vus ai servi de mun pel” (ll. 527–28, King, am I not a good minstrel? Today I served you with my stick). Absurd and exaggerated comportment serves as an entertaining indicator of the minstrel-fool. When jeering youths attack Tristan from the right, he irrationally retaliates on the left; without provocation, he inexplicably lashes out at Marc’s courtiers (ll. 257–58, 374–76). Such shenanigans serve as delightful diversion for the king (l. 381). Tristan’s aim to behave as a fool – “faire folie” (l. 181) – also involves verbal, as well as physical, fooling. Although Tristan, in an attempt to reveal his original identity to Yseut, interweaves truths into his fanciful discourse, he initially establishes before the court his disguise as a minstrel-fool through entertaining, nonsensical speech. He introduces himself to Marc with a fantastic story of how he was born from a whale and nursed by a great tigress (ll. 273–81). Marc and his court accept the stranger’s stories as signs of the minstrel-fool and smile in amusement at his speech (ll. 311–14). In order to be considered a universal sign of the minstrel, performance must be defined broadly and embrace such arts as fencing and hunting, as well as buffoonery and the playing of musical instruments. In the Folie, to prove that he is a “bon menestrel” (l. 527, good minstrel), Tristan boasts of a range of abilities that were connected to minstrelsy in the Middle Ages, but that may today fall outside a narrow definition of performance. Tristan vaunts his talent at fencing: “… sai ben eskermir de pel; / nul ne se cuvrerat tant ben / ke il ne ait auques del men” (ll. 516–18, I know well how to fence with my stick; no one will be able to protect himself well enough to parry my blow). In the Middle Ages it was standard for minstrels to entertain at feasts and banquets by fencing to musical accompaniment. The minstrel-fool thus claims to excel at a popular form of medieval performance.19 Medieval minstrels also assisted patrons in, and entertained them during, the hunt. Minstrels might be in charge of the hunting dogs, responsible for preparing and supplying meat for feasts (where they also performed), or hired to entertain patrons with song, music, or physical antics during the hunt.20 Over half 19 20

See Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo, 60–63. On minstrels and the hunt, see John Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel (Suffolk: Boydell, 1989), 47–49, 52–53, as well as his “Appendix B: Hunting and Minstrelsy,” 162–63,

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of Tristan’s response to King Marc’s inquiry into his craft (ll. 490–98, 504–14; twenty of thirty-five verses), details his skills at hunting in woods and forests (“chacer en bois u en forest,” l. 492). Marc only asks two precise questions concerning the minstrel’s trade, both of which regard knowledge of hunting and fishing: “Sez tu de chens, sez tu d’oisels?” (l. 489, Do you know about dogs, do you know about birds?) and “ke sez tu prendre en la rivere?” (l. 502, what do you know how to catch in the river?). Despite the inversions that perpetually permeate the fool’s discourse, the attention Marc and Tristan devote to the subject demonstrates the importance both the minstrel and his potential patron place on venery as one of the arts of minstrelsy. The author grounds the other minstrel disguise Tristan claims in the Folie, that of Tantris, on yet a different type of performance. Rather than advertise his minstrel abilities through physical antics, inane discourse, and boasts of fencing and hunting skills, Tantris bases his service as a minstrel on his capacity as a harpist and teacher. His performance is musical and his disguise as a minstrel is signified by his physical possession of a harp (ll. 353–56). In addition, Tantris’s performance includes a pedagogical aspect: the minstrel-harpist reminds Yseut of how he served at the Irish court as her music instructor (ll. 361–62). In the Continuation yet a different type of performance signifies Tristan’s minstrel disguise. Like Tantris, the minstrels in the Continuation are musicians – indeed they carry over a dozen different types of instruments. Tristan himself plays both the vielle and the flageolet, a type of small flute (ll. 3822–30, 4066– 67). However unlike Tantris, Tristan and his companions do not use their musical instruments to teach, but rather to serve Marc as watchmen: Dist Tristrans: “Rois de Cornuaille, Retien nous et done du tien, Car nous te servirons molt bien.” Li rois respont: “De quel mestier? – Sire, dist Tristrans, de gaitier Vous et vos tours, se mestiers est. Appareillié somes et prest De faire che que nous savons.”

3900–3907

(Tristan says: “King of Cornwall, hire us and pay us, for we will serve you well.” The king responds: “In what capacity?” “Sire,” says Tristan, “our job is to guard you and your towers. We are outfitted and ready to do what we know how to do.”)

In the Middle Ages, minstrel-watchmen used performance to comfort inhabitants of courts during the disquieting dark of the night, and sounded the hours on their instruments. They guarded the castle and kept an eye out for fires.21 Tristan and and the minstrel-huntsmen he lists in his index of historical minstrels, 185–91. See also Southworth, Fools, 40–42; and Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo, 36–38. 21 The character Malebouche in the Roman de la Rose is one such minstrel-watchman, a sentinel who protects the roses of his patron, Jalousie; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974), ll. 3889–908, 12273–75. The minstrel-watchman is also represented in aubes, a lyric genre whose theme is lovers’ parting at dawn. In such songs, the gaite becomes the confidant and accomplice of

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his companions prove their qualifications as minstrel-watchmen by performing a sweet song on their instruments: Lors [Tristan] comande a ses compaignons Qu’il mecent hors lor estrumens, Et cil font ses comandemens, Puis qu’il l’ot dit molt le font tempre. Chascuns son estrument atempre; Sonent et acordent si bien Que nus n’i set a dire rien, Tant est dolce la melodie, Car n’i a chevalier ne die C’ainc mais n’oïrent si dols son.

3908–17

(Then Tristan orders his companions to take out their instruments and they obey him. Because he said it, they do it quickly. Each tunes his instrument. They play and harmonize so well that no one there knows what to say. The melody is so sweet; every knight there says that he has never heard such a sweet sound.)

Convinced by the musical performance of their capacity to guard his court, Marc hires the minstrels as watchmen: “Seignor, dist li rois, ma maison / Gaiterez que je vous detien” (ll. 3918–19, “Sir,” says the king, “I hire you to guard my home”). Musical instruments and musical performance are essential indicators of the knights’ disguise as minstrel-watchmen in the Continuation. From their instruments, Marc’s seneschal recognizes the watchmen on the tournament field and points them out to the king (ll. 4308–11). Given the commonality of performance as a sign of Tristan’s minstrel disguises, we may, for practical purposes, generally define the minstrel as a professional performer. To do so, however, we must conceive of performance in broad terms as entertainment that embraces a wide range of arts that extend beyond music. Although in our two narratives the fool, Tantris, and the minstrelwatchman are all to some extent musicians, not all minstrel figures in medieval narratives play – or even possess – musical instruments.22 Nor is musical performance a signifier unique to the minstrel; rather the ability to sing, compose, and play an instrument was a courtly skill expected of nobles in the Middle Ages. 23 Indeed in the Continuation the fourteen well-bred knights of King Arthur’s court lovers whom he warns of the approach of day through his musical performance. See Gale Sigal, Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). See also Aucassin et Nicolette where, during the lovers’ secret rendezvous, the watchman’s song warns Nicolette of impending danger (xv). The minstrel-watchman was an actual historical figure as well as a literary character. See Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo (19, 50–53); Chambers (51); Southworth (English, 74–76, 125–30). On real, named minstrel-watchmen see Constance Bullock-Davies, Register of Royal and Baronial Domestic Minstrels, 1272–1327 (Suffolk: Boydell, 1986), and Southworth, “Index of Named Minstrels” (English, 185–91). 22 Neither Maugalie in Floovant nor Tronc in Ysaÿe le Triste carries a musical instrument, nor is their performance in any way musical when they disguise themselves as minstrels; Ysaÿe le Triste. Roman arthurien du Moyen Âge tardif, ed. André Giacchetti (Rouen: Université de Rouen, 1989). 23 Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo, 25.

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have all mastered a musical instrument and, when disguised as minstrels, are able to impress Marc’s court with musical performance without the aid of additional apprenticeship. This general definition of the minstrel as a professional performer derives from analysis of signifiers transcribed within texts and cannot account for signs that would have been fully communicated only in the performance of these narratives.24 Signs indicating the minstrel that the authors mention briefly, but do not describe in detail, may have been central components in the performance of these works and key indicators of Tristan’s minstrel disguises or of his original identity. The author of the Folie notes that Tristan knows how to change his voice, but does not develop this trait further. He merely states in a single verse: “Tristran sout ben muër sa voiz” (l. 212, Tristan was skilled at altering his voice). Yet Tristan’s vocal change is perhaps the most important element of his disguise, for Yseut ultimately realizes the fool is Tristan only when he resumes his own manner of speaking. At the end of the narrative Tristan finally tells Yseut: “Des or ne m’en voil mes cuvrir; / cunuistre me frai e oïr” (ll. 973–74, From now on I do not want to hide myself; I will make myself known and heard). He abandons his “minstrel voice” and Yseut immediately recognizes her beloved (ll. 975–78).25 In the more than 750 verses (over three quarters of the narrative) that separate the author’s statement of Tristan’s ability to change his voice and his resumption of his normal speech in the recognition scene, there is no description – or even mention – of Tristan’s voice, although camouflaging it is essential to his disguise. For the importance of such a sign to be evident to the Folie’s audience, the performer of the narrative would have had to incorporate vocal play into his performance. Effective transmission of Gerbert’s work would also have conceivably entailed the performer’s use of a distinctive voice to signify Tristan. In Gerbert’s narrative, Tristan never disguises his voice; rather it serves as a striking sign of his original identity that permeates through his one-eyed minstrel mask: La roïne tote tressalt, Quant de Tristran oï le vois, Car oï l’avoit maintes fois, Si s’esmerveille se c’est il; Mais ele dist bien que nenil, Que Tristrans a deus oeus sans faille.

24

3894–99

The performative aspect of the Folie is not to be underestimated. Indeed Lewis Sumberg argues that the Folie conforms to the basic principles of drama and that the narrative ought to be categorized as medieval theater; see “Drama Become History, History Become Drama: The Folie Tristan at Acre, 1286,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 17 (1990): 395–401. 25 On the centrality of voice to recognition in the Folie, see Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Folie Tristan d’Oxford: Speaking Voice, Written Text,” Tristania 7.1–2 (1981–82): 47–59, and her Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), chap. 1. See also Morgan Dickson, “Verbal and Visual Disguise: Society and Identity in Some Twelfth-Century Texts,” in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 41–54.

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(The queen trembles all over when she hears Tristan’s voice, for she had heard it many times. So she wonders if it is he. But she says it cannot be, that Tristan unmistakably has two eyes.)

Gerbert thus generates suspense and delays Yseut’s recognition of her lover by mixing vocal signs signifying Tristan and visual signs indicative of the minstrel. Furthermore, full actualization of identity indicators in the Folie would likely involve a performer’s considerable use of physical presence. In addition to vocal interpretation, gestures and physical actions not fully transcribed in the text could have been a central part of the narrative’s performance. As the author of the Folie notes, no one who either hears or sees Tristan in minstrel disguise can recognize him (ll. 217–20). Although in the Folie Tristan’s voice ultimately spurs Yseut’s recognition of his original identity, the queen continually insists that visual signs prevent her from believing the minstrel-fool is Tristan. When Brangien suggests the stranger is her lover, Yseut contradicts her: Nu l’est, Brenguain, kar cist est laiz, hidus e mult cunterfait, e Tristran est tant aliniez, bels hom, ben fait, mult ensenez.

577–80

(It is not him, Brangien, for this one is ugly, hideous, and deformed, whereas Tristan is so well proportioned, such a handsome, well-built, well-mannered man.)

Yseut tells Tristan that she cannot, by looking at him, discern any visual sign of her lover (ll. 709–12). Moreover, there are clues to physical and behavioral signs in the narrative that are lost on twenty-first-century readers dependent solely on surviving manuscripts. When the disguised Tristan enters Marc’s court, several courtiers rush up to the minstrel-fool and greet him “en sa guisse” (l. 266, in his manner). The author does not specify what he means by “en sa guisse.” A performer, however, could have clearly represented to his audience an interpretation of the courtiers’ comportment. In addition to the signs of minstrel identity recorded or hinted at in our surviving manuscripts, there may well have been signs represented in performance, but never transcribed in texts.26 There could have been signs particular to one performance, or to one performer’s idiosyncratic way of interpreting the narrative. We may miss signs of Tristan’s or the minstrel’s identity that were linked to physical or vocal performance and not recorded, or whose records have not survived to this day. Perhaps there was a common way to impersonate a figure – even a fictive figure – as ubiquitous as Tristan. Moreover, there may have been general signs that a society, culture, or group accepted as standard, but that were never put into writing.27 26

On textual recordings of performance, see Elizabeth Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (1984; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 27 Ambiguous meanings and obscure references in the Old French texts present a further challenge. One enigmatic passage occurs in the fool’s list of skills that make him a good menestrel: “Ben sai partir les tisuns / entre esquiers e garsuns” (ll. 519–20). Joseph Bédier admits that he does not know what the fool means here and claims that there is nothing, to his knowledge, in

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Painting the portrait of the minstrel character requires using broad strokes based on the textual information that does survive. Because no one sign universally identifies the minstrel qua minstrel across all narratives, it is ultimately the author’s use of the term menestrel or jogleor that signifies to the reader that the mask a character dons is unquestionably that of a minstrel. A comparison of the Folies Tristan of Oxford and Berne demonstrates the elusive nature of the minstrel, and the extent to which we, as readers, depend on the author’s labels as signs of the minstrel. Although the Folie of Berne and that of Oxford are versions of the same story, they differ in the terminology they use to denote Tristan’s disguise. Whereas the text of Berne exclusively uses fol,28 that of Oxford uses menestrel and jugleres in addition to fol. Although it is the same story as that of Oxford, can we be sure the Berne author considered his character’s disguise to be that of a minstrel? How to define the minstrel and delineate the boundaries between the minstrel and other figures is a delicate question with few obvious answers. Although we may generally define the minstrel as a professional performer, the minstrel is ultimately differentiated by an unstable, ambiguous, and ever-shifting nature that consistently challenges rigid categorization and defies narrow definition, leaving the reader dependent on the author’s choice of terminology for guidance and clarification.29 Ever a tricky figure, the protean performer evades our efforts at scholarly classification, yet ensnares us as modern readers – just as he expertly captured the attention of medieval audiences hundreds of years ago. Centuries after the demise of minstrelsy, readers’ perpetual fascination with the minstrel in his endlessly variable forms and roles demonstrates the continuing allure of medieval French performance culture and the powerful hold that this pied personage has on audiences even today.

the various Tristan poems to explain the lines; Les deux poèmes de La folie Tristan, ed. Joseph Bédier (1907; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 36. In their translation of the Folie, Lacroix and Walter can only guess at the meaning of the passage, which they call obscure (259 n. 15). Because the fool’s discourse plays with inversions and reversals, deciphering such verses can be difficult and can hinder semiotic study. 28 In the Folie of Berne, Tristan once uses “harpeor” (l. 395, harpist) when he relates the minstrel disguise he adopted while in Ireland. 29 The difficulties philologists have had pinning down definitions of the terms menestrel and jogleor reveal that even such a signifier as the word “minstrel” is fraught with ambivalence. See Raleigh Morgan, Jr., “A Lexical and Semantic Study of Old French Jogleor and Kindred Terms” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1951) and his “Old French Jogleor and Kindred Terms: Studies in Mediaeval Romance Lexicology,” Romance Philology 7 (1953–54): 279– 325. See also L. M. Wright, “More on the Meanings and Uses of Jongleur and Menestrel,” Romance Studies 17 (1990): 7–19.

PART III

DEVOTIONAL PRACTICE AND TEXTUAL PERFORMANCE

Performing Vernacular Song in Monastic Culture: The lectio divina in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame Kathryn A. Duys

Gautier de Coinci cast his Miracles de Nostre Dame as a single long performance.1 Most of his work calls for narrative recitation of miracle stories composed in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, while his songs, many of which are set to the melodies of the trouvères’ “greatest-hits,” call for minstrel-like singing.2 These performance practices are easily recognizable from secular literary models, romances and love songs, and they are well suited to the recreational purpose of the Miracles de Nostre Dame. As I have argued elsewhere, Gautier explicitly designed his work as a spiritual literary recreation for monks, nuns, and pious laypersons to replace the secular fare that they habitually turned to for relaxation.3 This essay will show that toward the end of the Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier’s performance practice shifts from recreation toward the disciplined devotional habits of monks. In his concluding cycle of sermons, prayers, and song, Gautier introduces a monastic practice, the lectio divina, that was usually applied to the meditative reading of Scripture. His final song, Entendez tuit ensamble 1

2

3

My thanks to Morgan Powell who called my attention to this fact. At the beginning of the Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier announces that he will translate Marian miracles from Latin into Old French verse, but pauses to sing songs to relieve a headache. He then opens his Latin source and translates miracle stories on the spot for over fifteen thousand lines. At the midpoint of his collection, he tells the miracle of Saint Leocadia, a miracle that he experienced personally and had no Latin source, and then sings the three songs that follow it. He then recommences translating at the beginning of book two, but before re-opening his grant livre, he sings a few songs, and then again begins to translate many miracles. He closes his collection with a sermon and cycle of prayers that include his final song. On performance practices of medieval song, see Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On Gautier’s minstrel-like persona, see my “Minstrel’s Mantle and Monk’s Hood: The Authorial Persona of Gautier de Coinci in His Poetry and Illuminations,” in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts, ed. Kathy Krause and Alison Stones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 37–63. On the recreational value of performance(s) in the Miracles de Nostre Dame, see my “Medieval Literary Performance: Gautier de Coinci’s Guide for the Perplexed,” in Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Laurie Postlewate and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 183–216.

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(II Ch 36), is the pivotal poem where this shift occurs, for it conveys monastic mnemonics and hermeneutics by means of secular poetic techniques.4 This calls for a slight but significant change in performance practice, for instead of being recreational, the final song is meditative. Consequently, the singer must subtly turn his mind away from his audience, inwards towards his own heart, and then, in meditative solitude, turn upward to God. Composed in the early thirteenth century, this song stands at the cusp of the great metamorphosis that spiritual reading practices would undergo in vernacular and Latin literatures throughout the high Middle Ages. Lyric citation is the poetic mechanism that allows Gautier to transform his final song into a meditation. Gautier used all manner of lyric citation techniques, but nowhere did he do so more elaborately than in his final song.5 The song is set to the melody of the famous Notre Dame monophonic conductus, Beata viscera, whose words were composed by Philip the Chancellor, and melody by Perotinus.6 Moreover, Gautier set the melody of Beata viscera to two different songs in his collection, De sainte Leochade (I Ch 47) and Entendez tuit ensamble (II Ch 36). When the melody appears in the final song of the Miracles, it is therefore both a double contrafactum (because it cites two other songs), and an autocitation (because one of those songs is Gautier’s own).7 These two songs fulfill a special function in the Miracles de Nostre Dame. They define the closure of the two books of Gautier’s Marian œuvre, for De sainte Leochade closes Book I of the Miracles de Nostre Dame, and Entendez tuit ensamble closes Book II.8 To emphasize the special place of these songs, a number of manuscripts enhance it with a second voice part that modestly ornaments Perotinus’s melody.9 The weight of citations in the song’s text is equally heavy, for with the exception of its first stanza and one other verse, every single line of this song is a citation of some part of the long prayer that directly precedes it, the Salus (II Sal 35).10 (See the Appendix for the complete text of the song and its textual citations.) The Salus is a poem that is seldom recognized as a rare early vernacular 4

Gautier’s other songs incorporate a range of devotional practices; see Daniel O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 11–32. 5 On Gautier’s use of lyric citation, see especially O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion, 4–32 and 114– 16; Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 104–18; Kathryn A. Duys, “Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997), 56–156; and Anna Drzewicka, “La fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci,” Le Moyen Âge 91 (1985): 33–51, 179–200. 6 Gautier de Coinci, Les chansons à la Sainte Vierge, ed. Jacques Chailley (Paris: Heugel, 1959), 56–57, 68–80, 148–52. 7 On self-citation, see Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 267–70. 8 On repeated melodies as a mechanism of textual design, see Duys, “Books Shaped by Song.” 9 Gautier de Coinci, Chansons à la Sainte Vierge, 68. 10 All citations from the Miracles de Nostre Dame and the numbering of its poems are from Gautier de Coinci, Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. Frederic Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1966–70). Translations are my own.

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rosary – also known as a Marian psalter or chaplet.11 Like its many contemporary Latin and later vernacular counterparts, Gautier’s rosary is divided into 150 quatrains; each one begins with Ave and in a very general manner may be said to catalogue the attributes of the Virgin. Each quatrain is composed of two pairs of alexandrine rhymed couplets (aabb), a striking shift from the non-strophic octosyllabic rhymed couplets of all of the other dits. The 150 quatrains are divided into five groups of thirty, each of which is headed by one phrase of the Angelic Salutation (Luke 1:28): Ave Maria; Gratia plena; Dominus tecum; Benedicta tu in mulieribus; Et benedictus fructus ventris tui. Amen. The rosary proper is preceded by a prologue of sixteen quatrains whose metrical structure is identical to that of the rosary. The first quatrain of the rosary’s prologue introduces the fifteen other introductory quatrains, all of which revolve around Eva and Ave, a highly conventional and popular palindromic typology in Latin. The quotations of the Salus in the final song summarize the rosary. The song’s metrical structure matches that of the rosary, except for its refrain, which is composed of four six-syllable lines with a cdcd rhyme scheme. 12 Just as the rosary has a prologue, so does the song. Its first stanza is an introduction, and the last a conclusion. Each of the ten stanzas in between begins with Ave, just like the quatrains of the rosary, and the refrain recapitulates the play on Eva and Ave in the rosary’s prologue. Together these citations, recapitulations, and repetitions form a condensed version of the rosary. The Latin words of the Angelic Salutation, the Ave Maria, appear in the song just as they do on a much larger scale in the rosary, where they serve as an ordering device. Although the quoted verses do not preserve the order of the long prayer’s stanzas, the order of the Ave Maria is, of course, maintained. A unique rubric in one Miracles manuscript formally announces the mnemonic function of this citation piece: Recordacio tocius salutis beate Marie virginis (A recollection of all the salutations of the Blessed Virgin Mary).13 The function of memory in this song relates to the difficulties of maintaining mindfulness in prayer. Anne Winston argues that the origins of Marian psalters lie in private devotional practice where they were initially recited as a replacement for the canonical hours to address fundamental memory problems: In “Marian psalters,” which originated around 1130, the antiphons that preceded each Psalm and announced its theme were replaced by verses that interpreted each of the 150 Psalms as a reference to Christ or Mary. Gradually the devotion was shortened to recitation of the antiphons and, in place of the Psalms, either Pater Nosters or Ave Marias. Without the Psalms, the connection that the antiphons had to a specific theme was lost. As a result the antiphons themselves came to be 11

The only reference to this prayer as a chaplet, Marian psalter, or rosary is in Koenig, Miracles de Nostre Dame, vol. 4, foreword, ix. 12 On the rarity of this metrical structure in lyric songs, see P. Verrier, “La ‘Chanson de Notre Dame’ de Gautier de Coinci,” Romania 59 (1933): 497–519. Verrier carefully explored the relationship of this song and De Sainte Leochade (I Ch 47) with Beata viscera, but he did not consider the Salus or Marian psalters in general in his survey of metrical models. 13 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2163, fol. 223v.

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replaced by rhymed free paraphrases or simply by 150 verses in praise of the Virgin. Partly for ease of recitation, the “Marian psalters” were subdivided into three sets of 50 stanzas, each of which was also designated as a “rosary” or chaplet.14

The 150 stanzas, she notes, were often a relatively routine catalogue of the Virgin’s attributes, so they allowed the mind to wander easily. An important solution to this problem appeared in some late-thirteenth-century vernacular manuscripts, which associated narrative meditations on the life of Christ with sections of the long prayer. This narrative support facilitated the work of memory and focused one’s thoughts on suitable subjects. The Saint Petersburg Codex, one of the earlier and best of the surviving Miracles de Nostre Dame manuscripts, inserts images into Gautier’s rosary that form a narrative sequence depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Purification (or Presentation at the Temple).15 These five images turn Gautier’s Salus into a “white,” or joyful rosary.16 But the Saint Petersburg Codex dates from about thirty years after Gautier’s death, and it seems to bring the meditative images to his prayer as an innovation, for the text of the rosary makes no mention of such a meditative narrative. The issue of appropriate thoughts in prayer was the focus of much debate during the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and Gautier, writing just a few years later, was similarly preoccupied: “Bouche por quoi chant ne lit / Quant li cuers pensse a fol delit…?” (Why does the mouth sing or read / While the heart thinks of foolish delight…? I Mir 29, vv. 181–82). Mary Carruthers has shown that many medieval authors used narrative and visual mnemonic supports to remedy mindless prayer, but others also mention singing as a solution.17 In the 1180s, Peter the Chanter wrote that singing and playing instruments could help prevent the mind from wandering: Videndum ergo, qui opifices necessarii essent Ecclesiae et qui non; qui tolerandi in ea et qui non. Necessarii sunt agricolae … artifices etiam instrumentorum musicorum, ut eis tristitia et taedium amoveatur, devotio non lascivia excitetur.

14

Anne Winston, “Tracing the Origins of the Rosary: German Vernacular Texts,” Speculum 68 (1993): 621. 15 Saint Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Fr. F. v. XIV, 9, fols. 249r, 250v, 252r, 253v, 255r. These images are reproduced in I. P. Mokretsova and V. L. Romanova, Les manuscrits enluminés français du XIIIe siècle. Les collections soviétiques, 1270–1300 (Moscow: Iskousstvo, 1984), 110–12, 143. 16 Anne Winston, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 3: “The 150 Aves – divided into three sets of fifty – are recited orally in groups of ten punctuated by an Our Father. During each set of ten Aves the worshiper meditates on one of a series of fifteen mysteries, events in the lives of Christ and Mary that comprise five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious episodes. The joyful mysteries recount: (1) the Annunciation, (2) the Visitation, (3) the Nativity, (4) the Presentation, and (5) the Lost Child Jesus Found in the Temple.” 17 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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(It is therefore ascertained which kinds of artisan are necessary to the Church; which are to be tolerated within it and which not. Farmers are necessary … players of musical instruments are also necessary so that boredom and depression can be relieved by them and so that devotion, not wantonness, may be inspired by them.) 18

In his Summa theologica, Thomas Aquinas wrote that, when properly used, singing could aide meditation by moving a worshiper to contemplate each word as it is sung: Si aliquid cantet propter devotionem, attentius considerat quae dicuntur, tum quia diutius morantur super eodem, tum quia, ut Augustinus dicit, “omnes affectus spiritus nostri pro suavi diversitate habent proprios modos in voce atque cantu quorum occulta familiartitate excitantur.” (If one sings out of devotion, he pays more attention to the content and meaning, both because he lingers more on the words, and because, as Augustine says, “there are certain modes in the voice and in song that correspond to our various spiritual emotions and are able to stir them because of a mysterious affinity between the two.”)19

Gautier, too, appears to have addressed the difficulty of mindless prayer with song: his lyrical recordacio. It focuses the mind of the singer not with narrative or images, but by submitting the Ave Maria to the familiar and very memorable method of three-fold interpretation: literal, historical, and moral.20 The song condenses the rosary, focuses it on the Ave Maria, and allows the process of singing to inscribe the Angelic Salutation in the memory and heart of the singer through the three-fold interpretation. The literal interpretation opens the song (vv. 1–33), and takes the form of a vernacular paraphrase or gloss of the Ave Maria. The historical interpretation (vv. 34–72) is built around a typology (the budding rod of Aaron, stanza 6) and references to the prophesies of Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah. Gautier problemized this historical interpretation of the Ave Maria by complaining that Jews did not recognize the prefiguration of Christ’s coming in their own holy books. The moral interpretation (vv. 73–96) is highly personal and serves to move the praying subject, in this case Gautier, into the purified spiritual state appropriate to true prayer. The song ends by resting on the image of the crucified Christ, the foundation and focus of all monastic prayer (vv. 89–91). This pattern corresponds to the mnemonics built into the monastic, meditative reading technique, the lectio divina. The lectio divina, or sacra pagina as it was also known, was the meditative, spiritual reading technique used by monks in a continuous, almost unchanged 18

Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–55 and 1862–65), 205:253; quoted and translated in Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 20. 19 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. and trans. Kevin O’Rourke O.P., vol. 39 (London and New York: Blackfriars and McGraw-Hill, 1964), 250–51. I have modified O’Rourke’s translation of Aquinas’s quotation from Augustine’s Confessions, X, 33 (Patrologia latina, 32:800). 20 These interpretive strategies are present in Gautier’s long rosary as well, but they are broader in scope and not as schematically presented as they are in the final song.

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tradition from the sixth through the twelfth centuries.21 It involved what Jacques Leclercq has called “active reading,” being the oral rumination on Scripture that inscribed the word of God in one’s heart and in one’s whole being.22 Speaking, thinking, remembering: this process allowed the prayerful to mouth the word of God and delight in its sweetness as they reviewed the words of Scripture from different exegetical perspectives – murmuring, speaking, or singing as the occasion demanded. The process started with reading and interpreting the Bible, then moved toward meditation on Scripture in order to foster true prayer. As Carruthers has shown, the lectio divina was one of the primary applications of the art of memory in monastic culture. Indeed, memoria was the connective tissue that held essential parts of the monastic reading experience together, because it gave meaning to the lectio and propelled it toward meditatio. The basic mnemonic that the lectio divina employed was the three-fold interpretation of Scripture. In the preface to his Chronica, Hugh of Saint Victor explains that the first two levels of interpretation focused on the text itself; they pertained to the act of reading, lectio, while the third level pertained primarily to meditatio.23 The literal sense of the word uncovered the basic action of the narrative. This often involved grammatical commentaries, paraphrasing, or rhetorical wordplay that literally focused on the letter of the word, such as acrostics or annominatio. The second level of interpretation related the action that was revealed by the literal meaning to another action, either to earlier actions recounted in the Old Testament through typologies, or to future actions through allegory. The third level of interpretation was tropological and anagogical in nature; it reoriented the words of Scripture so that the monk could use them to reflect on himself and his own actions in relation to Christ and the afterlife. Hugh notes that this is speech that “has changed direction or discourse folded-back on itself (sermo conversus sive locutio replicata), for without a doubt we turn (convertimus) the words of a story that is about others to our own instruction when, having read of the deeds of others, we conform our living to their example.”24 The goal of the monastic lectio was to attain a meditative state in order to nurture a desire for heaven that brought about true prayer, an inner song to God, as 21

On the lectio divina, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C. Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), especially 15–17, 29–34, and 72–86; and his “[The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture:] From Gregory the Great to St. Bernard,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. G. W. H. Lampe, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 183–96; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, especially 46, 156–88; and Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, especially 2–6. 22 Leclercq, Love of Learning, 16, 72–73. 23 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalion, III, 7–10; quoted and translated in Carruthers, Book of Memory, 162–69. 24 Hugh of Saint Victor, “De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum,” [preface to the Chronica] translated in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 265. Although we note that this process allowed a monk to learn his Scripture by heart, it is more accurate to say that a monk internalized Scripture in the lectio divina. This better explains the many digestive metaphors used to describe memoria, and illuminates the value (rather than the function) of orality and memory in the ruminatio of the lectio divina.

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Saint Gregory put it.25 For this reason, the monastic lectio was distinct from analogous scholastic reading practices. Rather than privileging the literal and historical interpretations as scholastics did, monks used them to build toward their highly personalized moral interpretation of Scripture. In the words of Gregory the Great, paraphrasing Augustine, “Scriptura sacra mentis oculis quasi quoddam speculum opponitur, ut interna nostra facies in ipsa videatur. Ibi etenim foeda, ibi pulchra nostra cognoscimus” (Holy Scripture presents a kind of mirror to the eyes of the mind, so that our inner face may be seen in it. There we learn our own ugliness, there our own beauty).26 The monastic study of Scripture delighted in meandering from word to word, figure to figure, between the two Testaments. What would appear to be digressive, scattered associations had great meditative value for monks; its strength lay in its power of suggestion, not in precision or rigor, and its goal was detachment from the world and humility. For Hugh of Saint Victor, the start of learning lay in the rule-bound lectio, but its consummation lay in the contemplative freedoms of meditation.27 Since the monastic lectio was not primarily aimed at the acquisition of knowledge, monks were less interested in the scholastic methods of applying logic and dialectic to Scripture, or putting forth quaestiones and responding through disputatio. They yearned for a personal communion with Christ. What was important for the contemplative life was not so much the search for truth in the text of Scripture, but the very act of reading it. In the highly oral, mnemonic reading process of the lectio, the monk literally savored God’s words, internalized them, and used them to shape his actions so that he genuinely lived the word of God with the intention of joining Him after death. Because the lectio divina was a hermeneutical method and textual experience that was part of a meditative process, we must consider the larger context of a meditative piece to understand its function and value. By replacing Gautier’s final song in its literary context – the concluding cycle of sermon, prayers, and song – we can fully appreciate how the lectio shaped the closure of Gautier’s Marian collection. His epilogue cycle opens with a short epistle, Qui ces miracles a leüs (II Epi 33), that ends by recalling the salutary effects of reflecting on death. It serves to introduce the Doutance de la mort (II Dout 34), a long sermon on the fear of death for those who aim for an afterlife at God’s side, the goal of a prayerful life. The focus of these two poems on death is a first step toward a contemplation of Christ on the cross and the afterlife. The epistle and sermon are followed by the elaborate rosary sequence – the rosary prologue, the rosary prayer, and the rosary (or final) song – that grandly requests Mary’s intercession and rests on the image of the crucified Christ in its last stanza. Following the rosary song and closing the collection are Gautier’s four brief prayers.

25 26

Leclercq, Love of Learning, 30. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, in Patrologia latina, 75:553d; quoted and translated in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 168–69. 27 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalion, III, 7–10; quoted and translated in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 162.

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While the monastic lectio shapes the entire prayer cycle that closes the Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier’s last song brings all the essential elements of the lectio and meditatio to bear within a single piece because of its pivotal role in the epilogue cycle preceding the concluding prayers. The final song conjoins the focus on the afterlife, the requests for Mary’s intercession, and a meditation on the crucified Christ, acting as a lyrical bridge built with personal memories. It represents the rosary and its Eva-Ave prologue in a condensed form through textual citations. The textual citations engage the meaning of the rosary and move it through memory by submitting its core biblical text, the Ave Maria (Luke 1:28), to the highly mnemonic literal, historical, and moral interpretations of the monastic lectio. The work’s distinctive melody calls for the singer to linger on the words, and stirs a mysterious affinity, as Augustine put it, with personal spiritual emotions, for Gautier’s rosary song is set to the same melody as the final song in his autobiographical miracle cycle.28 The personal memories evoked by the melody make the singer turn inward to his heart, and transform the piece into an “inner song” of true prayer. In the four final prayers that follow the song, Gautier’s audience completely disappears, and for the first time in the collection he has turned inward to address Mary and Jesus in solitude.29 The last of the prayers in the epilogue sequence, like the last stanza of the rosary prayer and its song, addresses the crucified Christ, asking the Lord for the same compassion that He felt for His mother as she grieved at the foot of the cross. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the monastic lectio no longer belonged exclusively within the walls of cloistered communities, for it began to be applied to vernacular works, and structured readings of new subjects, in new modes, for diverse purposes, in a new population that included lay people and women of various milieus. Just as scholasticism and universities reshaped the ancient monastic practice to create a distinct scholastic lectio in the twelfth century, from the thirteenth century on, these factors continued to push those changes in ever more complex ways to create a broad range of new reading techniques, performance practices, interpretative strategies, and textual experiences. There is not yet a typology of the changes the lectio underwent from the thirteenth century on, but Gautier’s innovations, bringing the monastic oral reading practice to bear 28

The first book of the Miracles de Nostre Dame closes with a miracle and three songs (the Leocadia cycle: I Mir 44, I Ch 45, 46, 47). That cycle of poems recounts how Saint Leocadia and the Virgin recovered the relics of Saint Leocadia and a statue of the Virgin from thieves and in doing so saved Gautier’s book from the devil. The relics were recovered at the banks of the River Aisne, whose waters then began to heal the sick. The miracle story is followed by three songs that are presented as the very songs performed during the procession held to commemorate the miracle. See n. 32, below, for another subtle link between the final song and the Leocadia miracle. 29 In other moments of song and prayer throughout the Miracles and in the songs, Gautier occasionally addresses the Virgin in the first person singular (“I”), but he always shifts back to the first person plural (“we”), making them public, rather than private prayers, and making him the leader of a community, rather than an individual supplicant. See also O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion, 13–14.

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on vernacular song, represents an early step in the metamorphosis of the lectio.30 Within a cloister, he applied the monastic lectio to a vernacular song in a recreational work that was on the margins of the organized devotions of monastic life. And although he maintained the orthodox objective of true prayer to Christ, he did so by making extensive use of the latest techniques of lyric citation practiced by secular poets who worked in the vernacular. Gautier’s final song stands out among all the Miracles de Nostre Dame lyrics in particular and among all Old French songs in general as the only known piece endowed with a distinct hermeneutical process whose cultural value is tied to a strictly defined performance practice. In some ways, Gautier’s use of the lectio divina appears quite orthodox here, but because he composed it in the vernacular and applied it to song using the vernacular poetics of lyric citation, his entire concluding cycle of poems, but especially his final song, is a trouvère-like performance with a distinctly monastic twist.

APPENDIX

List of Citations in Gautier’s Final Song II Ch 36, Entendez tuit ensamble (RS 83; L 72–5; MW 517,1; B 733) Citations note both strophe and line numbers of the Salus; parentheses indicate partial citations. II Ch 36, Entendez tuit ensamble

II Sal 35, Li Salu Nostre Dame

I.

Entendez tuit ensamble, et li clerc et li lai, Le salu Nostre Dame. Nus ne set plus dous lai. Plus dous lais ne puet estre qu’est Ave Maria Cest lai chanta li angeles quant Dieus se maria. Eve a mort nous livra Et Eve aporte ve, Mais tous nous delivra Et mist a port ave.31

1

II.

Ave a cui li angles dist: “Plena gratia.” Dame, en toy tant de joie et tant de grace i a Que de toi son sacraire fist li Sains Espris. Qui ce ne croit sanz doute dampnez est et peris. Eve…

9

31, 185 31, 186 33, (195) 33, 196

III.

Ave. En ton saint ventre se dormi Dominus. En si honeste chambre ainc mais ne dormi nus. Celui peut tes sainz ventres porter et soustenir

17

63, 313 63, 314 124, 559

30 31

Introduction

Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 46. The refrain (B 733) draws on the prologue to the Salus, II Pro Sal 35, stanzas 2–16.

132

KATHRYN A. DUYS Que ne puet cielz ne terre comprendre ne tenir. Eve…

124, 560

IV.

Ave virge Marie. In mulieribus Soies tu beneoite. N’est si soz ne si bus, S’en enfer ne vielt s’ame glacier et eslüer, Jour et nuit ne te doie a genolz salüer. Eve…

25

92, 429 92, 430 32, 191 32, 192

V.

Ave. Rois est des angeles fructus ventris tui. Gÿu ne welent croire – tuit fussent or bruï! De l’espine est la rose, et la fleurs de la ronce. Vooir mout bien devroient li murtrier larron ce. Eve…

33

123, (553) 123, (554) 46, 247 46, 248

VI.

Ave virge Marie. Des le tans Pharaon Fus tu prefiguree par la verge Aaron. Le douz fuit de ten ventre bien nos senefia La verge sanz racine qui s’i fuctefia. Eve…

41

127, 569 127, 570 127, 571 127, 572

VII.

Ave virge. Ysaïes bien te prophetiza. Danïel, Jeremies chascuns t’autoriza. Assés, dame, annuncierent toi et ta nacïon Mil ans et plus assez ainz l’incarnactïon. Eve…

49

41, 224 41, 225 41, 226 41, 227

VIII. Ave. Douce rousee des cieus vint et d’amont, Miel et lait degouterent li haut tertre et li mont Quant tes saintes mameles alaita Jhesu Cris. Gÿu ne verront goute ainz venra antecris. Eve…

57

40, (221) 40, 223 47, 249 47, 250

IX.

Ave. Quant tant t’ammomes, tuit sont d’ire acoré Gÿu, qui terre engloute com Datan et Coré. Tant les het mes corages, je ne le puis nïer, S’iere rois, jes feroie tous en un puis nïer. Eve…

65

70, 343 70, 344 48, 255 48, 256

X.

Ave. Se tu ne fussez, tous li mons fust dampnez, Mais Diex t’olt pourveüe, ainz que fust Adanz nez, Pour saner la grief plaie dont Eve nous navra. Qui ne t’aimme et honneure ja l’amour Dieu n’avra. Eve…

73

105, 481 105, 482 129, 579 129, 580

XI.

Ave pucele pieu. Piument enpiumenté Sont tuit cil qui bien t’aimment et servent piument. E! Pucele empieumentee, tu flaires plus piument A cinc cens mile doubles de basme et de piument. Eve…

81

133, 591 —32 133, (595) 133, 596

32

This rhyme – piument. E! – also appears within the only other annominatio figure built on piument in the entire Miracles de Nostre Dame, which is found in Gautier’s personal miracle, the Leocadia miracle (I Mir 44, v. 356).

THE LECTIO DIVINA IN THE MIRACLES DE NOSTRE DAME XII.

Ave virge Marie. Prïons tuit de cuer fin Qu’avec celui nous face vivre et durer sanz fin Qui pour nous donner vie en la crois devia. Sa chançon ci finee li prïeus de Vi a. Eve…

89

150, 661 150, 662 150, 663 150, 664

133

Performative Reading: Experiencing through the Poet’s Body in Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn

In the introduction to the ground-breaking collection of essays Performing Medieval Narrative, edited by Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, the editors describe the focus of their book as “performance in its more interpersonal, dramatic, and physical dimensions (visual, auditory, musical).”1 The contents indicate a clear adherence to that focus, with sections on medieval performers of narrative, oral performance of books, performability, and the experiences of performers who enact medieval works today. The editors nonetheless provocatively observe that, “Any way in which a narrative is actualized can be said to be a performance. In this sense, even private, silent reading is one kind of narrative performance” (3). And they further suggest how this process of turning silent reading into performance might work: “Readers, too, may assume the role of storyteller, performing narratives silently in their imagination, seeing the story unfold in their mind’s eye” (3). In this essay we take up the challenge of understanding how a reader might “assume the role of storyteller” in a silent reading that did, nonetheless, include visual, auditory, and musical dimensions – a process that we call “performative reading.” We examine one illustrated manuscript version of a poem on the life of Christ. It is one of the texts in Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 1130, a manuscript dated to about 1370, which contains three long poems written in octosyllabic couplets by the Cistercian monk Guillaume de Digulleville between 1330 and 1358: the Pèlerinage de vie humaine or Pilgrimage of Human Life, an allegory of the Christian life from birth to the moment of death; the Pèlerinage de l’âme or Pilgrimage of the Soul, the story of the soul’s judgment after death and its journey through purgatory; and the Pèlerinage de Jésus Christ, the Pilgrimage of Jesus Christ, which treats the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity,

1

Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 3.

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the Son, as a pilgrimage to earth.2 About 11,400 lines in length, the third poem recounts the life of Christ in chronological sequence through his return to heaven and the Assumption of the Virgin. Nearly twenty illustrated manuscripts of this poem survive, and they present a wide range of possibilities for visualizing its narrative. We do not know whether the poet had any involvement in the design or selection of illustrations, and, although we acknowledge similarities among them, we approach each manuscript as a uniquely conceived artifact that creates a unique experience for a reader-viewer. This essay argues that through its visual program and its rubrics, the late-fourteenth-century manuscript Sainte-Geneviève 1130 enables and reinforces a performative reading of Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist.3 The poem is a first-person narrative purporting to recount a dream vision within a dream experienced by the poet “one night in 1358.” As is possible in the world of the dream, the dreamer suddenly finds himself in one place and then in another, overhears the voices of angels conversing as they hover above him, and experiences encounters with human, divine, and allegorical characters at the same level of reality. He is not only literally present during the events of sacred history, but also occasionally interacts with the characters. Specifically, we argue that it is through the evocation and citation of the narrator’s body in both text and image that Sainte-Geneviève 1130 provides the reader access to the visual, auditory, and musical dimensions of this work. The reader-viewer’s ability to accept the higher reality of this dream world is enhanced both by careful control of language and by eleven miniatures – almost one-tenth of the total – that visualize the monk-dreamer as he experiences the various episodes in the life of Christ that constitute his dream. The distribution of miniatures visualizing the narrator, whether as poet, dreamer, or both, requires some explanation. We would argue that the dense cluster of such images at the beginning offers a way into the text, and those scattered later in the poem provide occasional reminders of the physical presence of the dreamer. Also, these miniatures illustrate events that the poet has interpolated into the received narrative of the life of Christ rather than canonical episodes, in which he does not appear, and there might well have been a concern that his vision be considered authentic. Miniatures of these unconventional episodes and of others that are not usually part of the familiar narrative (e.g., Joseph in conversation with a personification of Old 2

3

All three poems have been edited by J. J. Stürzinger: Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, de Guillaume de Deguileville (London: Nichols, 1893); Le Pèlerinage de l’âme (London: Nichols, 1895); and Le Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ (London: Nichols, 1897). For a description of this manuscript and a list of the miniatures, see Amédée Boinet, ed., Les manuscrits à peintures de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève de Paris, Bulletin de la Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures 5 (Paris, 1921), 96–107, pl. xxxi. Color reproductions of all folios with miniatures and details of nearly every miniature are available on Liber floridus: http://liberfloridus.cines.fr/. Color photos of the miniatures in the Pèlerinage de Jésus Christ in Sainte-Geneviève 1130 may be found in Paule Amblard, La Vie de Jésus selon Guillaume de Digulleville, moine du XIVe siècle (Paris: Le Pommier, 1999). This book also contains a paraphrase of the text in modern French, which should not be relied upon for details.

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Law) also assist the reader-viewer to visualize this new material. At the same time, the designer of the visual program underscores the originality of the poet’s additions by putting the poet-dreamer in the miniatures. They best represent the poet’s unique experience, what differentiates his dreaming from the version known to everyone. His physical representation at those moments underscores that his poem makes an old story new. Finally, through his visualization in both the first and last miniatures, those that frame the poem, the poet takes possession of the entire narrative and makes it uniquely his own. Most important for us, through repeated verbal and visual citation of the monk’s body, the artist enables a performative reading. Performance theory insists that performances are complex citational practices and that all communication is a presence known only through iteration and, further, that the site of this performativity is the body. We argue that, when perusing Sainte-Geneviève 1130, the reader-viewer’s body cites the body of the monk, thus joining him in the double dream vision. This readerly experience begins with the opening of the poem in SainteGeneviève 1130 (Fig. 1). The opening miniature, the only one of the poem’s 115 miniatures that is two-columns wide, functions to introduce both the subject matter of the poem and the method for reading it. This liminal image performs a number of different functions and shows the complexity of the way in which the poet-dreamer’s body is deployed to give the reader-viewer access to the text. The left side of the miniature shows Christ walking on a road and carrying the staff and scrip that identify him as a pilgrim. It thus closely visualizes the rubric directly below it: “Cy commence le pelerinage de lame ihesus crist” (Here begins the pilgrimage of the soul of Jesus Christ). This image of Jesus as pilgrim also summarizes the entire narrative of the poem. By contrast, the right side refers to a specific moment in the text on this page. The narrator, who speaks in the firstperson voice of the poet, tells us that in a parable Jesus spoke about a man who left his country to go on a long pilgrimage. Saint Gregory said this man was Jesus, who took human flesh and became a pilgrim from heaven. The narrator conceived the desire to see this pilgrimage, he confesses, and one night he dreamt that he was himself on a pilgrimage. In his dream he was walking in a garden filled with fruit trees and singing birds (as at the beginning of the Roman de la Rose) while thinking that he had not yet seen Jesus the pilgrim. This dreamer-pilgrim sat at the foot of an apple tree to listen to the birds, fell asleep, and, in a dream vision, that is, a dream within a dream, his desire was fulfilled (ll. 1–64). Following the composition from left to right, in the direction of the pilgrim Jesus’ movement, we see the narrator-dreamer seated in the garden. We see his meditation on the homily and his attempt to understand it. He listens to the birdsong with head bowed, eyes open but unfocused, arms crossed on his knees – a pose that captures the bodily sensation of detaching oneself from awareness of one’s surroundings as one falls deeper and deeper into contemplative thought. We argue that this citation of a common physical experience is felt in the body of the reader-viewer, whose senses are thereby prepared for the dream vision. The choice of this moment, the liminal space between two dreams, is revealing. The

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miniature models for the reader the appropriate bodily posture for being receptive to the experience of a dream vision: eyes must be unfocused or closed, as sight would interfere; the body must be relaxed in order to feel the range of physical sensations that the text will evoke.4 The image is thus more than a foreshadowing of the poem’s contents. Rather, by its visualization of the potential for experiencing the vision and for encountering Christ, who is present and available, it serves as an invitation to contemplative reading. The liminal image is, thus, doing more than illustrating the rubric and visualizing a specific scene; it both encapsulates the entire poem and refers to a specific moment within it. By presenting both Christ and the poet-dreamer as embodied figures in the same space, the miniature affords the reader-viewer’s body access to the poet-dreamer’s experiences of hearing and seeing the life of the incarnate son of God on earth.5 The inner dream begins with a sight the narrator simply describes because as he sees it he has no understanding of its import: an old man climbs an apple tree, eats his fill of lovely apples, and falls headlong into the earth, which opens to swallow him (ll. 65–74) (Fig. 2). The narrator has vague reactions: he knows that the man had suffered a misadventure and that no one had come to help him, but he understands that the man would surely have been lost had succor not come to him: Qui si grant fu et merveilleus Que s’en esmervelleront ceuz Qui m’orront dire que j’en vi, Quar encor en sui esbahi, Et m’est avis qu’encor songe Ou ausi soit com menconge.

79–84

([Succor] that was so great and marvelous / that it will astonish those / who will hear me say what I saw / for I am still quite astonished by it, / and I am of the opinion that I am still dreaming / or that it be like a lie.)

In these lines, Guillaume takes special care to establish a separation between seeing, saying, and hearing, but this separation also presents a succinct outline of a three-stage process through which the reader-viewer will accompany the author, from visual perception to rational understanding through textual articulation and apprehension, and, finally, to experiential knowledge of the divine. The emphasis on seeing is critical for understanding the type of experience that Guillaume offers the reader-viewer of the manuscript and its images. By soliciting the active participation of the body and the senses, Guillaume’s text pushes beyond an intellectual, readerly experience, proposing instead an affective and performative role 4

5

In the miniature, his eyes are not yet closed, as is always the case in other miniatures where the text indicates that the poet-dreamer has his eyes closed. Here, one could argue that the miniature represents the moment before he closes his eyes, which are shown as heavy-lidded, or that they are closing. See the analysis of the dream within a dream by Fabienne Pomel, who argues that this structure allows the poet to become a spectator of his dream, thus transforming the dream-vision into a theatrical text (“La théâtralité des Pèlerinages de Guillaume de Digulleville,” in Maistre Pierre Pathelin. Lectures et contextes, ed. Denis Huë and Darwin Smith [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000], 161–62).

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through which the reader-viewer joins the author/actor of the text and is invited to participate in his visionary experience. The movement is thus from the visual to the visionary, a process that informs the gradual unfolding of the dream vision related in the poem. The tension between sensual perception and true understanding is important for another reason. Guillaume evokes the possibility that, since his dream is totally astonishing, the reader might take it to be a false dream. This is an implicit criticism of his most important model, the Roman de la Rose, against which he thus sets up an oppositional reading.6 For Jean de Meun’s continuation and completion of Guillaume de Lorris’s text had also proposed the revelation of truths – secular, scientific, and divine – guaranteed by the auctoritas of its illustrious author, an authority reinforced by his use of first-person narration. Like the Rose, Guillaume’s text relates a dream vision in the first person; and as with the Rose, his text will issue in ecstatic contemplation of higher mysteries. But unlike the eroticized poetics of Jean de Meun’s dream vision, the truth of which vanishes upon the dreamer’s awakening, Guillaume will lead his reader before the throne of God, where he will witness the completion of Jesus’ earthly pilgrimage. Returning to the illogic of a dream world where the senses have not yet been corrected by reason, in the next image we see the birds, who had been singing in the garden of the poet’s outer dream, lift the dreamer of the inner dream and carry him to a mountaintop, from which he sees the world (ll. 85–108) (Fig. 2). The larger scale used for the figure of the dreamer in this image helps to transport the reader-viewer up there with him, and directs the dreamer’s gaze down at the panoramic view. The small human in the landscape resembles the dreamer in pose and in coloring of hair and garment, making him a kind of everyman figure, a citation within a citation. The poet-dreamer tells us that he sees the whole world, and everything in the world, truthfully. He doesn’t understand the implications of Adam’s fall. Although he has seen the falling man and is troubled by it, he has no interpretative framework, no understanding with which to interpret it. Therefore he sees a world that hasn’t yet felt its impact; in a way, it is the alternative world, the world that might have been had there been no fall. This image captures another liminal moment – between the fall and its consequences for humankind – and thereby gives the reader-viewer the lost experience of living in that harmonious world. The reader-viewer feels the bond between the dreamer and the inhabitants of that world, our lost selves; through him we are granted this vision of what the world would be like had it not been for the fall in an image that through its many natural details is full of appeal to the senses. 6

Implicit because he does not cite the Roman de la Rose or Jean by name here, but the rhyme songe::menconge renders the allusion transparent. Guillaume’s readers were doubtless familiar with the Rose but would also have remembered that in the Pèlerinage de vie humaine the author had claimed to have experienced that dream-vision after falling asleep after reading the Rose. On Guillaume’s texts as oppositional readings of the Rose, see Stephen Wright, “Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine as ‘Contrepartie Edifiante’ of the Roman de la Rose,” Philological Quarterly 68 (1989): 399–422; and Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 207–23.

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Next, according to the text, the birds who brought the dreamer to the mountaintop begin to flutter above him and to sing so sweetly that he lifts his eyes to look at them (ll. 109–18). This use of sound to direct sight, visualized by the upward curve of the bird’s body in the miniature, typifies the way this manuscript simultaneously engages multiple senses to create a synaesthetic response. Then, while the dreamer is enjoying the birdsong from his mountaintop vantage point, the heavens open, revealing such bright light that he would have been blinded had he not closed his eyes and kept them closed. He overhears a conversation, which he thinks is between angels (ll. 127–44) (Fig. 3). In the miniature, the poetdreamer’s gesture, shielding his eyes with his hand, visualizes the brightness of the light, while his open-eyed gaze directed upward indicates that his attention is fixed on the angels, whose voices he hears. This might, once again, be a liminal image, meant to capture the moment before he closes his eyes. This scene represents the next step in the dreamer’s cognitive process – first he sees Adam fall (without knowing it is Adam), and only now does he hear the story (ll. 145–93). He learns it from the unusual perspective of Adam’s angel, who had to abandon his charge when Adam took Pride as his companion. This discussion between angels, reported as direct speech, ends when Adam’s angel agrees to tell the King what has happened to Adam. While the dreamer concentrates on listening, his sense of sight is shut down – he says he dare not look at the angels. The poet continues to take great pains to lay out the cognitive process. Sight has moved from the perception of the natural world with the eyes of the body to a gaze turned inward – or upward, as represented in the image – and hearing has similarly progressed from the pleasant but unintelligible song of birds to the discourse of angels. It is especially interesting that this drawing up from the material to the spiritual world is not accomplished by a rejection of seeing and hearing but though their refinement and redirection. This lesson in the use of the senses teaches the reader-viewer how to be a performative reader through a disciplined interplay between sensual perception, the necessary but imperfect first step – imperfect both in the sense of (potentially) faulty and therefore misleading with regard to the truth, but also in that of ‘incomplete’ – and its cognitive processing by the rational mind. The next miniature in which the dreamer is represented indicates a shift, first in speaker, a change from overheard speech back to the poet’s voice (Fig. 4), and then in mode of perception, back to the sense of sight. The dreamer reports, “Quant ce oui, je me pensai / Que nulle rien ne faisoie / Se le maintieng ne vëoie” (When I heard this, I thought to myself that I would do nothing if I didn’t see the ensuing action; ll. 194–96). Thus determined to see what happens next, he shields his eyes with his scapular before opening them to look up. Still, as he puts it: La grant lumiere, qui venoit Du ciel haut, ressortir faisoit Ma vëue, com rebouquer Fait le soulel quant il luist cler Les iex de la chauve souris.

217–21

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(The great light that came from the high heaven troubled my vision, the way sun does when it shines brightly in the eyes of a bat.)

The text repeatedly uses words for “eyes,” “brightness,” and “light,” and there is a very dense cluster of flexions of the verb “voir” – four in the eight lines preceding the next image (ll. 214–21). This foregrounding of sight makes the reader-viewer want to see the golden disc in the sky and participate in the dreamer’s vision. The representation of the dreamer refers to overpowering sense experience, bodily experience, and this impact on his physical state is evidence for the reality of the vision. In the next miniature, after further readjustment and refinement of his vision, he sees the gold circle in the sky resolve into ten great circles, nine revolving about the center, the seat of God (ll. 222–79) (Fig. 4). The circles appear to be made of gold, azure, and polished crystal, and swarms of angels flutter and turn with them, singing as they go. This rich sensory experience engages both the sight and hearing of the dreamer. After having appeared in five of the first seven miniatures, including twice on fol. 160v, the poet-dreamer is not visualized again until fol. 170v, twenty-seven miniatures later, although he continues to narrate his dream, which moves on to the debate among the daughters of God and its resolution, then the Annunciation, Visitation, and Mary’s song to her unborn child, the Magnificat. Joseph enters the story at this point, doubts and is reassured by an angel, then escorts the Virgin to Bethlehem, where they encounter Lady Poverty, who guides them to the stable. The dreamer then addresses Mary directly (ll. 1847–1932), as is indicated by the rubric immediately following the miniature: “Cil qui songe a la virge marie” (The one who is dreaming, to the Virgin Mary) (Fig. 5). This is his first direct interaction with a character and marks a further step in the process outlined above: first, the dreamer only sees and hears; now he himself accedes to the discursive level of the other characters and can address one of them. His understanding of the deeper meaning of the vision and the pilgrimage, however, remains incomplete, as he is first indignant about Mary’s acceptance of Poverty, telling her that she could command angels. But then there is a shift and in a veritable harangue he gives her a lecture on how to accept poverty. Using “tu” all the way through and thus drawing attention to his special access to her, as well as to his authorial and authoritative position, he explains to her why she must be poor and humble. The gestures in the accompanying image indicate that he speaks and she listens, which corresponds precisely to the text. Her head bends and her robe drapes softly; she looks receptive and acquiescent, whereas his stance is straight and he is taller. It is perhaps not surprising to see the medieval gender system visualized here as male, clerical authority over a secular female who listens without venturing to speak. The reader-viewer, through performative reading, might well have cited the bodily postures that correspond to gendered positions and thus be made complicit in the system, although we must not exclude the possibility that male readers – for example, male religious – may have identified with Mary in her embracing of poverty and thus experienced a cross-gendering not uncommon in late-medieval devotional practices.

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The dreamer’s status seems to rise even higher when he is able to overhear a rather strained conversation between God the Father and the Holy Spirit (ll. 3571– 3642). As he watches Mary, Joseph, and the child on the Flight into Egypt, he sees brightness descend to hover above them, a cloud of angels within which are two figures, as illustrated in a miniature on fol. 182r. Once again he cannot look, but listens as the Holy Spirit enumerates in a kind of complaint to the Father the ways in which the infant’s only companions, Joseph and Mary (the one, old, and the other, a woman) are ill-equipped for a journey into an unfamiliar region. God the Father responds rather sharply that the Holy Spirit had participated fully in the decision to send the Son on pilgrimage, which is, of necessity, harsh. But, God adds, angels will always protect and defend them, and the Holy Spirit himself will guard and comfort them. In yet another subtle emphasis on the author’s authority, the poet-dreamer’s gestures in the miniature are very similar to those of God the Father. Like God, he can see and hear – even though he cannot fully comprehend – everything, both what is happening on earth and in heaven. The poet-dreamer has clearly reached a privileged point of view, as is indicated by the next miniature, which represents a kneeling monk addressing a crowned figure in an aureole who appears to respond directly to the earthbound dreamer (Fig. 6). Despairing that he cannot understand the mystery of the pilgrimage, the dreamer addresses God directly in a long prayer, each stanza of which begins with an illuminated letter of Guillaume’s own name in Latin (ll. 3679–3966). This prayer, in which he speaks for humankind despite its obvious self-indexing, is marked by several shifts in address and tone. First, the dreamer revisits the issues of the Parliament in Heaven, noting that since God is all-powerful, he could have pardoned Adam and his descendents without recourse to the sacrifice of his Son. But God’s decision to make this sacrifice of himself leads to the poet-dreamer’s despair from the knowledge that, as a mortal, he may suffer the wrath of Justice for his moral failings. He is heartened, though, by the guise that God has taken on at this juncture in the narrative: as an infant, he has hidden his royalty, and his intention is thus not one of vengeance but of love. The poet-dreamer now shifts his prayer to petition Mary, who is attending to her son’s needs, to act as his intercessor. Finally, in a collapsing of the narrative time of history with the extrahistorical time of mystical vision, he notes that the infant, like the dreamer, already carries his pilgrim’s staff and scrip, whose qualities he allegorizes. In a final plea, he begs Mary that, just as he bears the image of God as a man, his pilgrimage may resemble her son’s and thus allow him to achieve salvation. The next visualization of the dreamer is during Christ’s ministry, after the Jews have reacted to the resurrection of Lazarus by forming their conspiracy to get rid of Jesus – “sa mort procurer” (l. 7450). This reminds the poet-dreamer of a past vision in which predator birds conspired to attack and destroy an eagle, whom the dreamer now understands to be Jesus (ll. 7453–7526) (Fig. 7). His furrowed brow in the second of these miniatures (both on fol. 204r) may indicate his new understanding that this vision refers to the Passion that is to come. When the poet-dreamer awakens, he is back in the garden, that is, his inner dream has ended. There is no indication that he has awakened from his outer

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dream until after the “official” ending of the poem (Fig. 8). A rubric on fol. 229r reads, “Explicit le pelerinage Jhesucrist. C’est cy apres l’orison de cil qui le songa. Selonc la maniere du dit pelerinage” (End of the pilgrimage of Jesus Christ. After this is the prayer of the one who dreamt it. According to the manner of the said pilgrimage). Directly below the rubric, a miniature represents a monk in black habit and tonsure with long brown hair who kneels, hands clasped in prayer, head tilted back, and gaze directed upward to Christ. Uniquely in the visual program of the manuscript, Christ and the poet are placed on the same ground-line and occupy the same space. We call him “poet,” and no longer “poetdreamer,” because the rubric carefully uses the preterit: “songa,” in contrast to the rubric used to signal the many interventions of the poet-dreamer in the poem itself, “Cil qui songe” (the one who is dreaming). Here, then, back in his “real” world and having experienced the full journey of the Incarnation, the poet appears to have experiential knowledge of the divine, since he and Christ co-exist as embodied beings in a shared space. The miniaturist’s decision to create a massive wooden throne to support Christ’s body serves to underscore that body’s physical weight. We take the message of this miniature to be, however, not that the poet shares a physical space with Christ when he prays, but that the experience of his double vision has given him a deep understanding of the Incarnation, that he has learned bodily, emotionally, and intellectually: ultimately, through the engagement of his senses and his reason in the dream vision, he and Christ share embodiment. In the opening miniature, Christ and the poetdreamer also share a space, but before his dream vision the poet has no understanding of the import of that sharing; in fact, he complains that he has not yet seen Christ the pilgrim. Now we understand that this signals his lack of understanding of the Incarnation. This final miniature, then, not only engages the reader-viewer’s body in the familiar posture of prayer, but through that engagement provides the reader-viewer with access to the meaning of Christ’s pilgrimage, expressed through the human flesh that he donned. Performative reading grounds this dream vision in the body, providing the kind of corporeal experience that embeds such an unusual narrative in the reader-viewer’s memory. As Vitz, Regalado, and Lawrence observe, “Narrative swings the doors of performance open wider than any other medieval genre” (3). Wide enough, we add, to enable performative reading.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. Christ as Pilgrim and the Poet-Dreamer in a garden. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 159r. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

GUILLAUME DE DIGULLEVILLE’S PÈLERINAGE DE JHESUCRIST

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 2. Adam’s fall; the Poet-Dreamer regards the world. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 159v. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Fig. 3. The Poet-Dreamer blinded by the light of two angels conversing above his head. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 160r. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 4. Two angels speaking with Adam’s angel; the Poet-Dreamer sees a circle of gold in the sky; the Poet-Dreamer sees the circles of heaven. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 160v. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Fig. 5. The Poet-Dreamer questions and lectures Mary. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 170v. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Fig. 6. The Poet-Dreamer sees God in heaven and addresses a poem to him. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 182v. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Fig. 7. The Poet-Dreamer has a vision of predatory birds. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 204r. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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Fig. 8. The Poet prays to Christ. Guillaume de Digulleville, Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1130, fol. 229r. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

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The Anglo-Norman Office of the Cross in the Lichtenthal Psalter Lucy Freeman Sandler

Among the finest illuminated manuscripts produced in England during the second half of the fourteenth century for the noble Bohun family is a psalter now at Lichtenthal Abbey in Baden-Baden. The volume was probably made for Mary, heiress of Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton, shortly after her marriage to Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) in 1380/1 and certainly before her death in 1394 at the age of twenty-four. It is also probable that one of Mary’s daughters, Blanche, inherited the psalter and brought it with her to Germany when she married Ludwig, count-palatine of the Rhine, in 1402. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the psalter was in the possession of the abbess of the Cistercian convent of Lichtenthal, and there it has remained, except for a short period during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The Lichtenthal Psalter is richly illustrated. Twelve historiated initials and borders or bas de page scenes at the main text divisions include seventy-nine Old Testament subjects, from Creation to the raising of the Brazen Serpent, twentyone of them on the Beatus page alone. The work of the artist, John de Teye, sparkles with variegated color and pattern, and tooled gold, all concentrated or compacted in extremely small areas, since the page size is only about 7 x 5 inches and the historiated initials are not more than 1.5 inches in height. Characteristic of English manuscript illumination of the second half of the fourteenth century, vivacity of gesture, active movement, and abundance of surface detail override the construction of figural substance or spatial illusion. At the end of the Lichtenthal Psalter is an illustrated devotional text known as the Short Office of the Cross, here in Anglo-Norman instead of the normal Latin, followed by a common Latin prayer to the Virgin and Saint John, which begins “O beata et intemerata.”2 Ordinarily a component of books of hours rather than psalters, in its normal Latin form the Short Office of the Cross consists of a quatrain (sometimes identified as an “antiphon”) on an event of the Passion of Christ, 1 2

Baden-Baden, Lichtenthal Abbey Archiv MS 2. See Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London: Harvey Miller, 2004). Fols. 160r–164v (Short Office of the Cross), fols. 165r–165v (Prayer to the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist, “O beata et intemerata,” ending incomplete).

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a response, and a prayer for each of the canonical hours, Lauds excepted.3 Unlike longer offices, such as the Hours of the Virgin or the Hours of the Passion, there are no Psalms or lessons. The first quatrain, for Matins, begins “Patris sapientia veritas divina / Deus homo captus est hora matutina” (The wisdom of the Father, divine truth / God-and-Man was taken at the hour of Matins). The events commemorated in the office are the arrest and betrayal of Christ at Matins, Christ brought before Pilate at Prime, Christ carrying the Cross at Terce, the Crucifixion between thieves at Sext, the death of Christ on the Cross at None, the Deposition at Vespers, and the Entombment at Compline. A considerable number of English manuscripts of the fourteenth century contain the Short Office of the Cross with illustrations.4 The subjects are fixed by the text itself, constituting a standard cycle, a visual performance re-enacting the narrative of Christ’s Passion. In the mid-nineteenth century the Latin text of the Short Office of the Cross was published by the archivist-antiquarian Franz Joseph Mone in his compendium of Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters. Mone cited many examples of the office, noting that it is sometimes attributed to Pope John XXII (1316–34).5 As an appendix to his edition of the Latin text, Mone also published a French version. His exemplar was actually the Lichtenthal Psalter, which he mis-identified as a fifteenth-century manuscript “in Norman dialect.” He had learned of the Lichtenthal version of the office when he borrowed the psalter from Lichtenthal Abbey in connection with his preparation of a history of the newly established German state of Baden.6 Mone’s Latin text, which he based on German exemplars, differs considerably from that of most English manuscripts, and his edition of the AngloNorman text has numerous “improvements” to make it scan correctly, as the Latin does.7 3

4

5

6

7

For the Latin text of the Short Office of the Cross see Franz Joseph Mone, Die lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1853), I, nos. 82, 107–8; Analecta hymnica medii aevii, ed. Clemens Blume and Guido Dreves (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1886– 1920), XXX, nos. 13, 32. Mone evidently considered the verse text as a hymn because it was rhymed and placed in a position comparable to that of hymns in the longer form of the Hours of the Passion. For a list of examples see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285–1385, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 5, ed. Jonathan Alexander (London: Harvey Miller, 1986), II, 211. A devotion to the Passion for each of the canonical hours is of ancient origin however; see Victor Leroquais, Les livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale (Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1927), I, xxvi, citing references to such an office as early as the tenth century. Mone’s somewhat suspect role in the dispersion of the manuscripts of Lichtenthal Abbey came to be known as the “Affäre Mone”; see Felix Heinzer and Gerhard Stamm, Die Handschriften von Lichtenthal, Die Handschriften der Badischen Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, XI (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987), 22–29; Felix Heinzer, “Un témoin inconnu des ‘Bohun Manuscripts’. Le ms. 2 des archives de l’abbaye de Lichtenthal,” Scriptorium 43 (1989): 260–61; and idem, “Lichtenthaler Bibliotheksgeschichte als Spiegel der Klostergeschichte,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 136 (1988): 38–43. Mone commented that it was difficult to establish the rhyme pattern of the Lichtenthal office because it was written as prose. However, each new line of verse begins with a decorated capital letter, even if these initials are not aligned. On French verse forms see Gotthold

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Although Mone knew of only the one French version, that is, the one at the end of Lichtenthal Psalter, scholars since, above all Jean Sonet, have published the incipits or the entire texts of nine other French verse versions of the Short Office of the Cross.8 Two of these are Anglo-Norman, and occur in altogether at least nine English manuscripts – including illustrated examples in the well-known Vernon Psalter and an Hours of the Virgin at the Walters Art Museum.9 So far however, I know no other example of the Anglo-Norman version in the Lichtenthal Psalter, which remains, despite Mone’s disapproval of its inadequacies, the most direct translation of the standard Latin office. The exceptional conjunction of the unique Anglo-Norman text with a cycle of Passion images in the Lichtenthal Psalter suggests a pair of questions. First, how did the artist treat a devotional text that provided what amounts to “instructions” for its images; and second, does the fact that the text is in Anglo-Norman rather than Latin make any difference in the handling of the illustrations? To consider these questions, the pictorial cycle should be examined scene by scene. After the introductory line, “Le savoir a dieu le piere qu’est divyne verité” (The wisdom of

8

9

Naetbus, Nicht-lyrischen Strophenformen des Altfranzösischen. Ein Verzeichnis (Leipzig: J. B. Hirschfeld, 1891). Robert Reinsch, “Mittheilungen aus einer franz. Handschrift des Lambeth Palace zu London,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 63 (1880): 54–55; Paul Meyer, “Prières et poésies religieuses tirées d’un manuscrit lorrain (Arsenal 570),” Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français 27 (1901): 64–67; Arthur Långfors, Les incipit des poèmes français antérieurs au XVIe siècle (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1918), 13, 92, 397; Jean Sonet, Répertoire d’incipit de prières en ancien français (Geneva: Droz, 1956), nos. 17, 390, 631, 934–36, 976, 1031, 2043. With one new version, as noted below (Sinclair, 1988), the following include corrections, amendments, and additional manuscript examples for Sonet’s Répertoire: Édith Brayer, “Livres d’heures contenant des textes en français,” Bulletin d’information. Publications de l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes 12 (1963): 31– 102; Keith Val Sinclair, Prières en ancien français, Nouvelles références, renseignements complémentaires, indications bibliographiques, corrections et tables des articles du Répertoire de Sonet (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1978); idem, French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages, A Bibliographic Manuscript Guide (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979); idem, French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages, A Bibliographic Guide, First Supplement (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982); Pierre Rézeau, Répertoire d’incipit des prières françaises à la fin du moyen âge, Addenda et corrigenda aux répertoires de Sonet et Sinclair, Nouveaux incipit (Paris: Droz, 1986); Keith Val Sinclair, Prières en ancien français, Additions et corrections aux articles 1–2374 du Répertoire de Sonet, Supplément (Townsville, Australia: Department of Modern Languages, 1987); idem, French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages, A Bibliographic Manuscript Guide, Second Supplement (New York, Greenwood Press, 1988), no. 6455; Ruth Dean, with Maureen Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature, A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), nos. 966–67. Vernon Hours and Psalter, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 9.H.17, ca. 1300– 1310, ca. 1316, and after 1323, fols. 14r–18v, text incipit (14v), “Sire ihesu qui par tun duz pleiser” (Sonet 2043); Baltimore, Walters Art Museum MS W.102, end thirteenth century, fols. 73v–84v, 2r–3v, and Hours, Norwich, Castle Museum MS 158.926.4f, ca. 1310–20, fols. 9r– 26v, text incipit “A matines voleit ihesu orer pur nus ensaumple doner” (Sonet 17, Sinclair 3886, Dean 967); see Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, nos. 53, 61–62, nos. 15, 24–26, and nos. 47, 53–55. Still another Anglo-Norman version, with illustrations, is in an unpublished book of hours in a private collection in Paris; the Matins incipit is lost, but the text of the remaining hours does not correspond with other known versions, either Anglo-Norman or French.

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God the Father, which is Divine Truth), the arrest and betrayal of Christ is the theme of the Matins verses. The illustration (Fig. 1) is an expressive example of the standard composition of the Betrayal, using the area beyond the initial frame to show an armored soldier “entering” the initial field from the left, a feature of pictorial narration that heightens affective intensity, especially since half of the same soldier appears to emerge into the main space to the right of the initial frame. The verses for Matins link the abandonment of Christ by his disciples and his betrayal, not naming Judas as the traitor, but the Jews. Nevertheless, the focus of the composition is the normal kiss of Judas, suggesting that even had the artist used instructions for the image they would not have been the words of the adjacent text but rather concise phrases of the kind found in other manuscripts, such as “betrayal,” or “kiss of Judas.”10 The illustration for Prime (Fig. 2) responds to the first line of the text, “A houre de prime devaunt pilat mon tresdouz seignour ihesu crist estoit menee” (At the hour of Prime my sweetest Lord Jesus Christ was led before Pilate) and shows the expected subject. Again the image is characterized by a sense of dramatic urgency: an open-mouthed accuser with tongue thrust out – “Le face dieu que ert trebeauis par esconpage ount defoulee” (The face of God, which was so beautiful, they befouled by spitting)11 – on the left; a man threatening with raised arm behind Christ; a twisted man with gross-featured profile turned toward Christ while pointing toward Pilate; and Pilate himself, gloved hand on crossed knee, gesticulating toward the central figure whose hands are “tresforz de cordes lyee” (tied strongly with ropes). Here, the Lichtenthal artist’s interpretation of the subject accords with the specific details mentioned in the text.12 Did he actually draw these details from the adjacent words? English Passion iconography has a long tradition of graphic representation, often focusing on the physical details of the torture of Christ and the bestiality of torturers made grotesque by their evil acts.13 It is likely then that the artist had a clear mental image of a familiar Passion 10

On written instructions to illuminators, see Jonathan Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 52–73. 11 Recalling the words attributed to Saint Bernard in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda sanctorum, “facies pulchra prae filiis hominum sputis Judaeorum deturpatur”; see Th. Graesse, Legenda aurea (Reprint, Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1965), 226. The translation in Jean de Vignay’s French version, the Légende dorée (ca. 1340), differs: “La face tres bele sus toutes celes des filz des homes fu enlaidie des crachemens des iuis” (London, British Library MS Royal 19 B xvii, Paris, late fourteenth century, fol. 95v). 12 Cf. the illustration of Christ before Pilate in the late-fourteenth-century Hours of Eleanor de Bohun (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 18.6.5, fol. 24r), where, despite the similarity of the two figures of Pilate, the motifs of spitting, reviling, and beating are absent. 13 See, for example, the Betrayal and Flagellation in the mid-twelfth-century Winchester Psalter (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero C.IV, fol. 21r); see Francis Wormald, The Winchester Psalter (London: Harvey Miller), 1973. For a discussion of images of the torture of Christ and the bestiality of torturers, as well as numerous illustrations, see R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979); further, Thomas

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subject, for which the words of the text might have provided reinforcement, but not the single source of his pictorial imagery. The most powerful image of the Lichtenthal cycle is the scene of Christ carrying the Cross, the illustration for Terce (Fig. 3). The picture relates to the last verse of the quatrain, “A leu des peynes a ses espaules la croys benoite ad portee” (To the place of punishment he carried the blessed cross on his shoulders), and it incorporates details such as the purple garment and the crown of thorns that are mentioned in the previous verses. In this case the Anglo-Norman text, like some of the other French versions, specifies that “A l’oure de tierce crient ly iues qe mon seignour ihesu crist soit a la crois ataché” (At the hour of Terce the Jews cry that my Lord Jesus Christ should be attached to the cross) while the Latin version only says “clamitant” (they cry) without further identifying the subject of the verb.14 The prevalence of the conception of the Jews as Christ-killers accounts for the particularly brutal facial caricatures and violent gestures of the men accompanying Christ in the Lichtenthal image.15 The next illustration, for Sext (Fig. 4), shows the Crucifixion between thieves, one turned toward Christ and the other away. The sponge-bearer, charging in from the left across the initial frame, plays an important role, paralleling the text, “Quaunt sil liés ert uyn meldle dee fyel par une rosel ly ount donee” (When he was bound they gave him a mixture of gall on a reed). Most striking, the bad thief’s eyes are closed, underscoring his blind rejection of Christ, and the black beard and thick lips tip off the viewer to his evil nature. These details have no analogue in the text of the Office of the Cross; nor do they occur in the pictorial cycles otherwise most closely related to the Lichtenthal series. Bodily and spiritual blindness continues as a theme in the Lichtenthal picture of the Crucifixion with two witnesses (Fig. 5), the one on the left pointing to his one opened eye as he pierces the wound in Christ’s side with his spear, and the other raising his hand in testimony, as if to say, “Indeed this man was the Son of Bestul, Texts of the Passion, Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), especially 145–64; most recently, Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, “Passion Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript Page: ‘The Hours of the Cross’ in London, British Library Additional 37049,” Mediaeval Studies 66 (2004): 213– 52. 14 Jews are cited in Matins and Terce in the Lichtenthal Psalter, and also in Lauds and Prime in one of the versions most common in England (Sonet 17, Sinclair 3886, and Dean 967, see n. 9, above), which appears in four manuscripts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, usually incorporated into the longer Office of the Passion (not all listed in Sonet, Sinclair, or Dean): London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, Oxford, ca. 1270, fols. 98r–116v (most illustrations and parts of text cut out); London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 522, England, late thirteenth century, fols. 63r–65v, unillustrated; Baltimore, Walters Art Museum MS W.102, England, end thirteenth century, fols. 73v–84v (illustrated, see n. 9, above); and Norwich, Castle Museum MS 158.926.4f, Norwich, ca. 1310–20, fols. 9r–26v (illustrated, see n. 9, above). 15 Again in contrast to the less dramatic late-fourteenth-century representation in the Hours of Eleanor de Bohun (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 18.6.5, fol. 25v), or the pathos-filled scene in the contemporary hours in British Library MS Add. 16968, fol. 20r. For the medieval literary tradition of the role of Jews in the Passion, see Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 69–110.

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God.” There is one further figure, half-hidden, on the far left. The garments of these men are richly furred and the witness whose eyes have been opened is distinctly fat-bellied. These details, which again have no parallel in the text (where the spear-bearing witness is characterized as a “chivaler”) recur in other contemporary Crucifixion miniatures.16 But the most striking feature, the dove of the Holy Spirit flying from the lips of the closed-eye Christ to the head of Godthe-Father tucked into the space between the initial frame and the foliate finial, is, so far as I know, found only in manuscripts made for the Bohun family in the 1380s.17 This is the pictorial evocation of the first line of the quatrain, “A l’oure de noune mon seignour ihesu crist de cest vie est trepassee” (At the hour of None my Lord Jesus Christ departed from this life), but with additional details that emphasize the reunion of the Son with the Father via the Holy Spirit. The Lichtenthal image is the counterpart of the passage in the mid-fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ, “ ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ And saying this, He sent forth His spirit: with His head bowed on His breast toward the Father, as though giving thanks that He had called Him back, He gave up his spirit.”18 The last of the four subjects in which the wooden cross – illusionistically painted – is prominent is the Deposition (Fig. 6): “A l’oure de vespres le cors mon seignour ihesu crist de la seynte crois est oustee” (At the hour of Vespers the body of my Lord Jesus Christ is removed from the holy cross). The remainder of the quatrain is a lament on Christ’s suffering to heal our infirmities. The illustration, like the three preceding, has a limited number of figures aligned against the through-running gold ground, a forceful and intense rendition of a standard composition. By contrast, the Entombment for Compline (Fig. 7) has a larger cast: Joseph of Arimathea and John the Evangelist lower the shrouded body of Christ onto a bier; the three Marys pray in the center; two angels swing censers above; and two reclining soldiers gesticulate upward from below. Including the “sweet odours” specified in the text, all the details are familiar from contemporary Entombment iconography. In sum, the pictorial cycle of the Lichtenthal Short Office of the Cross is not directly dependent on the text, and probably was not influenced by the use of 16

See the Hours of Eleanor de Bohun (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 18.6.5, fol. 28r) and the hours in British Library MS Add. 16968, fol. 22r. Using later medieval paintings as examples, Mellinkoff, Outcasts, I, 128, noted that obesity is a characteristic of the representation of New Testament Jewish officials, such as Caiaphas (or Jewish “agents,” such as Pilate). The associations of wealth and obesity with Jews have perhaps informed the Lichtenthal image, suggesting in this case that it is Jewish eyes that have been opened. 17 See the Hours of the Virgin and Psalter, made for Mary de Bohun (Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek MS Thott 547.4o, fol. 22v), illustrating None. 18 Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa, ed. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 337, from the meditation for None. Recently, see Sara McNamer, “Further Evidence for the Date of the Pseudo-bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi,” Franciscan Studies 28 (1990): 235–61.

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Anglo-Norman. Instead, I think we can say that where details correspond it is not the result of a close reading of this text but of participation in what Michael Camille has called the “medieval imaginary,”19 embodied in both the visual and the verbal alike. More than that, from the point of view of the user of the book, the pictures do not just illustrate the text, they enrich the experience of reading or reciting it through their variations and additions, as well as their duplication, of the words. The Latin text of the psalter that precedes the short office of the cross may have been “readable” by the owner of this book in the limited sense that the words of the psalms had become recognizable by repeated vocalization; the complex Old Testament pictorial cycle accompanying the psalms – unrelated to the words – may itself have required oral exposition for a full understanding. The Short Office of the Cross however was more accessible, since it was written in the vernacular. Difficulties that might have arisen in recognizing the meaning of the written words could be alleviated by recourse to the illustrations. In this way, image and word reinforced each other, the two together providing an affective tool of devotion made all the more personal and powerful because it could be employed directly, without intervention of priest, chaplain, or spiritual advisor.

19

Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 307, a phrase derived from the title of Jacques Le Goff’s L’imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Fig. 1. Matins, Arrest of Christ. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 160r.

Fig. 2. Prime, Christ before Pilate. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 160v.

Fig. 3. Terce, Christ bearing the Cross. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 161r.

To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

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Fig. 4. Sext, Crucifixion between Thieves. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 162r.

Fig. 5. None, Crucifixion with Witnesses. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 162v.

Fig. 6. Vespers, Descent from the Cross. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 163v.

161

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

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Fig. 7. Compline, Entombment of Christ. Lichtenthal Abbey, Archiv MS 2, fol. 164r.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

“Laver de ses pechiés une pecheresse royale”: Psalm Collects in an Early Fourteenth-Century Devotional Book Elizabeth A. R. Brown

The New York Public Library’s manuscript Spencer 56 is a strikingly unusual devotional compilation.1 I have worked on the volume for a decade, aided and encouraged by a host of colleagues, all of them admirers of Nancy Regalado and her work. I offer this preliminary consideration of one of its many facets as a tribute to Nancy from us all. Spencer 56 is a small, elegant volume, prepared with meticulous care. Its parchment is thin, smoothly scraped, and virtually flawless; the script is precise, clear, and legible; the text is copied with few abbreviations; the decoration is simple, restrained, and beautiful; the historiated initials and miniatures are exquisite.2 The pages of the book, written in two columns, suggest its unusual nature, since, aside from breviaries, private devotional books were generally copied in long lines.3 As its contents reveal, Spencer 56 does not fit comfortably into any of the 1

2

3

I am grateful to the staff of the New York Public Library, and especially H. George Fletcher and Margaret Glover, for their many kindnesses as I have worked for a decade on Spencer 56. I thank, too, Susan Boynton, Nigel Morgan, Lucy Freeman Sandler, M. Alison Stones, and Adelaide Bennett; Dr. Bennett and I are now preparing a full study of the manuscript. Despite the errors of dating and provenance that (uncharacteristically) mar the article of Léopold Delisle, “Les Heures de Blanche de France, duchesse d’Orléans,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 66 (1905): 489–539, his study of the manuscript that is now Spencer 56 remains (characteristically) useful and fundamentally important. My title is derived from one prayer in the original manuscript, fol. 347r; it is echoed in prayers added later on blank folios, fols. 276r and 283v. The original manuscript contained 27 historiated initials and one miniature (fol. 280v); the final section has two miniatures (fols. 390r, 419v), added shortly after the preparation of the original core; another illustration (fol. 7r) was added in the fifteenth century; see n. 7, below, on these three distinctly different portions of the manuscript. Nine of the historiated initials (between fols. 245r and 386r) contain depictions of a woman wearing a wimple, as do the miniatures on fols. 280v and 390r; heads of a wimpled woman appear in small initials on fols. 31v, 137v, and 164r. The inventories of the collections of Charles V and Charles VI catalogued by Delisle sometimes indicated the number of columns, sometimes not. Only three of the 56 books grouped as Hours are said to be copied in two columns. On the other hand, the inventories identify just two of the 36 breviaries as being copied in two columns, although they are all likely to have been

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genres into which early fourteenth-century liturgical books have been divided, when the style of its script and decoration shows it was created. Still, as the inventories of the libraries of Kings Charles V and Charles VI show (and as Victor Leroquais long since remarked),4 there was enormous variation in the contents of books that included Hours. Some contained one Hours, some several; some had the Psalter, some “various histories of various saints.”5 A book particularly valued by Charles V (and identified in an inventory as “les très belles grans Heures”) comprised a calendar; a Psalter; Hours of the Trinity, the Virgin, the Passion, John the Baptist, and Angels; prayers to the Virgin; Hours of John the Evangelist, Saint Louis (king of France), Saint Louis of Marseille, and Mary Magdalene; memorials of different saints; vigils of the dead; the seven Penitential Psalms; the Litany; and more memorials of (presumably) other saints.6 The original core manuscript of Spencer 56 (fols. 31r–389r)7 consisted of similarly diverse elements, including a full Psalter (as well as the seven Penitential Psalms, the so-called Psalter of Jerome, and a lengthy prayer composed of excerpts from the Psalms), two Hours (of the Passion and of Saint Louis), litanies, memorials, and, most important, a host of prayers, some traditional, some uncommon, some perhaps unique. The tone of these prayers is arrestingly penitential and personal, focused on individual contrition and pleas for forgiveness. References to “Blanche” and “Philippe” in some of the orations give clues to the person for whom the manuscript was prepared (and in the case of three quires added at the end, one reference to “Blanche” sheds light on the person for whom and the circumstances under which they were appended). Following Virginia Wylie Egbert, I have long connected Spencer 56 with Blanche of Artois and Burgundy (1296/97–1325/26), the sorry young wife of Charles of La Marche (b. 1294, r. 1322–28), the third son of Philip the Fair of France (b. 1268, r. 1285–1314).8 Unlike Egbert, however, I do not think that

4 5 6

7

8

so written. See Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, part 2 (Inventaire des livres ayant appartenu aux rois Charles V et Charles VI et à Jean, duc de Berry) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1907), *23–29* (nos. 119–55), *41–50* (nos. 234–85). Les livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale, 3 vols. and supplement (Paris and Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1927–43) 1:iv–vii. Delisle, Recherches, 2:48* (no. 268). Delisle, Recherches 2:*43–44* (no. 247), a description of a book that was kept in Charles V’s study at Vincennes; as Delisle noted, the Hours were destroyed by the fire that ravaged the library in Turin. Two portions were added later: three initial quires (fols. 1r–30r) date from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, whereas the three final quires (fols. 390r–423r) are just slightly later than the preceding pages. Virginia Wylie Egbert, On the Bridges of Mediaeval Paris: A Record of Early FourteenthCentury Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 15–17. In 1961 Kathleen Morand suggested in a note to her study, “Jean Pucelle – A Re-Examination of the Evidence,” Burlington Magazine 103 (1961): 206–11, at 208 n. 16, that Delisle’s conclusions concerning the date and owner of Spencer 56 needed “revision”; she dated the manuscript to the end of the second decade of the fourteenth century but did not attempt to identify its owner. In the same article (p. 211), she suggested that Mahaut of Artois may have commissioned a Gospel concordance now in Brussels (Bibliothèque royale, MS 11053–4), which has stylistic affinities with the group of manuscripts Morand linked to Spencer 56.

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Blanche commissioned the book for herself, given the presence in the book of intercessions for “Blanche” by another, female “pecheresse” and, equally important, the circumstances in which Blanche was living when the book was made.9 Rather, I have become convinced that the person responsible for commissioning the manuscript was Blanche’s mother Mahaut, countess of Artois and Burgundy (b. ca. 1269, r. 1302–29).10 I hope later to present a full explanation of these conclusions. Still, a word about Blanche and Mahaut is in order. After the death in 1302 of Blanche’s father Othon, count of Burgundy, her mother’s ambitions propelled Blanche into the royal marriage which in the end destroyed her life. Blanche was only eleven when, in mid January of 1308, she was married to Charles, then thirteen. The ceremony was hastily performed at her mother’s castle at Hesdin shortly before Charles’s sister Isabelle married King Edward II of England. Six years later, in the late spring of 1314, Blanche was imprisoned in Château-Gaillard because (like her sister-in-law and cousin Marguerite, the wife of Louis of Champagne and Navarre) she was believed guilty of adultery. She could have been no more than eighteen years old. Blanche had borne Charles children, and at some point they had a son named Philippe, who died before the end of March 1322; he may possibly have been born while Blanche was in prison. When Charles of La Marche ascended the throne after the death of his brother Philip in January 1322, he speedily obtained a divorce from Blanche; the pope nullified their marriage on 19 May, less than five months after Charles’s accession. Despite her reluctant agreement to the divorce, Blanche was not released from confinement until shortly before her death. Precisely when and where she died is unknown, but she was no longer living on 5 April 1326.11 9

As will be seen, I think Blanche may have ordered the three quires that were appended to the original core. The decoration and script of the added quires are those of the original, but they – as well as the parchment – are inferior in quality. 10 The most accessible source of information about Mahaut is Jules-Marie Richard, Une petitenièce de saint Louis. Mahaut, comtesse d’Artois et de Bourgogne (1302–1329). Étude sur la vie privée, les arts et l’industrie, en Artois et à Paris au commencement du XIVe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1887). Françoise Baron has continued Richard’s work in a number of important studies. See, e.g., the exhibition catalogue she edited, L’enfant oublié. Le gisant de Jean de Bourgogne et le mécénat de Mahaut d’Artois en Franche-Comté au XIVe siècle (Besançon: Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, 5 décembre 1997/24 février 1998); and also n. 12 below. 11 I intend to treat the background and repercussions of the adultery affair in a future publication. I have discussed various aspects of the affair in “Diplomacy, Adultery, and Domestic Politics at the Court of Philip the Fair: Queen Isabelle’s Mission to the Court of France in 1314,” in Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History Presented to George Peddy Cuttino, ed. J. S. Hamilton and Patricia Bradley (London: The Boydell Press, 1989), 53–84; “Kings Like Semi-Gods: The Case of Louis X of France,” Majestas 1 (1993): 5–37; “Représentations de la royauté dans les Livres de Fauvel,” in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque organisé par l’Université du Maine les 25 et 26 mars 1994, ed. Joël Blanchard (Paris: Picard, 1995), 215–35; “Rex ioians, ionnes, iolis: Louis X, Philip V, and the Livres de Fauvel,” in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 53–72; and, with Nancy Freeman Regalado, “La grant feste:

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Mahaut maintained contact with Blanche after her disgrace, and I envisage Spencer 56 as a gift she sent her daughter.12 But whoever commissioned the manuscript, if Blanche acquired it after her imprisonment it must date between 1314 and 1322; Blanche would have had the final quires added to the manuscript before her death, possibly following her release from confinement, in 1324 or 1325. The contents of the original manuscript and the final quires are thoroughly appropriate to Blanche’s situation during these years. Among the core manuscript’s many singular features are the collects that appear after each psalm in the Psalter (fols. 1r–167v), and, more unusual, the prayers that are prescribed after each of the seven Penitential Psalms (fols. 259r– 67r). Even more extraordinary, ten of the twenty-two prayers accompanying the traditional divisions of Psalm 118 are presented as petitions from a woman,13 whereas all but one of the collects following the seven Penitential psalms are entreaties voiced by an individual for two or more women. In the context of the other elements assembled in Spencer 56, these prayers have special relevance to the Blanche who is the dedicatee of the book, and to the woman who interceded for her. Here I will discuss these prayers and offer an edition of the collects in an appendix.14

Philip the Fair’s Celebration of the Knighting of his Sons in Paris at Pentecost of 1313,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 56–86. I am now finishing an article provisionally entitled, “Blanche of Burgundy at Château-Gaillard: Documents in the Joursanvault Collection.” 12 Françoise Baron, “La gisante en pierre de Tournai de la cathédrale de Saint-Denis,” Bulletin monumental 128 (1970), 211–28, at 218–19. I am grateful to Françoise Baron for providing me with supplementary information about Mahaut’s contacts with Blanche, and to Pierre Bougard for making available to me copies of documents in the Archives départementales du Pas-deCalais. If, as I believe, one of the litanies in Spencer 56 commemorates the death of Mahaut’s son Robert, this would provide a terminus post quem of October 1317, since Robert died at the end of September and was buried on 2 October 1317. 13 The tally rises to eleven if (as seems likely) in the seventh collect (following the division of Psalm 118 called Zain, fol. 142v), familie tue is an error for famule tue. References to familia appear in the collects accompanying Psalms 56, 60, 64, 69, 85, and 87 (Spencer 56, fols. 81v, 84r, 86v, 92r, 108v, 110r); there (as in the source prayers) the word designates the body of the faithful addressing the Lord. But the versions of the collect for Zain in the first person singular in the series Domine apud quem (Hispana), on which Spencer 56 drew, refer to famulus, not familia: Louis Brou, ed., The Psalter Collects from V–VIth Century Sources (Three Series). Edited with Introduction, Apparatus criticus and Indexes by Dom Louis Brou, O. S. B. from the Papers of the Late Dom André Wilmart, O. S. B. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1949), 161 (“Spem quam dedisti mihi domine ipsa sit in humilitate mea famulo tuo consolatio, quae nobis erit in exultatione gloriae plenitudo”). Of the remaining eleven collects, three are in the first person singular (nos. 3, 14, 19); five are in the first person plural (nos. 2, 10, 28, 20, 22); two express simple wishes (nos. 12, 21); one (no. 17) contains both first person singular and plural elements. On the collects for Psalm 118, see Christine Mohrmann, “À propos des collectes du psautier,” Vigiliae christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Language 6 (1952): 1–19, at 12–13. 14 I reserve for a later date analysis of the curious blend of genders found in the Psalter of Jerome and appended prayers (fols. 184r–98r). Here masculine adjectives, nouns, and verb forms are sometimes changed to the feminine and sometimes not (e.g., egena, fols. 188r, 190r; saluam, fols. 189r, 195v [v. saluum, fols. 184r, 186r, 188v, 194v]; pauperam [!], fol. 196v; famula tua,

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However unusual it is to find collects in the Psalter of a private devotional book,15 the core texts of the prayers in this part of Spencer 56 are completely traditional. With few exceptions,16 they come from the earliest of the three groups of psalm collects established by Dom André Wilmart and published by Dom Louis Brou. Wilmart termed the group “Romana,” but it is perhaps preferable to designate it as Effice from the commencement of the first prayer.17 Redactions of

fol. 189r; seruam tuam, fol. 195v; ancilla tua, fol. 197r–v [v. puero tuo, filium ancille tue, fol. 189v; seruus tuus, fols. 190v, 191r–v]. 15 Victor Leroquais, Les psautiers manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France, 3 vols. (Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1940–41), 1:xlvi–ii; twenty-six of the 472 psalters inventoried by Leroquais contain psalm collects. They range in date from the ninth through the fifteenth century. See also Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 56–59 (referring to one fourteenth-century Psalter-Hours and a fifteenth-century collection of prayers, for which see Leroquais, ibid. 2:262–64 [no. 464], 2:285–86 [no. 487]). Leroquais did not indicate the presence of collects in the Psalters included in the Hours he catalogued in Les livres d’heures manuscrits; see 1:xii. See also Donald Drew Egbert, The Tickhill Psalter and Related Manuscripts: A School of Manuscript Illumination in England during the Early Fourteenth Century (New York and Princeton: The New York Public Library and The Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University, 1940), 10–13, 127–48. 16 See below, for Psalm 118. Spencer 56 deviates from the series Effice (Romana) in the collect used for Psalm 31, and in an additional prayer included after Psalm 50. For Psalm 31, Spencer 56 (fol. 57r) prescribes a collect found in none of the series edited by Brou: “Tege quesumus domine ihesu christe sancto indulgencie tue uelamine nostra piacula et carnis nostre facinora. ut tue beatitudinis cum angelis mereamur esse participes. cui est honor & gloria. Qui cum patre” (Cover, we ask, Lord Jesus Christ, with the holy veil of your forgiveness our sins and the crimes of our flesh, so that we may deserve to be sharers of your beatitude with the angels, to whom is honor and glory, who with the Father). An additional prayer, which contains a number of errors in transcription, appears after Psalm 50 (fols. 75v–76v, on 76v–77r): “Item alia oratio. Indignum me domine sacris tuis esse fateor qui innumeris cotidie peccatis fuscor. quod ego blandis te uerbis rogare presumo quem improbo sepissime factis. tu enim michi medicamen ingeris egro. ego sanitati mee contraria ago. legem tuam sacris paginis iudicam [sic, for inditam] lego. sed a preceptis tuis continuati [sic] corde receto [sic, for recedo]. da ergo michi domine cor compunctum quod uerasciter [sic] odio habeat peccatum meum est si donaueris peccata flere tuum est ut nubem ea cito delere. & licet palmam amiserim inimico fraudante ad ueniam saltem pertineam te miserante. Tibi deo est honor et imperium et potestas in secula seculorum. amen” (Again, another prayer. I confess myself unworthy, Lord, of your sacred things, I who every day am blackened by countless sins, which I presume to ask you with polished words, you whom I so often reject by my deeds, for you provide medicine for me in my sickness, while I do things injurious to my health; I read your law, inscribed on sacred pages, but in my heart I constantly reject your precepts; give me therefore, Lord, a contrite heart, which will truly despise my sin; it is yours to make us bemoan sins; it is yours swiftly to destroy them, like a cloud; and although through the enemy’s wiles I have lost the palm, may I, through your mercy, at any rate attain forgiveness; to you, God, is honor and empire and power forever and ever. Amen). In view of the use of the feminine in the collects for Psalm 118, the presence here of the masculine indignum is noteworthy. The masculine plural is found in the collect for Psalm 92 (Spencer 56, fol. 115r; supplices tuos), where it could stand for both males and females, and also in the collect for Psalm 94 (Spencer 56, fol. 117r–v), but here seemingly because the redactor or scribe treated ovis as masculine rather than feminine. 17 Louis Brou (Psalter Collects) edited the three series of collects from the manuscripts and notes of Dom Wilmart. On the edition, and on the collects in general, see Mohrmann, “Collectes,” 1– 19. Patrik [Patricius] Verbraken published a useful translation of Wilmart’s three series of collects, presented with Latin texts (but without manuscript variants), in Oraisons sur les cent

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the Psalter containing the Effice collects differed in their treatment of Psalm 118. Some have a single collect; some have special collects for each division of the psalm; some (like Spencer 56) rely on the collects found in a second group of psalter collects, known as Domine apud quem (which Wilmart termed “Hispana”).18 In general, the variants in the wording of the psalm collects in Spencer 56 distinguish the manuscript from any of those on which Wilmart and Brou drew. Some of the variants suggest links with the two Parisian manuscripts they used, but others are different.19 As to the collects for the twenty-two divisions of Psalm 118, the series in Spencer 56 is atypical in substituting for the tenth, nineteenth, and twenty-second divisions the collects that are employed in manuscripts of the Effice (Romana) series which do not adopt the collects of the Domine apud quem (Hispana) series but have a group of different prayers for the twenty-two divisions. Further research on the collects for Psalm 118 may establish whether the redaction in Spencer 56 is unique, or whether the compiler employed a source containing the same alterations of the traditional orations. None of the three prayers taken from the Effice (Romana) series – for the tenth, nineteenth, or twenty-second divisions – alludes to a female petitioner; the first and third are in the first person plural, the second in the first person singular. In this they resemble many of the other orations for Psalm 118. But they differ strikingly from the ten collects presented as the prayers of a single woman, rather than the petitions of a man or a group of individuals. The collects that, one by one, follow the seven Penitential Psalms are fully as unusual as the collects in the Psalter. These penitential prayers derive ultimately from a series of fifteen linked invocations that begin “Domine Iesu Christe, adoro te” and proceed from veneration of Christ at the moment of the world’s creation through the Last Judgment. They were used in Britain and northern France in the ninth century, and by the late tenth century the final six short entreaties (all linked with the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment) had become a Good Friday oration, intoned before the Cross after the first two of the seven Penitential Psalms. 20 cinquante psaumes. Texte latin et traduction française de trois séries de collectes psalmiques (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1967). 18 As will shortly be seen, in Spencer 56 nineteen of the twenty-two collects come from the group Domine apud quem (Hispana), whereas three are taken from prayers found in other manuscripts of the Effice series. 19 Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 50 (two eleventh-century Parisian psalter-hymnals, one reflecting the use of Saint-Denis, the other that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés). The collects from the Effice (Romana) series employed in Spencer 56 for the 19th and 22nd divisions of Psalm 118 suggest that the redactor of Spencer 56 was working with a manuscript linked to one of the two eleventh-century manuscripts (one from Marchiennes, the other from Nonantola) in which the collects follow these divisions; in the majority of manuscripts used by Wilmart and Brou, the prayers are attached, respectively, to the 18th and 21st divisions; see ibid., 214–17. 20 Lilli Gjerløw, Adoratio Crucis: The Regularis Concordia and the Decreta Lanfranci. Manuscript Studies in the Early Medieval Church of Norway (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1961), 13–14, 16–17, 26–27; the prayer “Domine ihesu christe gloriosissime conditor mundi” followed the next two psalms. The prayer “Tuam crucem adoramus” and two shorter orations were recited after the last three psalms. See also Pierre Salmon, Analecta liturgica. Extraits des

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These six invocations went on to assume a vigorous, independent life, as a generally useful prayer for individual devotion to be said throughout the year. They came to be attributed to Saint Gregory, and extravagant indulgences were connected with them.21 The prayers were often copied in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury prayer-books. Of the thirty-odd Hours that Leroquais signals as containing the prayer, only two date from the second half of the fourteenth century.22 The text of the prayer Adoro te was variable, but the invocations were ordinarily expressed as individual petitions, made on behalf of the person praying. The number of invocations was at least once increased to ten, although most often the prayer consisted of seven parts, the six traditional appeals and one supplementary address.23 Generally this seventh, additional appeal was inserted between the second invocation (dealing with Christ’s suffering on the Cross) and the third (treating his entombment). This prayer declares, “O Lord Jesus Christ, I implore manuscrits liturgiques de la Bibliothèque vaticane. Contribution à l’histoire de la prière chrétienne (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1974), 137; A. B. Kuypers, ed., The Prayer Book of Aedelvald the Bishop commonly called The Book of Cerne. Edited, from the MS in the University Library, Cambridge, with Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: The University Press, 1902), 114–17 (Prayer 19); André Wilmart, Precvm Libelli qvattvor aevi Karolini. Nvnc primvm pvblici ivris facti cvm aliorvm indicibvs (Rome: Ephemerides liturgicae, 1940), 45 (three invocations, “in cruce ascendentem,” “descendentem ad inferos,” “venturum iudicaturum,” in a manuscript of the late eleventh or early twelfth century from Subiaco), 142 (six invocations, “Orationes ad crucem,” added in the early eleventh century to the mid-ninthcentury Magnum libellus Turonensis, preceding an image of the crucified Christ); and Bernard James Muir, ed., A Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book (BL MSS Cotton Galba A.xiv and Nero A.ii (ff. 3–13) (Henry Bradshaw Society, 103 [for 1983–84]; Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell Press, 1988), 143–46, no. 68, especially 143 n. 1. For the Mozarabic rite’s use of the invocations on Good Friday, see Alexander Lesley, ed., Missale mixtum secundum Regulam beati Isidori dictum Mozarabes. Præfatione, notis, et appendice ab Alexandro Lesleo, S. J. sacerdote ornatum. (Rome: Sumptibus Venantii Monaldini; Typis Joannis Generosi Salomoni, 1755) 1:173; Edmund Bishop, “Liturgical Note,” in Kuypers, ed., Book of Cerne, Appendix V, 234–83, at 253–54. 21 Gjerløw, Adoratio crucis, 17, 19; Victor Leroquais, Les livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale, 4 vols. (Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1927–43) 1:xxxi (discussing the indulgences associated with the prayer); and 1:136 (BnF, lat. 1188 [wrongly cited as lat. 1189 on p. xxxi], an early sixteenth-century Hours, use of Rome, with a calendar associated with Bruges, for the indulgence I mention). See the preceding note, for the association of the prayer with an image of Christ crucified. 22 In Livres d’heures 2:399 (s.v. Domine Iesu Christe, adoro te in cruce pendentem…), Leroquais listed 24 manuscripts, ending (after 2:123) “etc.” I have also found references to the seven invocations in Leroquais’s analyses of manuscripts BnF, lat. 13310 (ibid. 2:151–56 [no. 236], dated 1508), lat. 18021 (ibid. 2:198–200 [no. 255], late fifteenth century), lat. 18034 (ibid. 2:226–30 [no. 268], ca. 1530). Note, too, the detached leaf in the Collection Daniel Wildenstein (Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, inv. M6180; exhibited as no. 113). The miniature, painted by Jean Bourdichon in the late fifteenth century, depicts the Mass of Saint Gregory, with the words “Domine Ihesu Christe Adoro Te” beneath the picture. 23 Leroquais, Livres d’heures 2:399 (Index, s.v. Domine Iesu Christe, adoro te in cruce pendentem…), a list of Hours containing the prayers (ending, after six references to items in vol. 2, “etc.”); ten invocations are found in BnF, lat. 10535, ibid., 335–37, no. 156 (use of Liège, late fifteenth century); 2:346, no. XXXVII, an edition of “Les sept oroisons de sainct Grégoyre” from BnF, lat. 1363, fol. 122r, late-fifteenth-century Hours, use of Rome; cf. Gjerløw, Adoratio crucis, 17.

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you because of that bitter suffering you endured on the Cross for me, most miserable one, especially when your most noble soul departed from your body; have mercy on my soul on its departure [from my body].”24 Focused on the moment of Christ’s death, the oration fittingly complements the other six. In light of this prayer’s early connection with the seven Penitential Psalms on Good Friday, the increase in the number of orations to seven is understandable. But Spencer 56’s use of the invocations as individual collects following each of the psalms is unusual. The compiler of Spencer 56 might have employed for the Penitential Psalms the usual collects appended to the psalms, as was often done.25 But to add variety, in Spencer 56 the prayers linked with Christ’s suffering on the Cross were employed. Comparison with other versions of Adoro te reveals numerous variants. Many are stylistic, but some go beyond this. Most important is the shift in purpose of the prayers. As originally conceived and generally recited, the orations were designed to promote the salvation of the individual who said them. Here, however, the person who offered the prayer of adoration did so on behalf of the souls of Christ’s woman-servants (famule tue). Only the last invocation was more inclusive, asking Christ not to enter into judgment “with your servants and your handmaidens (ancille tue)” but to forgive them their sins (peccata eorum) before he judged them. In Spencer 56, the invocation that complements the original six is also uncommon. Unlike the invocation recalling the moment of Christ’s death that was ordinarily added, this petition is more abstract. Inserted between the fourth invocation (focused on Christ’s descent into Hell) and the fifth (featuring his Resurrection and Ascension), it interrupts the chronological progression from Christ’s suspension on the Cross to the Last Judgment to introduce the notion of salvation through Christ’s sacramental sacrifice on the Cross.26 Equally extraordinarily, in Spencer 56 the Pater noster after each psalm was followed not by allusions to the Crucifixion or general petitions, but rather by the hallowed phrases from the Office of the Dead, “Requiem eternam dona eis domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.”27 Stressing as they did Christ’s suffering on the Cross, the segments of Adoro te reinforce the emphasis the rest of the book places on Christ’s Passion. The Passion Hours are the only Hours included in the volume except for the Hours of 24

Leroquais, Livres d’heures 2:346 (“O Domine Ihesu Christe, te deprecor propter illam amaritudinem quam pro me miserrimo sustinuisti in cruce, maxime quando nobilissima anima tua egressa est de corpore tuo; miserere anime mee in egressu suo”). 25 See Wilmart, ed., Precvm libelli, 27–30 (Libellus Trecensis), 53 (Libellus Coloniensis), 76–79 (Magnus libellus Turonensis); and Muir, A Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book, 75–79, no. 28, especially 75 n. 1. On collects connected with these psalms, see also Salmon, Analecta liturgica, 133–34. 26 See the text of the prayer in the Appendix. 27 Cf. the Good Friday liturgy, in Gjerløw, ed., Adoratio crucis, 25–28; and the liturgical elements prescribed after the penitential psalms in the ninth-century Libellus Trecensis, in Wilmart, ed., Precvm libelli, 27.

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Saint Louis.28 Further, the final pages of the original core manuscript contain French prayers centered on the Passion, one sequence of which closely resembles the short Office of the Passion now used by Franciscan tertiaries.29 The recipient of the volume seems to have been personally devoted to the Passion, perhaps because of her upbringing, which the liturgical elements in the book may have reinforced. If the recipient was indeed Blanche of Artois and Burgundy, the sufferings she had endured would fully account for such inclinations. In any case, the final item in the three quires that were added to the book shortly after its confection was another abridged Hours of the Passion, which ends with the declaration that Pope John XXII had composed the Hours and decreed an indulgence of a year for every recitation of the service.30 The changes in the psalm collects used in the Psalter of Spencer 56 focus attention on a single woman, who voices petitions on behalf of herself. In contrast, the orations accompanying the Penitential Psalms are made on behalf of the souls of two or more women. No more information is given about these women, but other prayers in Spencer 56 suggest that the orations might have been intended to help Blanche, the royal “pecheresse,” and also the “pecheresse” who was devoted to her welfare and in all likelihood offered the book to her, in hopes that it would lead her to repentance and salvation.

28

This focus meant that when the book was expanded in the early fifteenth century, the Hours of the Virgin and the Vigils of the Dead, essential elements in any Book of Hours, had to be added to the volume. 29 Spencer 56, fols. 380r–89r. For reasons I have explored elsewhere, I believe that the texts were intended to be read (and bound) in the following order: commendation of Saint Francis’s and Saint Clare’s devotion to the Hours of the Cross (now fol. 385r–v); a vernacular text linking Christ’s sufferings to the canonical hours (now fols. 383r–84r); French and Latin prayers centered on the Crucifixion, ending with an appeal to a guardian angel (now fols. 386r–89r); hymns and petitions to Saint Michael and God’s other angels, followed by a brief Confession (now fols. 380r–81r). In this reconstruction, fol. 382r–v (the conjugate of fol. 385r–v) would originally have been blank; on it were later copied Gospel sequences from John and Luke. For the Office of the Franciscan tertiaries, see http://groups.msn.com/FranciscanThirdOrder/office ofthepassion.msnw. This Office contains an additional section for Matins, assigning to Lauds the portion corresponding to the first segment in Spencer 56. 30 Spencer 56, fols. 419r–23v, “Memoire de la tres sainte et sacree passion nostre seigneur ihesucrist”; the manuscript terminates with the rubric, “Pape iehan le .xxijme composa cez heures et donna a chascun dicent icelles tant de fois comme il lez diront. i. an dindulgence. la quele chose nous octroit celui qui est benoit ou siecle des siecles. Amen.” On the Hours and Office of the Cross (or Passion), see Leroquais, Livres d’heures 1:xxv–vi, who pointed out that many fourteenth-century Hours attribute both to John XXII, who was also credited with writing a variety of other prayers.

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APPENDIX

I. The Psalm Collects The following collects for Psalm 118 are found in Spencer 56, fols. 139v–48v. Nouns and adjectives that refer to women appear in bold. Psalm 1181 [Aleph] Non me dereliquas usquequaque domine famulam tuam quique me interpretatione erudis inuicta uirtute confirmes. Per. Lord, do not utterly forsake me, your handmaiden, and may you who teach me by instruction confirm me in unconquered virtue. Through.

Psalm 1182 [Beth] Da nobis domine quatinus in omnibus uijs tuis delectemur neque quicquam nobis deesse uideamus cum te nobis adesse cognoscamus. Per. Grant us, Lord, that we may delight in all your ways and that we may see that we lack nothing when we know that you are with us. Through.

Psalm 1183 [Ghimel] Concupiscat anima mea desiderare iudicia tua in omni tempore & hoc solum nobis uigeat in amore; quod preparetur in munere. Per dominum. May my soul yearn to desire your judgments at all times, and may this alone flourish for us in love, which is prepared as a reward. Through the Lord.

Psalm 1184 [Daleth] Uiam iniquitatis amoue a me famula tua. & de lege tua miserere mei; ut et peccandi consuetudinem tollas & recte uiuendi perseuerenciam tribuas. Per. Remove the way of iniquity from me, your handmaiden, and graciously grant me your law, so that you take away the practice of sinning and grant perseverance to live rightly. Through.

Psalm 1185 [He] Auerte oculos meos ne uideant uanitatem; in uia tua uiuifica me famulam tuam odire fac seculum. et diligere christum per ipsum redemptorem dominum nostrum. Qui tecum. Avert my eyes lest they see vanity; quicken me, your handmaiden, in your way[s]; make [me] hate the world and love Christ, through that redeemer our Lord, who with you.

Psalm 1186 [Vau] Ueniat mericordia tua domine super me famulam tuam ne me ira deseruiat. sed habeam in remedium salutare & propiciatum lumen. Per.31 31

Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 160–61: “Veniat super nos misericordia tua domine, ne in nobis ira deseuire habeamus in remedium saluatorem quem propitiaculum et uidimus iudicem” (Let your mercy, Lord, come unto us, and may [your] wrath not rage against us; may we have as remedy the savior whom we have seen as propitiation and judge). Brou gives me as a variant for nobis in three manuscripts, with differing treatments of the verbs that follow.

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Let your mercy, Lord, come unto me, your handmaiden, and may [your] wrath not overwhelm me; but may I have as remedy the light of salvation and propitiation. Through.

Psalm 1187 [Zain] Spem quam dedisti domine ipsa sit in humilitatem familie tue consolatio que michi erit & in exultatione glorie plenitudo. Per dominum.32 May the hope that you gave, Lord, be a consolation in the humility of your family, which to me will also be a plenitude of glory, in exultation. Through the Lord.

Psalm 1188 [Heth] Porcio mea domine da michi custodire legem tuam famule tue ut sit michi hereditas quam sine fine possideam. Per. You are my portion, Lord; grant me, your handmaiden, that I may keep your law, so that it may be to me a heritage that I may forever possess. Through.

Psalm 1189 [Teth] Disciplinam & scienciam doce me famulam tuam domine. ut nec malicia aspera[m]. nec desidia remissa[m] nec [stulticia reddat]33 ignara[m]. Per dominum.34 Lord, teach me, your handmaiden, discipline and knowledge, so that malice will not make me harsh nor idleness remiss nor folly ignorant. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11810 [Iod] Scimus domine quia iustum est iudicium tuum. et obsecramus misericordiam tuam ut ueniat super nos misericordia tua et non confundamur. Per dominum.35 We know, Lord, that your judgment is just, and we beseech your mercy that your mercy may come unto us and that we not be confounded. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11811 [Caph]

Deficiat in salutari tuo anima domine famule tue desiderio indefesso.36 ex ubertatis gratie dono. receptura consolationem in premia. Per dominum.37

32

33 34

35

36 37

As it now stands, the syntax of this prayer is curious. The problem would be resolved by altering familie tue to famule tue. Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 161: “Spem quam dedisti nobis domine ipsa sit in humilitate nostra consolatio, quae nobis erit in exultatione gloriae plenitudo” (May the hope that you gave us, Lord, be consolation in our humility, which will be to us plenitude of glory in [our] exultation). MS stulticiam reddeam. The text of this prayer is garbled; I have added the requisite feminine accusative endings to the adjectives. Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 161–62: “Disciplinam et scientiam doce nos domine ut nec malitia asperos nec desidia remissos nec stultitia reddat ignaros.” Here Spencer 56 adopts the collect from the different series found in some manuscripts of Effice (Romana) (Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 214), rejecting the collect in the series Domine apud quem (Hispana) (ibid., 162): “Fac cor nostrum immaculatum in iustificationibus tuis domine, ut nec intellegentia praua nos polluat nec dispositio sinistra confundat” (Make our heart immaculate in your mandates, Lord, so that degenerate intelligence will not pollute us or sinister disposition confound us). The former prayer relates to verses 75–79, the latter to the final verse. MS in defesso. The text of the prayer is corrupt. Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 162: “Defecit anima nostra in salutari tuo domine desiderio indefesso proficiat exuberantis gratiae dono perceptura consolationem in premio” (Our soul faints for your salvation, Lord, with tireless desire; may it profit from the gift of overflowing grace, destined to receive consolation as a reward).

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May the soul of your handmaiden, Lord, faint for your salvation with tireless desire, by the gift of the fruitfulness of grace destined to receive consolation as its reward. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11812 [Lamed] In eternum domine permanet uerbum tuum in celo. et in ecclesie tue semper habitet templo ut habitatoris presencia habitaculi sit claritas indefessa. Per. Forever, Lord, your word is settled in heaven and will always live in the temple of your church, so that through the presence of the dweller the brightness of the habitation will never fail. Through.

Psalm 11813 [Mem] Dona michi domine famule tue semper legem tuam diligere. ut eam iugiter. meditemur in corde. et accepto tibi semper profitiamur38 in opere. Per dominum.39 Lord, grant me, your handmaiden, always to love your law, so that we may constantly ponder it in the heart and always profess it in work acceptable to you. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11814 [Nun] Sit lucerna pedibus meis uerbum tuum domine et lumen semitis meis. ut quid intelligamus instituat. & quo properamus ostendat. Per dominum. May your word, Lord, be a light unto my feet and a light unto my path, so that it may determine what we understand and reveal where we hasten. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11815 [Samech]

Auxiliare michi domine famule tue & salui erimus quia te desistente40 perdicio. & te prestante uitalis est plenitudo. Per.41 Help me, Lord, your handmaiden, and we will be safe, since without you is perdition, and with your aid is life-giving plenitude. Through.

Psalm 11816 [Ain]

Oratio. Doce me domine famulam tuam iudicium & iusticiam facere ut non [tradar] 42 aduersis nec calumpniantibus subdar iniquis. sed eloquencia in tante mentis diligenter ab omnibus malignis eripiar insidijs. Per.43 Teach me, Lord, your handmaiden, to render judgment and justice, so that I may not be handed over to misfortunes or subjected to evil calumniators, but by the eloquence of such a great mind be carefully snatched from all evil plots. Through.

38 39

40 41

42 43

MS procificamur. Cf. the prayer in Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 163, which explains the presence in Spencer 56 of verbs in the first person plural: “Da nobis domine sic legem tuam diligere ut eam iugiter meditemur in corde et accepto tibi semper perficiamus in opere.” MS de te sistente. This prayer is garbled. Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 163: “Auxiliare nobis domine et salui erimus: te enim desistente perditio et te praesente uitalis est plenitudo” (Help us, Lord, and we will be safe; for without you is perdition, and with you present is vital plenitude). MS tardar. Again, the text of this prayer is corrupt. Cf. Brou, ed. Psalter Collects, 163–64: “Doce nos domine iudicium et iustitiam facere, ut non tradamur aduersis nec calumpniantibus subdamur iniquis, sed eloquia tua intentis mentibus diligentes, ab omnibus malignis eripiamur insidiis” (Teach us, Lord, to render judgment and justice, so that we may not be handed over to misfortunes or subjected to evil calumniators, but because of your eloquence loving [you] with minds intent, we may be snatched from all evil plots).

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Psalm 11817 [Phe] Oratio. Riuos lacrimarum deduxerunt oculi mei domine iniqui legem tuam ex toto concupiscendam transgredimur per earum contraria abluamus per que peccata commisimus. Per dominum. Rivers of tears have run down my eyes; evil, we transgress your law, which we should desire above all else; may we wash through things contrary [to the tears], [those things] through which we have committed sins. Through the Lord.44

Psalm 11818 [Sade] Oratio. Ignitum uerbum tuum serui tui diligamus quod in nobis et peccatorum sordes decorat 45 et sciencie lumen accendit. Per dominum. May we, your servants, cherish your fiery word, which in us embellishes the filth of sin and sparks the light of knowledge. Through the Lord.

Psalm 11819 [Coph] Oratio. Deus qui ad te toto corde clamantes clementer exaudis. ad preces humilitatis mee misericorditer intende. Per.46 God who clemently hearken to those crying out to you with their whole heart, mercifully give ear to the prayers of my humility. Through.

Psalm 11820 [Res] Oratio. Misericordie tue multe domine plurimas in nobis iniquitates deleant. et ad indulgenciam tuam nos emundando perducant. Per. May your many mercies, Lord, destroy the manifold iniquities in us, and lead us, cleansed, to your forgiveness. Through.

Psalm 11821 [Sin] Oratio. Pax multa diligentibus nomen tuum domine & non est illis scandalum. presta ne illis unquam cogitationibus perturbantur [sic] quia amori tuo nichil in hoc mundo preposuerunt. Per.47 44

This text is garbled. Cf. the prayer in Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 164: “Riuos aquarum deduxerunt oculi nostri domine, qui legem tuam uetita concupiscendo transgrediuntur: quaesumus per ea crimina abluamus per quae peccata commisimus” (Rivers of waters run down our eyes, Lord, which transgress your law by desiring forbidden things; by them, we ask, may we wash away crimes, through which we have committed sins). In Brou’s edition, lacrimarum is a variant for aquarum. 45 See Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 164, where decorat is indicated as a variant in the first Psalter of Saint-Gall (mid ninth century, ibid., 47) for the preferred reading decoquat (melt away). 46 Here Spencer 56 adopts the prayer from the different series found in some manuscripts of Effice (Romana), using the collect that most manuscripts adopt for the 18th portion of Psalm 118 but that two eleventh-century manuscripts use for the 19th division: Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 216; see ibid., 47, 50, for the two manuscripts, one a psalter-hymnal of Marchiennes and the other a psalter of Nonantola. Thus, Spencer 56 rejects the collect in the series Domine apud quem (Hispana) (ibid., 164–65): “Vocem nostram exaudi domine secundum multam misericordiam tuam, ne in iudicio nos condempnes ut reos, sed pius ac misericors remuneres ut beatos” (Hear our voice, Lord, according to your great mercy, lest you condemn us in judgment as guilty; reward us rather, as blessed, O good and merciful one). The prayer used in Spencer 56 is especially appropriate to the first verses of this section of the psalm (verses 145– 47), whereas the prayer in the series Domine apud quem resonates with the last half of the section. 47 Cf. Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 165: “Pax multa diligentibus legem tuam [nomen tuum] domine et non est illis scandalum: praesta ne ullis umquam malis cogitationibus perturbentur, qui amori tuo nihil in hoc mundo praeposuerunt” (Great peace have those who love your law

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Great peace have those who love your name, Lord, and nothing shall offend them; grant that they may never be disturbed by those cogitations, since in this world they have placed nothing before love of you. Through.

Psalm 11822 [Tau] Oratio. Introeat domine oratio nostra in conspectu maiestatis tue ut sicut nos ab erroribus pristinis ut oues perditas reuocasti ita iustificationum tuarum edocti preconio mereamur ad plenam pietatis tue gloriam peruenire. Per dominum.48 May our prayer, Lord, enter in[to] the sight of your majesty so that, as you called us back like lost sheep from our former errors, we, instructed by the declaration of your mandates may deserve to arrive at the full glory of your goodness. Through the Lord.

II. The Penitential Psalm Collects The following prayers are found in Spencer 56, fols. 259v–66r. Each prayer is preceded by this formula, which terminates each of the psalms: Pater noster. Et ne nos. Set libera nos. Requiem eternam dona eis domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Domine exaudi orationem meam. Et clamor meus ad te ueniat. Oremus. Oratio. Our Father. And lead us not. But free us. Grant them eternal rest, Lord. And may perpetual light shine on them. Lord, hear my prayer. And may my cry come unto you. Let us pray. Prayer.

Psalm 6 (“Domine ne in furore tuo”)

Domine ihesu christe uite [sic] animarum famularum tuarum [adoro te]49 pendentem in cruce deprecor te ut ipsa crux liberet eas de angelis sathane et potestate tenebrarum et ab omnibus penis & angustijs atque cruciatibus. Amen. Lord Jesus Christ, life of the souls of your handmaidens, I adore you hanging on the Cross; I implore you that that Cross free them from the angels of Satan and the power of the shades and from all punishment and anxiety and torture. Amen.

Psalm 31 (“Beati quorum remisse sunt”)

Domine ihesu christe [adoro te]50 in cruce uulneratum deprecor te ut tua sancta uulnera sint remedium animabus earum. [name], Lord, and nothing shall offend them; grant that they may never be disturbed by any evil cogitations, who in this world have placed nothing before love of you). 48 Here Spencer 56 adopts the collect that a different series found in some manuscripts of Effice (Romana) prescribes for the 21st portion of Psalm 118, and that two manuscripts of this group uses for the 22nd portion: Brou, ed., Psalter Collects, 216–17; see above for the two manuscripts. Here again, Spencer 56 rejects the collect found in the series Domine apud quem (Hispana) (Brou, 166): “Sit manus tua ad saluandum nos domine in electione mandatorum tuorum, in tuo exultantes salutari legis tuae praecepta intentis mentibus peragamus” (May your hand help save us, Lord, in choosing your mandates; exulting in your saving help, may we observe the precepts of your law with minds intent). The prayer used in Spencer 56 is especially appropriate to the first verses of this section of the psalm (verses 169–70), whereas the one in the series Domine apud quem resonates with verse 173 (“Fiat manus tua ut salvet me, Quoniam mandata tua elegi”). 49 MS adorare. 50 MS adorate.

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Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you, wounded on the Cross; I implore you that your holy wounds may be the remedy for the souls of your handmaiden.

Psalm 37 (“Domine ne in furore tuo”) Domine ihesu christe adoro te [sic] mortuum et sepultum deprecor te ut tua pietate mors sit uita animarum earum. Amen. Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you dead and buried; I implore you that because of your goodness, [your] death may be the life of the souls of your handmaiden. Amen.

Psalm 50 (“Miserere mei deus”)

Domine ihesu [christe]51 adoro te descendentem ad inferos liberantem inde captiuos deprecor te ut animas earum nunquam dimittas ibidem introire. Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you descending to Hell and freeing the captives there; I implore you never dispatch the souls of your handmaidens to enter there.

Psalm 101 (“Domine exaudi orationem meam”) Domine ihesu christe adoro crucis tue uexillum per quod salutis nostre operari uoluisti ineffabile sacramentum deprecor te ut per eamdem crucem concedas animabus earum remissionem omnium peccatorum suorum et societate[m] omnium san[c]torum [t]uorum.52 Lord Jesus Christ, I adore the banner of your Cross, through which you chose to work the ineffable sacrament of our salvation; I implore you through the same Cross to grant to the souls of your handmaidens remission of all their sins and the companionship of all your saints.

Psalm 129 (“De profundis”) Domine ihesu christe adoro te resurgentem a mortuis & ad celos ascendentem precor te per gloriosam resurrectionem tuam et ascensionem miserere animabus earum et resuscita eas 53 cum sanctis tuis in nouissimo die. Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you rising from the dead and ascending to heaven; I pray you through your glorious resurrection and ascension to have mercy on the souls of your handmaidens and revive them with your saints on the last day.

Psalm 142 (“Domine exaudi orationem meam”) Domine ihesu christe adoro te uenturum et iudicaturum ad iudicium deprecor te ut non intres in iudicium cum seruis tuis et ancillis tuis peccatoribus pro quibus preciosum sanguinem tuum es dignatus sumere [et]54 effundere. sed ante dimittas peccata eorum quam iudices. Qui cum patre et spiritu sancto uiuis et regnas deus per omnia secula seculorum. Amen. Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you who will come and judge at judgment; I implore you not to enter into judgment with your servants and your handmaidens, sinners [all], for whom you deigned to take on and shed your precious blood, but [rather] to dismiss their sins before you judge, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign, God forever and ever. Amen.

51 52 53 54

MS xpe without an abbreviation mark. MS societate omnium santorum suorum. This word could refer either to the famule or to their souls. This section of the prayer is corrupt, since the abbreviation mark on sum’e clearly indicates sumere (and not summe); thus I have suggested the insertion of et as the most economical solution of the problem.

PART IV

PERSUASIVE PERFORMANCES

Dramatic Troubles of Ecclesia: Gendered Performances of the Divided Church Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

The relationship between the Church and medieval theater was fruitful and complex but it was also contested. Was the medieval Church a facilitator of, or an impediment to, the development of the theatrical form? How, for example, can one define the relationship between the dramatic elements of the liturgy and religious theater? Long ago Karl Young studied the drama of the medieval Church and its relation to the liturgy and posited rather rigid boundaries between the two.1 For him, any text that does not clearly indicate that human actors impersonate or perform specific characters is not a play. But as Carol Symes has shown in an important study of early medieval theater in France, our modern notions of what constitutes a text meant for performance are inadequate when it comes to the actual written documents and their manuscript context. The “arbiters of genre” Symes skewers want to see watertight categories of plays and non-plays in medieval culture; Symes, by contrast, sees fluid boundaries between a variety of performative texts.2 Indeed the drama of the medieval Church does not necessarily play itself out on a stage. Symes’s study encourages us to rethink definitions of medieval theatricality and the different ways in which the medieval period approached the idea of performance. For medieval writers there were many ways to stage performances without any explicitly theatrical accoutrements: allegorical psychomachias or interactive dream visions are just two examples of dramas that lose none of their vividness by not being actually performed by human actors. In this essay I propose to look at the notion of performance and its relationship to the medieval Church from a slightly different angle. Here the spotlight will not shine on the question of how the Church influenced the development of medieval theater but on the Church as “actress”: the star performer of my contribution to this volume is Ecclesia herself.

1 2

I would like to thank Roberta Krueger for her very helpful comments on a first version of this essay. See Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), especially vol. 1, chap. 3. See Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater,” Speculum 77 (2002): 778–831, at 813.

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My focus will be on the Church shown as suffering from one particular ill: one of the many schisms that again and again tore up her holy body over many centuries. We will see that Ecclesia’s troubles are staged in a variety of texts and contexts: sacred and secular poetry, dream visions, and complaints cast in judicial language. In each case we witness a dramatization of a political crisis, a kind of allegorical drama, starring the Church as a complex female personification. Ecclesia was of course one of the oldest personifications in the Christian tradition. As bride of Christ, as the sponsa of the Song of Songs, she was often opposed to the Synagogue, also represented as a woman, whose eyes were covered by a veil to signify her blindness to the true faith.3 Often her crown was shown toppling from her head in an allusion to Lamentations 5:16: “The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned.” Frequently, the two women were also contrasted by their age. Thus Philippe de Mézières specified in the stage directions for his 1372 play on the Presentation of the Virgin at the temple that Ecclesia “is to be represented as being young, beautiful, and goldencrowned, carrying a spear and a cross, while Synagoga is to be presented as elderly and shabbily dressed, with her eyes covered with a black cloth.”4 The allegorical figures of Church and Synagogue were also featured in a popular genre of religious polemical literature, the Altercatio (or Disputatio) Ecclesiae et Synagogae, a disputation on the two faiths, which originated in patristic writings and became especially popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.5 The two “women” were often depicted arguing, with Ecclesia accusing the Synagogue of being a murderous mother or taunting her as a miserable slave and powerless widow.6 In a thirteenth-century dream vision, featuring what can almost be called a catfight between Church and Synagogue, the Church taunts her opponent and even calls her “vielle ribaude fole” (crazy old strumpet).7 One particularly vivid image of this aggressive stance shows Ecclesia grabbing the Synagogue’s crown by reaching through the trunk of the initial “T” in a thirteenth-century pontifical (Fig. 1).8 In view of these contrasting characteristics traditionally attributed to 3

4

5

6 7 8

In a reference to Lamentations 5:17. Generally on the iconography of the Synagogue, see Wolfgang Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, trans. L. Chadeayne and P. Gottwald (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970). See also Margaret Schlauch, “The Allegory of Church and Synagogue,” Speculum 14 (1939): 448–64, especially 452–55 on the motif of blindness. See M. Catherine Rupp’s Introduction to Philippe de Mézières’s Figurative Representation of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, trans. and ed. Robert Haller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), xxxiv. See Hiram Pflaum, Die religiöse Disputation in der europäischen Dichtung des Mittelalters (Geneva: Olschki, 1935), 28–30, who attributes the Altercatio to Gilbert of Tournai (d. 1270). See Rupp, Introduction, xxxv. Schlauch, “The Allegory,” 454. This text by a jongleur named Clopin (not identical to Jean de Meun) has been edited by Pflaum in Die religiöse Disputation, 92–100, at 95. All translations are my own. This is fol. 11v of MS 342 of the Bibliothèque municipale de Reims. On the use of the letter “T” between the two female figures (instead of the cross), see Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Géographie historique d’un thème de l’iconographie religieuse: les représentations de Synagoga en France,” in Mélanges offerts à René Crozet à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire,

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Church and Synagogue, I will argue that many writers who wanted to dramatize the Church’s suffering and degradation brought about through schismatic divisions transposed the textual and iconographic features characterizing the Synagogue to the figure of Ecclesia, thus highlighting the heretic and lawless nature of the Church’s attackers.9 These attackers were male – schismatic popes and the rulers who supported them, simoniac bishops, or corrupt clerics – while the Church always was a “woman,” a fact that led to a number of paradoxes in the medieval Christian imaginaire. Through Ecclesia a medieval audience would be confronted with the “female nature” of a sacerdotium that as an institution was (and is) completely dominated by men.10 In fact, in its refusal of female ordination the Catholic Church has never come to terms with the contradiction between the “female” Ecclesia as sponsa, standing for a community made up of all male (lay and ordained) and female Christians – yet symbolically represented as “female” only – and the male priest, who is to “marry” the Church or sponsa who, however, also includes male Christians.11 We will keep this essential paradox in mind in our exploration of Ecclesia’s troubles, specifically those caused by schismatics. Throughout the history of the Catholic Church schisms were rampant; in fact, before the Great Schism (1378–1417) medieval historians counted about twentytwo of them. But not all of these divisions of the Church were equally traumatic for Christians; some were more localized and some were associated only with specific rulers. Many of them brought forth poetic responses, reflecting the anguish caused by the division of the Church as well as the urgency with which ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou, 2 vols. (Poitiers: Société d’Études Médiévales, 1966), 2:1141–57. Our image is fig. 7 in this article. 9 I am keeping in mind here Sara Lipton’s important study on the Synagogue and gender. Lipton studies the “highly feminized tropes” attached to this figure who is depicted, among other things, as a “hideous wanton,” as an “aggressive predator.” Lipton argues that this “aberrant femininity” does not present a simple polarity to the virtuous figure of the Church but rather is used by the authors and artists of the Bibles moralisées to think through a host of contemporary concerns. See “The Temple Is My Body: Gender, Carnality, and Synagoga in the Bibles moralisées,” in Eva Frojmovic, ed., Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 129–63. 10 On the function of a number of female allegorical figures for the medieval Christian imaginaire, see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 11 One of the arguments against female priests states that only a male priest can “marry” the Church. In 1995, when pope John Paul II declared the impossibility of ordaining women to be infallible dogma, many feminist theologians objected. According to Elisabeth Gössmann, the theology underlying the arguments against women priests is more than doubtful. See Die Zeit der Frau. Apostolisches Schreiben Mulieris Dignitatem Papst Johannes Paul II. Hinführung von Joseph Ratzinger, Kommentar von Elisabeth Gössmann (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1988). On the medieval arguments against a female priesthood, see A. J. Minnis, “De impedimento sexus: Women’s Bodies and Medieval Impediments to Female Ordination,” in Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, eds., Medieval Theology and the Natural Body (York: York Medieval Press, 1997), 109–39, especially 120 on Bonaventure’s blurring together of “natural and symbolic sex, in arguing that a woman cannot marry the Church because the Church is female.”

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some Christians sought solutions to these debilitating crises. In this essay I will look at a few examples of different types of schisms: the one at Liège in 1095, as depicted in the Carmina by Rupert of Deutz; the schism of 1159, as bemoaned by Ecclesia in a poem by Gautier de Châtillon (before 1163); and the Great Schism, as suffered by Ecclesia in some of Eustache Deschamps’s ballades and his Complainte de l’Eglise of 1393, as well as in Honoré Bovet’s Somnium super materia scismatis of 1394. As suggested above, in each case the “female” nature of Ecclesia allows for a gendered performance in the face of this political and ecclesiastical crisis. She may be cast in the role of a mother betrayed by her children, of a widow abandoned by husband and friends, or even of a victim of sexual violence, including rape. The imagery and vocabulary of victimization are thus gendered female in these examples: as a consequence the collective victims of a given schism, that is, the community of the faithful represented by Ecclesia, are “feminized” and their suffering is enhanced dramatically through the status of powerlessness they acquire as representations of women. At the same time, the call to action inherent in these texts acquires more urgency through the affective power of a female voice calling for help, a voice that in the various theatrical constructs we will explore frequently addresses itself directly to the audience. Rupert of Deutz and the schism in Liège Rupert of Deutz’ Ecclesia appears on the scene with torn clothes, her crown toppling from her head. She laments that she has been forced into adultery and now she seeks help from her own family, her spouse Jesus Christ, as well as from her mother-in-law, the Virgin Mary. Rupert thus stages the schismatic situation as a family drama where violence has led to the destitution of one of its members. But what was at the origin of this drama? The schism in the diocese of Liège, according to Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1076– 1129) and the chroniclers of the time, was caused by simony. The financial transactions involved in obtaining benefices could be interpreted as heresy, and heresy creates schism. The main culprit for Rupert was king Henry IV, while the victims were the popes from Gregory VII (1073–85) to Urban II (1088–99) who were challenged in certain areas by Henry’s choice, Guibert of Ravenna who reigned as the antipope Clement III (1080–1100). But the real victim for Rupert was Ecclesia and it was in his Carmina, composed between May and August 1095 but never completed, that Rupert dramatized the traumatic situation of the Church.12

12

On the historical background, see Maria Lodovica Arduini, Non fabula sed res: Politische Dichtung und dramatische Gestalt in den Carmina Ruperts von Deutz (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1985), chap. 1. The intricacies of the situation in Liège cannot possibly be detailed here. Generally on Rupert, see John van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The Carmina were edited by H. Böhmer in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Libelli de lite 3:622–41 (Hannover, 1897). I thank John van Engen for sending me a copy of this text.

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Very intricate from a formal point of view, it draws on many classical texts, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, featuring the impressive “female” figure of Philosophy. Boethius presented Philosophy as an authoritative female counselor to the despairing author figure whose majesty is somewhat marred, however, by her torn clothes. In the Carmina these shredded garments reappear in Ecclesia’s image, though Philosophy’s authoritative stance is replaced here by the Church’s downcast attitude, laments, and tears. The Church thus comes to resemble the Synagogue who, as we saw earlier, was often represented in shabby garments and losing her crown. Rupert’s Ecclesia is thus the descendant of Philosophy who is suffering from the degradation incarnated by her counterpart, the female Synagogue. The Carmina is set up as a dream vision (II, vv. 1–4) in which the poet is confronted with apocalyptic imagery and witnesses a long litany of complaints by the allegorical figure of the Church as well as the responses of a number of consoling figures, such as Mary, Christ, and at the poem’s end, a group of saints. The opening stanza shows us the dragon from Revelation 12 as well as the “woman clothed with the sun”; she is about to give birth to a child who will be rescued at the last minute from the menacing dragon. But eventually her clothes will be torn and she will be abandoned by her sons (I, vv. 34–39). Stanza III stars the denuded Church, with the crown falling from her head. In Stanza IV we find out who are the sons that have abandoned her in Stanza I: “O vos monachi, parcite matri! Cur vos etiam me lacerates?” (O monks, spare the mother! Why do you as well lacerate me? IV, vv. 1–2). The dialogue structure that follows creates the impression of a liturgical drama, as Maria Lodovica Arduini has observed. Ecclesia now addresses her complaints to another woman, the Virgin Mary, thus making the suffering from and the desired resolution of the schism a women’s affair: if the Church is the bride of Christ, Mary is her mother-in-law. Mary is willing to intercede with her son and, in a dramatic moment of pleading, even bares her breasts on which He had once sucked (VI, vv. 96–99). This induces Christ to inquire “Quid vult sponsa mea?” (What does my spouse wish? VII, v. 5), a question that leads to a lengthy dialogue on the Church’s current sufferings (as opposed to a period of past glory), detailing in veiled terms the history of the Liège schism and her tribulations at the hands of Nero and Simon, standing for king Henry IV and his antipope Clement III, and perhaps also for bishop Otbert of Liège (1091–1119) who had bought his episcopal office in 1091. Ecclesia speaks of her fear of schism, pointing out that the existence of the legitimate pope has been undermined by adultery (“Vivente sponso, servit adultero… Vir suis hinc tenet, hinc adulter”; IX, vv. 54–56) – that is, she now is supposed to have two spouses, or alternatively, a legitimate spouse and an unlawful lover. This gendered language dramatizes the king’s and the antipope’s schismatic actions – their faithlessness – as the crime of adultery destroying the legitimate marriage of the Church and Christ. The motif of adultery again assimilates Ecclesia to the Synagogue: beginning in late antiquity, polemical texts accused the Synagogue of adultery, stating that because of her infidelity she lost “her first

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husband” – God.13 The consequences of the schismatic disruption are thus shown to be more than dire. Although composed by a monk for a monastic milieu, Rupert’s Carmina stage the schismatic conflict primarily as a dramatic discussion between a woman, her mother-in-law, and her spouse. The charge of adultery leveled against the king and antipope would certainly be comprehensible to a female audience should they ever gain access to this type of text. But even a monastic audience would see victimization as gendered female in this poem and would thus understand more profoundly their own suffering and helplessness caused by the schism – and perhaps even the tribulations of real women. Gautier de Châtillon and the schism of 1159 Gautier de Châtillon (born in Lille c. 1135), a great satirical and epic poet, centers his depiction of the schism-torn Ecclesia on the crime of rape. The guilty parties are the schismatics and by implication perhaps the ruler who brought about the schism for the sake of furthering his imperial ambitions, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The schism of 1159 resulted from Frederick’s machinations putting into place the “Grand Design” that was to unite the administrations of Swabia, Burgundy, and Lombardy, a plan that would have changed the face of Europe.14 The emperor thought the pope’s support for this scheme essential, and when he could not get it, he put forward his own papal candidate: thus the legitimate pope Alexander III (1159–81), after a tumultuous double election, found himself opposed by a series of four antipopes, all of them supported by Frederick. This schism caused a fair amount of anxiety that was expressed in letters and allegorical texts by such authors as John of Salisbury, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elisabeth of Schönau.15 Here I would like to take a brief look at a poem by Gautier de Châtillon who worked at the chancellery of the English king Henry II and was also a friend of John of Salisbury. As a poet he is best known for his Alexandreis (1178–82), celebrating in 5,500 hexameters the deeds of Alexander the Great. In one of his moral-satirical poems he targets the schism of 1159.16 Written most likely before 1163, when the Council of Tours recognized pope Alexander III, this poem first dramatizes the poet’s uncertainty in face of two rival papal contenders, but then finally seems to opt for the pope opposed to Frederick Barbarossa, that is, Alexander III. Here again, we find dramatically gendered imagery. After admitting that he does not know who is the rightful pope (nescio; Stanza 6), the poet introduces Ecclesia as Christ’s sponsa and mulier in Stanza 7. The 13 14

See Pflaum, Die religiöse Disputation, 18. See Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), 103. 15 On the roles of these three personages in this schism, see my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism (1378–1417) (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006), chap. 1. 16 Karl Strecker, ed., Moralisch-Satirische Gedichte Walters von Châtillon (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1929), Poem 7, 89–96.

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Church complains silently (aput se) in Stanza 8 about having been raped through attacks by the schismatics (quo me rapit). Of course, the Latin word rapit can also mean “abducted” or “kidnapped.” But, as Kathryn Gravdal points out, “as early as 1155, the Latin raptus in the sense of abduction brings about the shift toward a sexual meaning,” so that the Old French words derived from the Latin term “designate abduction by violence or by seduction, for the purpose of forced coitus.”17 This reading of the term rapit seems to be confirmed in Stanza 13 when the Church complains about the prelates tearing her clothes to pieces so that they can divide them among themselves. This leads to the heartrending cry: “Veni, coniunx optime” (Come, dearest spouse; Stanza 16), she pleads, do not delay any longer, and most important, do not just write (“nil michi rescribas”) but come in person! She believes herself deserted (“me desertam creditis”; Stanza 17), but at the end of the poem there is a ray of hope since the spouse seems to be approaching, offering help and joy (Stanza 17). The crisis of this schism is thus enacted here as a drama of rape and temporary marital discord. Ecclesia is again a victimized woman and with her are victimized all Christians, male and female, who suffer at the hands of the imperialisticminded Frederick and his antipopes. Thus the particular appeal of this poem lies – as it did for Rupert’s Carmina – in its performance of a female voice crying for help. In Gautier’s poem, however, help in the shape of the male spouse, signifying the end of the schism, appears to be near. This end may represent a particular encouragement to a male audience to step into the role of the spouse and rescue the endangered Ecclesia through courageous action. Ecclesia and the Great Schism During the time of the Great Schism we find a veritable explosion of dramatic images starring both a monstrous two-headed Church and a Church torn and mutilated, a victim of familial strife or even marital rape. The suffering Ecclesia appears in a number of different literary contexts and in each case the affective power of her depiction is heightened by her “femaleness” and by the special kind of victimization her gender implies. It seems that the nature of this particular schism required especially powerful appeals that targeted the highest secular and religious rulers but that undoubtedly could also be heard on a more popular level.18 Of all known schisms the Great Schism lasted the longest (1378–1417); more than previous conflicts of this sort, it divided all of Europe into opposing camps, one supporting the Roman pope Urban VI and his successors, the other opting for the Avignon pope Clement VII and his successor, the Spanish pope Benedict

17

See Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 4. 18 For more general reflections on these issues, see the Introduction to my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries.

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XIII.19 Roughly, France, Spain, and Scotland were on the Avignon side, while the Italian territories, the Empire, and England chose to adhere to the Roman pope. Another unique feature of this schism was the fact that the same College of Cardinals had elected the two rival popes within the space of five months (in April and September 1378). Claiming they had been coerced by the armed Roman populace into electing an Italian pope in April, the cardinals, quickly disillusioned by Urban VI’s autocratic behavior, left Rome and proceeded to elect a cousin of the French king Charles V, Robert of Geneva, as pope Clement VII. Coercion, they argued, had made the first election invalid. Thus Europe was plunged into one of its most serious and long-lasting ecclesiastical and political crisis. The conflicts of the Hundred Years’ War, which had already pitted France against England for forty years, were also intensified through the new schismatic divisions between these countries. Many people, both secular and ecclesiastic, attempted to end this schism through diplomatic missions, various negotiations, and armed campaigns. At the same time, this crisis was reflected in the medieval imaginaire in a variety of ways. Many chroniclers, poets, visionaries, and prophets felt they had to speak out against the scandalous division of the Church, and many of them show us suffering figures of Ecclesia, whose gendered language recalls that of our earlier poems. Michel Pintoin, the chronicler of Saint-Denis, expressed the gendered nature of the Church’s troubles in particularly striking images.20 Speaking of popes Urban VI and Clement VII, Pintoin tells us for the year 1381, for example: “These scandals and others had their origin in the lengthy duration of this execrable schism; and the two rivals tore at the Church as if she were a prostitute that they had found in a place of debauchery” (1:91). By some, such as the Aragonese inquisitor Nicolas Eymeric, in a treatise of September 1378, pope Urban VI is depicted as a rapist of the Church.21 Conversely, the ambassadors of Hungary and Spain, who had arrived in Paris in 1381, claim that Urban VI is the Church’s legitimate spouse, whose wife is being alienated from him by a rival lover, the

19

For a concise history of the Great Schism and maps outlining the different papal obediences, see the Introduction to my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries. For a comprehensive history of the Great Schism with an emphasis on France, see Noël Valois, La France et le Grand Schisme d’Occident, 4 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1896–1902). 20 See Michel Pintoin [le Religieux de Saint-Denis], Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. and trans. M. L. Bellaguet, 6 vols. (Paris, 1842; reprint, with a preface by Bernard Guenée, Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1994). 21 See Heinrich Finke, “Drei spanische Publizisten aus den Anfängen des grossen Schismas. Matthäus Clementis, Nikolaus Eymerich, der hlg. Vicente Ferrer,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens, ser. 1, vol. 1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1928), 183–84. This image brings to mind a later illustration of Antonio Baldana’s De magno schismate, where the “first act of the schism” is depicted as cardinals on horseback pulling away the veil of the figure of Ecclesia. Pope Urban tries in vain to protect her. The beginning of the schism is thus shown as an act of male aggression against a female figure. See Paola Guerrini, Propaganda politica e profezie figurate nel tardo medioevo (Naples: Liguori, 1997), chap. 3. This image is fig. 12 in my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries.

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Avignon pope Clement VII (Pintoin, 1:77).22 The description of the schism as gendered violence – male versus female – thus became a staple of the discourse on this crisis early on. From among the large cast of fascinating characters engaged in schism polemics (which includes saints Catherine of Siena and Vincent Ferrer, as well as the well-known writers Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan) I will briefly focus on only two here: the prolific writers and peripatetic royal officials, Eustache Deschamps (ca. 1340–1406/07) and Honoré Bovet (ca. 1350–after 1409). Both of them show striking figures of the suffering Ecclesia. Deschamps’s ballade 243 begins with a complaint by Ecclesia evoking the opening of the Book of Lamentations: “Las! je me plain, destruite et desolée: / Tout le monde me fait sedicion; / Je fus jadis saincte Eglise appellée” (Alas! I complain, destroyed and desolate: everyone has betrayed me. I used to be called Holy Church; vv. 1–3).23 Like the fallen Jerusalem, the Church looks back to better times when martyrs and their miracles honored her. Now things are different: in typological terms she is figured by the Synagogue, who interestingly is not depicted as a misguided woman here, but rather as a place for fornication: “My sers en moy font fornicacion” (my subjects fornicate within me; v. 26), says the Church/Synagogue, thus depicting schism as sexual transgression.24 This pitiful complaint is addressed to Ecclesia’s “vray espoux” (true spouse; v. 29), Jesus Christ, and not, significantly, to kings and princes, as are a large number of Deschamps’s other ballades. As in Rupert’s Carmina and Gautier’s schism poem, Christ is seen as the only means to end the schism and heal the Church. Christ is the spouse of the Church, but so is the pope in the Christian tradition. Having two popes thus equals polygamy or even marital rape for the Church. As we saw already, this theme and its variations are rather widespread in writings about the schism and it also appears in Deschamps’s ballade 985 (5:230–32). Here Saincte Eglise is mournful because “.ii. espoux l’ont si violemment / Prinse, et un seul la deust sainctement, / Ou nom de Dieu, gouverner comme amie” (two husbands took her so violently, while a single one should rule her in a sanctified manner as beloved consort in God’s name; vv. 14–16). The schism thus violates the sanctity of the spiritual marriage between Ecclesia and the pope.25 22

This happened just before the Spanish kingdom of Castille declared for the Avignon pope Clement VII in May 1381. 23 See Œuvres complètes, 11 vols., ed. Marquis Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1878–1904), 2:75–76. 24 This topos is probably related to one of the central images of Hosea, where Israel is likened to a fornicating harlot. My thanks go to Susan Einbinder for this reference. See also Lipton, “The Temple Is My Body,” 134 and her fig. 2, for examples of the Synagogue’s “corrupting carnality.” 25 Similar imagery can be found in Deschamps’s Miroir de mariage, where he exhorts the prelates not to make the Church into an adulteress through the schism (Œuvres, 9:172). See also the anonymous 1381 poem, Lamentatio Ecclesie, edited by Valois in La France 1:389–94, where the Church complains of being forced to have two husbands and is then wooed by three partisans of different positions (one who favors to keep two popes, one who is pro-Clement,

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Deschamps also featured the lamenting Church in his only prose treatise on the schism, La Complainte de l’Eglise, dated 13 April 1393. At that moment the continuation of the truce between France and England was being negotiated at Leulinghem. The Great Schism, imbricated as it was by that time with the Hundred Years’ War, was one of the topics of discussion. Deschamps first wrote this text in Latin and then translated it into French at the request of the duke of Burgundy.26 Deschamps creates a judicial context for the Church’s complaint: he presents her indictment of those who have harmed her as an official address to all Christian rulers by their “povre mere tresdolente, desolée et desconfortée, de laquelle les entrailles sont tranchées et divisées en deux parties pour le pechié et abhominacion de ses enfans forlignans la voie de justice” (poor suffering mother, desolate and without comfort, whose entrails are cut into pieces and divided into two parts by the sin and abomination of her children, led astray from the path of justice; 7:293). The extreme violence perpetrated here is that of children against their mother. Deschamps dramatizes the unnaturalness of having a divided Church by offering the disturbing image of a mother being disemboweled by those who should love her most.27 Eglise, in a detailed indictment, calls on standard ancient and biblical exempla, such as the pride and greed of Alexander the Great or the fate of the city of Niniveh, models that should caution medieval Christians. Deschamps uses the Eight Beatitudes as a structuring device to express Eglise’s desire for the reform of her children’s morals. At present, abomination reigns, but Eglise proposes several strategies to remedy the situation: a crusade to liberate the Holy Land and the convocation of a General Council to resolve the schism. In her rationale for this Council, Eglise takes up the imagery of rape and adultery we have encountered before. For the Church, the Council’s goal is clear: “que je n’aye que un seul et vray espoux; et que la trencheure du cisme qui si detestablement m’a voulu et veult faite adultere, cesse du tout” (so that I have only one true husband and that the division of the schism that so detestably wants to make me into an adulteress should cease; 7:307). But it is not only the sin of adultery that is forced upon her, she also has been invaded and ravished like booty (“ravi[e] en maniere de proie”); her veil has been ripped in two.28 The term ravir again suggests rape, here in the context of warfare where to this day rape is one of and one who is pro-Urban). She finally calls for a General Council to decide between all these suitors. 26 See Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 116. 27 By contrast, in his Miroir de mariage Deschamps shows us the divided Church as a mother who offers us the “lait d’avarice” (milk of avarice; 9:171); the Church here is rotten and corrupted and forces her children to look for a better mother (“prenons autre mere”; 9:171). Thus even as a mother – a figure that often represents the Church – Eglise here evinces the double and apparently contradictory aspect of the Church as victim and perpetrator in Deschamps’s and many other poets’ works. This topic of the often-contradictory representations of the divided Church is explored more fully in my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries. 28 See the image in Baldana’s chronicle described in n. 21.

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the most brutal means an aggressor uses to subjugate the vanquished. Deschamps argues that the Church’s children should feel compelled by nature to put an end to this violence and avenge the only mother they have (7:309). As repentance saved the city of Niniveh, so it can save the Christian realm, Deschamps promises the Christian community victimized by the schism. Only spiritual and moral reform, he claims, can lead to the Church’s union. To end the treatise Deschamps reminds us of both the allegorical nature of his text and its official character by having Eglise affix her signature: Escript en mon pauvre palays, assiegé de discorde et de division perilleuse, attendans vostre secours par le moyen de oroison … le .XIIIe. jour du moys d’avril après Pasques, l’an de grace Nostre Seigneur mil .CCC. .IIIIxx. et treize. (Written in my poor palace, besieged by discord and dangerous division, waiting for your help by means of prayer … the thirteenth day of April after Easter, in the year of Our Lord 1393; 7:311).

Once more we see the Church suffering violence that is gendered female: a mother torn to pieces by her children, a woman raped in the course of warfare. Yet, the violence inflicted by the children is also self-directed: by mutilating the mystical body of the Church, Christians are mutilating themselves, for they constitute that body.29 Just seventeen months after Deschamps composed his Complainte de l’Eglise the Avignon pope Clement VII died, and for a brief moment there was only one pope, Boniface IX in Rome. There was a flicker of hope that the schism might now be brought to an end. In this context Honoré Bovet, a writer probably best known for his treatise on military art and knightly comportment, the Arbre des batailles, composed an allegorical dream vision, the Somnium super materia scismatis. 30 Thinking of the expanded notion of performance that we adopted in this essay, we can say that this text is the most theatrical in terms of the interaction between Ecclesia and the author figure. There is extensive dialogue between the two protagonists, and we can even imagine the setting as a stage set since the many countries the author visits are in fact condensed into a single “castle,” as we will see presently. In the tradition of Boethius’s Philosophy, Ecclesia here is a magnificently beautiful woman who appears to the sleeping author figure. Just when he is overwhelmed by her beauty she tells him: “touch my back” (69). In shocked surprise Bovet sees that her back is putrid and full of worms. Further, her garments are 29

For an analysis of similar imagery regarding the figure of France torn by civil war as well as the idea of the autophagy of a madman representing the French nation as it appears in Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif of 1422, see my “Enemies Without/Enemies Within: Threats to the Body Politic in Christine de Pizan,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 26 (1999): 1–15. 30 For an up-to-date biography of Bovet, see Hélène Millet and Michael Hanly, “Les batailles d’Honorat Bovet,” Romania 114 (1996): 135–81. The Somnium was edited by Ivor Arnold in L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun et le Somnium super materia scismatis (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1926), 69–110.

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lacerated and divided by “schism” (lacerates et divisis scisura; 70). Like Jerusalem in the Lamentations, she has been turned into a widow, abandoned by her spouse. She now counts on Bovet to become her champion by traveling to all the courts of Europe seeking an end to the schism. “Do you see at your right this very spacious palace?” Ecclesia asks the author (70). This palace, guarded by a host of allegorical figures that embody the contrast between the former unified Church and the current divided one, becomes the stage setting for Bovet’s quest for a ruler capable of ending the Great Schism. Entering over a drawbridge (loaded with allegorical meanings), the author finds himself at the ground floor of a multi-story edifice, which he proceeds to explore. This condensed space featuring the major European countries certainly evokes the mansiones of medieval plays located in what Henri Rey-Flaud terms “le cercle magique.”31 Here, each country and its ruler are assigned one floor of the palace. As the quest progresses, a complicated courtly relationship develops between the Church and the author figure. Bovet does his best to fulfill Ecclesia’s request, though – not unexpectedly – he is totally unsuccessful and is shunted from ruler to ruler with nothing to show for his diplomatic efforts.32 Meanwhile Ecclesia follows him around in the shape of a repeated vision and frequently berates him for his squeamishness. For example, at the court of Louis of Hungary he can find neither a bed nor food and complains bitterly. Ecclesia reminds him that her son suffered more grievously and states that Bovet must undoubtedly be French given his requirements for luxury even when traveling (81–82)! The text ends inconclusively, as did the efforts to end the schism in the brief interregnum of 1394. In the Somnium Bovet created a complex figure of Ecclesia who, in addition to the traits that link her to previous depictions, also acquired the character of a demanding courtly lady and of an actress in a play that dramatizes the urgency of her legitimate requests for peace and unity. This version of the Church thus delivers yet another gendered performance, this one also linked to secular, vernacular literary conventions. The burden of healing the schism is squarely placed on the shoulders of the recalcitrant European rulers who are the author’s partners in dialogue and the eyewitnesses to the Church’s tribulations. Within the courtly context they should feel an ethical obligation to come to the rescue of the Church in distress. That they seem incapable of doing so represents a serious indictment of the European ruling classes – who are both the protagonists and the intended audience of this drama of the divided Church. Conclusion Throughout the centuries the authors starring in these pages indicted Christians for the Church’s suffering and called them to action. They did so in texts that 31

See Henri Rey-Flaud, Pour une dramaturgie du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), chap. 2. 32 This allegorical journey wittily reproduces a number of real diplomatic efforts many of which Bovet was involved in. For a detailed analysis of this text, see my Poets, Saints, and Visionaries, chap. 5.

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explored the dramatic potential of the female allegorical figure of Ecclesia to the fullest. Whether she was an actor in Rupert of Deutz’ family drama, a rape victim in Gautier de Châtillon’s poem, accused of adultery or mutilated by her own children, the Church was placed by our poets in increasingly theatrical contexts, intensifying the direct appeals to her audience. As important as the theatrical aspects of these texts was the gendered nature of their discourse on violence. The “female” nature of the allegorical Ecclesia enabled a variety of authors over many centuries to depict the discord, misery, and victimization schisms created in specifically female gendered terms.33 Our poets exploited the vocabulary of violence directed at a suffering female victim in the most dramatic ways in order to highlight the damage done by schismatic divisions of the Church. The depiction of this type of violence can also be read as a call to arms: our authors called on secular and ecclesiastical rulers to do their duty and, by ending the schism, to protect the most important “woman” in their lives.

33

In other texts, especially from the period of the Great Schism, she can also be a monster, but these monsters are for the most part not explicitly gendered.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. Ecclesia snatches away Synagoga’s crown. Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 342, fol. 11v.

Preaching the Sins of the Ladies: Nicole Bozon’s “Char d’Orgueil” Laurie Postlewate

An important strategy in the method of early Franciscan preachers and poets was to evoke understanding of vice and virtue through concrete and visible examples. In sermons and catechetical texts, Franciscans used stories and poetry full of lively images to describe sin and show it in action; in this way, the Friars Minor provided literary performance of the vices and virtues for the purpose of correcting the sins of lay society.1 Indeed our understanding today of what “sinful” behavior was for medieval people is greatly enhanced by the depiction and enactment of specific vices in Franciscan literature. The works of Nicole Bozon, a latethirteenth-century English Franciscan preacher and poet, provide us with a rich display of the performance of sin and goodness: from moralized exempla, to verse proverbs, to saints’ lives and sermons, Bozon’s œuvre presents moral teaching infused with vivid imagery and dramatic presentation to communicate the circumstances of sin and the necessity for contrition.2 In his verse satire, the “Char d’Orgueil,” Bozon brings to life the vice of Pride, and gives special attention to a favorite subject of medieval moralists: the dress and social behavior of women.3 In the 140 alexandrine quatrains of the “Char d’Orgueil,” Bozon creates an allegorical picture to demonstrate how a single vice like Pride can engender a multitude of sins: what Bozon calls the “matire de se confesser” (the stuff of confession). Bozon describes, item by item, all the parts of a carriage which Pride, the queen of sin and daughter of Lucifer, had made for herself: 1

2

3

Saint Bonaventure explains the usefulness of visual images for understanding in the Prologue to his Tree of Life, a devotional work in which the reader is asked to imagine a tree bearing twelve fruits, each of which represents a moment in Christ’s life. See Bonaventure, Works, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 119–20. David Jeffrey, “Franciscan Spirituality and Vernacular Culture,” in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, ed. David Jeffrey (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 143–60. Deux poèmes de Nicholas Bozon, ed. Johan Vising (Goteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1919). The complete text of the “Char d’Orgueil” is extant in two manuscripts, BL Additional 46919 (fols. 66–74) and Cambridge Gg. 6.28 (fols. 1–8), and in partial form in BL Royal 8 E XVII (fol. 108) and Bodleian 425 (fol. 94). Vising’s edition is based on BL Additional 46919. A discussion of the variants can be found in his introduction (xvi–xxi).

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La reigne de pecché est estreite de haut lignage, La fille est Lucifer ke cheit de haut estage; Si est appelé Orguil, dame de graunt age, Ele se ad fet un char de mult grant custage.

1–4

(The queen of sin is descended from a lofty lineage; she is the daughter of Lucifer, who fell from a high place. She is called Pride, this lady of great maturity; she has made for herself a most costly carriage.)4

Pride’s role as the queen of sin in the “Char d’Orgueil” is of significance to the social status of Bozon’s public and the kind of sins found in the picture of Pride. Of the seven deadly sins, avarice was generally favored over pride by the Franciscans and Dominicans who, working mainly in urban settings, were typically more concerned with greed in the emerging mercantile economy. Pride – tumor nobilitas – was the special vice of the nobility and rich merchants, and also of the knights whose power is symbolized by horses like those drawing Pride’s coach in the “Char d’Orgueil.”5 While often shown as a principal fighter in the battles between the vices and virtues, Pride in Bozon’s poem is not a warrior, but a grande dame, a lady of haut parage, whose exaggerated individualism is displayed in her fabulous and costly carriage.6 The “Char d’Orgueil,” the parts of which represent myriad sinful acts, is the main image of Bozon’s poem; after the first quatrain, there is little mention of Lady Pride herself, and no attempt to describe her or to depict her engaged directly in action. Instead, Pride is explained through the objects she owns and the people who serve her. This approach reflects mendicant theology on the cardinal sins: it is not vice but the actions to which vice leads that condemn souls.7 In order to understand pride, one must examine the specific evil deeds of which it is the cause; accordingly, each part of Pride’s carriage represents a sin, an example of sinful behavior, or a sinful person. For example, the chassis of the carriage is covetousness (l. 15), the scarlet drape on the outside of the coach is “prive mauveis e bon en apert” (being bad in private and good in public, l. 33), and the nostrils of Pride’s horse Deleauté represent the minstrel who flatters as long as he is paid, but defames those who refuse to reward him (ll. 181–84). The structure of two parallel lists, the parts of a carriage and the attendant sins, provides a framework for the instances of evil that derive from pride. Bozon’s poem demonstrates the 4 5

6

7

All translations are my own. Mary Braswell, “Sin, the Lady, and the Law: The English Noblewoman in the Late Middle Ages,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 14 (1986): 81–101. In the fifth-century Psychomachia of Prudentius, a work of immense influence for subsequent representations of the vices, Superbia is a mounted warrior. Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus (ca. 1184) shows how Pride is ultimately conquered by Sober Reason when the Vices and Virtues battle for dominance of man’s soul. See also the examples of Superbia as warrior in medieval iconography in Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939), 101ff. and fig. 8a. See Jean Delumeau, “La mise au point de l’examen de conscience,” in his Le péché et la peur. La culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 211–35.

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power of what Paul Zumthor called the deictic function of allegorical descriptions, that is, their ability to imprint upon the mind vivid and memorable images that give material form and a sense of order to abstract notions.8 Indeed, for Franciscans like Saint Bonaventure and Nicole Bozon, images such as Pride’s carriage allowed preachers and poets to “cultivate devotion and to foster the piety of faith.”9 A lengthy segment of the “Char d’Orgueil” is devoted to a description of the horses drawing Pride’s carriage: Impatience, Denaturesce, Deleauté, and Envie. Various sins are evoked as parts of the horses’ bodies or of their tack. The description of Envie suggests the socially destructive force of this impetuous beast that is driven to excessive expenditure by the desire to appear other than he really is. This leads to a sixty-four-line digression from the allegorical picture of Pride’s carriage (ll. 257–336), in which the preacher’s voice takes over to deliver a sermon against women’s dress and their behavior in society. This segment of the “Char d’Orgueil” is also found in MS Royal 8 E XVII as a self-contained dit with the title “La Geste des Dames.” In addition to describing pride through allegory, Bozon provides here a mise en scène of the behavior of the ladies who, costumed to the hilt, perform the vice of pride in the theater of society.10 These ladies enter the scene rushing off to feasts to display their fancy headdress. Arriving decked out like horned beasts, they scrutinize the heads of the other ladies and gesticulate pretentiously with their arms, all the while chattering incessantly: Ke dirom de dames quant viegnent a festes? Les unes des autres avysont les testes, Portent les boces com cornues bestes; Sy nul seit descornue, de ly font les gestes. Des braz font la joie quant entrent la chambre, Mostrent les coverchef de seye e de kaunbre, Attachent les boutouns de coral et de l’ambre, Ne sessent de jangler taunt com sont en chaunbre.

257–64

(How we can describe ladies arriving at celebrations? With great interest they examine each other’s heads, wearing raised headpieces like horned beasts. If one of them is without her horns, the others make fun of her. Entering into the hall, they greet each other with arms open wide. They show off their headcoverings of silk and hemp, 8 9

Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 254–55. The utility of images for instruction is also discussed by Bonaventure in the second chapter of his Itinerarium in mentis Deum [The Soul’s Journey into God], in Opera omnia S. Bonaventurae, ed. Quarrachi (1898), 5:302. On the Franciscan use of pictorial images in general, see Denise Despres, “Franciscan Meditation: Historical and Literary Contexts,” in Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1989), 19–54. 10 These fourteen quatrains are similar in length and tone to Bozon’s collection of verse sermons, which address social ills such as hypocrisy, gossip, and all manner of moral laxity. See Brian Levy, ed., Nine Verse Sermons by Nicholas Bozon (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981).

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then attach them with buttons of coral and amber, and never cease to chatter as long as they are together in private.)

These ladies are ill mannered at the table as well: they attack their food and have the table attendants running back and forth to the kitchen. After eating, they engage in gossip and indiscreet conversation, two sins of the tongue often associated in penitential manuals:11 Deus vistes vallez unt assez a fere De servir les totes, checon a plere; Le hun a le quisyne le vyaunde a quere, Le autre en la botelerye bon vyn a trere. Quant eles unt dyné tut a grant leysyr, Se erdent ensemble de privement parler; Le une de l’autre encherche sovent le quer, Si ascune priveté puisse alocher.

273–80

(Two quick valets have their hands full to serve each one’s pleasure and all at the same time. One of them hurries to the kitchen to get the food, the other to take the good wine from the wine cellar. When they have dined in total comfort, they herd themselves together to talk in private; they search each other’s hearts to see if they can extract some secret matter.)

Determined to show off their clothes and bodies, the ladies intentionally trip so that the embroidery on the back as well as the front of their dresses will be exposed: Tele vient a feste pur estre avysee; Vaudreit plus a meson, vous dy pur verité, Kar ele est acheson de mal e pecché, Quant saunz nule reson trop est degysee. Quant eles unt montree ceo ke est devaunt, Trovent acheson d’escoper en baunk, Ke l’em puse veer le overayne graunt Que gist par derere, qe mucé fut devaunt.

297–304

(This fine lady comes to the celebration to be seen; she would be better off at home, to tell the truth. For here she is in the path of evil and sin, when she disguises herself for no good reason. When they have shown off what is on the front [of their gowns], these ladies find a way to stumble over their seat so that all may see the fancy embroidery on the back of their dresses, which was hidden from the front.)

The obsession these ladies have with elaborate handwork on their clothing is especially disturbing to Bozon who considers such activities an indulgence of 11

Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Les péchés de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 113–35.

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vanity and pride: if only they paid as much attention to sermons as they do to their finery! Lors vient en place le overe rydeyé, Le overe de Alemagne, le overe percee, E l’entayloure ove le overe levee. Cele ke plus les aprent, entre eles iert plus loee. Cele qe plus en seet sy est lor listresce, Les autres escoutent saunz somoyle e peresce, Ne dorment nule rien la, com font a la messe, Pour l’aprise du vanite dont eles [unt] grant leesce.

309–16

(Now they bring out pleated work, and German craftsmanship, and open embroidery, and work with embossed ornaments and couching. She who knows the most about it will be the most praised. The one who knows the most is considered their teacher; the others, never sleepy or lazy, are all ears. They won’t doze off here, as they do during mass, Since they are learning about vanity, which gives them great joy.)

But once the ladies leave the arena of public performance, their appearance is not so refined! Bozon pities the poor husband who, having made a bad deal in his marriage, regrets having “bought” such a beast of a wife: Puis s’en vont a meson, returnent de la feste, E taunt tost se chaungent la bele lusante teste; Cele qe fu si freche ja devent si reste, Ke le marchaunt se repentereyt qe achata cele beste.

321–24

(Then after the celebration they return home, and immediately their pretty, shining heads are changed altogether. She who was so fresh is now so rancid, that the poor merchant will repent of having bought this beast.)

The performance of pride is not limited to the time and space of public gatherings; vanity consumes the private lives of the proud ladies, as they engage in an endless cycle of spending and refashioning their outfits. They change the decorations on their headdress and gowns, putting pearls where before they had metal ornaments and changing one embroidered animal for another. Stepping back from the frenzy of this scene, Bozon concludes his sermon on the vanity of women by observing that preoccupation with one’s attire is a sign of how envy and pride grow when the povere chaytive (the poor wretched woman) “counterfeits” the rich: Mes qe lor atyl ja si ben ne soyt fest, Quant une foyz est veu, nule ren lor plest. Tel est ore envye e taunt de orgul crest, Ke la povere cheytive la riche contrefest. (But also their clothing is never good enough; once it has been seen, it pleases them no more.

333–36

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So it is when envy and pride are allowed to flourish, and the poor wretched woman imitates the rich.)

Returning to the allegorical construct of Pride’s carriage, the poet continues to associate excessive attention to dress with other sins, including neglect of prayer and religious services, desire for novelty and self-distinction, and lack of charity. A curious example of the frivolous behavior of these ladies is described in the croupière, the saddle strap that passes under the belly of one of Pride’s horses: this strap represents the long trains on the dresses of the ladies, and the buttons of the croupière are the little dogs which these women lovingly carry about seated on the trains. The same women, while flaunting their wealth, fear to have their trains stepped on by an unfortunate “povere”: E queus sunt les butuns atachez al cruper Fors les petiz kenez ke dames unt si cher? Sur la longe trene les font mult swef cocher; Ne suffreyent pas un povere de un pee la marcher.

397–400

(And what are these buttons attached to the harness except those little dogs which the ladies cherish so? They tenderly lay them down on the trains of their dresses; they suffer not that a poor person should walk there.)

The “Char d’Orgueil” presents an extended example of the association of dress with vanity and uncharitable behavior. Bozon may well have found in scripture the inspiration for his sermon on women’s dress: a favorite passage on the subject is Isaiah (3:16–25) evoking the vanity in dress of the daughters of Zion, and warning how their sweet smell will turn to stench and their beauty to burning. Penitential manuals in Latin and the vernaculars from the thirteenth century on include sins of vanity committed by both men and women; for example, in the Anglo-Norman Manuel des péchés (ca. 1260) we find excessive dress and hairstyle, and the flaunting of one’s wealth in public.12 Along the same lines, Chaucer’s Parson warns that “muche superfluite” and “desordinant scantness” in dress are evidence of pride. Vernacular sermons also warn against immodesty in dress and the profligate spending of those attempting to keep in fashion.13 As the passages from the “Char d’Orgueil” cited above demonstrate, Bozon’s poem, while staging the performance of pride, is itself highly suggestive of the performance of a preacher leading his public through the examination of specific examples of sin. Composed almost entirely in the present tense, the poet/preacher’s delivery invites his reader or listener to witness the scene of Pride and her team, and even to pick the cast of characters: Elysoum ore un charetter de propre voluntee. (Let us now choose a driver who is of his own mind.) 12 13

373

Le manuel des péchés, ed. E. J. Arnould (Paris: Droz, 1940), 73–74. Gerald Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 411.

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Alouum ore un garson au mestre charetter. (Now we will pick a helper for the master driver.)

401

Baillom ore au charetter une verge en sa meyn. (Let us now give to the driver a stick he can hold.)

421

Devisums ore les armes a ces chivalers. (Let us now imagine some arms for these knights.)

449

Finally, the poet/preacher could not be more adamant about the dangers of joining Pride’s entourage. In the concluding passages of the poem, he exhorts his public to let Lady Pride and her carriage pass by, and to follow instead “the narrow path” of the righteous: Mes jeo vus dirray mon conseyl pur ben eschaper: Pernons congé de la dame si la lessom passer E tenom nous au destre par un estreyt senter; Ceo est de amer Deu e sur tote rien doter.

545–48

(But here is my advice to escape [this vice]: Let us take leave of this lady and let her pass by, and keep ourselves on the straight and narrow path, which is to love God and above all else to fear [Him].

Bozon’s picture of Pride and his verse sermon on the vanity of ladies’ dress reflect the opinions expressed in the Middle Ages concerning the potential immorality of fashion. From moral commentary to sumptuary legislation to literary works from the twelfth century on, we find textual evidence of efforts to describe, criticize and control the way people dressed and behaved. The medieval ambivalence toward fashion was especially acute when the offenders were women whose ability to fashion themselves was in reality strictly regulated both by class and by sex.14 Women who indulged in ostentatious display of the body were also believed to be more inclined to other forms of wicked social behavior such as gluttony and pernicious speech, as demonstrated in the “Char d’Orgueil.” Within a few decades of the composition of Bozon’s poem, sumptuary laws in England would imitate the legislative measures taken earlier in France to regulate expenditure, hem lengths and fabric choice – for both women and men. These laws do not appear to have affected to any great extent the way people actually dressed, and on the whole they seem to have been a vain attempt to control the social

14

Diane Hughes, “Regulating Women’s Fashion,” in History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 136–58; Susan Stuard, “Gravitas and Consumption,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999), 215–16; and Joanna Crawford, “Clothing Distributions and Social Relations c. 1350–1500,” in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004), 153–64.

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signifier of clothing.15 We can say, however, that Bozon’s fusion of preaching and poetic imagination in the “Char d’Orgueil” left his public with a vivid image of Pride and a lively demonstration of this vice by the outrageous ladies of fashion – a performance they would not easily forget.

15

The first sumptuary laws in England were promulgated in 1337. On attempts to regulate dress through legislation in England, see Frances Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926); Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 298– 303; John Scattergood, “Fashion and Morality in the Late Middle Ages,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1987), 255–72. For a discussion of sumptuary controls in France and Italy, see especially Sarah-Grace Heller, “Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc and Italy,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121–36. For the situation in Germany, see Gerhard Jaritz, “Ira Dei, Material Culture, and Behavior in the Late Middle Ages: Evidence from German-Speaking Regions,” Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001): 53–66.

Making Names, Breaking Lives: Women and Injurious Language at the Court of Isabeau of Bavaria and Charles VI Helen Solterer

In the murky climate of Paris 1413, on a Mayday when king Charles VI had gone mad, noble factions were killing each other off, and the city in revolt, the major chroniclers focused on one episode. Each narrated the arrest of women attending the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria.1 Jean Le Fèvre’s account presents a menacing break-in (75–79). A crowd of commoners, led by butchers known as the Cabochiens, penetrated the Hôtel particulier of the dauphin demanding that he hand over all traitors in his residence. Next stop: the queen’s own Hôtel Saint-Pol where a roll-call of traitors was read out loud in front of Isabeau. Six dames and four damoiselles d’honneur were named and denounced as traitors. Deep into the queen’s private chambers, the women were pursued until with much “fear and weeping,” they were led away to prison. The Bourgeois of Paris’s version of the damoiselles’ arrest, by contrast, is summed up in a few judgmental lines: thirteen or fourteen of them were taken away for “they were well familiar with evil doing.”2 No chronicle mentions these women again. The silence is telling. It suggests how precarious was their social role, how fragile their reputation.3 It is sympto1

2

3

Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis [Michel Pintoin], ed. M. L. Bellaguet (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1841), 3:268–331, and electronic re-edition, introduced by Bernard Guenée (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1994); Chroniques de Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Rémy, ed. François Morand (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1876), chap. 35, 74–87; La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douët d’Arcq (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1858), chap. cii–iv, 343–69; Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449, ed. Colette Beaune (Paris: Lettres gothiques, 1990), 56–66; “Journal parisien des années 1412, 1413,” ed. A. Tuetey, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Île de France 44 (1917): 163–82; Histoire de la ville de Paris, ed. Michel Félibien and D. Guy-Alexis Lobineau (Paris: G. Desprez & J. Dessartz, 1725), 2:713, 765. “Les Parisiens [les Cabochiens] prirent avec lui [le frère de la reine] 13 ou 14, (tant) que dames que damoiselles, qui bien savaient la mauvaiseté.” Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 58. All translations from the French are my own. See Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Smail (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003); and the special issue, “La Renommée,” Médiévales 24 (1993).

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matic of infamy: the complete loss of name in the public domain.4 It was as if the damoiselles no longer existed socially speaking, as if they were dead. That infamous disappearing from the record prompted historian Colette Beaune to surmise that once they were imprisoned, they were “badly mistreated, raped.”5 Whether this group of women was guilty of any crime is a moot point. These chronicles and their representations were caught in the crossfire of partisan politics in a city riven by civil war and under constant threat of invasion. Were the damoiselles charged and attacked as part of the royal entourage? As members of this or that noble faction? As intimates of one of the most pilloried queens of France, besieged by charges of infidelity and corruption?6 In such a polarized context, hypotheses about them proliferated.7 And they prove very difficult to substantiate. Yet one point remains clear: the damoiselles of Isabeau had borne the brunt of repeated verbal attacks. They were hit by accusations from all political sides, represented negatively by preachers, royal propagandists, nobles, and people in the city streets. Systematically the women were stigmatized as disruptive, conniving, malicious, and publicly dangerous. This stigma underscores the conflicted power of public language. Women’s names were already over-determined in the hierarchy of medieval courts, guaranteeing the honor of so much more than themselves, of their men, of their social caste, of their political and religious communities. What happens when the public name, damoiselles d’honneur, made this over-determined value explicit? Not only 4

5

6

7

See Francesco Migliorino, Fama e infamia: problemi della società medievale nel pensiero giuridico nei secoli XII e XIII (Catania: Editrice Gianotta, 1985); Frank Stewart, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Claude Gauvard, “Rumeur et stéréotypes à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in La circulation des nouvelles au Moyen Âge. XXIVe Congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994), 157–77; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. “Cinq dames de la reine, Bonne Visconti, Isabelle des Barres, Catherine de Villiers, Isabeau Maréchal et Marguerite Aubin connurent le même sort [as some men in her company and that of the king, imprisoned in the Louvre tower],” Colette Beaune states, “Elles furent fort maltraitées et violées,” Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 58 n. 21. Rachel Gibbons, “Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France (1385–1422): The Creation of an Historical Villainess,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996): 51–73. Thelma Fenster, “Who’s a Heroine? The Example of Christine de Pizan,” in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara Altmann and Deborah McGrady (New York: Routledge, 2003), 121– 22, 127. Rachel Gibbons, “The Queen as Social Mannequin: Consumerism and Expenditure at the Court of Isabeau of Bavaria, 1393–1422,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 371–95; Marie-Véronique Clin, Isabeau de Bavière. La reine calomniée (Paris: Perrin, 1999); Rachel Gibbons, “Les conciliatrices au bas Moyen Âge: Isabeau de Bavière et la guerre civile (1401– 15),” in La guerre, la violence et les gens au Moyen Âge, ed. Philippe Contamine and O. Guyotjeannin (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1996), 2:23–34; Yann Grandeau, “Isabeau de Bavière ou l’amour conjugal,” in Actes du 102e Congrès national des sociétés savantes, vol. 2, “Études sur la sensibilité au moyen âge” (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1979), 117–48; Yann Grandeau, “Itinéraire d’Isabeau de Bavière,” Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques 45 (1964): 568–670. See also Sandra Hindman, “The Iconography of Queen Isabeau de Bavière, 1410–1415: An Essay in Method,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 102 (1983): 102–10.

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were these women represented as “evil-doers,” and their language cast in extreme terms, but the actions taken against them were also extremely violent. This chain of reactions offers a chance to examine what we call character assassination: the process by which destroying the name of a social group such as courtly women could enable and legitimate attempts to hurt them physically. According to the chroniclers, the damoiselles were charged with a languagebased crime of the worst order.8 Treason was understood as the gravest attack against the highest political authority. As Middle French vocabulary conveyed it, this attack struck at the quintessence of the monarch’s power, his majesty.9 Accusing the queen’s ladies of the crime of lèse-majesté was relatively simple to do since they worked in the royal household, inhabiting the corridors of power. This charge was described further as commocion, or agitation. Once presented as creating trouble, the women were linked implicitly to sedition, to a treasonous language that was “cruel, presumptuous, mad,” and as destructive as physical blows.10 Speaking out against the king and his authority was tantamount to striking out against him physically. And the more numerous and vehement the seditious words, the greater the threat of damage became. As scholastic commentary analyzed the situation, sedition generated discord among people.11 It spread widely with the result that it implicated many in undermining the body politic from within. Why women as agents of sedition? Why these particular women? Certainly the civil war between Armagnac and Burgundian factions provoked many seditious voices in Paris that were no means limited to one gender, or indeed to any single class.12 Yet through the writing of the early fifteenth century, the “noise and agitation” (noise, commocion) of “seditious troublemakers, aggressive disturbers of the peace” (sedicieurs, troubleurs de paix et malveillans) was projected onto women,

8

On “sowing discord” (seminatio discordiarum), see Edwin Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15–16, 157; David Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 91; Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Péchés de la langue. Discipline et éthique de la parole dans la culture médiévale (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 177. 9 See my essay, “Fiction versus Defamation: The Quarrel over the Romance of the Rose,” The Medieval History Journal 2 (1999): 111–41. 10 Jean Gerson personified Sedition as a woman who was “cruel, presumptuous, full of rage, bringing every opposition out” (crueuse, oultrecuidee et folle traioit tout au contraire). See his “Vivat Rex” or “Pour la réforme du royaume (1405),” in Œuvres complètes de Jean Gerson, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1966), 7:1152. 11 Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 15–16. 12 See Bernard Guenée, Un meurtre, une société. L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans, 23 novembre 1407 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Claude Gauvard, Violence et ordre public au moyen âge (Paris: Picard, 2005); Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Joël Blanchard and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Écriture et pouvoir à l’aube des temps modernes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000); Jacques Lemaire, Les visions de la vie de cour dans la littérature française de la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994); and my “Flaming Words: Verbal Violence and Gender in Pre-modern Paris,” Romanic Review 86 (1995): 355–78.

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and frequently attributed to them.13 In the civil history of Paris during the Ancien Régime, the damoiselles d’honneur of French queens were implicated in these bloody municipal and national struggles.14 During the 1780s, the Marquis de Sade with his Histoire secrète d’Isabeau de Bavière treated nobles to stories of fifteenth-century court ladies and men, and of their libertine liberties.15 At the same time, the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was caught up in the strident vilification of those aristocratic women who were attending their queen. Indeed the venomous campaign directed against the foreign, German-speaking monarch linked Marie Antoinette of Austria to Isabeau of Bavaria. However different the struggle, however diverse the women involved, the reflex to single out women at the court for seditious treason was remarkably constant. The link between women and sedition in France has a long history. In pre-modern and early modern Europe, the majority of episodes of sedition, historian Jean Delumeau has argued, were animated by fear, and that anxiety was figured most commonly by women and butchers. 16 If we pay close attention to the process of feminizing the negative social force of sedition in early fifteenthcentury Paris, we can track precisely how the specific group of courtly women were set up to represent it, and as importantly, to live it out. In terms that Nancy Regalado has done so much to establish, we can decipher another mode of scripting and performing public language in the late-medieval urban culture of the court: the mode of scape-goating.17 *** First, the damoiselle d’honneur needs introduction, or rather the damoiselles. Invariably, they appear on the courtly scene in the plural. Along the route of a parade or a procession in late medieval Europe, in the interior of a chambre des dames, we find circles of them.18 Omnipresent witnesses, they populated every 13

14

15 16 17

18

Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, chap. vi, 112. See Claude Gauvard, “De grace especial”. Crime, État et société à la fin du moyen âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991), 1:344. On the Marie Antoinette-Isabeau of Bavaria parallel, see Pierre Saint-Amand, “Terrorizing Marie Antoinette,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 379–99, especially 383, 393; Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette (New York: Zone Books, 1999); Pierre Ronzeaud, “De la harangère à la ‘harangueuse’. Étude d’un stéréotype polémique forgé au XVIIème siècle,” in Ouverture et dialogue. Mélanges offerts à Wolfgang Leiner à l’occasion de son soixantième anniversaire, ed. Ulrich Döring, Antiopy Lyroudias, and Rainer Zaiser (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), 739–53. Chantal Thomas, “Isabeau de Bavière: dernière héroïne de Sade,” unpublished paper, Colloques de Cérisy, June 1981. Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles. La cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 145, 183. Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005); Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Allegories of Power: The Tournament of Vices and Virtues in the Roman de Fauvel of MS BN Fr. 146,” Gesta 32 (1993): 135–46. See Elizabeth Brown and Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Universitas et communitas: The Parade of the Parisians at the Pentecost Feast of 1313,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Perform-

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courtly situation. These numbers explain to some extent why they have attracted little attention. Always there, always forming a group, they are rarely distinguished as single figures or individual women. They remain anonymous too. As historian Yann Grandeau pointed out, the full names of these women were rarely acknowledged.19 If they were identified at all, it was by their first name. Although many of them came from petty noble families and were known in their own right, once they were absorbed into the company of damoiselles, they lost such distinguishing features and were blended into a homogeneous whole. In house, these women were called upon to shadow their superiors. Christine de Pizan described their vital role in her Livre des Trois Vertus, composed to train women for their place in public:20 La … haulte dame … en son lit au matin … avironee de riches paremens et de toutes choses pour aise de corps, dames et damoiselles entour elle qui l’ueil n’ont a aultre chose fors a avisier que riens ne lui faille de tous delices, prestes a courir a elle se elle souspire tant soit petit ou se elle sonne mot, les gemoulx flechis pour lui administrer tout service et obeir a tous ses commandements… (The high-born lady in bed in the morning, surrounded by rich ornaments and everything for her bodily comfort, with ladies and women-in-waiting around her, intent on catering to her every need, ready to run to her should she sigh ever so slightly or utter a word, poised on bended knee to administer any service and obey any command…)

The damoiselles were a necessary part of the noblewoman’s lavish household. In the intimacy of the bedroom, they ensured that everything worked properly. Like so many walk-on parts in a large-scale spectacle, these women accompanied the queen in all her public activities. The damoiselles were drafted to mirror the beautiful people. In the public eye, their function, in Grandeau’s phrase, was pure representation.21 They signified, displayed, and magnified the social value or honor of their mistress. Their dress code was thus crucial. It is hardly surprising to ance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 117–54. 19 Yann Grandeau, “Isabeau de Bavière ou l’amour conjugal,” 118, and “De quelques dames qui ont servi la reine Isabeau de Bavière,” Bulletin Philologique et Historique 53 (1971): 129–239. 20 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, ed. Eric Hicks, intro. Charity Cannon Willard (Paris: Honoré Champion), 12; Roberta Krueger, “ ‘Nouvelles choses’: Social Instability and the Problem of Fashion in the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, the Ménagier de Paris, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre des Trois Vertus,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 49–85; Andrea Tarnowski and Rosalind Brown Grant, “Autobiography and Advice in Le Livre des Trois Vertus,” in Une femme de lettres au moyen âge. Études autour de Christine de Pizan, ed. Liliane Dulac and Bernard Ribémont (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), 151–68; Rosalind Brown Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206–13; Julia Walker, “Re-Politicizing the Book of Three Virtues,” in Au champ des escriptures. Actes du IIIe colloque international sur Christine de Pizan, ed. Eric Hicks et al. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 533–48; and Kathleen Ashley, “The Miroir des Bonnes Femmes: Not for Women Only?” in Medieval Conduct, 86–105. 21 Grandeau, “Isabeau de Bavière ou l’amour conjugal,” 148.

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discover statutes describing the kind of garment to be worn, and dictating that all damoiselles dress exactly alike in a fleur-de-lis habit. Numerous, indistinguishable, uniform, the women who made up this company could offer no more confirming backdrop for the queen. Such a sketch of damoiselles evokes models beyond didactic literature. Their group resembles another version of the courtly company as it was introduced in the Roman de la Rose. The round of carolers, the crush of comely, young people in the garden, the numbers of dancers who encircle the bachelor: all these characters embody the love service required in that decorous world. The damoiselles mimic these allegorical figures right down to their exquisite dress. They also fit perfectly into what Charles d’Orléans – in his own retro-Rose mode – calls in La Retenue d’Amours, “the house completely full up with agreeable people” (la maison de plaisans gens si largement remplie), or what he names allegorically in a ballade, “Bonne Compaignie” (good company).22 In the Court of Love, the assembly founded by the young king Charles VI, the damoiselles were also allocated their part. They were pressed into serving the various ladies in the opulent, exhibitionist scenario that acted out the seductions of hetero-erotic love. In fact, this Court depended on their participation since it was dedicated to “the honor and praise of all ladies and all women” (a l’honneur, la louange de toutes dames et damoiselles).23 Courtly life and letters were supposed to match perfectly, even in a city up in arms. “In such painful circumstances,” Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet emphasized, “life was made to resemble literature.”24 This pattern of living by a literary model is a familiar condition underwriting much of late-medieval courtly culture. Yet in the case of damoiselles, it was their official mission. This block of yes-women gave critical mass and vital energy to the script of courtly pleasure. By the same token, the role allotted them created a dilemma. Since it placed them in a pivotal position, any trouble marked them as potential accomplices. The necessary obedience to their noble ladies, as Christine described it, could link them to all manner of dangerous pleasure, aligning them with “the temptations that assail” their mistress (adonc souventes fois avendra que temptacion l’assauldra, 12). One major sign of this double-bind emerged in the spectacle at Charles VI’s court known as the Bal des Ardents (1393).25 According to Froissart and Michel 22

Charles d’Orléans, Ballades et rondeaux, ed. and trans. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992), 32, 304. 23 La Cour amoureuse, dite de Charles VI. Étude et édition critique des sources manuscrites, ed. Carla Bozollo and Hélène Loyau (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982), 1:42. 24 “Dans des circonstances douloureuses … on fait en sorte que la vie ressemble à la littérature.” La couleur de la mélancolie. La fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), 51. 25 Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Livres III–IV, ed. Peter Ainsworth and Albert Varvaro (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004); Lorraine Stock, “Bal des Ardents,” in Medieval Folklore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Tales and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29–30; Michel Zink, Froissart et le temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); and Peter Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of

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Pintoin, the chronicler of Saint-Denis, this festivity was organized around the wedding of Catherine the German, a favorite damoiselle and fellow countrywoman of the queen.26 The king decided to celebrate with a masked ball that was an opportunity to regale the group of women as a whole. He arrived disguised as a wild man, “his body deformed, his gestures contorted, howling horribly like a wolf” (66). The masquerade veered suddenly out of control when flames ignited and, in the chaos, three men in disguise were burned alive. The king was spared because he was wrapped up in the folds of the damoiselles’ garments. Both accounts cast the Bal moralistically as a story of joy turned into tragedy. The tragic twist is associated first with the king. He is shown to be impetuous, resembling a spoiled child who refused to grow up. Here was a leader who preferred playacting to ruling. The chronicles judged Charles VI implicitly for his madness.27 Not only was he ill, his malady also took a toll on his subjects. Royal behavior appeared suspiciously destructive to his kingdom. One image accompanying Froissart’s account of the Bal des Ardents brings other players in this tragedy into view (Fig. 1).28 The damoiselles are there as usual in the background, attending to the queen and the Duchess of Berry. This time, their presence is ominously charged. On the one hand, they are part of the king’s rescue. Froissart singled out the Duchess for praise, but he also made clear that she had accomplices. As the miniature depicts it, the damoiselles are also responsible for saving the king from the fire. On the other hand, they are complicit with the frenzy. By their simple presence, consorting with the ecuyers d’honneur, they are implicated in the festivity that goes fatally awry. With the event bound up from the beginning with the corps of damoiselles, and with one foreign damoiselle in particular, the rescuers were represented as troublemakers in this disastrous scene. Froissart’s narration qualifies their participation in the ball in two ways. Visually, their dress appears as outlandish and deforming as the animalistic costume of the king. The pointed headdress of the damoiselles shows them to be horned, and thus in league with diabolical forces.29 Verbally, the women fare no better. Both

26 27 28

29

History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 151–69, 180–92. Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis, 2:64–71, 88–93. See Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Lorraine Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and Its Illustrators: Historicity and Ficticity in the Verbal and Visual Imaging of Charles VI’s ‘Bal des Ardents’,” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000): 123–80; Lorraine Stock, Cultural Primitivism and the Medieval Wild Man (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming); and Peter Ainsworth, “Froissart et ‘ses’ manuscrits: images, codex et ressources électroniques,” in Froissart dans sa forge, ed. Michel Zink and Odile Bombarde (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2006). See E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 24–41; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 155–62; and Christine Marchello-Nizia, “Codes vestimentaires et langage amoureux au XVe siècle,” Europe: Revue Mensuelle 61 (October

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Froissart and the chronicler of Saint-Denis focus on dancing, the frenzied sarrasine of the king and the courtly steps of the damoiselles. For the chroniclers, it was a behavior that deserved moral condemnation because it bore consequences that extended beyond the nobles and damoiselles. In the clerical account, “the kingdom is threatened by lamentation and infamy” (66). The stock charge of immoral shenanigans transmutes into a political indictment involving the near death of the king. Since it was rhetorically impossible to chastise the king for his own foolishness, someone else had to take the blame. Through a series of associations, the chronicler of Saint-Denis takes his readers from the dancing groups to their immoral, evil machinations, all the way to a sinister picture of the kingdom in disarray. The damoiselles are the common presence throughout, this time representing in all their movements and finery, the suspicion of civic disorder. Embedded in these chronicles are clues of a damning portrait in the making. In the tense season at Charles VI’s court, the figure of wanton, politically dubious damoiselles took shape, mixing commonplaces of courtly literature in uneasy measure with time-honored misogynistic clerical judgments. The fascination with dress-up, the disgust with glamour, the fear of eros run amuck, the frustration over civic responsibility: this combination of feelings was an undercurrent of many clerical accounts of women’s behavior that circulated at European courts over centuries. Yet, in this case, darkened by the specter of the king’s death, the implications were especially forceful. Could this representation of a specific, identifiable group be activated against a known cohort of women? Some ten years later, there was evidence of this representation hardening into condemnation. In her Livre des Trois Vertus Christine had devoted a section to the “ladies and women who live in the court of a princess or high-born lady” (dames et damoiselles qui demeurent a court de princepce ou haulte dame, 121). As Roberta Krueger has taught us, Christine was peculiarly sensitive to the dilemmas of women in the public domain and she wrote with the intention of preparing them strategically for this life.30 Her advice to damoiselles operated largely by prohibition. Unlike the books concerning the princess and noble ladies, where she balanced what was forbidden with what was recommended, Christine concentrated on what these women should never do. To emphasize the seriousness of this warning, she presented a scenario of banishment: La sage princepce, tout ainsi que le pastour se prent garde que ses berbis soient maintenues en santé et se aucune en devient roingneuse il la separe du troupel de paour qu’elle peust empirer les autres.31 (The wise princess, just as the shepherd takes care that his sheep are kept in good health, and if any one becomes mangy, separates it from the flock for fear that it may harm the others.) 1983): 36–42. See also E. Jane Burns, Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 30 Roberta Krueger is working on a book on late-medieval and early-modern didactic literature for women. 31 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, 72.

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The scene relays the common fear that licenses eliminating any likely troublemaker from the group. The nature of the trouble is ambiguous since the trope of disease does not specify any particular problem.32 The pronouncements that follow revolve around a pair of concerns. Following in the moralistic vein of the chronicler of Saint-Denis, she focuses on their dress, and its provocations (superflu habis). The warning reads: Afin que toutes choses en honnesteté se correspondent, que les robes et les attours de ses femmes, quoy que ilz soient riches et beaulx comme il apertient, bien soient fais d’onneste façon, bien mis et bien seans et nettement maintenus, mais n’y ait nulle desguiseure ne deshonnesteté de trop grands colléz ou d’aultres oultrages.33 (In order that everything correspond modestly, [the wise princess wishes] that the dress and the headdress of her women, though sumptuous and rich according to their station, also be modest, as it is appropriate, that they be seemly, neat, and well cared for so that there be no deceptive layering, nothing vulgar, no exaggerated necklines or other excesses.)

Christine reworks the traditional clerical correspondence linking the scale of the damoiselle’s dress with the reliability of her character. If clothes are excessive, the person appears tricky, and is marked as suspect of delinquent behavior. The choice of appearing in such manner of dress is symptomatic of a volatile, fickle person. As so many protean guises, clothing functions as the outward sign of a character in revolt. “But God knows how large the headdress is and how high the points are! Truthfully, it is a very ugly outfit, and unbecoming” (Mais Dieux scet se selon cest abit convient large attour et haultes cornes qui rest en verité un très lai abillement, et qui messiet, 159). Christine too conjures up horned, devilish women, and in so doing she attempts to strip them of all guises, exposing them as unsightly, that is, as unfit for the courtly world. Christine works another, well-known correspondence between the damoiselle’s outerwear and her language. Her chapter of prohibitions locks the two together as comparable bodily effects. Christine fixes on the mouth “that nourishes passion, luxury, and voluptuousness” (nourrissement du feu, lecherie et friandise, 18). She aims to muzzle it, to require the damoiselle to be coyes en parole, if not silent, then soft-spoken and still.34 The strain of this prohibition is acute. How could a member of a courtly company reckon with the conflicting pressures on her language? For the damoiselle d’honneur the crux remained: her service demanded beautiful talk.

32

“Le bon prince qui aimera son pays gardera les siens soingneusement a l’exemple du bon pasteur si qu’il garde ses ouailles, lequel veille par grant cure pour les deffendre des loups et des males bestes, et que elles soient nettement tenues et en santé…” (The good prince who loves his country will look after his own subjects carefully according to the example of the good shepherd who looks after his sheep. He watches out for them with great attention in order to defend them from wolves and malicious beasts so that they will be kept clean and healthy.) Livre de la policie, ed. Angus Kennedy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 13. 33 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, 73. 34 See Jean Gerson, “Pour que on refrène sa langue,” in Œuvres complètes, 7, pt. 1:400.

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Christine’s reflection on flattery was one way of acknowledging this strain. The inveterate flatterer speaks reassurances and consolations instead of warnings and critiques. She is quiet when she should speak up to defend her mistress. Invariably, the flattering damoiselle does not keep the interests of her mistress uppermost in her mind: “By her talk, the flatterer drives a nail into the eye of his master or mistress; that is to say, she blinds them with blandishments” (Le flatteur par sa parole fait tout ainsi que se il fichoit un clou en l’ueil de son maistre ou maistresse, c’est a dire qu’il l’aveugle par ses blandices, 127). This cruel portrait turns language into a piercing weapon. As clerical commentators had devised it some centuries earlier, the flatterer disabled those who listened, making them unable to see and judge properly.35 This speaker was out to attack the authority of the mistress, and the sharpness of words also conveys the stakes. Flattery is a purely self-serving language that makes a mockery of service. It signals an unreliable speaker who may turn out to be disloyal or seditious. For courtly culture, the problem of flattery was double-edged. In Eustache Deschamps’s ballade, “Sur la manière d’être à la cour,” “one must flatter; one must fawn over those who are in power and tell them that they act wisely” (Il fault blandir, il fault larder / ceuls qui ont le gouvernement / et dire qu’ilz font saigement).36 In order to survive the pressures of court service, flattery with all its flourishes often proved unavoidable. It provided a pragmatic strategy for navigating the pitfalls of service, of maintaining the favor of the lady or lord even under the tensest of circumstances. Once again a double bind threatens. The courtly situation of the damoiselle’s language could push the speaker up against an impasse: damned if she does flatter, vulnerable if she doesn’t. For Christine, however, no matter what the practice at court, flattery with its injurious potential placed the damoiselles in the realm of slanderers.37 The problem of injurious language was a major preoccupation for Christine over decades, as Thelma Fenster has proven. And Christine assessed the risks of such language from many different angles. The damoiselles’ language could do the damage of slander because their words “betray the woman to whom they are outwardly pleasant and obedient” (ils font traïson a celle a qui ils monstrent bel semblant et obeisance).38 Speaking injuriously in this way was an act of violation because it destroyed the social bond that their comely language was meant to confirm. The damoiselles’ aggressive, destructive language had a peculiar punch because it jeopardized the stability of the royal household. And this danger spread outwards since such defamation “can travel to different countries” (Car cellui diffame puet 35 36

Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 126–29. Eustache Deschamps, “Balade en forme de lettres patentes sur la manière d’être à la cour,” and “Sur la manière d’être à la cour,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de SaintHilaire, 6:13. 37 Thelma Fenster, “La fama, la femme, et la Dame de la Tour: Christine de Pizan et la médisance,” in Au champ des escriptures, 461–77; and my The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 138–45. 38 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, 73.

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aler en maintes contrees, 145). In this analysis, the women’s language verges on becoming a problem of the common welfare. Christine’s confrere, Jean Gerson, had already made an explicit link between the injurious language of flattery and sedition. In a harangue on the reform of the kingdom, in Paris, 1405, he lashed out against the flatterer who “by words with two faces instigates dissensions so as to give the appearance of making peace” (par parolles à deux visaigez … suscite dissencions pour sambler qu’il face la paix).39 The threat of flattery was particularly dangerous because it developed under the cover of diplomacy. However counterintuitive it appears to link flattery with slander, Gerson made clear how the flatterer badmouths in a surreptitious manner. That could prove devastating for the common good. In her advice to women at court, Christine did not state the problem of political betrayal outright. Nor did she identify women’s language as seditious. But the momentum of her warnings about flattering, backbiting damoiselles signals the danger nonetheless. And the web of allusion to the consequences of public language at court demonstrates that she, like Gerson, was critiquing the destructive dissension that flattery created in the kingdom. Unlike him, she focused her critique on the most vulnerable female speakers in the public domain. Her harsh critique was meant as a support. Christine, the habitué and canny reporter of the Parisian court scene, had more than likely observed what was happening to Isabeau’s ladies.40 Her didactic prose on the court of Charles V had already tackled implicitly the vagaries that she remarked in the circle of his son and daughter-in-law. The damoiselles d’honneur had come a long way. Over these ten tumultuous years of Charles VI’s reign, their reputation mutated significantly: from attractive followers in the courtly retinue to a band of scheming, slanderous gossips or lauzengiers. In the representation of clerical and lay writers, they had swung from one end of the courtly lineup, from Bonne Compaignie, all the way to the most tricky personae of courtly love, the badmouthing mesdisants. Christine’s didactic work responded to the threats facing women at court by warning them of this switch in role. However hard she tried to outfit them for the pitfalls of court life, her depictions had the added bittersweet effect of reinforcing the putative role of treacherous speaker. Her advice contributed to making the damoiselles a focal point of so much discontent and suspicion about Charles’s court as a whole. Within the same year, another event of public speaking shows how the women in Isabeau of Bavaria’s service continued being conscripted into the role of unreliable, seditious speakers. The occasion was a sermon preached by the Augustinian friar, Jacques Legrand, to the queen on the subject of her entourage.41 He spoke allegorically on the battle of Virtues and Vices, as well as on the court of Venus. 39 40 41

Jean Gerson, “Vivat Rex” or “Pour la réforme du royaume,” 7:1163. Thelma Fenster, “Who’s a Heroine? The Example of Christine de Pizan,” 122. Michel Pintoin cites the sermon in the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis, 3:268–71. The illustrations of Jacques Legrand’s didactic manual, Livre des bonnes mœurs, continue to show his critique of women’s ostentatious dress. See Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 1138.

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Legrand turned to allegory so as to make his judgment obliquely and to save himself from Isabeau’s disapproval. But he also used allegory to slot the damoiselles into a nasty part and treat them censoriously. His scenario evokes the Rose and the special courtly world from which vice is banished. Courtiers have given into offensive, even wanton behavior. As followers of Venus, courtiers play the roles of Drunkenness and Debauchery (Ebriatas, Commessacio). It is the damoiselles who are held responsible for corrupting the ecuyers, and waylaying knights. Their carrying-on was represented as scandalizing even the common people. Legrand’s allegory pushes the stock type of the indulgent courtier to the extreme. “These outrageous, pathetic followers” (maledicte et infernales pedissece, 269), as Legrand calls them, are caricatures, libertines avant la lettre, who deserve moral condemnation. Legrand goes further, branding the women courtiers as mesdisants. According to the chronicler, “the preacher did not ignore that women, and above all, ladies flared up easily at words that did not please them; their anger was fearsome” (Sciret muliebre genus et precipue generosum a displicentibus verbis ad iracundiam promptum, que multis funesta fuit, 268). From the outset, the queen and her damoiselles were typecast as furious, vengeful characters. Their actions were described in emotional terms that typified the anxiety around mesdisants. Legrand’s sermon also dovetailed with the clerical analysis of slanderers, as angry people bound to speak injuriously. Legrand’s judgment, then, conflated the type of corrupt courtiers with mesdisants. This potent combination helped him to hit the damoiselles even harder. Legrand drew a scene of Isabeau’s entourage with alienating social effects. “If you don’t believe me,” the preacher chastises the queen, “go out into the city, disguised as a poor woman, and you will hear what everyone is saying” (Que si non velis credere, in habitu mulieris paupercule eundo per civitatem, audies ab infinitis personis, 268). The preacher frames Isabeau of Bavaria by claiming that the clergy is in solidarity with city people. Not only does he dress her down, putting her into the place of a commoner, but he also accuses the court of having lost touch with its subjects. In this allegorical scenario, the angry, debauched servants are accountable for having estranged the royalty from their citizens. Legrand has scripted Isabeau’s women in the role of splitting the kingdom apart, and their language and actions are therefore set up to have treacherous repercussions. The reported responses to Legrand’s allegorical sermon reveal best how the Augustinian cleric succeeded in putting the model of disloyal, destructive damoiselles into action. “Several of the queen’s women go to the preacher to express their shock at his temerity,” Legrand related, and they asked, “how could you have dared to speak so much ill in public?” (sed dum a domicellis ipsi familiarissimis predicatori dictum fuisset: “Miramur qualiter ausu temerario tot mala protuleritis libere,” 268). The clerical judgment is simple to anticipate. The women who are depicted disregarding the interests of the wider kingdom will prove to be threatening speakers who retaliate against the preacher. They charge him with their own crime of speaking badly about others. In a stunning reversal, the chronicle shows them to be exemplary badmouthers. It is not surprising that this account ends with the king applauding Legrand and accepting his diagnosis of

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the ills of the state. Once the damoiselles are implicated in disturbing the common good of the kingdom, condemnation is inevitable. With the monarch lined up alongside the cleric against his own courtiers, the women have no chance to defend themselves against the charge of having spoken divisively. They are subject to the king’s censure.42 But the king is insane, and the damoiselles’ speech to the preacher conforms to their duty to speak out in defense of their lady as even Christine outlined it. Such circumstances had little or no bearing on the clerical rendition of the episode. Since both Legrand and the Saint-Denis chronicler saw Charles VI’s court through the lens of its court of love, they used the literary model against the courtiers. They framed the women in Isabeau of Bavaria’s entourage as incorrigible mesdisants with the result that the damoiselles were locked into a condemning role, convicted according to a literary scene that was not only rife with its own tensions, but the favorite butt of clerical attack. All the insecurity about and resentment toward the court as a whole was focalized through a collective figure, a persona whom courtly and clerical culture had long agreed to hate. And this channeling deepened the resentment even more. The final move to scapegoat the damoiselles worked to pin the destructive political chaos on them. Even though many different individuals made up the queen’s entourage over this twenty-year period, they were consistently charged as a group. Isolated, and confined to their adversarial role, these women were primed to absorb the extreme accusation of sedition as well. Isabeau of Bavaria’s damoiselles d’honneur were arrested and hauled away because they had been represented as playing their courtly role too well. They were too visible, too extravagant, too quick with words. Their good name already contained the seeds of their notorious bad name. The attributes that defined their service to the queen were held against them, the talents commonly praised as part of the delightful spectacles of courtly love turned into liabilities. Ironically, these women were perceived and judged through a courtly tradition of literary representation that had grown more untenable and discredited over the years. Bonne Compaignie and the mesdisants had been twisted together and had yielded, by the early fifteenth century, a contradictory and dark figure. In the hands of moralists as different as Christine de Pizan and Jacques Legrand, this figure developed such a determining force that it came to be acted out on several living women. The Saint-Denis chronicler related that the queen chased several damoiselles from her household. A just banishment? Perhaps. A desperate face-saving move on the part of the queen? Given the bitter rivalries at the court of Charles VI, more than likely. But it also constituted an actual strike against the person of the damoiselle d’honneur, one case that confirms how exactly the language defining people can be translated into blows. 42

“Contrary to the expectations of his court, he accepted his recommendation, he judged it reasonable to put an end to the excesses according to the preacher” (rex … ultra spem detrahencium curialium ipsum recommendatum habens, racionabile judicans ut predicati emendarentur excessus). Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis, 3:274–75.

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It would take another decade before the full vindictive force behind the representations of the damoiselles was unleashed. When the Cabochiens seized thirteen or fourteen of them in May 1413, they branded them with the figure of the mesdisants, inflicting the charge of hateful destructive language directly upon them. Denouncing them as traitors was the bitter proof that these women were victimized by public language, the power of making people’s reputations, and breaking them violently. In the world of the French monarchs Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria, the traffic in courtly representations of women had human costs. Because the damoiselles enacted the honor of the royals, they were the first to suffer the consequences of dishonor. It fell to these supporting actors to pay the price for maintaining the illusory show of an irreproachable monarchy, and its lavish, beautiful, loving company.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. The Bal des Ardents, Paris, 1393. Jean Froissart, Chroniques. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 2642, fol. 176.

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Performing the Nation: The Play Performed at the Great Feast in Christine de Pizan’s Biography of Charles V Lori J. Walters

This study examines Christine de Pizan’s description of the ceremonials surrounding the 1378 visit to Paris of Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg.1 These events figure in her 1404 biography of Charles V, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, hereafter referred to as Charles V.2 The ceremonials included a short play put on for the Emperor by Charles V at the Great Feast held in his honor. In Christine’s version of the events, the play, which depicts French princes of the blood working together in a common Christian effort, can be considered to be a mise en abyme of the “staging techniques” characteristic of the exercise of royal power by Charles V. Charles had exhibited such techniques in several ways that I will consider here; first, by having the play produced; second, by having a description of the play included in his own official copy of Les Grandes Chroniques de France, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 2813.3 The description of the Emperor’s visit in this copy, where it is illustrated by eighteen miniatures, is the most densely illuminated segment of text in the entire book. A splendid miniature in this segment is the often-reproduced miniature of the play,4 1

2 3

4

For a recent study of the episode, with pertinent bibliography, see Françoise Autrand, “Mémoire et cérémonial. La visite de l’empereur Charles IV à Paris en 1378 d’après les Grandes Chroniques de France et Christine de Pizan,” in Une femme de lettres au Moyen Âge. Études autour de Christine de Pizan, ed. Liliane Dulac and Bernard Ribémont (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), 91–103. I thank Roberta Krueger for her comments on an earlier version of this essay. Suzanne Solente, ed., Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, 2 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1936–40). See Solente, Charles V, 1:xlii. Solente here refers to the copy attributed to Pierre d’Orgemont, which is BnF f. fr. 2813, 1:xlii, xliv n. 1. Generally speaking, Christine repeats the narration of the Emperor’s trip as it was found in copies of the long version of Les Grandes Chroniques, although every once in a while she omits some details like a proper name; Solente, Charles V, 1:xxxviii n. 5. For more on Christine’s use of MS 2813, see Lori J. Walters, “Christine de Pizan comme biographe royale,” in Le passé à l’épreuve du présent, ed. Pierre Chastang and Michel Zimmermann, forthcoming. Illustration of the miniature is provided in François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France, trans. Ursule Molinaro (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 107; Susan Crane, The

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whose heraldry makes allusion to Jean de Berry and Philippe le Hardi, Charles V’s brothers. Whereas MS 2813 has an extensive iconographic cycle, no such cycle was present in any known manuscript of Christine’s biography.5 If the play’s exemplary function is suggested by the miniature found in MS 2813 and by several lines in the text, its exemplary function in Charles V is indicated by variations on those same lines showing that Christine adapts Charles’s earlier use of the play as a powerful tool in order to meet the political needs of her own time. My findings support Anne Hedeman’s claims that the relatively unadorned tracts of people such as Jean Gerson and Christine became the true successors of the political program outlined in Charles V’s copies of Les Grandes Chroniques.6 In her Charles V Christine resurrects Charles’s use of the play, performed a quarter of a century earlier, as an example of princes’ collaboration in a common Christian effort, thereby evoking problems facing contemporary France, problems that she implicitly calls upon Jean de Berry to help solve. Following in the footsteps of Charles V, who had originally employed the play to rally the Emperor to France’s side against England, Christine emphasizes the play’s exemplary function in an attempt to encourage French princes of her time, chief among them Jean de Berry, to band together again and repel English aggression. This is a study of how Christine appropriated techniques popular with Charles V for her own use as royal biographer, as she tried to unify France during the civil dissentions of the early years of the fifteenth century. My ultimate objective is to understand how Christine performs, and in performing helps to bring about, ideas about nationhood that were particularly dear to the French monarchy. I. Christine and the play performed during the Great Feast One of the high points of the 1378 visit of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to Paris was the play put on for him at the Great Feast held in his honor.7 In her biography of the French king Charles V, Christine de Pizan describes the play as an “entremez,” or intermède. It was a little treat for the eyes that was served to the King and royal princes between courses: Entremez y ot, l’un comment Godeffroy de Billon conquist Jherusalem, laquelle histoire ramentevoir estoit pertinent pour exemples donner à telx princes; estoit la cité grande et belle, de bois, peinte, à panonceaux et armes des Sarrazins, moult bien faitte, qui fu menée devant le dois, et puis la nef ou Goudeffroy de Billon estoit, et puis l’assault commencié et la cité prise, qui fu bonne chose à veoir.

5

6

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Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 165. As has been noted by Solente, Charles V, 1:lxxxv–xcvii, and Anne Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes Chroniques de France,” 1274–1422 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 138–39. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 140, makes the related point that the text of her Charles V often had an ideological function similar to that conveyed by images in books of Christine’s time produced for Charles’s son, Charles VI. Crane, The Performance of Self, 164–66.

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(There were intermèdes, one [showing] how Godefroy de Bouillon conquered Jerusalem, the retelling of which was pertinent for giving examples to such princes; the city was great and beautiful, made of wood, painted, in panels and arms of Saracens, very well done, which was brought before the dais, and then the ship where Godefroy de Bouillon was, and then the assault began and the city taken, which was a good thing to see. Charles V, III.41; my emphasis.)8

The play represents the story of Godefroy de Bouillon’s conquest of Jerusalem in the First Crusade.9 Besides the Emperor, his son, and his retinue, the play’s audience of noble men included the dauphin, the dukes of Berry, Brabant, Bourbon, Burgundy, and others. Christine justifies Charles’s choice of subject by saying that he believed that there was no better example to put before the noblest men in Christendom. Here is how the same point had been made in MS 2813: Et fist le roy faire à propos ceste histoire, que il lui sembloit que devant plus grans en la Chrestienté ne povoit on rementevoir, ne donner exemple, de plus notable fait, ne à gens qui mieulx peussent, deussent et feussent tenus tele chose faire et entreprendre, ou service de Dieu.10 (And à propos the king had this story put on, because it seemed to him that before greater people in Christianity one could not retell nor give example of a more notable action to any people who were better able, more obligated, and more expected to do and undertake such a thing, in God’s service.)

The verb ramentevoir appearing in passages in both works means to bring exemplary lessons culled from the past to bear upon contemporary events, in the hope that these will in turn give a positive shape to France’s future. The lessons encoded into the original event staged by Charles V, which Christine sought to bring again to mind in her biography, become apparent when we survey Christine’s description of the Emperor’s trip to Paris. Her narration begins in III.33 with the Emperor writing to Charles V to request a visit, and ends with her summary of the event in III.49. Charles sends a gift of horses to the Emperor as he makes his way to Paris. He then goes to welcome Charles IV with an assembly of royal princes, greeting him with sounding trumpets and a full display of royal regalia. The heading of Christine’s Chapter 37, “Cy dit la belle ordenence et grant magnificence, qui à l’entrée de Paris fu faite, à la venue de l’Empereur” (Where one speaks of the great pomp and of the beautiful organization deployed in the Emperor’s honor, at his entry into Paris), stresses Charles’s elaborate organization of the ceremonials surrounding his visit. Christine describes to her readers Charles’s reception of the Emperor in the royal palace, the presents made to him by the city of Paris, the ceremonies observed when he lunched with the French king, and the most splendid celebration of all, the dinner known as the Great Feast. 8 9 10

All English translations in this study are my own. Avril, Manuscript Painting, 107. Quoted by Hedeman, The Royal Image, 306 n. 46; my emphasis. Roland Delachenal, ed., Les Grandes Chroniques de France. Chroniques des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V, 4 vols. (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France, 1910–20), 2:238–40.

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The reason why Charles V had so carefully orchestrated the Emperor’s visit becomes clear when he pronounces a speech afterwards at the Louvre palace. Beginning with reference to the conquest of Gascony by “Saint Charlemagne,”11 Charles decries the fact that English kings, both in the past and at the present time, refuse to recognize the principle that they are vassals of the King of France. After hearing Charles’s supremely eloquent speech, the Emperor decides to discredit English claims with his fellow Germans (III.43) and promises to place himself and his relatives at Charles’s service. The pact between the two Charles is sealed by an exchange of gifts. The Emperor was offered, among other things, a piece of the true cross, two books of hours, and two gold flacons, in the form of pilgrim’s shells, sculpted in high relief depicting how Saint Jacques had appeared to Saint Charlemagne to show him the road to Spain (III.44–46). In summarizing these events, Christine claims that Charles’s actions during the visit gave eloquent testimony to his “virtuous deeds and good conduct.” She emphasizes how important it was that he had had the exemplary events of his visit set down in writing: Est bien drois que [pour] belle legende et exemplaire nottoire aux princes à venir soit enregistrée chose, laquelle si notablement et grandement ne pourroit avoir esté menée et par tel ordre en toutes choses, sanz en nulle voir quelconques faulte, se grant poissance, grant senz et grant prudence de prince ne l’eust gouvernée… (It is good that such a beautiful story and such a salutary example for the princes of the future be set down in writing, because never could a thing so magnificent and important have been conducted as perfectly, with such harmony and without the least clumsiness, if it had not been organized by a prince as noble, as intelligent and as farsighted. Charles V, II.49; my emphasis.)

In her biography Christine repeats Charles’s gesture of having had the event set down in writing in Les Grandes Chroniques in order to emphasize her own text’s similar function in proposing an example for present and future princes. In thus resurrecting and perpetuating Charles’s original exemplary gestures of putting on the play and having its exemplary lessons eternalized for future generations, Christine, as I will show, can be said to re-perform them in order to realize the King’s goals for the nascent French nation-state. Christine’s aim was to encourage present and future rulers to follow the example set by Charles, who was himself following the examples set by Saint Louis and Charlemagne.12 We have already seen that Charles honored Charlemagne as a saint. His vision of Charlemagne was colored by the description of the Christian Emperors found in Book V of Saint Augustine’s City of God. This becomes apparent when Christine concludes her description of the Emperor’s visit by ranking 11

Although Charlemagne was never officially canonized, Charles V celebrated him as if he were a saint. For Christine’s efforts to promote Charles V as a saintly king in the line of Saint Louis and Charlemagne, see Lori J. Walters, “Constructing Reputations: Fama and Memory in Charles V and L’Advision-Cristine,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Smail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 118– 42, at 130–36. 12 Walters, “Constructing Reputations.”

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Charles V along with Alexander and the worthies of the Roman Empire. She connects Charles’s conception of a prosperous and stable kingdom of France heading a united Christendom to his consideration for Charlemagne, the first “great Charles,” and for the work that had supplied the theoretical underpinnings of the Holy Roman Empire, The City of God, reported by Einhard in his Vita Caroli Magni to be the Emperor’s favorite book. As Christine tells her readers in III.12, Charles V followed Charlemagne in considering The City of God to be the monarchy’s highest authority after the Bible. II. The concept of performance as it relates to the nation Along with Saint Louis, Charlemagne was one of the major figures in Les Grandes Chroniques, which Suzanne Solente, the modern editor of Christine’s biography, claims as its major source.13 Portraits of the chief writers who promoted the reigns of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, Einhard and Primat, are the only author portraits to be found among the 176 miniatures in MS 2813. Primat, the subject of two of the three author portraits, was the monk of Saint-Denis from whom Louis IX, the future Saint Louis, commissioned Les Grandes Chroniques some time in the mid-thirteenth century, thereby giving the institutionalization of the official ideology of France a tremendous boost. Primat freely adapted existing Latin chronicles into the first installment of a French dynastic history, which was continued by others at the monastery. When the “Mad King” Charles VI neglected maintaining these chronicles, others stepped in to supply the lack.14 One such person was Christine de Pizan, who in 1404 undertook a biography of the reigning king’s father, Charles V. Pierre Nora has called Les Grandes Chroniques the source of “a new historical memory” in France.15 In these chronicles French rather than Latin becomes the language capable of creating the idea of a “nation,” a term that appears several times in the work’s prologue. Christine picks up on Primat’s use of the term when in Charles’s biography she expresses her faith, despite momentary setbacks, in the glorious destiny of the noble nacion françoise.16 In her biography Christine documents the ongoing transformation of France from a group of separate kingdoms into a more cohesive entity held together by shared beliefs, a centralizing monarchy operating out of Paris and Saint-Denis, and unified by a common language. But not only does she record France’s collective memory, Christine helps shape 13

“Christine s’est servie d’abord et avant tout des Grandes Chroniques de France. Elle les cite en maints endroits…” Solente, Charles V, 1:xli. 14 Hedeman, The Royal Image, 137–39. 15 Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:21. 16 “Ainsi fu le commencement de celle noble nacion françoise couronnée d’ancienne noblece, laquelle [Dieux mercis!], d’oir en hoir, est continuée, maulgré les flocs de la descordable Fortune, jusques cy en amendent en bien, à laquelle chose Dieux ottroit tousjours accroissement de gloire jusques au terme des cieulx!” (Solente, Charles V, 1:13–14, my emphasis). See Lori J. Walters, “Christine de Pizan, Primat, and the noble nation françoise,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales 9 (2002): 237–46.

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that memory, and the nation itself in the process, at a moment when, in Hedeman’s words, royal history was becoming national history.17 A theoretical model for this study is supplied by the Egyptologist Aleida Assmann. She has found that collective memory has its origins in the obligation of friends and family to remember the names of their dead and to hand them down to posterity. Remembering the dead has a religious dimension and a secular one that can be summed up by the difference between pietas and fama. In contrast to the religious orientation of pietas, fama is a secular means of making someone eternal. Assmann shows that in many ways fama resembles a theatrical mise en scène.18 Complementing the insights of Aleida Assmann are those of Susan Crane, who focuses upon the performance of self during the Hundred Years War between France and England. Crane maintains that in contrast to the modern belief that performance falsifies the true, inner self, in this period performance makes the self. These theoretical models, taken together, help us understand how Christine, in composing Charles’s biography at the request of Philippe le Hardi, performs her self in order to perform the nation. I adopt Crane’s definition of performance as “heightened and deliberately communicative behaviors, public displays that use visual as well as rhetorical resources.”19 Christine’s biography constitutes an elaborate dramatization of Charles V’s fama.20 It perpetuates Charles’s own staging techniques, i.e., the ceremonials and rituals surrounding the exercise of his royal public functions.21 III. The historical background and the relation of Charles V to Les Grandes Chroniques When Philippe le Hardi requested the biography from Christine in 1404, twentyfour years after his brother’s death, the King of France Charles VI was insane, and his wife Ysabel de Bavière had been declared regent for the underage dauphin, Louis de Guyenne. Ysabel was poorly equipped to head the government. Louis’s uncles and brothers were supposed to assist her, but they preferred to feud amongst themselves. The biography responds to these challenges to monarchical stability in two major ways. First of all, it provides the dauphin Louis with a model of wise kingship, in the hope that the work would mold the young dauphin

17 18

Hedeman, The Royal Image, 139. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 33; Margarete Zimmermann, “La memoria au féminin,” in Contexts and Continuities: Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pizan (Glasgow, 21–27 July 2000), ed. Angus Kennedy (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2000), 3:922–23. 19 Crane, The Performance of Self, 3. 20 Walters, “Constructing Reputations,” 118–42. 21 For more on this topic, see Lori J. Walters, “Christine de Pizan, France’s Memorialist: Persona, Performance, Memory,” in Cultural Memory in France, ed. Aimée Boutin et al., Journal of European Studies (April 2005), 191–207.

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according to the model of his wise grandfather Charles V rather than his mentally ill father Charles VI. Second, the biography attempts to unite those governing the country on the dauphin’s behalf. Christine wanted to create unity among the dauphin Louis de Guyenne’s uncle Louis d’Orléans and his great uncles, Philippe le Hardi and Jean, duc de Berry – all three her patrons at one time or another – who tended to forget the dauphin’s interests and instead jockeyed for their own personal advantage. Although Philippe’s agenda was self-serving, he was nonetheless the person most committed to the cause of unity. Christine commends Philippe for his wisdom. In this, as in many other qualities, he more closely resembled Charles V than did Louis d’Orléans, with whom he often came into conflict. It is likely that Philippe wanted to show that by having Christine glorify Charles he was the one most qualified to continue his brother’s work.22 The political situation deteriorated further soon after Philippe’s commission of Christine’s services. Philippe died on April 27, 1404 when Christine had finished only the first part of her three-part biography. On January 1, 1405, having completed the book a month earlier, Christine presented it to Jean de Berry, Charles V’s only brother still alive at the time. Civil war broke out in Paris in 1407, led on the Burgundian side by Philippe’s son Jean sans Peur and on the Armagnac side by Jean de Berry. Then followed over a quarter century of conflict culminating in the English occupation of France. It took the intervention of Jeanne d’Arc to once again put a Valois king on the French throne, in the person of Charles VII, Charles V’s grandson. Christine celebrated Jeanne’s promotion of Charles VII in her last and final work, written from the convent of Poissy where she had gone to escape the Parisian massacres of 1418.23 Christine’s retelling of Charles’s production of the play is a reaction to the political turmoil in France at the time she was writing Charles V. Her biography represents an ideologically motivated attempt to keep France on a stable course through some of the most difficult years of early French history, years in which the nascent nation-state was threatened with extinction. Charles V’s brother Philippe commissioned the biography at a moment when the official copies of Les Grandes Chroniques were not being maintained as they should have been. 24 Philippe wanted a biography of Charles that would foster the continuation of the work his deceased brother had begun. To guide Christine’s efforts, he lent her several copies of Les Grandes Chroniques produced during Charles’s lifetime and under his supervision.25 Although we cannot identify all the copies to which Christine had access, Solente, Autrand, and Hedeman all agree that Christine knew MS 2813.26 This manuscript contains the only complete description of the 22 23

Solente, Charles V, 1:xxvii–xxix. Entering Poissy in her early fifties, Christine spent the final eleven years of her life there in the company of her daughter and Charles VII’s sister, who were nuns, both named Marie. 24 Hedeman, The Royal Image, 139. 25 Solente, editor of Charles V, identifies one copy as Vat. lat. 4791, which Hedeman does not treat in her study of Les Grandes Chroniques. 26 Solente, Charles V, 1:xxxviii–xlvi.

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Emperor’s visit.27 All the other extant versions are abridgements of its text.28 It is believed that some time after Charles V’s death in 1380, MS 2813 passed into the hands of his brother Jean de Berry, the same patron to whom Christine presented the completed version of the biography. IV. Performing self and nation: Christine as performer of Charles V’s fama Christine’s expert manipulation of her persona, a term derived from the Latin word designating the facemask worn by actors on stage, facilitates her performance of self and nation. Christine’s usage highlights the inherent performativity of medieval works. In her biography, Christine collaborates with Philippe le Hardi in establishing Charles V’s bona fama as the “wise king Charles” as a model for the foundering monarchy. Christine stages Charles’s enduring reputation through the staging of her own identity as witness to that fama. She bases her biography on her own memories of the king while augmenting these with information from official documents and memories of others who had known him.29 In her introduction Christine states her name and how she came to write the book. When in the same passage she identifies herself, saying “Je, Christine de Pizan,” she symbolically raises her hand and testifies to the truth of what she has seen and heard of the King. She also testifies to the truth of the testimony of others whom she had interviewed as well as to her experience as reader of books considered important by the monarchy. Her biography is a document in which she sets down or registers Charles’s deeds in writing (note her use of the verb enregistrer in Charles V, III.49, quoted above). We realize that Christine considers her own biographical gesture to be the performance of a great example from the past, which needs to be repeated by other rulers and writers in order to influence the future of the French nation. It is significant that Christine opens her biography by placing herself onstage in her reader’s mind’s eye, as she addresses a prayer to God for the success of her work: Sire Dieux, euvre mes levres, enlumine[s] ma pensée, et mon entendement esclaires à celle fin que m’ignorance n’encombre mes sens à expliquer les choses conceues en ma memoire. (Lord God, open my lips, enlighten my thought, and clarify my understanding so that my ignorance does not prevent my senses from explaining the things conceived in my memory. Charles V, I.1; my emphasis.)

Christine here stages the King’s fama through the staging of her own persona as a spiritually improved version of her real self. Her opening words, “Sire Dieux, 27

Anne Hedeman, “Valois Legitimacy: Editorial Changes in Charles V’s Grandes Chroniques de France,” The Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 97–117, at 97. 28 Autrand, “Mémoire et cérémonial,” 91. 29 Solente, Charles V, 1:xxxii–lxxx. Eyewitness accounts are a major source. Christine’s father was undoubtedly present at the Great Feast. Christine, who was at the impressionable age of thirteen or fourteen at the time, may well have been there with her father.

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euvre mes levres,” are the first words of the Hours of the Virgin, which form the unchanging core of the Book of Hours. If these words were original to David (see Psalm 50.17), Mary’s ancestor, they pertain more to Mary in the context of the biography given Christine’s female gender and because Mary was at this time more closely associated with these words than was David. Mary, the speaker of the Book of Hours, repeats this very phrase in the Hours’ next two sections, the Hours of the Cross and the Hours of the Holy Spirit. In mouthing words so closely associated with the Virgin in the semi-ubiquitous Book of Hours, Christine implies that her authority to speak results from her imitation of Mary’s piety, humility, and sorrows, those the Virgin experienced by witnessing her son’s suffering and death. In terms of the vocabulary I have adopted for this essay, we might say that Christine has performed Mary’s example first by reading about it in the Book of Hours and second by applying it to her own actions. The selfimprovement derived from her reading gives her the authority to ask her readers to improve themselves on the example she has thus performed for them. The ultimate goal of this series of imitative performances is the betterment of country as a whole. By analyzing Christine’s practice in her biography of Charles V, we can understand how what Crane calls the performance of self was in early fifteenthcentury France tied up with the performance of the nation.30 In order to universalize her request, Christine exploits the analogy between herself as grieving widow and mother of three children, one a son who had died in childhood,31 and Mary, Christ’s mother and witness to his crucifixion and resurrection.32 She bases her appeal upon the connection between Christ and Mary at the Crucifixion, a prominent theme in the Hours of the Cross. Christine implicitly makes the claim that although she is a sinner like all other human beings, she has nonetheless become qualified to give birth to the image of a revitalized King Charles V because of her sufferings and her vow to lead a chaste life after the death of her husband. We are reminded that Christine received the commission to write the biography because Philippe had been highly impressed by her grasp of history in La Mutacion de Fortune. In that work, composed in 1403, Christine presents an allegorical rendition of her husband’s death, an event she represents as 30 31

I am currently exploring this idea in a book-length study. Although Christine does not allude directly to her son’s death in works prior to 1404 (nor anywhere in her works, for that matter), we cannot discount the possibility, given the pronounced role she everywhere accords to the connections between her personal history and her textual persona, that this fact about her life would have been known by her audience and contributed to the force of her self-representation as a second Mary. 32 This linking is also made in the “Obsecro te” and “O intemerata,” the two most popular optional prayers that owners of Books of Hours requested for their prayer books. Roger Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: George Braziller, in association with the Walters Art Gallery, 1988), 94. Christine’s self-presentation as the “seulette” or “widowed soul” had been a focal element of her persona from her earliest lyric poetry. Gerson’s similar use of the figure of the “seulette” to refer specifically to Mary at the Annunciation and Crucifixion tends to confirm my identification of Christine’s self-projection as a figure of Christ’s widowed mother. This was the subject of my plenary lecture at the Sixth International Christine de Pizan Society conference held in Paris, July 20–24, 2006.

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having transformed her into figures both of Christ and of his sorrowful mother. (In parsing her name as being that of the “most perfect man” plus “ine,” Christine adopts for herself a potentially double-gendered persona formed upon the figures of Mary and Christ or David, the latter viewed as a figura of Christ’s human nature.) By identifying the biography’s speaking self closely with Mary, Christine dramatizes her own piety, humility, and personal sufferings, as she enlists God’s help in trying to get her fellow citizens to work for the country’s unity and stability. Christine’s self-imaging as a second Mary as a model for humanity’s selfimprovement could not fail to be understood by her audience. In forming her persona on the exemplary image of Mary that was present throughout the Book of Hours, Christine was tacitly asking her readers to apply to France’s current difficulties the virtuous examples presented in her biography, foremost among them her own exemplary self and Charles’s, as well as the other examples contained therein of noble men and women of the past. And no one would have been more sensitive to Christine’s appeal than Jean de Berry, Charles V’s brother and the duke to whom Christine presented the biography. Before Jean’s death in 1416, he had commissioned six Books of Hours33 to take their place beside the other nine in his collection. (Of the six commissioned by Jean, none better communicates the magnificence and pageantry of his reign than the incomparable Très Riches Heures.) In reciting his Hours, which ideally Jean, like everyone else, would do each day, he would have been inspired to become an example for his people on the model of Mary and David. Applying this method of performative reading to Charles’s biography, as Christine’s opening words encourage him to do, Jean would understand that he was being asked, by the divine authority invested in the monarchy transmitted to him through Christine, to apply the exemplary lessons contained in the biography to his own life. I also believe that Christine intended her vernacular echoes of the opening words of the Hours of the Virgin to unite the French people behind Jean and the other royals guiding France. In III.12 Christine tells how Charles had all the venerable books of the past, from Holy Scripture to the masterpieces of the ancients, translated into French “pour la grant amour qu’il avoit à ses successeurs, que, au temps à venir, les voult pourveoir d’enseignements et sciences introduisables à toutes vertus” (for the great love he had for his successors, who, in times to come, he would want to supply with teachings and learning introducing all virtues). Charles instituted his translation campaign with the hope of imparting the wisdom of the past to later generations responsible for shaping the country’s future. Christine perpetuates Charles’s desire to produce virtuous actions in his successors by translating into French the Virgin’s words as they appeared in the very popular Book of Hours. I have shown previously how in her Sept psaumes allégorisés of 1409 Christine translates and provides moral commentary on the penitential psalms with a similar goal in mind, that of uniting the country through 33

Françoise Autrand, Jean de Berry. L’art et le pouvoir (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 438.

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the use of the “royal vernacular.”34 In her allegorization of Psalm 50 she again voices the line “Sire Dieux, ouvre mes levres,” this time choosing to speak rather through Mary’s ancestor, David. But her gesture remains ultimately the same. She makes an appeal for unity based upon the exemplary conduct of the country’s rulers and their male and female subjects, conduct all were to derive by imitating the monarchy’s major models, Christ, Mary, and David, or models derived from these models, as Christine in her Cité des Dames makes clear by establishing Mary as the ultimate female model. Christine’s account of the Holy Roman Emperor’s visit of 1378 reflects upon these performative processes. The rendition of the Great Feast in copies of Les Grandes Chroniques represents a historical precedent of exemplary value. Charles V had an account of events that had taken place between 1350 and 1380, which included the Great Feast, added to the chronicles, probably under the direction of his chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont.35 In explaining the significance of the play in these copies, Hedeman explains how it depicts secular and religious figures viewing a scene in which they worked together on a common Christian endeavor: One of Charles’s goals for the imperial visit was to persuade the Holy Roman Emperor to condemn England’s actions in the Hundred Years’ War. The plea he delivered before the emperor the night after the state dinner at which the play was performed (and recorded in the text of Les Grandes Chroniques two chapters after the description of the dinner) presented a litany of dastardly English deeds that contrasted markedly with the portrayal of the English monarch in the play. Charles described an English king who broke treaties and ordered the murder of emissaries, but the crusading play portrays a heroic English king assisting in a triumph over the infidel.36

The well known miniature of the play found on fol. 473v of Charles V’s MS 2813 introduces important nuances into the account of the Great Feast that confirm Hedeman’s interpretation. The illustration includes additions to the text that provide commentary on the original event, commentary to which Christine appears to have been sensitive. The miniature introduces a major change into the text by placing the King of England at the taking of the Holy City, whereas in fact only his brother Robert of Normandy had taken part in the event. Moreover, whereas the text does not identify the men depicted in the action of the play, coats of arms in the miniature identify two knights as the counts of Flanders and 34

See Lori J. Walters, “The Royal Vernacular: Poet and Patron in Christine de Pizan’s Sept psaumes allégorisés and Charles V,” in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 145–82. 35 Avril, Manuscript Painting, 107; Solente, Charles V, 1:xxxviii–xlvi. Philippe le Hardi presented Christine with at least one copy in order to supply her with background material for the biography. Vat. Lat. 4791 seems to have been her major source for the text, but she was familiar with many other copies, including Charles’s official copy, MS 2813. 36 Hedeman, The Royal Image, 132. Crane, The Performance of Self, 164, suggests that Charles V may have been trying to persuade the Emperor to undertake a Crusade with him. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 131, says there is little evidence to suggest Charles V was ever seriously interested in going on Crusade.

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Auvergne. Although many knights helped Godefroy de Bouillon make his final, victorious assault on Jerusalem, the miniature pictures only the counts of Flanders and Auvergne doing so.37 Hedeman thinks that these two counts may have been selected because the counties of Flanders and Auvergne belonged to Philippe le Hardi, duke of Burgundy, and Jean, duke of Berry, two of Charles’s brothers, who played important roles in the protocol of the emperor’s state visit. She goes on to speculate that the depiction of their predecessors as counts in the play was meant to compliment them.38 This detail, I believe, may have had another meaning. It was perhaps intended to be a reminder to the two dukes of their duty to work together on all forms of Christian campaign. The lesson encoded into the play, as it appears in the miniature illustrating the Great Feast in MS 2813, was that the dukes of Berry and Burgundy had to band together against English aggression. This included influencing the reigning King of England, who according to Charles V was acting badly, to conform to the positive image of the earlier English king in the play. In Christine’s rendition of the events, her line “laquelle histoire ramentevoir estoit pertinent pour exemples donner à telx princes” transfers the exemplary function of the similar reference in MS 2813 (quoted in Part I, above) to her description of the play in her biography of Charles V. Christine chooses to emphasize this scene again a quarter century after the production of MS 2813 because she believed that the warring dukes, Jean de Berry (who had witnessed the play at the Great Feast) and Jean sans Peur, son of the now deceased Philippe le Hardi (who had also witnessed the play), had to be reminded of its implicit lesson. It is also possible that a major reason for Philippe’s commission of the biography from Christine was to try to enlist his brother Jean’s cooperation in supporting the dauphin. In Christine’s biography, as in Charles’s own official copy of Les Grandes Chroniques, whose description of the play is illustrated by the splendid miniature highlighting the lessons to be drawn from the scene, the play presents a positive example in which the dukes of Burgundy and Berry collaborated rather than squabbled. Thanks to their collaboration, they were able to bring about a victory for a united Christendom in the legendary past, with a useful lesson for the troubles of 1379. If things were bad in 1379, they were even worse in 1404. The givens, however, were much the same: the dukes of Burgundy and Berry were again vying for position, internal strife was placing France in even greater danger of being invaded by England than in 1379, and the Great Schism continued to divide Christendom. Christine follows Charles V’s lead in trying to strengthen Valois legitimacy in face of internal divisions and external challenges from the English crown.39 Charles had the section about the Emperor’s visit added to Les Grandes Chroniques just one year before his death. His frequent updating of the chronicles was 37 38

Hedeman, The Royal Image, 131. Hedeman, The Royal Image, 132. See Hedeman’s full treatment of the Holy Roman Emperor’s visit, 128–33. 39 See Hedeman, “Valois Legitimacy,” 97–117.

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only one of the measures that Charles, a sickly king through much of his reign, adopted in order to ensure the continuity of his line. Such considerations would be uppermost in his mind since the beginnings of the Valois dynasty had been especially rocky. Ensuring dynastic legitimacy remained of great concern to the Valois. Charles V’s own reign, although remarkable for its achievements, was also a time of difficult conceptions and birth. It took Charles V and his queen eighteen years to produce a male heir. Ironically, the long-awaited heir, Charles VI, went crazy twelve years into his reign. Assuring dynastic continuity remained a major problem during the reign of Charles VI. Insanity did not render him impotent, far from it. Charles VII was his eleventh child. But before Jeanne d’Arc brought about Charles VII’s ordination and crowning in Reims in 1429, four previous dauphins had already met untimely deaths.40 If producing a dauphin was a difficult job, legitimizing his rule was even harder. Here is where warriors like Jeanne d’Arc and advisors and book producers like Christine and Pierre d’Orgemont enter the picture. When Charles V died in 1380, someone, most likely Pierre, added a frontispiece miniature of the anointing and crowning of Charles VI to Charles V’s copy of Les Grandes Chroniques. 41 Significantly, the book’s final illustration is of Queen Jeanne’s death; Charles V’s death is not depicted. The new addition, placed at the book’s opening, supports dynastic continuity and places Charles VI in the role of the continuator of the achievements of his father, the “wise king Charles.” The superb miniature of Charles VI illustrates not one, but two old adages. The first is, “The King is dead, long live the King!”42 the second, “The Prince is father of the king.”43 Both express the idea that what is important is not the individual ruler, but dynastic continuity. V. Conclusions: Christine’s performative Word By restaging a drama about a French victory in the Crusades, which Charles V had consciously staged in an original performance, Christine performs the glories of the past and calls into being the enduring status of the French nation and the Valois kingdom in the future. Christine’s biography represents her attempt to give birth to an image of kingship strong enough to continue the dynastic chain and to rally the country behind the designated heir. Christine’s incorporation into her biography of the account of the Emperor’s visit is indicative of her desire to pay tribute to Charles by appropriating for herself as monarchical memorialist the staging techniques Charles himself had employed in the exercise of his royal 40

The first two, also named Charles, died, the first at birth in 1386, the second in 1401 at age 9, followed by Louis de Guyenne in 1415 and Jean de Touraine in 1417. Another son, Philippe, was born and died in 1407, when Louis was dauphin. 41 Avril, Manuscript Painting, 109. 42 Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris and Christine’s ally in the public quarrel about the Roman de la Rose (1401–2), preached the sermon Vivat rex (Long live the King!) to the royal court on November 7, 1405. 43 Elizabeth Brown, “The Prince is Father of the King: The Character and Childhood of Philip the Fair of France,” Medieval Studies 49 (1987): 282–334.

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functions, techniques he had had continued in the execution of his own copy of Les Grandes Chroniques. By highlighting Charles V’s use of the play as an example whose “retelling … was pertinent for giving examples to such princes,” Christine builds upon Charles V’s political philosophy and his methods in order to help resolve problems of her own day. Christine’s gesture is potentially a double one. For she not only discusses Charles’s staging techniques, but even more pertinently, she puts them into effect in her writings. In so doing, Christine casts herself as a paragon of wisdom and eloquence who forms herself on Charles’s sterling example of these same qualities, a move recalling at once the pairing of Einhard and Charlemagne, and of Primat and Saint Louis. This gesture allows us to realize that along with promoting Charles’s fama, Christine’s biography also promotes her own fama as official historian in the line of the French monarchy’s most esteemed historians, Einhard and Primat. It is clear too that Christine conceived of the biography as a model for both future rulers and future royal writers. These conclusions receive support from Charity Cannon Willard, who claims that the biography securely established Christine’s reputation as historian conjointly with Charles’s reputation as “the wise king Charles.”44 The present study enables us to view Christine de Pizan as a consummate interpreter of official royal ideology, one who supported the monarchy’s belief in the power of the written word to preserve the memory of worthy thoughts and deeds long after the death of the physical body. Unfortunately, many written words are lost, and others remain only unanswered prayers. But such was not the case here, for the French nation did survive its birth throes. Christine’s biography worked along with other genealogical histories and mirrors of princes of the period to perpetuate the ideal of a wise king that enabled the monarchy to justify its privileges, legitimate its powers, and perpetuate its rule in the most trying of times. Through works such as Charles V, the idea of a good French king was endorsed, and those in power were instructed through his positive model of leadership. As unlikely as it may seem, it took an Italian-born woman to help the French monarchy accomplish its aims. Christine did so by managing to find a way to connect her female self to the performative models the French monarchy routinely used to legitimize its power. Taking her cue from royal display and from authoritative texts like the Bible and The City of God, Christine exploited the simple but irrefutable fact that ideas only take on concrete existence after they have been conceived, staged, and re-performed time and again. Performance through deeds and through words was, and still is, the only way to ensure that a good idea will eventually come into being.

44

Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea, 1984), 221.

PART V

RE-ENACTMENTS AND LEGACIES

Variegated Performance of Aucassin et Nicolette Evelyn Birge Vitz

I happily dedicate this article to Nancy Freeman Regalado, a wonderful colleague. Her collaborative spirit1 and collegiality, her warm friendship, and her wise counsel have meant a great deal to me in my years at New York University. *** The literary works that survive from the medieval period have come down to us in manuscripts. We are grateful for those manuscripts, as we are for the work of the scholars who edit and study them. But we also need to think beyond manuscripts, to the fact that few people in the Middle Ages actually read the words inscribed on those folios. It is through live performance of some kind that most men and women knew, experienced, and appreciated the works contained in manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, works were frequently recited from memory, sung, acted out, or read aloud; private reading was rare, silent reading practically non-existent.2 My recent work focuses largely on issues relating to the performance of narrative. We all recognize that medieval plays were intended to be performed dramatically, and songs to be sung. But it is somehow harder for us today to conceive that most medieval narratives were also intended for live performance. (One problem is surely that storytelling in modern Western culture has been relegated to the world of children.) These pages are drawn from a book in progress that evaluates the “performability” of a number of French medieval narratives.3 My underlying 1

2

3

Our most recent collaborations are Performing Medieval Narrative, co-edited with Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), and “Storytelling in Performance,” a workshop at New York University (http://www.nyu.edu/humanities.council/workshops/storytelling/). Nancy was also a co-founder of “Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase” (see n. 16, below, for further details) and is a member of its Advisory Board. On these issues, see inter alia Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). The following pieces have been published or will soon appear: “Performance in, and of, Flamenca,” in “De sens rassis”: Essays in Honor of Rupert T. Pickens, ed. Keith Busby, Bernard Guidot, and Logan Whalen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 683–98; “La performabilité de la voix et du déguisement dans le récit conté vs. le théâtre: Wistasse le moine” will appear in

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argument is that works often contain within themselves a considerable amount of information as to how they were to be performed: they tell us whether they were to be recited, or acted out by one or more performers, or sung, or read aloud, or read privately; they may also tell us a good deal about the tone, mood, and performance style that are called for. This article focuses on Aucassin et Nicolette. Many scholars have emphasized its considerable debt to the literature of the period – and indeed epic, historical discourse, romance, lyric, and saint’s life are combined and woven together here in a delightful manner.4 This is a deeply literary work in the sense that what it sets before its audience is not “reality” but rather a mirror reflecting many different kinds of works of literature (or verbal eloquence). My focus is on what this work calls for by way of performance.5 I argue that information embedded within Aucassin et Nicolette calls for a strongly variegated performance – one that highlights a remarkable range of performance styles and modes, related to the varied discourses and scenes the text contains. Along with the long-recognized alterna-

4

5

Pris-Ma (a publication of the Université de Poitiers), special number devoted to “Voix.” I have given several presentations on these issues: “Performing Silence,” Thirty-ninth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2004; “On the Performability of Medieval Narrative: The Chanson de Roland and the Rhymed Roland,” South Central Modern Language Association, New Orleans, October 2004; “The Performability of the Guillaume d’Orange Cycle,” Modern Language Association Convention, Washington, D.C., December 2005; “Performing Guillaume de Lorris’s Le Roman de la Rose,” Forty-first International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2006. For basic facts about this work, and a listing of many classic studies devoted to it, see the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises. Le Moyen Âge, ed. Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage; rev. ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1992), s.v. “Aucassin et Nicolette,” 111–12. In his valuable edition of the work, Mario Roques also provided an annotated bibliography, as well as a full glossary and the melody: Aucassin et Nicolette, chantefable du XIIIe siècle, 2ème édition revue et complétée (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1982). The debt of Aucassin et Nicolette to the literature of the period is clear; see, for example, John Revell Reinhard, “The Literary Background of the Chantefable,” Speculum 1 (1927): 157–69; and Kaspar Rogger, “Étude descriptive de la chantefable ‘Aucassin et Nicolette’,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 67 (1951): 409–57 and 70 (1954): 1–58. Many scholars have examined and debated the handling of the literary aspects of this work, as well as the elements of parody, pastiche, and satire found in it. A useful article that reviews much of the controversy is Rudy Spraycar, “Genre and Convention in Aucassin et Nicolette,” Romanic Review 76 (1985): 95–115. The performance character of this work has long been clear – indeed, it was clearer a hundred years ago than it is today (the past few decades having generally been concerned with other aspects of this work, as noted above). In The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), E. K. Chambers discussed Aucassin et Nicolette as part of the minstrel tradition (1:42, 45, 74ff.). Wilhelm Meyer-Lubke argued that it is a play: “Aucassin und Nicolette,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 34 (1910): 706–98. Grace Frank devoted a chapter of Medieval French Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954) to Aucassin et Nicolette (XXIII, 237–42), arguing not that it is not strictly speaking dramatic, but that it was performed and mimed by a single performer. The performance dimensions of Aucassin et Nicolette have drawn little scholarly attention in over fifty years. In these pages, I argue for a strongly heterogeneous performance style involving at times a single storyteller, at times several performers – and I set this discussion into the broader context of the performability of a wide range of works of medieval narrative.

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tion between singing6 and speaking go further variations: storytelling, both sung and spoken; declamation, and probably reading aloud; singing of various kinds; recourse to instrumental music; dance; mime; and dramatic acting and impersonation. The evidence suggests, moreover, that this work might have been performed by a small troupe of performers with a wide range of skills. Costumes, props, and simple stage-sets were also quite possibly part of the performance. It is useful to review some basic facts about this unusual work, our sole “chantefable,” surviving in a single manuscript from the Picard region, dating from ca. 1200. This brief work is composed of 41 short sections in which verse and prose alternate. The verse segments, of varying length, are assonanced, and are made up of seven-syllable lines with a four-syllable line at the end of the segment. The manuscript also – and this is rare! – provides the melody for the sung portions. The notation gives three short melodic lines, two of them longer than the third. The first line of music almost certainly was for the first line of each sung section; the second melody for the remaining lines of the section, except for the last, shorter, line of poetry which would be sung to the short melodic line. The verse lines derive in part from epic tradition, which generally favored assonance, sometimes had an orphan (short, final) line, and is known to have been sung to simple melodies, repeated from laisse to laisse.7 But the line length breaks with the epic, whose line was normally of ten (occasionally twelve or eight) syllables; seven-syllable lines come from the lyric tradition.8 The prose segments are also variable in length, though generally longer than the verse segments. There is a good deal of repetition between the verse and prose sections. Another basic alternation is present here: sung vs. spoken or told. The manuscript indicates at the start of verse segments: “Or se cante” (Now it is sung) and at the start of each prose segment: “Or dient et content et fablent” (Now they talk and narrate and tell stories). All of this means that, if we think not just in terms of poetic form but in terms of performance, there is major, and constantly reiterated, discontinuity. Just as we get used to the sung poetry, it gives way to the spoken prose; just as we settle into the prose narratives, they end, giving way again to the sung verse – and on it goes. The narrative and dramatic illusion and the esthetic continuity are continually being broken and reset, reconfigured before our eyes and ears. Today, those are only imaginary eyes and ears, but the performance would have been for the 6

7 8

In contrast to its general performance character (which has fallen into eclipse; see the previous note), the importance of melody and song in Aucassin et Nicolette has continued to attract some attention; see, for example, John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 222, 225–27. See, for example, the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, s.v. “chanson de geste,” 239. Lines of seven syllables occur frequently in the lyric tradition. See, for example, in Chansons des trouvères, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, with Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1995), the following songs, by number: Blondel de Nesle (90, 91), Conon de Béthune (93), Gace Brulé (101, 106), Richard de Semilly (110), Gautier de Dargies (117), and Thibaut de Blason (120).

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physical eyes and ears of original audiences. Thus, Aucassin et Nicolette never lets the audience settle comfortably into the story: into the simple pleasures of the narrative illusion. These shifts appear to be intentional and are smoothly choreographed, with continuity and clarity provided by the on-going characters in the story and by the repetition of plot elements. But we are not merely shifting back and forth constantly from verse to prose, and from sung to spoken – which are already substantial performance shifts. We also, I believe, move back and forth between a solo figure and several performers. This alternation is apparent from several scenes that play singularity off against plurality. We begin with the solitary voice of the elderly narrator who introduces his work thus: “Qui vauroit bons vers oïr / del deport du viel antif” (I, ll. 1–2, p. 42; Who would like to hear good verses / – the delight of an elderly old man [or an elderly man from ancient times]).9 He concludes it thus: Or a sa joie Aucassins et Nicholete autresi: no cantefable prent fin, n’en sai plus dire.

XLI, ll. 22–25, p. 162

(Now Aucassin has his joy and Nicolette as well; our chantefable ends, I don’t know what more to say.)

But in that conclusion, an “our” – “no chantefable” (our chantefable) – precedes the first person singular of the final verb: “n’en sai plus dire” (I don’t know what more to say [about it]). A sense that this work is a collective one is present throughout; we often hear several voices. Perhaps the clearest instances of this plurality of performers are in the scene with the shepherds: there are several of them, singing and playing musical instruments, and probably dancing as well. We’ll return to them later, but for the moment we need only note that the presence of several instruments presumably calls for several performers. We have, then, fundamental, on-going, and highly accentuated discontinuities and alternations in performance: verse vs. prose, singing vs. talking, solo vs. multiple performers. We also have, in a less systematic way, performance differences that flow from all the various genres represented and brought together in this work. I begin with performance of narrative genres, and with the chanson de geste, whose performance style is fundamental to this work. The singing style here both imitates and diverges from epic-type song: it is similar to the sung, assonanced epic laisse, but the lines are all too short – these are lyric lines. This would 9

Quotations are from Aucassin et Nicolette, édition critique, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1973); this edition also contains a modern French translation of the work, as well as a useful bibliography. The numbers following each quotation below provide: the section number in roman numerals; the line numbers within the section; and the page number. English translations are mine. An English translation is commercially available – ’Tis of Aucassin and Nicolette, in Aucassin & Nicolette, and Other Medieval Romances and Legends, trans. Eugene Mason (New York: Dutton, 1958), 1–42 – but, while it has some charm, it is stilted and archaic.

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presumably make for an interesting and unusual performance style. And of course the subject matter that fills these segments – these pseudo-laisses – is hardly epic in content. In dialogue with this pseudo-epic performance style are other modes that flow from various genres and types of discourse. The first prose section (II) begins like historical discourse:10 Or dient et content et fablent que li quens Bougars de Valence faisoit guere au conte Garin de Biaucaire si grande et si mervelleuse et si mortel qu’il ne fust uns seux jors ajournés qu’il ne fust as portes et as murs et as bares de le vile a cent cevaliers et a dis mile sergens a pié et a ceval, si li argoit sa terre et gastoit son païs et ocioit ses homes. Li quens Garins de Biaucaire estoit vix et frales, si avoit son tans trespassé. Il n’avoit nul oir, ne fil ne fille, fors un seul vallet. Cil estoit tex con je vos dirai (II, ll. 1–9, p. 44). (Now they talk and narrate and tell stories that Count Bougars of Valence made war on Count Garin of Beaucaire – war so great, so amazing, and so deadly that not a single day dawned when he was not at the gates and walls and barriers of the town, with a hundred knights and ten thousand men-at-arms, on foot and on horse. And so he burned the Count’s land, and ruined his countryside and killed his men. Count Garin of Beaucaire was old and frail, and had outlived his time. He had no heir, neither son nor daughter, except just one boy. And I will tell you how he was.)

This is historical discourse of a largely epic character, as is common in the Middle Ages – exclusively concerned with issues of warfare and inheritance of land. The passage is eloquent and rather heavy, characterized by verbal pairs (cevaliers, sergens; pié, ceval; vix et frales; fil, fille) and trios (grande, mervelleuse, mortel; portes, murs, bares; argoit, gastoit, ocioit). This kind of discourse or writing suggested a particular style of performance (though the tongue might well have been firmly placed in the cheek): a grave “prose-tells-the-truth” style; perhaps a “serious-reading-aloud-in-the-court” style. But suddenly, right in the middle of this historical discourse – and this grave and grandiloquent performance style – the narrator shifts to a new character, set of themes, genre, and mode of performance, as we meet the young lover Aucassin: Aucasins avoit a non li damoisiax. Biax estoit et gens et grans et bien tailliés de ganbes et de piés et de cors et de bras. Il avoit les caviax blons et menus recercelés et les ex vairs et rians et le face clere et traitice et le nes haut et bien assis… Mais si estoit soupris d’Amor, qui tout vaint, qu’il ne voloit estre cevalers, ne les armes

10

It is possible that the prose discourse here is imitating – and playing with the performance of – early written prose historiography. If so, this would affect our understanding of the date of this work: the consensus is that it was composed somewhere between the last quarter of the 12th century and the first quarter of the 13th century. Historical works in vernacular prose are not known to have existed before around 1207; see Historiens et chroniqueurs du Moyen Âge. Robert de Clari, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commynes, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). It is not clear how early such historical works in prose were read aloud or circulated in written form – thus making them targets for parody or pastiche.

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prendre, n’aler au tornoi, ne fare point de quanque il deust (II, ll. 10–14, 16–18, p. 44). (Aucassin was the boy’s name. He was handsome and noble and big and with wellmade legs and feet and body and arms. He had blond hair with little curls, and light and laughing eyes, and a bright and well-fashioned face, and a high-bridged, wellmade nose… But he was so surprised [conquered] by Love, who conquers all, that he did not want to be a knight, or take up arms, or go to tournaments, or do anything that he should.)

We are now in romance, not history, and a different performance style seems called for. We now hear the narratorial voice presenting the romantic portrait of the young lover who has been brought to his knees by Love. There is, moreover, an additional twist here: this is a parody of romance style. This portrait is more like that of a beautiful young girl than of a young man; Aucassin is just too cute! It is fine for him to be handsome and well made, but several details take this portrait over the top: the curliness of his blond hair and especially his “face clere” that is so “traitice” (well-fashioned): this is how beautiful young females are described. The narrator is winking at the conventional portrait of the hero and heroine. All of this has further implications for performance style. We cannot be allowed to take this passage “seriously” as romance; this portrait would most likely be performed with a smile – and it would elicit smiles of response in an audience who knew these conventions well. Thus, as regards narrative genres, we have pseudo-epic-style performance; historical declamation or reading aloud performance; and romance performance, gently mocked. There are others as well (several types of performance present in Aucassin et Nicolette must land on the cutting room floor for lack of space). But we do not just have narrative genres here. Drama is also present, as was already implicit in the alternation between a solo storyteller and multiple actors. The presence of a theatrical dimension in this work is particularly interesting because it is precisely around 1200 – and in Picardy, from which this manuscript comes – that secular (mostly comic) drama separates itself off from storytelling; also, in different ways, from religious drama.11 Thus, we are soon introduced to the actors playing Aucassin – our goofy but lovable, love-sick hero – and his father and mother. We are in the midst of a little, comic family drama. Aucassin’s father tells him: “Fix, car pren tes armes, si monte el ceval, si deffent te terre et aïe tes homes.” (II, ll. 20–21, p. 44; Son, now take up your arms, and get on your horse, and defend your land and help your men). Aucassin’s indignant answer is:

11

On the emergence of secular theatre, see Grace Frank’s classic Medieval French Drama, especially chap. XX (“The Beginnings of Comedy in France,” 210–16), as well as the chapter on Aucassin et Nicolette. In The Mediaeval Stage, E. K. Chambers also discusses at length the emergence of drama from minstrelsy and mime, as does Allardyce Nicoll in Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963). Recent studies on medieval drama devote little if any attention to the roots of secular theatre in the performance and storytelling practices of minstrels and other entertainers.

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Pere, fait Aucassins, qu’en parlés vos ore? Ja Dix ne me doinst riens que je li demant, quant ere cevaliers, ne monte a ceval, ne que voise a estor ne a bataille, la u je fiere cevalier ni autres mi, se vos ne me donés Nicholete me douce amie que je tant aim (II, ll. 24–28, p. 46). (Father, says Aucassin, why are you talking about this now? May God give me nothing that I ask him for if I should become a knight, or mount a horse, or go into combat or battle, or strike a knight or anyone else at all, if you do not give me Nicolette, my sweet friend, whom I love so much.)

Other dramatic characters are eventually introduced, typically one or two at a time: the vicomte, Bougar, the watchman, and others. There is complex generic interplay and slippage here between storytelling and drama. Sometimes a character appears to be acted out dramatically by an actor, as we just saw in the case of Aucassin and his parents. Sometimes, as here, the narratorial presence nonetheless remains, as indicated by words like “fait Aucassin” (says Aucassin), though narratorial presence is not the rule. Sometimes the character is simply evoked and talked about by the solo storyteller, as in traditional storytelling where the storyteller is indeed a one-man band, imitating all the voices, playing all the characters. The case of Nicolette is an interesting one, as she receives especially mixed handling. Sometimes she appears to be a fully dramatic – speaking, acting – character, but she seems sometimes, rather, to be mimed. Like Aucassin, his parents, and others, Nicolette may perhaps be played much of the time by a separate actor, either female or a youthful male. The two lovers could indeed be virtually identical as performed since they are described in almost the same terms: curly blond hair, light eyes, bright faces – both as pretty as they can be. They are presumably just dressed differently. The Nicolette actor might even be a bit larger than Aucassin: she is certainly, as many readers have noted, the active and vigorous character, the one who acts. He mostly weeps. But Nicolette does not seem to be a fully dramatic character when she first appears in the story, and in this passage her voice may be mimed by the storyteller. She is introduced to us in section V (her name was mentioned briefly by Aucassin in II). The storyteller describes her. She is, we are told, in the prison cell where her adoptive father has placed her: Ele avoit blonde la crigne et bien faite la sorcille, la face clere et traitice: ainc plus bele ne veïstes. Esgarda par le gaudine et vit la rose espanie et les oisax qui s’ecrient, dont se clama orphenine: “Ai mi! lasse moi, caitive! por coi sui en prison misse? Aucassins, damoisiax sire, ja sui jou li vostre amie et vos ne me haés mie! Por vos sui en prison misse en ceste canbre vautie

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u je trai molt male vie; mais par Diu le fil Marie, longement n’i serai mie, se jel puis far.”

V, ll. 7–25, p. 54

(She had blond hair and her eyebrows were well made, her face was bright and well-fashioned, you never saw a more beautiful one. She looked around the garden and saw a full-blown rose and the birds who called, then she cried out that she was an orphan: “Alas! Poor unfortunate wretch that I am! Why am I put in prison? Aucassin, my young lord, I am your beloved and you do not hate me! For you I am in prison in this vaulted chamber where I am having a very bad time; but by God, the son of Mary, I will not be here long, if I can do it.”)

Here the narrator is describing her, and he is apparently the first to speak in “her” voice. He may also, however, point to the actor playing her part. In the next section the likelihood of a mimed presentation seems even stronger. Nicolette is, we are told, in her bed. A nightingale awakens her. She thinks about Aucassin, and about how his father wants her dead. She decides to escape from her prison cell – and she promptly does so, making a rope and climbing out the window. In this scene, we may hear that nightingale (bird imitations were popular),12 but we do not hear Nicolette. She does not speak here at all – she just acts with her characteristic decisiveness: Nicolete jut une nuit en son lit, si vit la lune luire cler par une fenestre et si oï le lorseilnol center en garding, se li sovint d’Aucassin sen ami qu’ele tant amoit. Ele se comença a porpenser del conte Garin de Biaucaire qui de mort le haoit, si se pensa qu’ele ne remandroit plus ilec, que, s’ele estoit acusee et li quens Garins le savoit, il le feroit de male mort morir. Ele senti que li vielle dormoit qui avuec li estoit: ele se leva, si vesti un blaiut de drap de soie que ele avoit molt bon, si prist dras de lit et touailes, si noua l’un a l’autre, si fist une corde si longe conme ele pot, si le noua au pilier de le fenestre; si s’avala contreval le gardin, et prist se vesture a l’une main devant et a l’autre deriere, si s’escorça por le rousee qu’ele vit grande sor l’erbe, si s’en ala aval le gardin. Ele avoit les caviaux blons et menus recercelés, et les ex vairs et rians, et le face traitice, et le nés haut et bien assis, et lé levretes vremelletes plus que n’est cerisse ne rose el tans d’esté, et les dens blans et menus; et avoit les mameletes dures qui li souslevoient sa vesteure ausi con ce fuissent deus nois gauges; et estoit graille par mi les flans qu’en vos dex mains le peusciés enclorre; et les flors des margerites 12

On bird imitations by performers, see for example John Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1989), 13.

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qu’ele ronpoit as ortex de ses piés, qui li gissoient sor le menuisse du pié par deseure, estoient droites noires avers ses piés et ses ganbes, tant par estoit blance la meschinete. Ele vint au postic, si le deffrema, si s’en isci par mi les rues de Biaucaire par devers l’onbre, car la lune luisoit molt clere, et erra tant qu’ele vint a le tor u ses amis estoit (XII, ll. 5–34, pp. 78–80). (Nicolette lay one night in her bed, and she saw the moon shine brightly through the window and she heard the nightingale sing in the garden, and she remembered Aucassin her friend whom she loved so much. She began to think about Count Garin de Beaucaire who hated her with a deadly hatred, and she decided that she would not stay there any longer, for if she was accused and if Count Garin knew it, he would make her die a painful death. She sensed that the old woman who was with her was asleep: she got up, put on a fine mantle of silk that she had, and she took the sheets from the bed and the towels, knotted them to each other, and so she made as long a rope as she could, and she knotted it to the pillar of the window, and she climbed down into the garden, and she took her clothing with one hand in front and the other behind and fastened it up short because of the dew that she saw thick on the grass, and she went down through the garden. She had blond hair with little curls, and laughing light-colored eyes, and a beautifully formed face, and a nose that was high-bridged and well placed, and lips that were scarlet, more than a cherry or a rose in the summer, and small white teeth; and she had hard little breasts that lifted her clothing like two large nuts; and she was so slender around the middle that you could put your two hands around her, and the daisies that she broke with the toes of her feet and that lay on the instep of her foot showed completely black against her feet and legs, so white was the maiden. She came to the gate, and undid it, and she went out into the streets of Beaucaire, in the shadows, for the moon was shining brightly, and she walked until she came to the tower where her friend was.)

This scene thus raises the likelihood of mime. Nicolette says nothing here. Rather, she wakes up, thinks, acts. This scene could quite possibly have been mimed by the Nicolette actor while the narrator spoke the lines. This solution would also allow for a handling at once comic and erotic of Nicolette’s feminine charms: the actress (or actor) can show off amusingly, or perhaps ironically,13 her pretty face and delightful body. This slipping back and forth between storytelling, full dramatic impersonation, and mime emphasizes yet again the remarkable lack of commitment to sustained illusion that is fundamental to Aucassin et Nicolette: it delights in a highly 13

Of course, if the door to parody and antiphrastic send-up were to be opened wide in performance, many new possibilities would arise. For example, Nicolette as performed might (all the time? some of the time?) look truly saracenic (and not be so white that she makes daisies look black), or she might act like a seductive “belle sarrasine”; on these and related issues in the work, see for example Maria Rosa Menocal, “Signs of the Times: Self, Other and History in Aucassin et Nicolette,” Romanic Review 80 (1989): 497–511; and Jane Gilbert, “The Practice of Gender in Aucassin et Nicolette,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33 (1997): 217–28. Or the gender reversals in the work could be pushed to the limit, with Nicolette being made to look and act decidedly male, in strong dramatic contrast to a weak and girlish Aucassin. As to a performance handling that emphasized the satirical potential of the work: Aucassin might be made to look – be performed as – arrogant and lordly in his relations with the shepherds, and so on. (See Spraycar, “Genre and Convention,” on the issue of satire.)

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variegated performance style. This work, like a number of other medieval works, appears to showcase a variety of arts of performance and of performers. Along with a blend of narrative and drama, Aucassin et Nicolette includes still further performance modes: instrumental music and, quite possibly, dance. Singing with instrumental music is apparent in the scene with the shepherds (XVIII and XX–XXII). When Aucassin comes in, they are singing. He asks them to repeat their song for him, but they refuse. They are rather churlish churls – which is part of the joke. (But it is also possible we are to understand that they refuse to sing because at this point – section XXII – we are in a spoken portion of the work. In other words, their refusal may be a play on form: “we” sing in sung parts (e.g., XXI), “we” just talk in spoken parts.) They are apparently playing instruments, as well: when Nicolette gives them money, they say that with it they will buy tarts, little knives, and presumably more instruments: flutes, horns, and shepherds’ pipes – “flaüsteles et cornés, / maçüeles et pipés” (XXI, ll. 14–15, p. 106). This suggests that the actors playing these roles are playing these or other instruments: these little shepherds are musicians. It is also likely that in keeping with the medieval pastoral conventions – as seen later in the century in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion – the shepherds are dancing; they are having a delightful time picnicking on the grass: “si mangeoient lor pain et faisoient mout tresgrant joie” (XX, ll. 35–36, p. 104; they were eating their bread and having very great joy). Physical frivolity among semi-idealized peasants is apt to involve some dance steps. As we have seen, Aucassin et Nicolette draws attention in many ways to modes of performance: storytelling, dramatic acting, mime, singing, instrumental music, probably dance. The question of the performers now arises. I suggested earlier that the chantefable was composed for performance by a small troupe with broad skills. How many actors would it take to perform Aucassin et Nicolette? This work contains a good many characters, but relatively few of them are of a fully dramatic nature – that is, involving spoken parts, divided among several actors, and with performable actions. Other characters are more rooted in storytelling tradition and may simply be conjured up for the audience by the voice and gestures of the storyteller.14 All the characters except the narrator and the lovers make brief, cameo appearances, typically one or two characters at a time. Therefore, a small handful of 14

Characters, both dramatic and narrative are: Aucassin and Nicolette; his parents; her father; the viscount; and later, the (non-speaking) viscountess; Bougar de Valence; the watchman; the shepherds (only one of whom speaks); the knight (who tells Aucassin to go into the forest); the ugly bull herder; the merchants (non-speaking); the King of Torelore and his Queen (who does not speak); the King of Carthage; the pagan king whom Nicolette’s family want her to marry (also a non-speaker). Several other groups of characters are evoked: the knights and the enemies of the King of Torelore, the Saracens, and the twelve sons of the King of Carthage. These various groups of characters can either be represented by one or two actors, or do not need to be represented by actors at all (as they do not speak) but only evoked by the storyteller. Thus, for example, both the merchants and the Saracens can be represented by one or two characters – or just evoked by the storyteller. The same goes for the twelve brothers of Nicolette who are referred to but are never actually presented as characters and never speak.

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actors could be deployed repeatedly for new roles. Moreover, the actors playing Aucassin and Nicolette would be free at many points, since in some scenes only one of them is present. As I do the performance math, four actors plus the narrator would be adequate. The key roles are the Narrator, Aucassin, and Nicolette. Two more actors – augmented by the Aucassin or Nicolette actor when available – could play in succession: the Mother and Father, the viscount, Bougar de Valence, the watchman, the shepherds, the knight, the King of Torelore, the King of Carthage, the viscountess. Thus, five performers in all would suffice for this little troupe – though more might be merrier. Costumes and props of a minimal or stylized nature could have sufficed and would have facilitated the rapid shifts in performers’ roles; these might have included a sword for a knight, a crown for the king, a little musical instrument or crook for a shepherd, a large cloak for a man, a smaller and more colorful cloak or headdress for a woman. It may well be that the troupe had recourse to simple stage-sets, such as a stylized painted city, castle walls, and a ship or two. We have little documentation on this issue, but we are in a period when dramatic works are now beginning to receive stage sets.15 I have only been able to scratch the surface of the performance nature of this clever and delicious work, but it is surely clear that Aucassin et Nicolette plays with and combines, in an ambitious and inventive fashion, many performance conventions and practices of its day. Scholars have noted that this is a work about literature rather than reality, but it is perhaps above all a work about performance.16

15

Our surviving records mostly concern religious dramas. One thinks for example of the representation of paradise in the Jeu d’Adam, on whose staging see, most recently, Maurice Accarie, Théâtre, littérature et société au Moyen Âge (Nice: Serre, 2004), “La mise en scène du Jeu d’Adam,” 109–24. 16 Students and I have experimented with Aucassin et Nicolette in a course called “Acting Medieval Literature,” in which I teach medieval literature through performance. Some results of these experiments are available on the website “Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase”: http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu/mednar/.

Late Medieval Representations of Storytelling and Story-Performance Kathleen A. Loysen

The decision to re-enact on the page a scene of oral storytelling is extraordinarily prevalent in late-medieval French literature, as it will continue to be throughout the sixteenth century. Texts such as the anonymous Cent nouvelles nouvelles (1462) and the anonymous Évangiles des quenouilles (ca. 1470–80)1 experiment with the staging of oral storytelling in a range of ways, using embedded narratives, the structural device of the frame, and the depiction of storytelling circles. Scenes of oral storytelling are fertile ground for inquiry regarding late medieval practices of story transmission, especially the dynamic relation between performance and audience reception.2 This essay proposes to examine how storytelling and story-performance are represented in the narrative literature of late-fifteenth-century France, and why the staging of these processes was so compelling for authors of the period.3 Indeed, why did late-medieval narrative artists choose not merely to tell stories, but also to show others telling stories, and to contain within their romans and collections of nouvelles reflections upon the art and function of storytelling? What can we posit as the motivation for such complex narrative structurings? 1

2

3

Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Roger Dubuis (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991); and Les évangiles des quenouilles, ed. Madeleine Jeay (Montreal: Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1985). Many other texts operate in similar ways: Martial d’Auvergne’s Arrêts d’Amour (1460s); Philippe de Vigneulles’s Cent nouvelles nouvelles (1510); Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux (1531); Nicolas de Troyes’s Grand parangon des nouvelles nouvelles (1535–36); Hélisenne de Crenne’s Angoisses douloureuses (1538); Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1540s); Noël Du Fail’s Propos rustiques (1547), Balivernes ou contes nouveaux d’Eutrapel (1548), and Contes et discours d’Eutrapel (1585); Claude de Taillemont’s Discours des champs faëz (1553); Bonaventure Des Périers’s Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis (1558); Jacques Yver’s Printemps d’Yver (1572); Etienne Tabourot des Accord’s Bigarrures (1572–85) and Escraignes dijonnaises (1614); Bénigne Poissenot’s L’Esté (1583); Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées (1584–87); Nicolas de Cholières’s Neuf matinées (1585) and Après disnées (1587); Bérolade de Verville’s Moyen de parvenir (1593); and even the anonymous Caquets de l’accouchée (1622). Space does not permit consideration of these fascinating examples. Gabriel-André Pérouse defines the genre of the nouvelle collection as “la mise en scène d’une société conteuse.” Nouvelles françaises du XVIème siècle. Images de la vie du temps (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 24.

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It perhaps goes without saying that the storytelling conventions highlighted in these collections call repeated and insistent attention to the presence of the cercle conteur, begging the question of whether the point of such collections is precisely to illustrate the dynamics of any interpretive community,4 the reactions of the story recipients, and the necessity of their presence. That is, the authors of these collections elected not merely to tell stories, but rather to show stories in the process of being told and received. Indeed, the meaning of such story collections may lie not only in the stories themselves, or in the reactions of members of the cercle conteur inscribed in the tales, but also in the author’s examination of how this crucial transaction takes place. These texts can (and, I suggest, should) be read as symbolic story performances: the reader-reception circuit – the act of reception and interpretation – is dramatized before our eyes through the evocation of the sound of the human voice. Most theorists of reader-reception have not paid sufficient attention to the medieval or early modern periods, taking as their primary examples contemporary models of textual transmission and reading in which interpretation is a solitary act accomplished in silence and/or in writing.5 However, the prevalence of such configurations in late medieval texts shows, in fact, that medieval authors are aware of their texts as objects that exist within a social network and function as tools for collective entertainment and moral correction, as well as being mechanisms for cooperative acts of textual transmission and interpretation. Such collections take as their model Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353; circulating in French translation as of 1414). What they all borrow from their illustrious predecessor, to varying degrees, are elements such as the mise en collection of a series of narrative (or quasi-narrative) units; the presence or the evocation of a cercle conteur; and a fractured narrative voice. Some also add the division into days, an elaborate frame narrative, and conversational interludes among the members of the cercle around and between the tales themselves. It is important to note how unlike early medieval tale collections these works are. Texts such as Marie de France’s Lais, the various branches of the Roman de Renart, or exempla and fabliaux collections function in fact more as compilations or cycles than as collections. There is no reflection upon the stories as being told before a physically present audience. It is true that they do often evoke an oral storyteller who refers to or directly addresses a (fictional) audience. And yet, the external reader’s focus is not called directly to this audience’s participatory functions. The inscribed audience is there to remind us of how storytelling actually took place – in public, 4

5

The term is borrowed from Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Roger Chartier and Brian Stock also speak of “interpretive communities,” “textual communities,” and “communities of readers.” See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). One important exception is Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack’s Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2002), which devotes chap. 7 to readerresponse theory as it can be applied to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.

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aloud, in festive settings. However, similar collections of the late medieval and early modern period – post-Boccaccio – take things several steps further. They evoke a present audience not merely to call our attention to the representation of an oral storyteller, but also to demonstrate how that audience participates in the act of textual reception, interacting with and speaking back to that teller, and performing acts of interpretation in cooperation with the group. Thus is the entire context of enunciation outlined, along with its implications for our understanding of the reader’s or hearer’s role in the construction of textual meaning and its ethical applications. Above all, the literature of this period must be conceptualized as existing within a social framework. The social circumstances of a work’s actual transmission or reception, as well as those represented within the narrative framework of the text, must always be taken into account. I shall take as my first example the anonymous Cent nouvelles nouvelles, offered as a gift to Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, in 1462. This may appear at first an odd choice for inclusion in this study. The text has no frame narrative, no division into days, no narratorial scribe figure, and, indeed, the cercle conteur is only evoked in the reader’s mind by the mention of the name of a storyteller for each nouvelle. The lack of an explicit cercle necessarily means the text also lacks interaction on the part of its members. The reader is not given access to conversations that take place in reaction to the tales themselves. But the mere suggestion of each storyteller’s identity is powerful, carrying with it implications for the readerreception circuit and transaction that are the subject of this study. As Roger Dubuis has pointed out,6 many critics have mistaken the mention of the tellers’ names for references to a specific iteration of the collection’s performance, as if the work were a transcription of an actual event instead of a text shaped to make itself appear as if it were a documentary record. In Nancy Freeman Regalado’s words, these readers have mistaken representation for reference.7 What is the difference, and why is this difference so critically important? Firstly, because we are not dealing with an “ensemble disparate”8 of tales written by multiple authors and then gathered together by a single compiler. To the contrary, as Roger Dubuis has shown, the unity of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in terms of style, structure, and intent demonstrates that the entire work is the creation of a single author. This anonymous, single author nonetheless shaped his/her collection to appear as if it were the record of an actual storytelling event (like those that continued to be common in this period in France).9 The author of the 6 7 8 9

Roger Dubuis, Préface, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, 11. See Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Effet de réel, effet du réel: Representation and Reference in Villon’s Testament,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 63–77. Dubuis, 11. See Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Roger Dubuis, Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle en France au Moyen Âge (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1973);

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Cent nouvelles nouvelles thus combined various characteristics of the medieval narrative tradition to arrive at something new and unexpected for his audience of listeners and readers.10 That is, while working within the framework of the seminal Boccaccian paradigm, he/she also mixed into the blend characteristics of both fabliaux and collections of exempla.11 However, the explicitly declared and unifying moral principle found at the end of many exempla leads to a kind of fixity that the Cent nouvelles nouvelles lack – they have no moral commentary attached to them.12 And this is precisely why the naming of the teller and the evocation of a storytelling circle are of such great consequence for our understanding of the collection’s function. It is only when a tale can be imagined as being told not only by a live teller, but to a live audience, that the issue of textual interpretation becomes relevant. The author is playing with the notion that a text necessarily contains within itself its own singular interpretation; that the function of a text is to transmit a univocal message to a passive, unthinking, and non-responding audience. Quite to the contrary, however, what takes place in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is the dramatization – however lightly sketched out – of the storytelling act and how this necessarily takes place as a transactional operation between, at the very least, two parties, teller and hearer/reader, who work together to create meaning. Moreover, the represented teller does not communicate with only one audience member, but with a multiplicity of them, and these audience members, as we shall see more explicitly in the case of the Évangiles des quenouilles, can and do, by their very multiplicity, increase the number of possible and potential interpretations of any text. The notion of a stable truth transmitted by a univocal text to a silent, passive audience is completely overturned. What happens here is the mise en scène of the act of transmitting, receiving, and interpreting stories. In response to the question, “To whom does power of interpretation belong?” this author answers: “To the reader.” While this may seem banal to the post-modern reader, accustomed as she is to theories of narratology and reader-response, this is indeed strikingly new for the late medieval period. The collection overtly signals the processes involved in the act of narration – either written or oral. At the same time, this act is made to appear as an oral scene precisely in order to emphasize the active nature of the interpretive task of any story recipient. Madeleine Jeay, Donner la parole. L’histoire-cadre dans les recueils de nouvelles des XVe– XVIe siècles (Montreal: CERES, 1992); Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Gabriel-André Pérouse, Nouvelles françaises du XVIe siècle. Images de la vie du temps (Geneva: Droz, 1977). 10 Referring to the style of his own work in the dedicatory piece, he declares, “Quant à la coupe et à la finition, elles relèvent d’un style qui est, lui, vraiment nouveau,” 29. 11 See Roger Dubuis, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle; Janet Ferrier, Forerunners of the French Novel: An Essay on the Development of the Nouvelle in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954); and Werner Söderhjelm, La nouvelle française au XVe siècle (1910; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973). 12 See Judith Bruskin Diner’s Introduction to her translation of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles (New York: Garland, 1990).

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Similar dynamics are even more in evidence in a text such as the Évangiles des quenouilles. Also anonymous, dating most likely from 1466–74, and originating in the court of Burgundy,13 the Évangiles des quenouilles tell the story of a group of peasant women who call upon a cleric to transcribe, on their behalf, the tenets of their inherited system of alternative knowledge. Their aim is to create a book for posterity that will serve as the record of their wisdom. Over the course of six days they exchange and comment upon axioms that have been variously described as folkloric, superstitious, and occult.14 At the same time, the language with which they cloak their arcane pronouncements derives from two decidedly official lexical realms: the sermonistic and the scholastic. They also organize their veillée physically so that it resembles the hierarchical setting of the preacher at the pulpit, or the master in the schoolroom. Yet here, an illiterate woman inhabits the position of authority. Furthermore, the cleric himself is represented as imposing literary order upon the women’s oral utterances in order to create a text patterned as a scholarly treatise. This intermingling of sermon and school techniques and terminology, within the strange setting of a peasant women’s veillée, is only one among many juxtapositions the text puts in place: the oral and the written, the female and the male, the folkloric and the clerical.15 This text also borrows many elements from the Boccaccian model, in very different ways than the Cent nouvelles nouvelles did, although it also depicts a 13

On the Burgundian court as a site of literary experimentation see Madeleine Jeay, “Le travail du récit à la cour de Bourgogne: Les évangiles des quenouilles, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et Saintré,” in “A l’heure encore de mon escrire”: Aspects de la littérature de Bourgogne sous Philippe le Bon et Charles le Téméraire, ed. Claude Thiry (Louvain-la-Neuve: Lettres romanes, 1997), 71–86. 14 See Gretchen Angelo, “ ‘And the Word Became Flesh’: Women’s Language in the Misogynous Literature of Late Medieval France” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994), 134–39; Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 35–37; Laura Doyle Gates, “Distaff and Pen: Producing the Évangiles des Quenouilles,” Neophilologus 81 (1997): 13–17; her “ ‘Soubz umbrage de passetemps’: The Functioning of Women’s Storytelling in the Évangiles des quenouilles, the Comptes amoureux of Jeanne Flore and the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1995), 39–42; and her “ ‘Tomber en quenouilles’: Hermofrodita and the Évangiles des quenouilles,” Le Moyen Français 30 (1992): 63–64; Madeleine Jeay, Donner la parole, 163–64; her “Les évangiles des quenouilles, de la croyance populaire à la locution,” in La locution. Actes du colloque international, Université McGill, Montréal, 15–16 octobre 1984, ed. Giuseppe Di Stefano and Russell McGillivray (Montreal: CERES, 1986), 281–301; her Savoir faire. Une analyse des croyances des Évangiles des quenouilles (Montreal: CERES, 1982); and her “Le travail du récit à la cour de Bourgogne: Les évangiles des quenouilles, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et Saintré,” in “A l’heure encore de mon escrire,” 83–84; Dominique Lagorgette, “Tabourets du diable ou crédules innocentes? Les Évangiles des quenouilles dans la France de l’Inquisition,” in Magie et illusion au Moyen Âge (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1999), 307–21; Anne Paupert, Les fileuses et le clerc. Une étude des Évangiles des quenouilles (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1990), 9–12 and 231–36; Gabriel-André Pérouse, “Portraits des parleuses et portée des paroles dans les Évangiles des quenouilles,” in Le portrait littéraire, ed. K. Kupisz, Gabriel-André Pérouse, and J.-Y. Debreuille (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1988), 41–42. 15 For more on the Évangiles, see Kathleen Loysen, Conversation and Storytelling in Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century French Nouvelles (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

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verbal exchange in progress. As in the Decameron, there is a fully developed frame narrative, the division into days, and a represented cercle conteur. It also includes a narratorial scribe figure and, most importantly for my purposes, it includes – in both direct and indirect discourse – conversation and interaction between the cercle and the scribe, as well as among the members of the cercle. However, the material collected here is not a series of fully developed nouvelles, but anecdotal advice, maxims, and gossip. One of the central goals of the text appears to be to fully contextualize the scene of both narrative and conversational exchange to show how these two verbal modes converge to illustrate the interpretive process. The leader of each day, its présidente, shares with her live audience members a series of chappitres, to which the others then respond with their gloses. The chappitres are shaped as if they constituted incontrovertible and universal truths:16 each présidente introduces her series of chappitres with some variation of the formula “je dy pour aussy vray comme euvangile que…”. And yet, the reader’s attention is drawn to how this supposed “truth” is contested by the active listeners who receive it. They listen not in silence, but participate fully in a sort of stylized conversation. Each chappitre is met with a corresponding glose, an interpretive comment which either confirms or refutes the truth enunciated in the chappitre, and often even constitutes a counter-example illustrating another possible reality.17 Thus is the experiential perspective of each member of the cercle widened through the conversational process. Indeed, by addressing her inscribed audience as “vous” (“je vous dy,” “sachiez pour vérité”), each présidente calls upon the external reader to focus on the communicative process. She and her companions are actively engaged in conversation and interpretive debate regarding the axiomatic truths they share.18 This debate generally takes place in an orderly manner (or is, at least, made to appear so by the scribe, whose task it is to transcribe and organize the women’s interchange). While respecting turn-taking rules and the ritualized alternation of chappitre/glose, each woman present is nonetheless fully involved in the discussions.19 This fact comes most clearly to light on those occasions when disagreements arise,20 or when the narrator claims to have difficulty making sense of the multiplicity of divergent voices and opinions he hears.21 This is, of course, part of 16 17 18 19 20

Loysen, 24. Loysen, 49. Loysen, 49. For a fuller discussion, see Loysen, 51–54. One key example is: “Pour cest argument sourdy grande noise entre toutes les assistentes et telement que les unes soustenoient le texte de ceste euvangile et les autres soustenoient la glose, et si grant clameur sourdi entre elles, qu’on ne savoit a laquelle entendre” (Évangiles, ll. 514–18; Following this argument there arose such a hubbub among all the women present, so much so that some supported the text of this évangile and others the gloss, and such a great clamor arose among them that one could not tell whom to listen to). All translations are my own. 21 For example: “Pour ceste derraine glose sourdy grande tumulte entre les femmes illec assemblez…” (ll. 1276–77, After this last gloss a great tumult broke out among the women gathered

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the point of the book: that the act of textual reception and interpretation is not passive, but highly active, reactive, and interactive. The text stands as an exemplary dramatization of the dialogic process of textual transmission, reception, and interpretation. What conclusions can be drawn from this brief examination of the late medieval nouvelle collection as a body of texts that dramatize the reader-response process? Their purpose, I submit, is to call attention to the very processes involved in medieval narration and interpretation as being potentially live and performative. We are invited by these texts to reflect on the ways that written narrative can contain within itself images of multiple discursive paradigms and indeed refer to its own birth from the oral setting it depicts. The purpose of that depicted scene is to suggest literature’s social context, to demonstrate that stories belong to the rituals of social exchange, in which the autonomy of each individual’s voice is a constitutive element in a larger interpretative process. Nouvelle collections such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the Évangiles des quenouilles are a study in the art of narration, through their portrayal of varied storytelling agents often embedded within conversational rhythms.22 Most importantly, these texts should be seen as dramatizing or re-enacting on the page the act of reading and interpreting. They may even constitute instructive models for late medieval readers concerning ways in which the readerly-interpretive transaction – the process of speaking back to an authorial agent – might take place.23

there). On another occasion, the narrator describes the ensuing tumult as being “tant de rire comme de parler toutes ensemble, et ne sembloit autre chose fors que ce fust un marchié de hire hare sans ordre et sans voloir entendre l’une l’autre, ne atendre la fin de leurs raisons” (ll. 1277–80, [There was] as much laughter as there was talking among the women, and it seemed nothing other than a marketplace with all its brouhaha, with no order and without being able to hear one another or wait until the end of one another’s words). 22 Loysen, 167. 23 I am indebted to conversations with B. Christopher Wood for this concept.

Paratextual Performances in the Early Parisian Book Trade: Antoine Vérard’s Edition of Boccaccio’s Nobles et cleres dames (1493) Cynthia J. Brown

When Pierre Gringore had the first-known ordonnance protecting an author writing in French printed in the colophon of his Folles entreprises in December 1505, a new breed of writer was born.1 Or rather, a new ground-breaking use was made of the paratext of printed books: the author was now featured in defiant fashion. Writers such as Gringore did not suddenly develop a consciousness about the place of prominence they deserved on the literary stage, however. New bookpublishing strategies resulting from the advent of print, in particular innovative paratextual “performances” orchestrated by a bold new class of printers and publishers, played a critical role in challenging authors to assume their responsibilities as literary creators in a more dramatic and dynamic manner. Testing and forcing the undefined limits of their new functions, bookmakers often triggered an equally provocative response on the part of authors, such as Gringore. His experience as an actor, dramatist, and director in Parisian theatrical events likely contributed to his heightened sense of visual and verbal performance in both his literary texts and the paratextual apparatus of the books that contained them.2 One of the most famous Parisian publishers of the time, the kind of entrepreneur whose actions Gringore targeted with the advertisement of his authorprivilege ordonnance in December 1505, was Antoine Vérard (fl. 1485–1512).3 Because he successfully exploited the writings of past and present authors for his own ends, this publisher’s output offers fascinating insight into underlying bookmaking tensions during the decade preceding Gringore’s advertisement of his 1 2

3

For details, see Cynthia J. Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 17–59. For details on the author’s life, see Pierre Gringore, Œuvres polémiques rédigées sous le règne de Louis XII, ed. Cynthia J. Brown (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 12–27; and Charles Oulmont, Pierre Gringore. La poésie morale, politique et dramatique à la veille de la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1911), 1–28. For a discussion of Gringore’s visual sense, see Cynthia J. Brown, “From Stage to Page: Royal Entry Performances in Honour of Mary Tudor (1514),” in Book and Text in France, 1400–1600, ed. Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming in 2007). See Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard: Parisian Publisher, 1485–1512 (Geneva: Droz, 1997).

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author privilege. While the simultaneous reproduction of manuscripts and printed books continued during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Vérard’s contribution to the Parisian book market stands out for his publication of hybrid books. These luxury copies of his imprints were reproduced on vellum instead of paper and often illustrated with miniatures painted by hand in place of the original woodcuts. With this parallel system of book production, Vérard attracted a broad clientele of unknown readers through his paper copies of the work and inspired particular patrons to order and purchase his more expensive hybrid versions of them. Thus, the relationship between Vérard and his projected audience was of capital importance.4 This publisher-client relationship contributed to the destabilization of the author’s role in the system of literary production following the advent of print, a destabilization that Gringore contested through the author privileges he obtained and advertised in nearly all of his publications from late 1505 on. A brief examination of the paper and hybrid copies of Vérard’s 1493 La louenge et vertu des nobles et cleres dames provides a case study of how the bookseller, through a manipulation of the paratext, was able to undermine the “traditional” author-patron relationship and essentially reconfigure the bookmaking relationship. It is not surprising that the savvy Vérard chose to exploit the somewhat provocative theme of famous women with his publication of an anonymous translation of one of the most popular works of the late medieval period, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus,5 which presented more than one hundred examples of famous women of the classical and medieval worlds. What is more unexpected are the interconnections among the famous-women topos, the new forms of book reproduction, and the reconfiguration of relationships involving author, patron, publisher, and reader resulting from the advent of print in France. I argue through this case study that it is the notion of fame that drew literary patrons, author, translator, and publisher to this work, both determining the original book’s subject and defining bookmakers’ engagement in its subsequent reproduction. Vérard’s decision to publish the Nobles et cleres dames reflects the strategy he frequently adopted of having printed in French earlier popular works whose authors were already deceased, while targeting a clientele among nobles and bourgeois with printed copies, and royal clients with his luxury copies.6 In fact, at least three vellum copies of Vérard’s edition of the Nobles et cleres dames have come down to us today. A comparison of the paratext of one of these luxury copies with 4 5

6

See Winn, 101–205, for a study of Vérard’s patrons and customers. Composed in the fourteenth century, De claris mulieribus was translated several times into French from the beginning of the fifteenth century on, including the famous 1401 translation once attributed to Laurent de Premierfait. See Jeanne Baroin and Josiane Haffen, eds., Des cleres et nobles femmes, Chap. I–LII (Ms. Bibl. Nat. 12420) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), IX. Vérard was, according to Winn, “the first publisher to make systematic use of vellum for at least a few copies of almost every edition” (36). She claims that some 150 extant vellum copies made from his more than 280 editions are still extant (31 n. 52).

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that of the paper edition of the work uncovers implicit tensions among its bookmakers, with some explicitly vying for prominence on the book’s paratextual stage.7 Written by the work’s anonymous translator,8 the prologue that Vérard incorporated into his edition of the Nobles et cleres dames informs the reader that the queen of France, Anne of Brittany, had inspired this translation of Boccaccio’s work. Vérard’s adoption of this prologue emphasizing the queen’s role in the book enterprise was likely aimed at impressing potential book purchasers, for it authorized the translation of the original work as well as the person publishing it. In the prologue, the anonymous translator makes this strategy explicit, as he defines the queen’s influence on the outcome of his translation: Et si vous est agreable que ce present livre voise en lumiere, donnés luy hardiesse et auctorité de ce faire. Car j’ay ferme et indubitable esperance, se ainssy vous plaist, que vos congié et auctorité royaulx feront ceste presente translacion seure des assaulx des mauvais et iniques detracteurs qui tousjours ont de coustume poindre et picquer, non pas seulement les acteurs, mais avecquez ce les expositeurs et translateurs (fol. a2v).9 (And if it is agreeable to you that this present book go out into the world, grant it the courage and authority to do so. For I have the firm and certain hope, if it pleases you, that your royal license and authority will protect this present translation from the assaults of bad and wicked detractors who are always accustomed to pricking and stinging not only authors, but interpreters and translators along with them.)

Although the contemporary translator of the Nobles et cleres dames focuses on Anne of Brittany’s protection of his work against its potential detractors, it is not a one-way association, for, at the same time, he praises the queen and flatters her through favorable comparison with the famous women originally staged by Boccaccio: … j’ay parfaicte esperance que vostre trescelebrable nom volitera de plus en plus par les bouches des hommes par sur la fameuse et tresclere memoire de toutes les dames illustres, cleres, et nobles du temps passé (fols. a2v–a3r). (I have the singular hope that your very honored name will flutter increasingly over the lips of men above the well-known and very bright memory of all illustrious, famous and noble women of past times.) 7

8

9

Extant paper copies of this edition include Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. G 365, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Fol. H 4992, and Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, OE XVe s. 639. At least ten additional copies are located in other European and American libraries. Could the translator have been Guillaume Tardif, who, around the same period of time, translated several works for Charles VIII, which Vérard then printed, often without identifying the translator? See Winn, 68, 86–87, for details. All citations from the Nobles et cleres dames are taken from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. G 365 copy. Abbreviations have been resolved, the distinction between i and j, u and v has been regularized, the cedilla has been used as in modern French, and the elision of vowels is indicated by an apostrophe. The acute accent indicates the masculine singular and masculine plural in –s (but not those in –ez) of past participles; it also indicates that a final syllable is pronounced (donnés). Punctuation and the use of capital letters follow modern norms. All English translations are my own.

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This verbal association between Anne of Brittany and Boccaccio’s famous women is visually reinforced by the seventy-seven woodcuts scattered throughout Vérard’s edition. Placed at the beginning of the anonymous translator’s prologue, the image of a crowned lady seated on a throne before three other female court figures (fol. a1v) ostensibly represents the queen, who is identified in the prologue that follows. But this same woodcut, one of the nine images repeated throughout Vérard’s edition, is reused to identify nineteen other women in the translation. These visual associations between Anne of Brittany in the prologue and other famous women, such as Semiramis and Juno, in the body of the Nobles et cleres dames connect the French queen as a noble and virtuous woman with twenty percent of the famous women Boccaccio had studied in his work. Anne of Brittany, a living woman of renown, thereby served as an explicit link between the famous women of the past and those of the present. Furthermore, in his prologue the anonymous translator links the dissemination of Anne of Brittany’s renown to the diffusion and ultimate success of his own translation, since, according to him, the book, by virtue of the new possibilities of multiple reproduction, could more successfully promulgate word of her virtues than the queen herself: “Et que comme ainssy soit que ne puisses estre par tout par puissance corporele, ce present livre fera congnoistre vous et vos merites a ceulx qui sont presentement vivans” (And since it is such that you are not physically able to be everywhere at once, this present book will make you and your merits known to those currently living; fol. a3r). Promoting the interdependence between himself and the French queen, the translator of the Nobles et cleres dames ends up publicizing his role – and that of his translation – in the diffusion of Anne of Brittany’s name to posterity:10 Et mesmement vous fera estre eternele envers les posterités et generacions futures subsequentes et advenir. Et finablement, aidant nostre Seigneur, ne serés pas seulement eue et reputee tresresplendissante sur et entre les nobles dames qui ont esté et seront en ceste vie transsitoire et corruptible, mais avecques ce aprés que aurés despoullé et laissé l’abit humain de ceste mortalité perissable, vous serés receue en perpetuele clarté par Celuy qui est largiteur des graces et biens celestez (fol. a3r). (And it will even immortalize you for posterity and future and subsequent generations. And finally, with the help of our Lord, you will not only be esteemed as most resplendent above and among the noble ladies that have existed and will exist in this transitory and corruptible life, but in addition, after you have stripped away and left behind the human vestment of this perishable mortality, you will be received in perpetual brightness by Him who is the provider of celestial graces and goods.)

Thus the translator, his anticipated patron, and his book as literary, artistic, and indeed political object were linked through their interconnected potential for fame. However, the translator’s most fascinating revelation about what motivated him to translate the Nobles et cleres dames is his allusion to the kind of sexual 10

Many of the anonymous translator’s ideas echo those expressed by Boccaccio in his original dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli, which does not appear in Vérard’s edition.

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antagonism that characterized the centuries-old debate surrounding the condemnation and defense of women. For in his dedication to Anne of Brittany, the anonymous translator refers specifically to a contemporary dispute about the virtues of each sex. According to him, his translation was carried out in order to furnish Anne of Brittany with ammunition against the masculine position, supporting instead the argument that there was widespread evidence of virtuous women: Affin que vous, ma tresredoubtee dame, ayez matiere de repliquer et alleguer les nobles et celebrables vertuz qui ont esté par cy devant ou sexe feminin: quant les princes et seigneurs du royaume vouldroient, en devisant devant vostre illustre majesté, proposer les beaux faiz et vertuz des homes a la diminution des louables vertuz des dames (fol. a1v). (So that you, my very redoubted lady, may have the material to respond and argue for the noble and celebrated virtues that have always been embodied in the female sex: when, in discussions before your illustrious majesty, the princes and lords of the realm would like to propose the great deeds and virtues of men to the detriment of the praiseworthy virtues of ladies.)

The translator apparently refers to discussions in which certain men of the court might negatively compare the virtues of women to those of men in front of the queen herself. His praise of female attributes also implicitly reawakens the controversy about female readers. Should they have the right to read texts, such as Boccaccio’s, containing non-Christian ideas or pagan examples? In other words, did women possess a critical enough mind to be able to distinguish good from evil? The anonymous translator responds affirmatively in the case of Anne of Brittany through a horticultural metaphor: … tressouveraine et redoubtee dame, se vous entriés en ung vergier ouquel eust plusieurs belles fleurs parmy ung tas de ronsses et de espines, et vous vousissés cueillir lesdictes fleurs, vous detourneriés avecquez vos elegans et delicieux dois la pointure desdictez ronssez et espines et par aprés cueilleriés lesdictes fleurs. Pareillement, tresredoubtee dame, vous saurez bien cueillir et retenir les choses louables et vertueuses desdictes anciennes dames, fuir et eviter les vicieuses. Et certes, quant aucune dame crestienne lyra quelque chose en ce present livre digne de louenge, laquelle chose elle congnoistra ne estre point en elle, celuy sera cause et matiere de eveiller son engin, affin qu’elle puisse surmonter en honnesteté, pudicité ou autre vertu les dames gentilles et paiennes. Et metra lors ladicte dame crestienne toute[s] les force et vertu de son engin ad ce qu’elle ne soit vaincue en vertu par aucune dame paienne du temps passé (fol. a2v). (most sovereign and redoubted lady, if you entered an orchard where there were many beautiful flowers among a pile of brambles and thorns, and you wished to pick these flowers, you would, with your elegant and delicate fingers, avert the prick of the brambles and thorns, and afterwards you would pick the flowers. Similarly, very redoubted lady, you would know well how to pick and retain the laudable and virtuous things about the aforementioned ladies of the past, and to flee and avoid the vicious things. And certainly, when any Christian lady reads something in this present book worthy of praise, which thing she recognizes as not being in her, this will be the cause and reason for awakening her mind, so that she may surpass in honesty, modesty or other virtue noble pagan women. And then this Christian lady will use all the force and virtue of her mind so that she will not be surpassed in virtue by any pagan lady of times past.)

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By implicitly alluding to men’s anxiety about the intellectual capacities of women, the anonymous translator of the Nobles et cleres dames likewise calls attention to Boccaccio’s own ambiguous attitude about his famous women. The Italian author’s female case studies were all famous, but not necessarily virtuous: he judged many to be infamous. The anonymous translator, on the other hand, stands squarely on the side of women in general, and of Anne of Brittany in particular, praising her as a reader who would know well how to distinguish virtuous behavior that should be imitated from dangerous behavior to be avoided. Here the translator seems to echo many ideas promoted by Christine de Pizan in her Cité des Dames, including her suggested “antiphrastic” reading of misogynistic works and her conception of women as intellectually and morally worthy.11 Thus, in the eyes of the translator of the Nobles et cleres dames, Anne of Brittany not only played a central role in the dissemination and ultimate success of his translation. As a virtuous and wise woman who would not be derailed by the negative examples of famous women described by Boccaccio, she also served as an intellectual role model for all other women for whom “la lecture de ce present volume pourra[it] exciter et eveiller le noble courage … a faire et acomplir plusieurs faiz et operacions vertueuses a l’imitacion et maniere des nobles dames anciennes” (the reading of this present volume could excite and awaken their noble spirits … to carry out and accomplish many feats and virtuous actions in imitation of noble ladies of the past; fol. a2r). The fact that this translation was successfully printed and circulated, presumably among a large number of readers, would have probably pleased the anonymous translator. Whether or not this success resulted from action taken by the queen vis-à-vis Vérard cannot, however, be verified. In any case, the publisher’s involvement in the printing of the work altered the relationship that the translator had established with Anne of Brittany in the prologue. First, the translator’s identity was never disseminated with his translation in Vérard’s edition. The publisher had identified Boccaccio as author of the Nobles et cleres dames on the title page: “Le livre de Jehan Bocasse de la louenge et vertu des nobles et cleres dames translaté et imprimé novellement a Paris” (The book of Giovanni Boccaccio concerning the praise and virtue of noble and famous ladies translated and recently printed in Paris; fol. a1r).12 For as bookseller, Vérard would have profited from his association with the well-known Italian author by attracting a larger clientele of readers with this publicity. But advertisement of the identity of the less famous 11

Anne of Brittany owned a printed copy of Christine’s Trésor de la Cité des dames, published by Vérard in 1497 and dedicated to the queen by the publisher (Winn, 132–33). But there is no evidence that she possessed a (manuscript) copy of Christine’s Cité des dames, which was never printed during this time; see Michael Jones, “Les manuscrits d’Anne de Bretagne, Reine de France, Duchesse de Bretagne” in Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 55 (1978), 43–81. 12 In addition, the author’s name was announced in the rubric preceding the translator’s prologue – “Le prologue du translateur sur le livre de Jehan Bocasse par luy fait de la louenge et vertu des nobles et cleres dames” (fol. a2v) – as well as in the rubric announcing Boccaccio’s prologue: “Le premier chapitre est le prologue dudit Bocasse” (fol. a3v).

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translator may have been deemed unnecessary in the publisher’s quest to arouse the interest of potential book purchasers. Being known among some contemporaries, moreover, the translator’s identity may have overshadowed or at least complicated Vérard’s own paratextual performance. Indeed, the absence of the translator’s name created a convenient ambiguity for the publisher, whose own name – the only contemporary name associated with the publication – appeared in the colophon of the publication, followed by his printer’s mark: Cy finist Bocace des nobles et cleres femmes imprimé a Paris ce xxviii. jour d’avril mil quatre cens quatre vingtz et treize par Anthoine Verard libraire demourant a Paris sur le pont Nostre Dame a l’ymage saint Jehan l’evangeliste ou au Palais au premier pillier devant la Chappelle ou on chante la messe de messeigneurs les presidens (fol. t5v). (Here Boccaccio ends Concerning Noble and Famous Women printed in Paris this 23rd day of April 1493 by Antoine Vérard, bookseller living in Paris on the Notre Dame Bridge at the sign of Saint John the Evangelist or at the first pillar of the Palace in front of the Chapel where one sings the mass of my lords the presidents.)

By suppressing the translator’s name in the volume he published and by identifying himself in the colophon, Vérard shared this privileged paratextual space only with the famous – but deceased – Boccaccio, placing himself in the same universe, because both had contributed to the creation of the book. As a result, the potential confusion between Vérard’s function and that of the contemporary translator in the book’s creation made all the more ambiguous Vérard’s relationship with the translator’s dedicatee, Anne of Brittany. The reader could easily believe that it was the bookseller who had penned the prologue and dedicated his edition to the queen.13 This suppression of the translator’s identity and implicit appropriation of his functions by Vérard are more dramatically evident in two of the extant hybrid versions of the Nobles et cleres dames. To personalize the copies dedicated to the kings of France and of England, Charles VIII and Henry VII, respectively, Vérard had to eliminate the entire prologue that had originally figured in the printed paper copies, because it directly addressed the queen. Indeed, the first two folios of the prologue (ai–aii), on which the woodcut of the queen originally figured, were removed from the French king’s copy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Vélins 1223), and Vérard had the last lines of the prologue erased from the third folio. A miniature added to this folio depicts Vérard, not the translator, on bended knee offering his book to King Charles VIII.14 The substitution of the generic 13

In fact, in “Les plus anciennes traductions françaises de Boccace,” Bulletin Italien 9.3 (1909): 194, H. Hauvette, who describes the 1493 edition of the Nobles et cleres dames, goes so far as to claim that “Antoine Vérard s’y donne pour l’auteur,” without, however, providing any details. 14 See Winn, 114–16, for a description of this modification, and 115, for a copy of this miniature. In the hybrid copy destined for Henry VII (see London, British Library, IB 41132b), the first two folios of the prologue are blank and a dramatic miniature of Pyramus and Thisbe, who are not however included in Boccaccio’s book or the translation, replaces the generic woodcut of a crowned female. By contrast, the third known extant vellum copy (Manchester, John Rylands

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woodcut of the queen by this dedication scene effectively eliminated the visual and thematic links between the original dedicatee, Anne of Brittany, and the famous women of the work. What complicates any attempt to untangle these various relationships is Winn’s fascinating discovery of a dedicatory miniature depicting Vérard presenting a book to Anne of Brittany on the verso of a folio that contains text from the Nobles et cleres dames, which was inserted into another vellum imprint, Robert de Saint Martin’s Trésor de l’âme, offered to the queen by Vérard at a later date (around 1497).15 Of particular significance is the fact that Boccaccio’s work on famous women was of such interest to two of the most powerful men in Europe at the time. But why did Vérard dedicate a decorated copy of his edition of the Nobles et cleres dames to the king rather than the queen, when the prologue he incorporated into the printed paper copies specified that Anne had inspired this translation? Did Charles VIII play any role in this modification of dedicatees? And if so, why did he commission a luxury copy of a translation originally destined for Anne of Brittany?16 Was there a misunderstanding between Vérard and the queen, or between the king and the queen? Or was it simply a more practical arrangement for all involved? We will never know the answers to these questions. But it was the king who received a luxury copy of Vérard’s publication. An examination of the paratextual features of Vérard’s Nobles et cleres dames implies that there existed some form of competition between the translator of the work, whose name was never published and who may never have even been aware of Vérard’s activities, and the publisher, who clearly identified himself verbally and visually in the paratext. In addition, the absence of a copy of the work bearing an illustration that confirms Vérard’s dedication of it to Anne, the apparent displacement of the original miniature depicting Vérard’s dedication to Anne from the Nobles et cleres dames to the copy of another work, and the apparent replacement of that already prepared dedicatory miniature to the queen with one depicting King Charles VIII suggest the possibility of tensions between the publisher Vérard and the translator’s dedicatee, Anne of Brittany. Whereas the reader of the paper edition of the Nobles et cleres dames could appreciate the responsibility given to the French queen in the transmission of this translation, the power the translator accorded his dedicatee disappeared from the volumes specially prepared for the kings of France and England. Most likely honoring royal protocol, Vérard doubtless sought to avoid any confusion or competition between queen and king. It was in the vellum copies dedicated to the kings of France and England that Vérard eliminated the critical contribution of both translator and queen to the creation of the Nobles et cleres dames. Assuming the function of translator and Library, Inc. 15883), which also bears miniatures (painted over the original woodcuts), does retain the dedication to the queen. Whether or not this could have been Anne of Brittany’s copy remains to be seen. 15 Winn, 134–35. 16 Winn, 134–35, poses similar questions.

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replacing Anne of Brittany by her husband, Vérard suppressed at the same time all association between text and female dedicatee, as well as all references to any controversy about the virtues and intellectual capabilities of women. In other words, he eliminated the contradictions and hidden tensions beneath the surface of these texts in the paper copies of his edition. Vérard’s erasure of the queen and of the praise of women in these royal copies explains perhaps why Anne of Brittany decided some ten years later, as the wife of Louis XII, to commission Antoine Dufour to rewrite Boccaccio’s work about famous women. The manuscript book of the Vies des femmes célèbres, magnificently illuminated by Jean Pichore, was completed around 1506 and treats a number of women placed on Boccaccio’s literary stage, but others as well.17 Like the anonymous translator of the Nobles et cleres dames, Dufour explicitly distances himself from Boccaccio, who, he claims, had placed too much blame on famous women. This new work seems to confirm Anne’s preference for manuscript books and signals perhaps her predilection for a system of book reproduction over which she maintained greater control. In fact, the liminary miniature of the volume depicts the queen both commissioning the work from Dufour and receiving it from him.18 This brief examination of the printed and hybrid copies of Vérard’s publication of Des nobles et cleres dames in 1493 offers one example of the complex associations among authors, translators, patrons, and publishers in the early book trade in Paris. The fame that had determined Boccaccio’s particular selection and staging of women in his Nobles et cleres dames brought to this work a renown that led a certain translator to reproduce the work in French for Queen Anne of Brittany, whose own fame was directly linked to the book’s subject and projected success and popularity. In turn, the bookmaker, who sought to publish this translation of a famous work in order to gain a profit, assumed the mantle of renown associated with the original book, as he suppressed the identity of the previous participant in the book’s creation. On the one hand, we lose all trace of the anonymous translator’s name and, in certain personalized versions of the work, the name and role of his female dedicatee. On the other, the identities of the work’s famous, but deceased, author and of its publisher were retained and emphasized in the paratext of all the versions of the Nobles et cleres dames. The control that Vérard held over this and other publications, most apparent in his manipulation of paratextual material, doubtless reflects the implicit and explicit rivalries that existed among those who sought to profit from famous works. It was precisely in this competitive climate, in which the living translator of the Nobles et cleres dames had been displaced and replaced by the publisher, that Pierre Gringore took a stand. By obtaining an author’s privilege that gave him control over the publication of nearly all the first editions of his works beginning 17

Currently housed as MS XVII in the Musée Dobrée in Nantes, the Vies des femmes célèbres was edited by G. Jeanneau (Geneva: Droz, 1970). For the attribution of miniatures to Jean Pichore, see François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440– 1520 (Paris: Flammarion-Bibliothèque Nationale, 1993), 415. 18 See the frontispiece of the Jeanneau edition for a copy of this miniature.

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in December 1505, by having his name as author advertised in the paratext of his works, by presenting himself in dedication scenes that decorated many editions of his works as well as in illustrations on the title page that served as his author’s mark, by sometimes advertising his own address for clients seeking to obtain his book,19 Gringore appropriated the role of savvy booksellers such as Vérard and proved that he had learned well from them that paratextual performances, the privileged activities of publishers, could ultimately lead to professional fame.

19

For details, see Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers, 94–97, 235–42, 266–68.

“Resuscitating” Medieval Literature in New York and Paris: La femme que Nostre-Dame garda d’estre arse at Yvette Guilbert’s School of Theatre, 1919–24 Elizabeth Emery

Mme Yvette Guilbert a fondé en Amérique une école d’art dramatique: douze jeunes filles qui jouent des scènes de mystères ou donnent des spectacles religieux. C’est une sorte de confrérie de la Passion, vêtue d’or et d’ornements sacerdotaux, qui chante et officie… Tout un public s’en émeut et pleure comme si elle lui rouvrait les sources de la prière. Voilà donc quelque chose de nouveau: le principe de tout un art dramatique… (In America, Mrs. Yvette Guilbert founded a school of the dramatic arts: twelve young ladies who perform scenes from mystery plays or stage religious shows. It is a kind of Brotherhood of the Passion, clothed in gold and priestly ornaments, that sings and officiates… The entire audience is moved and cries as if [the Brotherhood] were re-opening the origins of prayer for it. Here, then, is something new: the principle of a whole dramatic art…) Emmanuel de Thubert, in Yvette Guilbert, La chanson de ma vie

From 1919 to 1924, a small troupe of women toured America and Europe, enthralling audiences with their performances of medieval theater and song (Fig. 1). Spectators described them as an illuminated manuscript brought to life: “enchanting,” “naïve,” and resurrecting “these Middle Ages whose productivity we have so unjustly neglected.”1 The program featured Guibour ou La femme que Nostre-Dame garda d’estre arse, from the fourteenth-century Miracles de NostreDame par personnages, followed by a selection of songs by composers such as Thibaut de Champagne, Adam de la Halle, and Guillaume de Machaut, or by chansons de toile, estampies, drinking songs, and liturgical chants in Latin.2

1

2

Research for this essay was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to François-Pierre Goy, Mathias Auclair, and Bruno Sébald of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Regina Psaki and Bettina Knapp for their suggestions regarding this project. “Ce Moyen Âge dont on a si injustement ignoré la fécondité.” See the collection of newspaper clippings at the Arts du spectacle branch of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNFAS), RO 16087, fols. 87–160. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the French are my own. This is play number twenty-six of the forty Miracles de Nostre-Dame par personnages. The troupe also performed number thirty-six, Pierre le changeur, as well as other miracle and

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Sometimes, the medieval repertory was juxtaposed with more modern music to illustrate the development of French lyric through the ages, a process that awakened audiences to the “strange modernity” of medieval literature. These were, in fact, student performances directed by Yvette Guilbert (1865– 1944), and they reflected her idiosyncratic theories about staged interpretation, which anticipated by nearly a century today’s performance-based studies of medieval works. Fascinated by early drama and song, Guilbert dedicated her life to making them accessible: “Pour toucher le grand public, il n’y a que le théâtre” (Only theater can reach the masses).3 This essay argues that although her contributions have been forgotten today, Guilbert brought “old France” to life through performance, making her mark as one of the most effective popularizers of medieval literature in early twentieth-century America and France. The teachings of Yvette Guilbert’s School of Theatre still provide insights into the performance possibilities of medieval texts. Today, Guilbert is remembered primarily as a cabaret singer, the subject of one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. In the 1890s, however, her fame rivaled that of her friends, serious actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eléanora Duse.4 Guilbert was an unusual performer, a self-educated woman from the working class who was neither a trained actress nor a singer. She was lauded, instead, as a diseuse, brilliant for her uncanny ability to manipulate voice, facial expression, and gestures to bring to life the characters represented in her repertory. It is commonly thought that Guilbert disappeared at the turn of the century. On the contrary, she reinvented herself as a scholar-performer. By the 1930s, she had allegedly collected or copied 88,000 French songs from the sixth to the nineteenth centuries. Medievalists such as Jean Beck, Joseph Bédier, Alfred Jeanroy, and Gustave Cohen collaborated with Guilbert, referring to her as “notre consœur en érudition” (our scholarly sister).5 From 1900 to her death in 1944, she toured Europe, America, and the Far East on “propaganda missions” or “crusades” to bring attention to French culture. She reinforced these travels with publications and translations of the texts and music of old songs (for the Middle Ages these include Les pastourelles du quinzième siècle, Chanteries du moyen âge, and Chansons anciennes recueillies par Yvette Guilbert) as well as interviews and

3

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5

mystery plays. For more detail on individual performances, see the excellent program collection at the BNF Opéra (BNFO), “Collection Yvette Guilbert. Numéro 38184.” Maurice de Waleffe admiring her “propaganda efforts” in a 1919 article entitled “Yvette Guilbert va fonder à New-York une École française du Théâtre.” BNF, n. a. fr. 16020, Papiers Poincaré XXIX, fols. 308–31. The best biography of Guilbert is That Was Yvette by Bettina Knapp and Myra Chipman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), based on Guilbert’s memoirs, Yvette Guilbert: Struggles and Victories (London: Mills and Boon, 1910), La chanson de ma vie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1927), and La passante émerveillée (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1929). Gustave Cohen refers to her in these terms in a 14 June 1934 letter. BNF, n. a. fr. 17596, fol. 155. On her collaboration with Jean Beck, see John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 240–44. Her relationship to other medievalists and her voluminous collection of songs are mentioned in a great number of newspaper interviews.

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lectures about how to perform them (How to Sing a Song: The Art of Dramatic and Lyric Interpretation and Une heure de musique avec Yvette Guilbert).6 This working-class woman, whose formal education ended at the age of twelve, was nominated to the Société des anciens textes français in 1921. In order to understand the 1919–24 American student tours and the performance theories that prompted them, a bit more background information is necessary. Soon after the outbreak of World War I (1915), Guilbert and her GermanAmerican husband left Paris for New York, where Guilbert threw herself into performances of the archival material she had been unearthing in libraries since the 1890s. She headlined at The Lyceum and Maxine Elliott Theaters, David Belasco’s Stuyvestant Theatre, and the Neighborhood Playhouse, among others, while embarking on a grueling series of cross-country American tours featuring “Eight Centuries of French Song.” The warm welcome she received during these tours came from her renown coupled with her status as a representative of the martyred French nation: The Craftsman, for example, called her “the spirit of her nation made incarnate. She is France – joyous, humorous, tragic, kind, strong, gay, without self-consciousness.”7 Guilbert embraced this role, likening herself to a wandering minstrel, “instilling into all nations the love and respect for its own by celebrating in songs its manifold beauties,” and helping audiences understand French heroism. 8 Indeed, Guilbert worked valiantly for war relief efforts and her performances and lectures about French drama and lyric poetry were in high demand at universities throughout the country. She gave annual lectures at Columbia and Barnard from 1916 to 1920, while traveling to Bryn Mawr, Smith, and farther-flung schools.9 It is likely that her success in academic venues encouraged her to found a school of the arts. Guilbert had long championed the importance of education for women, particularly actresses, so they would no longer be “doll wom[e]n,” whose “total ignorance of letters and of art of all kinds makes [them] doubtful scholar[s] and actress[es] of undoubted inferiority.” For her, the “actress of tomorrow” would speak several languages, would know world history and the history of theater, art, and literature, and she would draw and study works of art in museums.10 In such articles, Guilbert laid out her vision for a liberal arts education complemented by training in performance, dance, song, set and costume design. How to 6

How to Sing a Song (New York: Macmillan, 1918) and Une heure de musique (Paris: Aux éditions cosmopolites, 1930). For the best (though incomplete and often inaccurate) list of Guilbert’s songs, publications, performances, recordings, and films, see the 1994 Bibliothèque nationale de France exhibit catalog, Yvette Guilbert, diseuse fin de siècle, 75–105. 7 From “The American Girl’s Education Not Human Enough,” The Craftsman 30 (July 1916): 365–73. 8 Ibid. Variations of these words occur in other lecture and program notes. 9 For copies of Columbia and Barnard programs, see the Guilbert program archives at the BNFO and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPLPA). La passante émerveillée, 65–67, cites poems dedicated to her by faculty and students at schools such as Columbia and the University of Nebraska. 10 See “The Actress of Tomorrow,” a 1906 text reprinted in Theatre Magazine (December 1916): 366 and 406. She worked tirelessly to establish charities for women, artists, and children.

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Sing a Song: The Art of Dramatic and Lyric Interpretation (1918), a collection of lectures explaining her own performance practices, established her as an expert in the field, giving credence to her new role as director of a School of Theatre, which opened its doors in October 1919 with twenty students.11 Founded with the motto “All Arts in one Art! All Arts in one Artist!” the curriculum of Yvette Guilbert’s School of Theatre epitomizes her performance theories; first of all, it was to serve as an alternative to most American drama teaching of the time, which was not yet institutionalized and consisted of, as Guilbert put it, “repeating … lines with certain movements of the arms as gestures… No mental development, no analytical superiority, no psychology, no observation, no deduction.”12 For Guilbert, an actor needed to be a “chanteur, danseur, mime, peintre, sculpteur, décorateur, musicien – artiste enfin!” (singer, dancer, mime, painter, sculptor, decorator, musician – an artist, in short!). Focusing on the personal interpretation of characters, of “feeling” over “intellect,” she advocated historical study complemented by close readings of texts that taught students to understand and incarnate their characters.13 Accordingly, her pupils attended lectures about the history of theater, music, literature, and art with faculty from Bryn Mawr, Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, and New York University. In addition to scholarship, Guilbert stressed the importance of captivating the audience. She rejected vocal techniques taken from the opera, preferring voices capable of incarnating multiple characters to “pretty” ones. Her teaching thus stressed breathing techniques, diction, physical mimicry, and “coloring words” to bring out their meaning, while the curriculum involved physical training through the Dalcroze method of Eurhythmics, as well as practical lessons in costume and set design.14 The Paris school, founded in 1921, functioned on a similar basis, but with a mixed group of American and French students working in collaboration with professionals.15 Above all, Guilbert considered her students a “compagnie” or troupe, a group of apprentices who would learn their craft through performance itself. Tours were thus planned from the school’s inception, as were concerts around the world, including two new medieval theaters she planned to establish in Paris in collaboration with Bédier, Cohen, and Jeanroy, among others.16 11

12 13 14 15 16

For a description of the financial and ideological difficulties Guilbert encountered in establishing the school, see Knapp and Chipman, 280–91. A publicity brochure entitled “1920–21 Yvette Guilbert’s School of the Theatre,” contains a syllabus, costs, and goals, as well as detailed program information and photographs for that year’s performances (Yale University Library). Knapp and Chipman, 282–83, have argued that Guilbert was a pioneer, establishing her school before drama departments were accepted features of American universities. 16 June 1919 letter to Clayton Hamilton (New York Public Library [NYPL], Clayton Hamilton papers). Such ideas were repeated throughout How to Sing a Song. See the first chapter of How to Sing a Song. “Appel à la jeunesse. Le ‘Conservatoire de Mme Yvette Guilbert’,” BNFAS, RO 16087, fols. 127–28. Her collaboration with the clergy and leading medievalists on a “Théâtre religieux” and a “Théâtre de la Vieille France,” is mentioned in detail in a 1922 interview (BNFAS, RO 16087, fols. 116–17).

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Although Guilbert’s concept of dramatic education, as expressed in How to Sing a Song, derives specifically from her own experiences, The Neighborhood Playhouse, with which Guilbert was associated from her arrival in New York, also exerted a critical influence. The Grand Street Theater, founded by Alice and Irene Lewisohn in February 1915, provided an American counterpart to Guilbert’s social activism in France: run by women, it developed from work with immigrant children’s festivals, combining amateur productions with professional ones and providing a variety of entertainment and educational options for the community. It became one of the premier American stages for avant-garde theatrical experimentation.17 The Lewisohns shared Yvette’s innovative ideas about the use of the voice, body, costumes, lighting, and set design while introducing her to American models of teaching. Guilbert’s choice of Dalcroze methods, instructors, and curriculum (scholarship, applied craft workshops, vocal and physical training) corresponded closely to the Lewisohns’ practices, and it is no surprise that she dedicated How to Sing a Song to them, while producing the English world premiere of Guibour at the Playhouse in 1919.18 It is through analysis of this production and its revival with students that we can best understand Guilbert’s techniques for interpreting medieval texts. As in her school’s curriculum, the key elements for the revival of Guibour were research, close readings, and analysis of texts through performance. Guilbert’s goals were not modest; she sought to use performance to educate her audiences about French heritage: “Rescuciter l’air du passé?” Oui. Faire connaître aux nombreux Français qui les ignorent les mystères, les miracles de Notre-Dame, les farces et soties, les romans de chevalerie, les monologues, les fabliaux, les dits, les chants d’amour des troubadours et des trouvères, les complaintes des Croisades…19 (Resuscitate a semblance of the past? Yes. Familiarize the many Frenchmen who do not know them with mystery plays, miracles of the Virgin, farces and soties, Arthurian romance, fabliaux, dits, the love songs of the troubadours and trouvères, Crusade laments…)

But how could one “resuscitate” the past through performance? First of all, Guilbert believed in what today we would call “historicallyinformed performance,” which relies on surviving documentation to intuit performance practices.20 The costumes and sets of the New York production 17

For a history of the Playhouse, see Alice Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), especially the discussion of Guilbert’s goals and Playhouse activities, 92 and 82–84. See also Melanie Blood, “The Neighborhood Playhouse 1915–1927” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1994). 18 See Crowley, 177–78, for the Lewisohns’ theories of incarnating characters, and 92–96, for a description of Guibour. 19 1922 interview, BNFAS, RO 16087, fols. 116–17. 20 For the challenges of this process, see Benjamin Bagby, “Beowulf, the Edda, and the Performance of Medieval Epic: Notes from the Workshop of a Reconstructed ‘Singer of Tales’,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 181–92.

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(Fig. 2), commissioned from Robert Edmond Jones, were inspired by medieval manuscripts and paintings, as were many of the gestures used.21 This was one of Guilbert’s cardinal rules: Comment chanter bellement une Légende Dorée, sans l’enluminer du souvenir plastique des “Primitifs”? Comment “gesticuler” une chanson de toile, un chant de croisade, une aube, une verderie, etc. sans connaître les documents qui les éternisent dans la mémoire humaine? 22 (How can one sing a Golden Legend beautifully without illuminating it with the visual memory of the “Primitives”? How can one “gesticulate” a weaving song, a Crusade song, a dawn song, a reverdie, etc. without knowing the documents that immortalize them in human memory?)

This approach was novel at a time when it was rare to perform medieval plays, let alone to make inquiries into recreating what might have been done in a medieval setting.23 Second, she advocated close readings of the text to find performance cues. Her familiarity with Guibour, for example, is evident in the detailed stage directions and clever scene divisions of Anna Sprague Macdonald’s English translation, which was dedicated to Guilbert and on which the diseuse had collaborated. 24 Guilbert had proposed the play to the Lewisohns and worked tirelessly on it (Guibour was her first English-language role). Perhaps the most clever innovation was to place actors figuring the Virgin and the saints in the niches of the church (Fig. 3). Guibour prays to these “statues” in passing, and at the climax of the play the miracle comes to life: God asks them to descend to save the repentant sinner from burning. Third, Guilbert felt that performance was crucial for medieval texts, which were not merely literary or musical relics: Ah! Ces savants qui, ne s’occupant que du côté littéraire dédaignent la notation musicale, ou ces musicologues, qui, ne s’intéressant qu’à la forme musicale, ne donnent que le titre de la chanson sans se soucier du texte. Et quand, après dix ans de patience, j’arrivai à reconstituer quelques chansons, il me sembla avoir enfin tiré d’une plaine de sable un trésor enfoui.25 (Ah! Those scholars who, in treating only the literary side, discount musical notation, or those musicologists who, interested only in musical form, give only song titles without bothering with the text. And when, after ten years of patience, I 21 22

Jones’s drawings are preserved in the Guibour file of the NYPLPA. From L’art de chanter une chanson (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1928), 59, the French version of How to Sing a Song. Although Guilbert was later friendly with Cohen, it is not clear whether she had read his Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux du moyen âge (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1906) before the 1919 Guibour performances. The use of “mansions” in Figs. 1 and 4 suggests that she had. 23 For a description of the difficulties faced by Henry Adams, who also sought to perform medieval music at this time, see Siegmund Levarie, “Henry Adams, Avant-gardist in Early Music,” American Music 15 (1997): 429–45. 24 New York: The Sunwise Turn, 1919. 25 La chanson de ma vie, 194–95.

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succeeded in reconstituting a few songs, it seemed as though I had finally pulled a buried treasure out of a sandy plain.)

For Guilbert, it was performance that brought text, music, and interpretation together, revealing the hidden “treasures” of medieval culture. Accordingly, she used music from manuscripts when available (in her troubadour, trouvère, and fifteenth-century repertory, for example) by borrowing from previously published transcriptions like those of Jeanroy, Paris, and Beck, or by having songs transcribed for her.26 In other situations, where the music was not clearly specified (as in the case of Guibour), she worked with a collaborator to find appropriate works to complement the action. She had copied and transcribed nearly all of Coussemaker’s Le drame liturgique du moyen âge for this purpose. Although Guilbert chose to delete the lengthy sermon and the mass contained in the fourteenthcentury text of Guibour and to ignore the rondels sung by angels, her version did include twenty-one musical pieces, from “Le lai pieux” and “Kyrie, eleison” to “Gloria in excelsis Deo” and “Dominus vobiscum.” The rest of the translation followed the original nearly word for word.27 As this example reveals, Guilbert was less interested in fidelity to authentic performance practices of the Middle Ages than in making the texts interesting and comprehensible for a modern audience. She applied her theories for interpreting modern song to the medieval corpus, never hesitating to take liberties with words or to add asides in order to convey the drama inherent in the words.28 Similarly, although she knew that Guibour was a miracle play (the name she gave it in the United States), Guilbert called it a mystère (mystery play) in France in order to capitalize on the cachet that surrounded this term in turn-of-the-century Paris.29 Given the reaction of her audiences, her modifications were effective. Even shorn of the sermon and the mass, spectators found the play quite religious for modern taste. Yet they also found such “superstition” charming, choosing verbs such as “resuscitate,” “reconstruct,” “animate,” “relive,” and “re-flower” to describe the troupes’ ability to bring the medieval past to life.30 Spectators were 26

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She describes this process in La chanson de ma vie, 194–95: “Quand je parvins au XIe siècle, des textes latins surgirent, il me fallut les faire traduire. Quand j’en avais reçu la traduction, je me les faisais chanter en latin, puis sur les points où étaient les accents, j’établissais la traduction moi-même en vers français et je rythmais mon vers, selon les accents latins, afin de respecter le style musical du vieux thème.” This technique is confirmed by her manuscripts, preserved at the BNF Musique. See the production notes in the Guibour file at the NYPLPA. See the first chapter of How to Sing a Song, in which she advises adding words, sounds or pauses to songs in order to heighten the drama. The term mystère had been used throughout the nineteenth century to refer to medieval plays, as evidenced by the title of Petit de Julleville’s 1880 Les Mystères, the first two volumes of L’histoire du théâtre en France. Though it was known that true mystery plays developed in the fifteenth century (as he admits), the term continued to be applied indiscriminately to all genres of medieval theater well into the twentieth century. See Medieval Saints in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2004). See, for example, the anti-Semitic review featured in Life (30 January 1919): 173 or the numerous (mostly positive) reviews in BNFAS, RO 16087, fols. 87–160.

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also shocked by the “modernity” of Guibour, in which a woman murders her sonin-law to save her reputation, only to be discovered and punished by the police. Some critics remarked that such a plot could not truly have been written in the Middle Ages: it was too “modern” and not “strange” enough.31 In “bringing to life” medieval texts, Guilbert and her students revealed not only the similarity of medieval characters to those of the early twentieth century, but also the period’s “neglected productivity,” the richness of its language, music, and dramatic composition. Guilbert’s performances may have lacked authenticity by today’s standards, but she, like modern performers Benjamin Bagby and Anne Azéma, themselves influenced by the theories of Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini, understood medieval material as changing with each interpreter.32 As Bagby points out, an “authentic” performance is impossible; without a recording from the text’s creator, there is no way of knowing with certainty how a piece was originally performed and how to emulate it.33 Similarly, Azéma notes that any performance, even in the Middle Ages, was already a re-interpretation: “the performer becomes, for the duration of the performance, the poet. With each presentation before a public, the work is created anew in the spirit of mouvance and mutation described by Paul Zumthor.” In words uncannily resembling Guilbert’s claims of kinship with medieval minstrels, Azéma presents the performance of medieval culture as a continuing process: Performers neither can nor should replicate previous performance. Yet neither do they invent something totally original. Like the medieval scribes, modern performers interpret and edit a body of material that is already present. Modern versions can be seen as part of a continuity – one link in the long chain of ever changing forms, texts and melodies … one moment in such a continuing process.34

Guilbert, who was at the vanguard of attempts to perform recently rediscovered works from the Middle Ages, saw herself precisely in this light; she continued the work of her medieval counterparts by interpreting their works to the best of her ability. It is no wonder that so many people described her as a minstrel: she, too, “rewrote” or “revived” the texts of the past through performance. But why did Guilbert see performance of medieval drama and song as so important that she dedicated forty-five years of her life to educating the public about them? I would argue that it was precisely in response to this issue of “resuscitation,” of keeping texts alive through performance. When interviewers asked Guilbert about her penchant for medieval theater and song, she always stressed the need to create institutions to preserve drama and song. Without performance, texts risked dying, falling into obscurity. Individual songs, which had nothing to 31

See Pierre Chapelle, “Mme Guilbert et sa Compagnie” (16 December 1922) in BNFAS, RO 16087, fols. 156–57. 32 See Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972) and Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante (Paris: Cerf, 1989). 33 Bagby (2005), 182. 34 “ ‘Une aventure vous dirai’,” in Vitz, Regalado, and Lawrence (2005), 209–22, at 210, 218.

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hold them together unless they were inscribed in a larger volume, as in medieval chansonniers, were particularly endangered. This message is clear in Une heure de musique, where she pleads with readers to emulate Paulin and Gaston Paris, who rediscovered “national treasures” by classifying them and printing them in large volumes for posterity. She presents her own book in this light: Ouvrez-le, il est rempli de quelques belles chansons de nos aïeux, une heure, une bonne heure de joie elles vous apportent, chantez-les, ressuscitez-les! Empêchez de mourir dans le souvenir l’esprit du pays de France, car en ces temps … l’Amérique nous vitriole de ses acides, nous fouette de ses violences, nous soumet à ses trépidations, nous infuse son délirium de l’or… Cinq siècles, la “Musique américaine” attendit l’estampille européenne!35 (Open it, it is filled with a few lovely songs from our ancestors, they will bring you one hour, one solid hour of joy. Sing them, resurrect them! Keep the spirit of France from dying in memory because today … America sprays us with its acid, whips us with its violence, submits us to its fears, infuses us with its delirium for riches… “American music” waited five centuries for the European estampie!)

In post-war France, live performance was increasingly replaced by recordings, while the ever-popular French song had been usurped by the arrival of a music industry promoting American-inspired genres, notably jazz. Without the “life” conferred by performance, Guilbert felt that the French identity inherent in the country’s old music would disappear. Unfortunately, Guilbert’s valiant conservation attempts and numerous publications of old plays and song have slipped back into obscurity.36 The 88,000 songs contained in her personal “musée de la chanson,” which she planned to leave to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, have disappeared, though they may still come to light (most of the documents given to the library after her death were dispersed among the various departments and remain uncatalogued). Despite Guilbert’s pioneering efforts, her schools ran out of money, the Parisian theaters were never realized, and her experiments with medieval drama and song have been forgotten. Ironically, she knew her efforts were doomed from the start; she predicted failure as early as 1912, when she complained that the French public would not pay attention to the scholarship of “une femme comme moi” (a woman like me): her working class background, gender, and notoriety as a cabaret singer would always overshadow other accomplishments.37 Similarly, her actresses were not taken seriously because of their repertory, gender, and nationality: they were “naive” 35 36

Une heure de musique, 8. With one major exception: while there was no “library of song” in her lifetime, today the Bibliothèque nationale de France has not one but four departments conserving materials related to music and performance. 37 BNFAS, RO 16087, fol. 111. Modern scholars continue to downplay Guilbert’s achievements because of her background. As Siegmund Levarie puts it, “Yvette Guilbert was a great artist and interpreter, though no scholar,” 434. Similarly, while John Haines gives Guilbert credit for the originality of her performances, he does not discuss her research into medieval song; he depicts her primarily as a popular musician working in Beck’s shadow, and explains their unlikely collaboration as a result of Beck’s own interest in the café-concert, 240–44.

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and “enchanting” foreign young ladies in a “curious” play from the past. In contrast, Les Théophiliens, the troupe of largely male student performers assembled by Sorbonne professor Gustave Cohen just ten years later, would enjoy tremendous critical and scholarly acclaim, profoundly influencing subsequent theories about the performance of medieval drama.38 Yet Guilbert’s performances and techniques were emulated by others, notably in university settings. Cohen is a case in point. The two had collaborated in the past and his Théophiliens were the mirror image of her female “Brotherhood of the Passion.” Because she had missed the first of his student performances, he invited her, in a 14 June 1934 letter, to the Miracle de Théophile, indicating that “avec reproduction exacte de la mise en scène médiévale … cet essai de restitution vous aurait certainement intéressé” (with an exact reproduction of medieval staging … this attempted reconstruction would certainly have interested you). He promised to send her his version of Robin et Marion and closed by calling her “celle qui sait faire revivre par son talent les chants du moyen âge” (she who, with her talent, knows how to make medieval songs live again).39 Jean Beck similarly saw her performance experience as important for his study of medieval song. In a 1917 letter to a friend he wrote: “I am absolutely certain that her interpretation will give us precious indications, if not final solutions to most of the difficulties of rhythm.”40 In the United States, Guilbert’s experiments with students were also imitated. As drama departments began to flourish in the 1930s, Guibour was reprised around the country by student actors.41 Though Guilbert’s contributions to popularizing medieval drama and song have been forgotten today, her experiments in performing medieval works with students influenced the scholars who followed her and adopted her performance techniques: historical research, the study of text and illuminated manuscripts, and the importance of “all the arts in one art.” Guilbert and her troupe sparked audience interest in the Middle Ages, dispelling the notion that medieval literature was “strange” and full of eccentricities. Her published modern transcriptions and recordings of old French song went even further, allowing the public to interpret and perform material formerly accessible to scholars alone. Moreover, the prefaces of these works directed readers to her sources – Beck, Jeanroy, Paris, Coussemaker, and others – thereby creating a new audience for medieval scholarship. Most important, however, was Guilbert’s insistence on the performance-based study of medieval texts. For her, text and spectacle were inseparable, and medieval texts – poems, songs, drama, prose – needed to be performed for their beauty 38

See Helen Solterer, “The Waking of Medieval Theatricality: Paris 1935–1995,” New Literary History 27.3 (1996): 357–90. Her analysis of Cohen’s techniques – particularly the emphasis on historical research and attempts to incarnate characters – reveals parallels with Guilbert’s work. 39 BNF, n. a. fr. 17596, Papiers Yvette Guilbert I, fol. 155. 40 Letter to Marius Barbeau dated 26 April 1917 (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Marius Barbeau’s Correspondence, box 168, folder 57), cited in Haines, 242. 41 See the Guibour file at the NYPLPA for programs from Mills and Vassar.

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and complexity to emerge. Medievalists such as Nancy Freeman Regalado continue this tradition today when they initiate their students into the treasures of medieval literature by asking them to perform it. How better to understand the clever word games and complex formal structure of François Villon’s poetry than by analyzing a ballad before writing and reciting one’s own pastiche of it? How better to read Old French poetry – at first glance so obscure – than by reciting it aloud in a group, teasing out its meaning phonetically before studying it and listening to it sung? Yvette Guilbert, like her modern professorial counterparts, instinctively understood that it is by performing medieval texts and seeing them performed that the spirit of the Middle Ages continues to thrive.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1. French Miracle Play Revived by Yvette Guilbert. Theatre Magazine (April 1921): 239.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 2. Guibour, Neighborhood Playhouse Production, 1919. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 3. When the Church of the Middle Ages Overcame the Law. Literary Digest (1 March 1919): 29.

The Pitfalls and Promise of Classroom Performance Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

A desire to bring together medieval French literature and performance has twice led me to teach a course focused on the city of Arras through its geography, history, and literary expression. The course’s interdisciplinary structure and multiple aims are briefly outlined in the description: During the medieval period, Arras was a major commercial and cultural center in northern France. This course explores the complex world of Arras by highlighting two of its major authors, Adam de la Halle and Jean Bodel, whose works run the gamut of literary forms practiced from the late twelfth through the thirteenth century: from epic to bawdy tale, from debate poems to sacred and comic theater, from poems of leave-taking to pastourelles and love songs. Focusing on the urban context of Arras, we will concentrate particularly on lyric poetry and theater, two genres especially linked to the dynamics of performance. Students will have the opportunity to gain insight into the imaginative world of these texts by researching their context and performing them in the theater of the class.

In the course design, performance as a facet of medieval works intersects with performances realized by students, who are invited to encounter these very foreign texts through distinct but complementary approaches, each yielding its own kind of insights and identifications. An intellectual approach “from the outside” situates the medieval texts in their historical and political, social and cultural contexts. A more intuitive approach works “from the inside”: students organized in teams invent ways to present selected scenes, excerpts, or poems, and then perform them for the pleasure of the class, whose collective role as Arrageois audience completes the exchange and launches further analysis and discussion. In this essay in honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, teacher and mentor par excellence, I would like to share my experiment, its promise and problems, and offer colleagues a pedagogical model that capitalizes on the multiple talents of our students, while demonstrating that medieval works can still leap off the page and live in performance. Since the course was conducted in French and included both undergraduates and graduate students who had no previous experience with medieval literature, I used texts in bilingual editions or found both versions in separate editions to put on reserve or include in a course packet. Jean Bodel’s works need to be assembled

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from various sources;1 Courtois d’Arras2 and Adam de la Halle’s Œuvres complètes3 are readily available. Students were primarily reading the modern French translations but had access to Old French originals. I offered a supplementary class each week for graduate students interested in reading out loud, translating, and commenting on a given passage in Old French. In the regular two-hour classes, we frequently worked on words, phrases or whole songs in the original language when translation could not give all the associations or nuances of meaning, the play of rhythm and rime. A bibliography distributed at the beginning of the semester included secondary readings on medieval society, Arras and northern France, literary history in general, genres, lyric poetry and theater in the Middle Ages, and the works included in the course. In addition to their oral participation, undergraduates wrote two short critical papers, graduate students a long final essay, on topics negotiated with me in advance. The syllabus included instructions for the students’ presentations, and teams were assembled as soon as course registration was settled. Each team had twenty to twenty-five minutes to give a three-part presentation on the work and date chosen: (1) an introduction to the literary context (the genre or type, as well as any particulars of the authors) and the social setting in which the work functioned, its production, reception, and transmission;4 (2) the performance; (3) reflections on the process of working with the text from academic and performative viewpoints. Each group (or a representative) had to meet with me a week in advance to discuss their plans, verify bibliography, and show me an outline of the presentation. Teams were required to distribute handouts on the day of performance, including a brief outline for the students to follow and a list of works consulted. The presentations were a showcase for the students’ myriad talents and boundless imagination, inspired by the medieval texts and pushed by pedagogical imperative. The first time I gave the course in 1998, a series of outstanding performances left me amazed – and reluctant to give the course again for fear of disappointment. Nevertheless, the lure was too great and, while the 2004 repeat yielded fewer spectacular presentations, the second time through gave me a better grasp of the ingredients for success. Before outlining possible problems to avoid, 1

2 3 4

A Lettres Gothiques edition of Jean Bodel’s works is in progress. In the meantime, I used the following editions: Fabliaux, ed. Pierre Nardin (Paris: Nizet, 1965); Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas de Jehan Bodel, trans. and ed. Albert Henry (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965); “Les pastourelles de Jehan Bodel,” ed. Annette Brasseur, in Arras au moyen âge. Histoire et littérature, ed. Marie-Madeleine Castellani and Jean-Pierre Martin (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 1994), 257–302; Les congés d’Arras (Jean Bodel, Baude Fastoul, Adam de la Halle), ed. Pierre Ruelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Courtois d’Arras (L’Enfant Prodigue), trans. and ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). Œuvres complètes, trans. and ed. Pierre-Yves Badel (Paris: le Livre de Poche, 1995). See Hans Robert Jauß, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 76–109.

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let me describe four of the highpoints to show how such an exercise can help students synthesize historical knowledge, literary analysis, and dramatic experience. Jean Bodel’s fabliau, “Li sohaiz desves,” was the first work chosen for performance. The students edited the text for the sake of time but covered the entire narrative, performing in Old French (which the students could follow on a handout). The platea5 was set up in front of the classroom before any of us arrived: on one side, a table transformed into a cart with wheels and mysteriously covered by a cloth; two chairs set off to the other side to serve as beds when the newly returned merchant and his wife retired, he to sleep off the effects of too much food and wine, she in frustration to dream of visiting a market. Leaving the husband asleep, the wife dream walked across the playing area and, as she arrived in front of the table, the narrator, now in the role of merchant, set up a sign, “Marchié aux viz.” He uncovered the table to reveal a large assortment of plaster-of-Paris penises in all shapes and sizes, some erect, some prone, one even hanging over the side. We in the audience gasped in astonishment. The two student players haggled and then struck a bargain for the biggest, while the wife worked her way back to her bed in time to land the blow of her palm not on the merchant’s hand but her sleeping husband’s face. The performance was an incredible hit and set the tone for those to follow (it was even reprised at the end-of-semester party for the entire department). The dramatic comedy of Jean Bodel’s narrative was fully exploited and left no doubt that it was shaped for performance before an audience.6 The same team gave a wonderful version of the tavern scene from Courtois d’Arras, filmed ahead of time and shown on video during class – a good alternative for students worried about stage fright or eager to try out special effects (a later group followed their example in order to film an extract from the Jeu de la Feuillée in an outdoor setting with sunshine and springtime leaves). The students chose the elaborate scene of seduction in the tavern not only because it seemed to them the most important adaptation in this version of the Prodigal Son, but also because it clearly resonated with Jean Bodel’s introduction of Artesian lowlife in the tavern scenes of the Jeu de saint Nicolas, the first work we read (without performance, in order to give students time at the beginning of the semester to orient themselves within the medieval world of Arras). Just as the anonymous medieval text modernized through its staging the biblical parable, mixing narrative and dramatic elements,7 so my students situated the scene in a contemporary 5 6

7

Henri Rey-Flaud, Pour une dramaturgie du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980). This performance continued to have an afterlife outside the classroom when I subsequently brought the box of penises home as a souvenir. Having placed it in the trunk of my car, I stopped at a supermarket on the way to my house. Since the store is built over a highway, I had to drive to a pick up area to have my groceries loaded into the car. I noticed the man who was placing the bags in my trunk kept looking at me with a silly grin on his face but I couldn’t understand why. All was clarified once I got home and opened the trunk. See Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater,” Speculum 77 (2002): 778–831.

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bar, where blaring rock’n’roll music played as two streetwise prostitutes duped the misnamed Courtois, taken in by their charms while blindly embracing one of them cradled on his lap. The frame of commentary provided by the students emphasized the spaces represented: the tavern as a place where an innocent country bumpkin had little control; theater as a space with no designated place in the medieval city but representing the dramatic potential of many literary types, performed by a single jongleur or two or three players.8 The group who chose extracts from Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion took full advantage of the Cambridge Consort recording I lent them to add music and song to their performance.9 Equally striking were their visual effects: using an overhead projector, costuming and a selection of props (stuffed animals, peasant clothes, straw hats, an assortment of colorful apples), the students formed living tableaux in front of the picture frames they projected onto a screen, which beautifully reproduced the kind of framing found in medieval illuminations. Likewise, their hands pointing and bodies carefully arranged reproduced the kind of dramatic punctuation used in manuscripts to represent people engaged in conversation. For the first set of extracts from the two seduction scenes, the students used their transparencies to give a static decor, in order to emphasize the importance of the words, suitably enhanced by gestures. For the bergerie with its picnic and games, their staging was more fluid in consonance with the gaiety of the music and dialogue: they emphasized spectacle with movement and dance. Their post-performance reflections revealed their imaginative itinerary from an initial impression of “what’s the big deal?” to an understanding of the clever subtlety Adam deployed in rewriting pastourelles as dramatic form. Their efforts to visualize the stylized world represented – nature, simplicity, peasants’ repasts, lively characters in a tranquil universe of leisurely amusement – led them to suggest how his art might speak to the nostalgic projections of a courtly public eager for divertissement. While this group marshaled an impressive number of elements, my fourth example shows the power of a single performer to bring life to a lyric narrative. In the last presentation of the 2004 class, a graduate student performed a passage from Adam’s congé or farewell to Arras. He read the first part in Old French standing in the middle of our semi-circle in order to give the students a sense of the sonority of Old French but then, worried about the text’s comprehensibility, he switched to the modern French translation. At that point, his performance really came alive: he not only spoke with greater confidence but spoke and moved at the same time, directing each stanza of Adam’s poem to a particular student sitting before him, moving and reciting as if each of the persons named were really 8

9

One graduate student developed the idea of theatrical space in her final paper by analyzing the Jeu de la Feuillée from the point of view of staging: what we can learn about the performance space from the words of the manuscript, how a director should arrange the movement of characters, the number of players required based on who is needed “on stage” at any given moment, etc. The World of Adam de la Halle (c. 1237–c. 1287) as performed by the Cambridge Consort, dir. Joel Cohen, Turnabout Vox, TV-S 34439, 1972, LP record.

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present. The effect on the particular student suddenly engaged was electric, as she listened intently, eyes fixed on the speaker (the only male student in the class); the connection expanded as “Adam” moved around the circle, addressing each student in turn. You could not find a clearer example of how much the words of the text depend on body and voice, whether the original Adam’s or those of anyone across the centuries who embodies them again. This Adam did not wear a scholar’s gown expressing his desire to leave a decadent Arras and resume his studies in Paris, but through the drama of the spoken word moving through space he deeply impressed that impulse on us, even as we felt the strength of his links to Artesian friends soon to be left behind. With these examples to suggest the range of student presentations, let me reflect more directly on what I learned, especially through the contrast between 1998 and 2004, about the problems and potential of combining pedagogy and performance. First, the wide variety of approaches developed by the students confirmed the premise of the course: all forms of Old French literature have a dramatic, performative dimension that can be and needs to be realized, in order to bring these works back into the lived experience not only of their medieval public but of modern readers as well. But not every group was as successful in doing this magic trick as the ones I described. The amount of hard work, organization, and imagination varied considerably, depending on the particular students involved. Among the key factors determining the group’s success, however, were not only the individuals but the size and composition of the team. In 1998 I started with four groups, each combining four or five graduate and undergraduate students (dropouts reduced two teams to three). The size and mix created a useful synergy that was translated into their performances. It also allowed students to specialize where they felt most comfortable, some acting in front of the class, others giving the introduction or afterword, all collaborating throughout the planning and presentation. While the one-person performance I cited above shows that exceptions are possible, in general a critical mass of students seems necessary for maximizing the brainstorming, moving imaginatively and effectively from ideas to execution, and balancing the academic and the performative. In 2004 I had more class meetings, fewer students and a reversed balance between undergraduates and graduate students (nine and four respectively; five and ten in 1998): the students arranged themselves into separate groups of undergraduates and graduates, six teams with one to three members each. The two-person teams were not as creative as the three-person groups, who gave some memorable performances (e.g. a very pregnant Dame Douce getting her urine tested in the Jeu de la Feuillée, multiple role-playing indicated with minimum props in Courtois d’Arras), but never reached the creative heights and insightful performances of 1998. The undergraduates in 2004 lacked the support and experience provided by the graduate students the first time around, especially since the Masters and doctoral students signed up for the last two presentations. The relation among the three parts of the presentations also revealed some critical issues. With some notable exceptions, students were typically unable to clarify the links between their academic research and the creative choices they

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made intuitively to bring out in performance what they learned about these works in their medieval context. Perhaps this missing link represents the difficulty of making the right and left brains communicate. On the other hand, once the students gave their presentations, it was possible to bring out in the ensuing discussions how their decisions could reveal exciting insights into the works themselves and their life in medieval performance, whether in the marketplace, the confraternity hall, or on the manuscript page. The quality and sophistication of the academic research and literary analysis underpinning the introductions varied significantly between the graduates and undergraduates, as was clearly indicated once the teams were no longer mixed. Different levels of expectation for grading and class discussion had to be recognized. The benefits of using performance in class are not limited to the student side of the equation. Giving this course provided me with an opportunity to renew my teaching not only through the effort to integrate other disciplines into my usual approaches to literature but also by making me focus on performance in every facet of the course, in the works, in the student input, and in my own role as teacher.10 Although I continued to follow my preference for the Socratic method, engaging students in analyzing the text, asking lots of questions, and keeping preliminary lectures to the minimum necessary for situating Arras, the period, and the works, I also found myself trying to think more creatively about ways to help students see what brings these texts off the page into the give and take of urban life, in song, in representation, in recitation and reading out loud. In some cases, I invented experiments to mimic the spirit of the textual interplay. For example, when we read Adam de la Halle’s jeux-partis, after analyzing the types of subjects proposed for debate, the way arguments are typically built, the relationship between the two voices and with their public, I invited the students to stage their own debates (though not in song and verse) as an in-class exercise. Having set up a number of possible topics similar to those found in the jeux-partis but transposed into their college experience (dating issues, boyfriend-girlfriend tensions), I divided the class two by two and gave them ten minutes to develop a scenario, which they then performed more or less improvisationally before the class through four “stanzas,” closing with two envois to invite opposing judgments. The play of insults and innuendo, competing claims to general truth and superior knowledge, the laughter and showing off (despite the difficulties of quick repartee in a foreign language) provided a valuable pastiche of medieval performance. I also looked for modern forms that might offer insight into medieval genres that were new to the students. In 2004, as I prepared to teach the class on Jean Bodel’s congé, I learned that the body of Spalding Gray, a well-known actor and 10

The course also led to two publications, one on Jean Bodel’s pastourelles (“What Short Tale Does Jean Bodel’s Political Pastourelle Tell?” Romania 120 [2002]: 118–31), the other on the Jeu de saint Nicolas (“The Miracle of Compound Interest, or Accounting Games in the Jeu de Saint Nicolas,” in “Contez me tout”: Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Herman Braet, ed. Catherine Bel, Pascale Dumont, and Frank Willaert [Leuven: Peeters, 2006], 39–55).

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monologuist who turned his life into mesmerizing stories, was identified after being pulled from the East River. His unfortunate death and its representations in The New York Times and The Boston Globe11 and even in his own monologue, It’s a Slippery Slope,12 struck me as a painful but sympathetic entrance into the poem in which Jean Bodel, suffering the exile of lepers, speaks about his own death in life as he takes leave of Arras, the city and his friends. After giving a brief introduction to the literary type of the congé, I introduced the figure of Spalding Gray to the students, read from his obituaries and played part of It’s a Slippery Slope, a narrative threaded through with worry about his mother’s suicide and thoughts about his own, as Gray tries to learn how to ski and stay connected to life. We then returned to Jean Bodel and his poem by comparing the two artists, two men from different eras but with common threads of human experience. Given the interdisciplinary character of this course, I also sought collaboration with scholars working in other fields. “Medieval Arras” was enriched by the input and guest seminars of Professor Carol Symes, finishing her Ph.D. in History at Harvard when I serendipitously met her and now teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She gave lectures in both iterations of the course, one on the history and geography of Arras, a later one on the deluxe manuscript that contains Adam de la Halle’s collected works, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 25566. Both lectures were illustrated copiously, both filled with insights informed by her experience with theater from a scholar’s, as well as an actress and director’s point of view. In 2004, having shown the online site of another manuscript of Robin et Marion (Bibliothèque de Méjanes, MS 166),13 Symes invited us to read the manuscript page itself as a kind of performance, the text placed on either side of the miniatures, words and music in the center. Her discussion led the students performing Adam’s play to make two-dimensional paper puppets modeled after the figures illustrated in the manuscript, held up on wooden sticks and moved by the two puppeteers (not very dramatic but their interest in the manuscript inspired a wonderful handout on the art of illumination and the roles of scribe and parchmenter, downloaded from the internet).14

11

Shaila Dewan and Jesse McKinley, “The Body of Spalding Gray Found; Monologuist and Actor Was 62,” The New York Times, Tuesday, March 9, 2004, A1, A25. Ed Siegel, “Spalding Gray, 62; shared his ideas, angst to create theater,” The Boston Globe, Tuesday, March 9, 2004, Obituaries. Bruce Weber, “On the Stage, a Storyteller; in Life, a Pained Innovator,” The New York Times, Tuesday, March 9, 2004, A25. 12 Spalding Gray, It’s a Slippery Slope: An Original Monologue Written and Performed by Spalding Gray, Mercury Records, 314 558 288–2, 1998, Compact Disc. His last works have now been published, with a foreword by Francine Prose, and many tributes given in his memory at Lincoln Center on April 13, 2004: Spalding Gray, Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005). 13 Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, Bibliothèque de Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence, MS 166 (Rés. Ms. 14): http://toisondor.byu.edu/dscriptorium/aix166/. 14 Treasures of Medieval Manuscript Illumination From Philadelphia Collections, A Collaborative Project of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries: http://www.leavesofgold.org/.

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Music was also an important facet of the lyrics we read. In 1998, Professor Vincent Pollina of Tufts University contributed his expertise on the relationship between music and text to help students understand the nature of trouvère song, which I sketched out myself in 2004. Playing songs on CD was an indispensable part of both courses and inspired some students with particular musical talents. One adapted a trouvère melody from another song, so that she could sing Jean Bodel’s pastourelle, “Contre le douz tans novel,” accompanying herself on the flute. Her initiative reflected a desire to give a complete performance of the song as music and text. Other musicians in the class also found the overview of the songs’ musical character, including materials showing their transcription in medieval notation, a special tie between their own experience and the medieval context. Judging by the course evaluations I received at the end of the semester, the students found the presentations to be an important element in realizing the interdisciplinary goals of the course. So perhaps it is fitting to give them the last word to sum up the results of their experience. From 1998: I do think it was an excellent idea to have to perform the literary pieces … It helped us all feel the performative quality of the medieval texts we have been studying. It allowed us to identify and understand the modernity of the issues dealt with in those texts … It triggered a different process of thinking from the difficulty to perform this piece. It was nice to be able to present something which we could organize and create. Using our creativity made the project more enjoyable and I learned more. I saw other students preparing their presentation, complaining about it but – I’m positive – having a great time. They’ll never forget this experience nor the texts that they “performed.” The presentations are an effective way to encourage class participation and are good reminders that these “old” texts were once living and can be resurrected effectively.

From 2004: I enjoyed the presentations because they forced me to draw upon creativity and share ideas with my classmates. By discussing interpretations with the people in my group, I gained deeper understanding of the material. Performing a scene gave me unique insight into the nature of plays/theater of this time period and the difficulties/complications involved. It required me to analyze the works in a different way and to visualize them which I think is important for dramatic theater. It did however make me self-conscious, but I got over it. It was nice to have the opportunity to “step out of the box” and be challenged with a creative endeavor. The presentation helped my “public speaking” skills. This is typically difficult for me anyway, and usually worse in French. But it helped me overcome my “fear” of speaking French with an audience.

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I really enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of the class – also being a sociology major I like to analyze things in a comprehensive way. We were able to connect the literature to the society and the culture of Arras which I think is really important, especially for literature from such a long time ago.

My thanks to all the students of “Medieval Arras” and to the organizers of Nancy’s Festschrift for giving me an opportunity to describe this experiment in pedagogy and performance. I hope it will inspire others as well.

« Dunc chante haut et cler » : remarques sur l’interprétation de la musique médiévale Anne Azéma

Nous trouvons fréquemment dans les récits médiévaux, textes poétiques et lais des mentions de « voix », de « chant ».1 Les descriptions de composition et d’interprétation, les mentions d’écriture et d’enseignement musical y abondent. Il m’a semblé intéressant d’examiner ces concepts littéraires ou métaphoriques de la vie musicale et de l’utilisation de la voix en vue de leur utilité pour les interprètes d’aujourd’hui. Quels enseignements pouvons-nous – interprètes du répertoire médiéval séculier, lyrique et narratif – tirer de telles descriptions ? Il convient de prime abord de rappeler que nos conventions actuelles concernant la création, la transmission et l’interprétation musicales ne sont pas tout à fait les mêmes que celles qui régissent le répertoire médiéval séculier.2 La notion d’Auteur-Compositeur-Interprète, reconnue de nos jours uniquement pour certains répertoires (comme celui de la chanson), est loin de la conception couramment acceptée dans le monde de la musique classique et de chambre, qui veut que le compositeur et l’interprète soient deux personnes bien distinctes, aux talents particuliers et aux fonctions précises et clairement définies. Dans le contexte du récit médiéval, et d’une certaine façon dans celui de la musique médiévale en général, l’interprète contemporain ne peut que devenir créateur à son tour. Nous ne reviendrons pas ici sur la question de l’interprétation musicale des récits, longuement explorée ailleurs.3 L’interprète médiéval et/ou contemporain de ces récits est non seulement le maillon d’une chaîne créatrice, il est aussi, de fait, le créateur d’une œuvre qui ne prend véritable vie qu’à cause de son interprétation, de sa voix. Afin d’examiner les notions de création, d’écriture et d’interprétation dans le domaine du récit médiéval, quels textes nous parlent de façon plus évocatrice que les narrations de l’histoire de Tristan et Yseut ? Icônes 1 2

3

Voir Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages : Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (London : J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987), chapitre 8. Voir Anne Azéma, « Une aventure vous dirai », dans Performing Medieval Narrative, éd. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado et Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2005), 209–22. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 1999) ; Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1960), chapitre 2.

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par excellence des héros-musiciens, Tristan et Yseut nous sont représentés dans leur vie musicale de maintes façons et à plusieurs moments cruciaux de leur histoire. Héros tous deux, ils sont nécessairement uniques dans leurs exploits : ce statut demande des qualités hors pair, mythiques, dissociées de la réalité et du possible. Mais tout au long de la trame de leur histoire musicale certains indices nous révèlent peut-être des pratiques réelles. Ce sont les rôles de Tristan et Yseut compositeurs, écrivains, interprètes (vocaux et instrumentistes) qui retiendront notre attention. Nous examinerons en particulier les récits de Thomas de Bretagne4 et de son héritier, Gottfried von Strassburg,5 ainsi que la Folie d’Oxford6 et le Roman de Tristan en prose.7 « Voudrai un lai trover » Dans ces narrations de l’histoire de Tristan et Yseut, les deux protagonistes sont présentés comme des musiciens, auteurs et interprètes. Dans celle de Gottfried, entre autres, Tristan le musicien joue de plusieurs instruments, chante et s’accompagne, compose.8 Il joue – devant la cour du roi Marc – de manière si belle et de façon si exquise que le harpeur présent en est étonné. Chanteur et instrumentiste accompli, Tristan prélude à la harpe de façon mélodieuse, connaît maints lais, parle plusieurs langues et captive ainsi l’attention de tous.9 Dans une autre scène, où il tente de distraire Yseut aux Blanches Mains, tout l’art de Tristan nous est décrit, comme un catalogue de ses capacités : il lui narre des histoires, chante, écrit et lit, joue de la harpe, compose plusieurs lais pour toutes sortes d’instruments à cordes.10 C’est à ce moment qu’il compose le « noble » lai dit « de Tristan » qui sera estimé et aimé partout jusqu’à la fin du monde, nous dit Gottfried. Yseut, elle aussi, compose, ou interprète en composant. Thomas nous relate que, sans public apparent, dans sa chambre, elle crée un lai, miroir de sa propre histoire, sur le chevalier Guiron et son destin dramatique.11 Le processus de création implique donc non seulement la naissance d’une œuvre nouvellement créée – elle « trove », « fait » un lai – mais aussi, dans ce cas, son interprétation simultanée, la voix accordée à l’instrument.12 Le chant accompagné à la harpe est 4

Dans Tristan et Yseut, éd. Jean Charles Payen (Paris : Garnier, 1974), 145–244. Date généralement acceptée : 1160–70. 5 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, éd. Rüdiger Krohn (Stuttgart : Universal, 1981). Gottfried (vers 1210) utilise Thomas de Bretagne comme source pour son récit, c’est pourquoi nous l’incluons ici. 6 Dans Tristan et Yseut, éd. Payen, 265–97. 7 Vers 1230–40. Le roman de Tristan en prose, éd. Philippe Ménard et al., 9 vols. (Genève : Droz, 1987–2000) ; Le roman de Tristan en prose, éd. Renée Curtis, 3 vols. (Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 1985). 8 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 3618 sqq. 9 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 3613–14. 10 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 19196 sqq. 11 Thomas de Bretagne, éd. Payen, l. 833–44. 12 Dans la Folie d’Oxford, éd. Payen, l. 519–20, Tristan nous dit : « Ben sai temprer harpë et rote / E chanter après à la note » (Je joue très bien de la harpe et de la rote, et chante juste). Je modifie ici la traduction de Payen.

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ici simultané à l’acte de création. Qui plus est, Thomas nous décrit la manière dont elle interprète ce lai : « Dulce la voiz e bas li tons » (la voix est douce, le ton bas ; la voix est maintenue à un volume bas, dans la solitude de sa chambre, en opposition à un chant qui serait plus fort, public). A contrario d’une autre femme musicienne, Marthe, femme du fils d’Yseut, dont la vie musicale est amplement décrite dans Ysaïe le Triste,13 il ne semble pas y avoir de cassure entre Yseut la Compositrice ou l’Écrivain, et Yseut l’Interprète. Son rôle de compositrice et d’interprète est clairement établi ;14 il se développe rapidement et publiquement, sans différence apparente avec celui de Tristan. Comme nous le transmet Gottfried, ses écrits, ses lectures à haute voix et ses chants réjouissent cœurs et oreilles.15 Ce qui est joie pour tous est un plaisir pour elle.16 Il est intéressant de noter cette notion de plaisir de l’interprète : nous ne sommes pas dans le contexte d’une jongleresse ayant à gagner sa vie et à se faire une place au sein d’une cour, avec tous les aléas que cela peut comporter. Il s’agit ici, au contraire, d’un geste artistique spontané, aisé, complet (composition et interprétation) qui non seulement distrait, mais aussi fait la joie des auditeurs et celle de l’interprète. En raison de son talent, ainsi que de son apprentissage (que nous évoquerons plus loin) et de son travail, Yseut accède à la « joie » qui naît de l’équilibre délicat entre les attentes des auditeurs et la possibilité qu’a un artiste de les nourrir. Le répertoire qu’Yseut joue à la vièle comprend « son » estampie, « son » lai et « ses » airs étrangers dans le style français de Sens et Saint-Denis.17 Ces possessifs peuvent signifier des compositions propres à Yseut, ou l’établissement d’un répertoire qui devient le « sien » – une sélection de morceaux préférés, admirés, qui deviennent attachés à la personnalité et aux capacités techniques d’un interprète particulier. Tout comme dans le cas de Tristan, les morceaux qu’Yseut interprète sont de genres hauts et bas, aristocratisants (chansons, lais) et popularisants (pastourelle, rotrouenge), pour reprendre la terminologie de Pierre Bec.18 Dans la narration en prose avec musique du manuscrit de Vienne, 19 c’est directement dans les textes poétiques des lais avec musique que sont clairement exposées les intentions compositrices des amants. Tout comme on le constate 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

Marilyn Lawrence, « Yseut’s Legacy : Women Writers and Performers in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste », dans Acts and Texts : Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, éd. Laurie Postlewate et Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam : Rodopi, 2007), 321–37. Le roman de Tristan en prose, éd. Ménard et al., 7:1, l. 13 sqq. : « Et avoec ce ele contoit si bien et si envoiesement que on ne peüst a celui point trouver nule dame miex chantant de li de chans. Et de trouver boins dis estoit ele fontainne sour toutes les dames » (Et aussi elle contait si bien et si délicieusement que l’on ne pouvait trouver de dame qui chante mieux qu’elle. En matière de composition, elle dépassait toutes les dames). Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8048 sqq. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8054 sqq. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8057. Pierre Bec, La lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles). Contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux, vol. 1 (Paris : Picard, 1977). Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 2542, une source plus tardive. Voir Tatiana Fotitch et Ruth Steiner, Les lais du roman de Tristan en prose d’après le manuscrit de Vienne 2542 (Munich : Wilhelm Fink, 1974).

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fréquemment dans les répertoires des « trouveurs », le poète-musicien décrit son fait créateur. Tristan dit : Ja fi canchonettes et lais Mais a ce point toutes les lais, Je fais mon daerrain lais, Amours m’ochist n’est ce biau lai.20

Même si Tristan a toujours composé (et il a fait des chansonnettes et des lais, nous dit-il) tous ses lais mènent à un seul, celui-ci, le dernier, qui le tue. Yseut en ce qui la concerne, selon ce manuscrit de Vienne, écrit et envoie une lettre à Tristan, supplique pour son retour : « A vous Tristan … Mant mon brief que fait de cuer ai ».21 Dans ce lai, il n’est pas uniquement question d’Yseut compositrice de texte et de musique, mais bien d’Yseut écrivain, chantant qu’elle est écrivain, et donc interprète de ses propres émotions « mises en écriture ».22 De sa mort qu’elle sent venir, Yseut fait un lai, qui sera très prisé et touchera sans conteste tous les amoureux : « De ma mort que voi approchier / Fai un lai qui sera mout chier. / Bien devra tous amants touchier / C’amours me fait a mort couchier ».23 Pour chacun de ces lais mortels des amants la présence du public est à la fois indispensable et souhaitée par les protagonistes. Tristan apostrophe les passants et leur demande de venir contempler sa douleur : « A vous tous qui passes la voie / Venes chascun de vous voie / S’il est dolours fors que la moie ».24 Le créateur et l’interprète disent en musique leur plainte afin d’interpeller les passants, les amants, afin de leur faire sentir la peine extrême dans laquelle ils sont. Le public est un élément crucial de ces faits musicaux : à la fois intervenant et témoin, il est spectateur et participant au geste créateur qui se développe sous ses yeux, grâce et à son regard et à son écoute. Dans le Roman de Tristan en prose, Yseut, apprenant la fausse nouvelle de la mort de Tristan, demande sa harpe. Avec son instrument, et sur le modèle du « Lai Mortal » de Tristan, elle compose rapidement un lai – « por l’amour de li voudrai un lai trover » (pour son amour, je voudrais composer un lai) – dont on nous

20

21 22 23

24

Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 2542, lai 1, I:1–4 ; Jadis je faisais des chants et des lais / Mais tous mes lais mènent à ce point : / Je fais mon dernier lai / Car en ce beau lai, amour me tue. Voir aussi maints trouvères. Un exemple parmi de nombreux, Gillebert de Berneville : « J’ai fet maint vers de chançon / Et s’ai mainte foiz chanté » (J’ai composé bien des vers de chanson / et j’ai bien souvent chanté). Chansons des trouvères, éd. et trad. Samuel N. Rosenberg et Hans Tischler, avec la collaboration de Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Paris : Librairie Générale Française, 1995), 742–43, v. 1–2. Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 2542, lai 14, I:1 et 4 ; À vous Tristan … J’envoie cette lettre où j’ai mis mon coeur. Le roman de Tristan en prose, éd. Ménard et al., 7:1, l. 21. Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 2542, lai 2, IV:1–4 ; De ma mort que je vois venir / Je fais un lai qui sera très prisé / Et qui touchera tous les amants véritablement / Car c’est amour qui me fait me coucher et mourir. Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 2542, lai 1, XXIX:13–15 ; À vous tous qui passez le chemin, venez voir s’il est douleur plus grande que la mienne.

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précise aussi que la mélodie est plus difficile à composer que les mots.25 Plus tard, en réponse au lai que Kahedin lui envoie pour la courtiser, elle lui adresse son lai par le truchement du même harpiste, dans une versification similaire et sur la même musique que celui de Kahedin.26 Dans chacun de ces deux exemples, nous trouvons la mention de techniques de composition : un nouveau lai composé sur un modèle poétique et/ou musical préexistant.27 Grâce à ces précisions, nous entrons dans la force du récit narratif : en mêlant ainsi détails techniques et mythes, le récit n’en devient que plus crédible. Nous pouvons y glaner des informations plus que précieuses, qui guideront nos pas. D’autres questions doivent rester en suspens : celles des techniques (instrumentale, vocale) et celles, beaucoup plus difficiles à cerner, des styles, de la production et des couleurs vocales,28 de la tessiture et de la formation des musiciens. Cette liste est loin d’être exhaustive et ne fait qu’entrapercevoir les nombreux choix laissés à l’interprète contemporain. Nous ne disposons pas pour ces répertoires séculiers de traités vocaux, à proprement parler, sur lesquels se baser en tant qu’interprètes. Cependant, Timothy McGee nous rappelle que nous n’avons pas assez exploré les traités destinés aux musiciens formés par et pour l’Église.29 Ces deux sphères, celle de l’Église et celle du monde séculier, sont sans doute moins éloignées que nous ne voulons le croire, et ce pour plusieurs raisons. Les directives que l’Église enseignait à ses chanteurs sont peut-être directement applicables à une partie de notre répertoire séculier.30 Il est aussi intéressant de constater qu’Yseut est formée non seulement par sa mère, depuis qu’elle peut apprendre « par la main » ou « par la bouche »31 (nous lisons par là, à l’écrit et à l’oral ; on peut lire également, par l’instrument et par le chant), mais aussi par un prêtre qui a été également le formateur de la reinemère. Ce prêtre lui apprend les arts livresques et les instruments à cordes. 32 Tristan est éduqué, lui, par des musiciens professionnels, excellents dans leur art, étrangers à la cour de Marc, jouant d’un style particulier et immédiatement identifiable. Lorsque Tristan écoute le harpeur gallois jouer à la cour de Marc, il étonne tout le monde en reconnaissant le style dans lequel le harpeur joue, puis il interprète à son tour une douce musique excellente, dans le style breton.33 Un premier élément nécessaire à un choix d’interprétation serait donc de pouvoir reconnaître le style dans lequel un autre musicien joue, d’en connaître la généalogie, de 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Curtis, Le roman de Tristan en prose, 3:896. Ces extraits sont également cités dans Songs of the Women Trouvères, éd. et trad. Eglal Doss-Quinby et al. (New Haven et Londres : Yale University Press, 2001), 15–16. Le roman de Tristan en prose, éd. Ménard et al., 1:156, l. 15. Voir Emmanuèle Baumgartner, La harpe et l’épée. Tradition et renouvellement dans le Tristan en prose (Paris : SEDES, 1990), 119. Noter que les rimes en sont différentes. Je définis « couleur vocale », un terme de technique vocale, comme la combinaison du placement et des résonances. Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998), chapitre 2. Voir Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, tableau 2.1, p. 37 et commentaires. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7724. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7720. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 3555 sqq.

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pouvoir l’imiter, le faire sien, et enfin le transcender. Dans la version de Gottfried toujours, Yseut est en apprentissage avec Tantris-Tristan, qui lui enseigne tout ce qu’il sait.34 Le point crucial est que Tantris, le maître, lui présente le meilleur de son savoir musical et livresque, de façon à ce qu’Yseut puisse, à son tour, faire ses propres choix. Elle apprend rapidement35 à jouer de la harpe et de la lyre36 ainsi que de la vièle, dans le style gallois.37 Éduquée de manière courtoise en général, elle est aussi versée dans les langues, parlant l’irlandais, le français et le latin.38 La chanteuse que je suis écoute avec intérêt le fait que Tristan et Yseut soient instrumentistes, qu’ils aient atteint un certain niveau technique sur des instruments différents et qu’ils s’accompagnent de plusieurs d’entre eux. Cela non pour nous forcer à conclure que pour faire de la musique médiévale il est indispensable de pouvoir jouer de la harpe ou de la vielle, mais pour attirer notre attention sur le fait que la harpe est, du moins pour les répertoires du Nord, un accompagnement au chant souhaité et encouragé par de nombreuses sources médiévales.39 On peut également remarquer que l’accord et la préparation de la harpe, les préludes revêtent une grande importance dans de nombreux récits.40 Le soutien de la voix par un instrumentiste qui est la même personne que le chanteur donne une souplesse que peu de partenaires peuvent établir entre eux. La narration, ou du moins le côté narratif du chant – qu’il raconte ou non une histoire, ou qu’il « narre » une émotion – s’épanouit au mieux lorsqu’elle est soutenue, sous-tendue, par une deuxième ligne musicale, celle d’un instrument. Ceci semble être une constante humaine dans les récits épiques, mais aussi dans les poésies chantées-narrées. Dans la grotte des amants, ou dans la tour du château du roi Marc, Tristan et Yseut s’accompagnent mutuellement ou chantent ensemble.41 Chez Gottfried, ce moment d’isolement est poussé à l’extrême : les amants, coupés du monde, ne se nourrissent plus que de musique, leurs voix et cordes se mêlant dans une union qui n’est plus de l’ordre de l’humain. Voix et instrument sont appelés à tendre vers un tel idéal. « Dunc chante haut et cler » De quelle manière pouvons-nous vraiment prétendre tirer un quelconque enseignement, en tant qu’interprètes, de ces quelques remarques ? De nos jours la part semble être faite belle aux chanteurs dans la musique médiévale. Nous devrions

34 35 36 37 38 39

Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7964 sqq. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8030. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8564. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7987. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7985. Voir la liste – non exhaustive – chez Page, Voices and Instruments, appendice 3. Avec toutes les réserves et les questions que l’on peut émettre concernant la facture des instruments, leur accord, la nature des cordes et autres détails essentiels… 40 Page, Voices and Instruments, 110 sqq. 41 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 17200 sqq. Voir aussi Curtis, Le roman de Tristan en prose, 3:833, l. 27.

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tous être enfants spirituels d’Andrea von Ramm et Thomas Binkley,42 du Studio der Frühen Musik, sans qui ce domaine n’aurait pas eu sa voie – ni ses voix – toutes tracées. Leur attention très marquée aux styles et aux langues, leur désir de voir le « chant médiéval » atteindre des maturations techniques et expressives devraient être les nôtres. Que ce soit en suivant les chemins ouverts par cet ensemble ou a contrario de leur style, beaucoup d’interprétations contemporaines de musique médiévale leur sont redevables. À la suite de leur travail, il est crucial de s’interroger sur les choix possibles concernant l’interprétation de la musique médiévale séculière en général, et plus particulièrement sur les choix de production vocale liés à cette musique. Le sujet est épineux, car, comme pour tout choix d’interprétation de la musique médiévale, il est difficile d’établir des canons modernes qui ne soient pas influencés par des éléments étrangers au répertoire. Ces éléments sont nombreux : physiologiques, variants géographiquement, de génération en génération. Mais ces choix semblent aussi être tributaires de modes, plus que de réflexions approfondies sur le répertoire lui-même et ce qu’il peut nous révéler. La difficulté de ce répertoire étant bien qu’en l’absence de continuum musical et sonore, il reste à l’interprète non seulement le travail de création que nous avons mentionné plus haut, mais encore celui, tout aussi intimidant, d’avoir à créer les paramètres dans lesquels cette création va pouvoir s’épanouir. C’est pourquoi les indices que nous examinons ici ont un poids non négligeable, même dans leur imprécision. Les notions d’enseignement et de transmission de style révèlent plusieurs éléments importants pour nous, interprètes. Le premier est qu’Yseut sait lire et écrire : elle est donc lettrée, courtoise. En outre, elle est libérée par l’enseignement qu’elle reçoit.43 Et finalement, c’est grâce à l’apprentissage de plusieurs styles différents qu’elle se forme complètement. À l’inverse de ce que nous pouvons observer de nos jours à l’écoute d’interprétations de musique médiévale, qui – suivant des canons d’interprétation très récents, nés avec l’avènement des enregistrements – semblent se reproduire l’une l’autre sans grands changements, Yseut, elle, est libérée par ce qu’elle entend et apprend. L’autre élément crucial est que l’apprentissage de styles différents ainsi que la capacité de parler plusieurs langues contribuent à faire d’elle une artiste accomplie. La notion de style est à la fois cruciale et impossible à cerner. Nous savons qu’Yseut joue dans le style français de Sens et Saint-Denis, et dans le style gallois ; nous savons que Tristan joue dans le style breton. Mais aucun texte ne nous décrit ces styles de façon plus précise, hormis pour nous dire que ce sont des styles « étrangers », autres, différents de ceux que les auditeurs sont alors accoutumés à entendre. Traîtres, donc, ces indications qui courent dans plusieurs de ces relations. Traître aussi peut-être le désir de les remarquer – ou de les faire parler à tout prix ; mais dans l’absence de précisions réelles, chaque choix informé 42

Andrea von Ramm, 1928–99, et Thomas Binkley, 1932–95. Voir également Sterling Jones, The Story of an Early Music Quartet, manuscrit non publié, Munich, 2005. 43 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7970 sqq. : « … daz sî nâch ir selber kür/ze lêre dar ûz naeme, / swes sô sî gezaeme » (afin qu’elle puisse faire ses propres choix d’études, comme cela lui convenait).

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nourrira l’imaginaire de l’interprète. De cette manière, plusieurs courants stylistiques se sont développés dans le chant dit « médiéval » ces deux dernières générations, et particulièrement pour le répertoire séculier. Souvent le reflet d’observations de pratiques de musiques dites « vivantes » et baignées d’une langue particulière, ils sont le résultat de recherches de création, ou de re-création, de couleurs vocales autres. C’est un ouvrage entier qui devrait être consacré à cette question cruciale, et mal observée, tant que l’enseignement pratique de la musique médiévale restera dans son enfance.44 Il est très utile pour un interprète de savoir qu’Yseut possède une connaissance intime des structures poétiques et musicales. Dans le Roman de Tristan en prose, les épisodes où Yseut compose (le lai sur la mort supposée de Tristan puis la réponse à l’hommage de Kahedin) notent tous deux le recours à des éléments préexistants à ces compositions comme tremplins facilitant et guidant ces nouvelles créations. Cette technique de composition, essentiellement médiévale, implique une poétesse-musicienne en pleine possession de ses moyens. Dans le cas du « Lai Mortal », nous trouvons une composition proche d’un contrafactum,45 un miroir poétique du lai que fit Tristan jadis. En ce qui concerne l’écriture de la réponse d’Yseut à l’hommage de Kahedin, là aussi, le canevas musical et poétique est maintenu, le même harpiste-interprète faisant le lien entre les deux participants à ce dialogue. Sans connaissance intime des formes poétiques il est impossible de prétendre à une interprétation de la musique médiévale : sans le savoir technique qui permet de travailler efficacement, rapidement si besoin est, de composer et les mots et la musique – même si pour certains d’entre nous, comme pour Yseut, les mots nous viennent peut-être plus facilement que la mélodie – impossible d’être à égalité avec nos collègues médiévaux, impossible de prendre le relais et de devenir véritablement « interprètes » à notre tour. La production vocale est l’essence même de ce qui va créer une interprétation et la démarquer d’une autre. Être reconnu par le son de sa voix, emblème représentant l’être tout entier, est un des éléments importants dans l’histoire de Tristan et Yseut. Dans le récit de la Folie d’Oxford, Tristan revient à la cour de Marc en contrefaisant son apparence et sa voix.46 Cette voix altérée et sa feinte d’être fou 47 l’empêchent d’être reconnu par Yseut. Tout comme le son « autre » et « étranger » des chants français que jouent Yseut, voici une autre mention, vocale cette fois-ci, d’un son « différent » au point de modifier celui qui l’émet, de le rendre méconnaissable à celle qui le connaît mieux que tout autre être au monde. Quelle 44

L’exemple de Montserrat Figueras semble le plus parlant pour l’école hispanique ; d’autres exemples reflètent les écoles anglaises ou nordiques ; enfin, des choix de productions vocales que je qualifierais de « méditerranéennes-génériques » expriment un souhait de couleurs autres, non définies, hormis par leur « étrangeté », leur « différence ». Il est à noter qu’une fois établies pour l’auditeur, ces couleurs vocales sont rarement modifiées durant un même concert ou enregistrement. 45 Voir Baumgartner, La harpe et l’épée. 46 Voir l’article de Marilyn Lawrence, « The Protean Performer : Defining Minstrel Identity in Tristan Narratives », dans ce même ouvrage. 47 Thomas de Bretagne, éd. Payen, l. 179.

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interprète ne serait pas fascinée par une telle possibilité ? Alors que nous sommes encore à l’aube de l’exploration de certaines parties du répertoire séculier médiéval, et en particulier du répertoire narratif, ces exemples de couleurs vocales variées, dans un contexte d’interprétation de « rôle » – Tristan, jouant le fou – doivent être entendus et suivis.48 Voici une possibilité de recherche de couleur vocale qui devrait être attrayante pour un chanteur. Une uniformisation de la production vocale ne nous semble pas être dans l’esprit de ce répertoire.49 « L’autre son », le son étranger et étrange, qu’il soit instrumental ou vocal, semble avoir une importance capitale et contribuer également à la finition de l’art d’un interprète. Que faire des descriptions du chant d’Yseut, par exemple ? Le terme « doux » revient souvent.50 Il est prudent de considérer cette description non seulement comme un qualificatif attaché pour toujours à la personne d’Yseut, mais aussi comme une notion « générique » du chant courtois. Chaque fois que cette couleur vocale est mentionnée dans le cas d’Yseut, que ce soit chez Thomas, Gottfried ou d’autres, la harpe l’est aussi. Élément courtois aussi par excellence et pour toujours lié à l’histoire de Tristan et Yseut, maintes fois cité et répété,51 le chant accompagné de la harpe est bien entendu aussi un topos à prendre pour ce qu’il est : l’assurance que la personne décrite est véritablement l’héroïne courtoise, celle qui sait et composer, et chanter, et s’accompagner à la harpe, au contraire d’autres qui ne sont que jongleresses, ou qu’écrivains. « Wol vun munde », le deuxième qualificatif que Gottfried donne au chant d’Yseut dans ce passage,52 est une expression plus difficile à cerner. Rüdiker Krohn la traduit par « mit schöner Stimme » (d’une belle voix). Dans sa traduction anglaise Arthur Hatto donne : « [Yseut] sang well ».53 Gottfried amplifie ce jugement esthétique : « si sang… / wol unde wol und alze wol ».54 Ce jugement esthétique nous mène à un autre désir d’efficacité d’interprétation, qui est celui où le chanteur chante si bien, « wol unde wol und alze wol », que celui qui l’écoute entre dans un autre monde. À l’évidence, une description de production vocale plus précise n’a pas grand intérêt pour le narrateur, ni peut-être pour nous, interprètes contemporains. Le « bien » chanter, quel qu’en soit le style, est celui qui émeut le public. Le chant d’Yseut évoque pour Gottfried celui des sirènes : « Wem mag ich sî gelîchen / dies schoenen saelderîchen / wan den Syrênen eine ? ».55 Philippe de Thaon, lui, 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55

Cette scène de la Folie d’Oxford, non comprise dans le CD de la Boston Camerata de Tristan et Iseult (Erato, 1989), a été ajoutée par la suite aux productions en concerts, justement à cause de son potentiel scénique, dont John Fleagle, décédé en 1999, a fait pleine mesure. La grande majorité des choix vocaux faits de nos jours pour le répertoire médiéval, même séculier, est encore très liée à un idéal de couleur vocale influencé par le chant choral anglais et ses dérivés. Thomas de Bretagne, éd. Payen, l. 855. Voir Page, Voices and Instruments, chapitre 9. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 7996. Arthur Hatto, trad., Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (New York : Penguin Books, 1960), 147. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8075 ; d’une extrême beauté, sans limite. Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8085 ; À qui puis-je la comparer, cette belle, bénie par la fortune, sinon à une sirène?

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fait chanter sa sirène « haut et cler ».56 Le terme « haut », peut être entendu comme se rapportant à la hauteur du son, à une couleur vocale, utilisant des résonances placées haut dans le visage, ou à une tessiture haute – non basse. Le terme « cler », qui peut être compris comme une résonance claire, c’est-à-dire non voilée, ou une élocution claire, nous donne une idée de ce que le chant séducteur et séduisant peut être pour l’idéal onirique et mythique du monde médiéval. Gottfried compare le chant à celui de la sirène. Il nous dit qu’Yseut chante ouvertement et secrètement, que son chant est reçu par les yeux et les oreilles de ses auditeurs.57 Nous quittons là le domaine de la voix féminine et entrons dans celui du général et de l’humain, indépendant du sexe. Gottfried semble donner au terme « chant » le sens troubadouresque de « so »58 – c’est-à-dire une œuvre faite de la combinaison de mots, de musique et ici d’un autre élément que l’on appellera, faute d’autre terme, l’interprétation. En bref, non seulement Yseut sait lire et écrire, composer les mots comme les airs des chants d’amour, mais encore son chant séduit l’auditeur, car par le royaume des oreilles, il atteint celui du cœur. Peu importe le placement vocal, peu importent les couleurs vocales : Gottfried a mis le doigt sur ce qui reste important, sur le chemin que nous devons suivre. Bien au-delà de la séduction primaire qui veut que la sirène attire l’auditeur – masculin – dans ses rets, le chant mène à un autre monde, qui est celui de la musique cachée, secrète, que l’on entraperçoit par le miroir des yeux, musique à laquelle on accède par le désir.59 Ce monde naît du « chant », de la « voix » et aboutit à l’oubli de soi. Quoi de plus tentant pour un interprète ? Cet exemple de chant orphique ne peut qu’être inspirant. Dans le contexte de ces récits amoureux, nous découvrons des éléments cruciaux qui vont déterminer certaines de nos décisions d’interprètes. La composition, l’écriture et l’interprétation mènent, main dans la main, le geste artistique de Tristan et Yseut. Impossible pour nous, interprètes contemporains, de nous contenter de chanter ce qui a été interprété précédemment : chaque « chant » est une nouvelle composition, une nouvelle écriture et une nouvelle interprétation, déterminées ou influencées par une connaissance affinée des structures poétiques et musicales médiévales. Sans cet élément de création, aucune interprétation n’est possible. En examinant la formation d’Yseut, comme celle de Tristan, nous apprenons que l’éthos médiéval de l’apprentissage inclut non seulement les techniques instrumentales et vocales, livresques, orales, mais aussi que c’est par la connaissance d’éléments étrangers, autres, et l’apprentissage de ceux-ci que l’on peut accéder à la plénitude de son art. Malgré l’impossibilité de fait d’accéder à un son « médiéval » quel qu’il soit, et peut-être l’absence de pertinence d’une telle recherche, ces sources nous ouvrent clairement la voie et aiguisent notre curiosité ; 56

Philippe de Thaon, « Serena en mer hante », dans Poètes et romanciers du Moyen Âge, éd. Albert Pauphilet (Paris : Gallimard, 1952), 267, l. 10 : « Quand se volt dejuër / Dunc chante haut et cler » (Quand elle veut se divertir, elle chante haut et clair). 57 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8111–12. 58 Terme en occitan médiéval, littéralement le « son ». 59 Gottfried, Tristan, l. 8131.

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ce n’est qu’avec un pluralisme de styles et de couleurs que l’art de l’interprète atteint sa plénitude. Les textes que nous venons d’évoquer nous rappellent aussi que le concept hautement courtois et troubadouresque du « so » reste le but de ceux qui vont réjouir le cœur de leurs auditeurs. Tant d’indications qui peuvent guider nos pas aujourd’hui. Viser une telle interprétation, « ouverte » et à la fois « secrète », riche de couleurs vocales multiples, multilingue, libérée et inspirée par des styles multiples et, surtout, ayant pour but d’atteindre chacun, auditeur et interprète, au plus profond de son être, se révèle « joie pour tous » et « plaisir » pour l’interprète.

Tabula Gratulatoria

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TABULA GRATULATORIA

Tabula Gratulatoria Jonathan J. G. Alexander Elizabeth Archibald Adrian Armstrong Mary-Jo Arn Anne Azéma Benjamin Bagby Corinne Freeman Barnwell Margaret Bent Tom Bishop Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski Michel-André Bossy, Brown University Maureen Boulton Susan Boynton Cristian Bratu Cynthia J. Brown Elizabeth A. R. Brown Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner E. Jane Burns Ardis Butterfield Christopher Callahan Kimberlee Campbell Mary J. Carruthers, New York University Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet Tracy E. Christopher Michael Clanchy Robert L. A. Clark Simonetta Cochis Alice M. Colby-Hall Joyce Coleman Rita Copeland and David Wallace Raymond J. Cormier Susan Crane Mark Cruse Sioned Davies

Peter F. Dembowski Carolyn Dinshaw Eglal Doss-Quinby Carol R. Dover Martha N. Driver Kathryn A. Duys Elizabeth Emery Richard K. Emmerson Richard Foley Ellen and David Freeman Karen L. Fresco Claudio Galderisi David Georgi Patricia Harris Stäblein Gillies Jennifer Gjulameti Hope Glidden, Tulane University Henriette Goldwyn Joan Tasker Grimbert Anne D. Hedeman Sylvia Huot Tina Kane Peter Kardon, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Martin Kauffmann Sarah Kay Arnold Kerson Pilar Regalado Kerson Roberta L. Krueger Marilyn Lawrence Laurence de Looze Carla Lord Kathleen A. Loysen Elizabeth Cavitch Lucia Donald Maddox Nadia Margolis Peggy McCracken

Deborah McGrady Jacques E. Merceron Judith Miller William D. Paden Wendy Pfeffer Yolanda Plumley Vincent Pollina Laurie Postlewate F. Regina Psaki Antonio E. Regalado Jeff Rider, Wesleyan University Edward H. Roesner Samuel N. Rosenberg Anna Russakoff Martha Dana Rust Lucy Freeman Sandler Matthew S. Santirocco Pamela Sheingorn Kathryn A. Smith Helen Solterer Mary B. Speer Joan Hinde Stewart Catharine R. Stimpson Alison Stones

Mariana, Gregory, William and Charlotte Regalado Succop Edward Sullivan Sara Sturm-Maddox Carol Symes Jane H. M. Taylor Richard Trachsler and Gabriella Parussa Evelyn Birge Vitz Susan W. Wade Lori J. Walters Sarah White Mary Beth Winn Mary Wolinski Elizabeth Anne Wright Elizabeth C. Wright Michel and Odile Zink Jan M. Ziolkowski Smith College Junior Year in Paris Program University of Kentucky Libraries

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