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This collection of essays pays tribute to Nancy Freeman Regalado, a ground-breaking scholar in the field of medieval French literature whose research has always pushed beyond disciplinary boundaries. The articles in the volume reflect the depth and diversity of her scholarship, as well as her collaborations with literary critics, philologists, historians, art historians, musicologists, and vocalists - in France, England, and the United States. Inspired by her most recent work, these twenty-four essays are tied together by a single question, rich in ramifications: how does performance shape our understanding of medieval and pre-modern literature and culture, whether the nature of that performance is visual, linguistic, theatrical, musical, religious, didactic, socio-political, or editorial? The studies presented here invite us to look afresh at the interrelationship of audience, author, text, and artifact, to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the creation, transmission, and reception of medieval literature, music, and art.
EGLAL DOSS-QUINBY is Professor of French at Smith College; ROBERTA L. KRUEGER is Professor of French at Hamilton College; E. JANE BURNS is Professor of Women's Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Contributors: ANNE AZÉMA, RENATE BLUMENFELD-KOSINSKI, CYNTHIA J. BROWN, ELIZABETH A. R. BROWN, MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER, E. JANE BURNS, ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, KIMBERLEE CAMPBELL, ROBERT L. A. CLARK, MARK CRUSE, KATHRYN A. DUYS, ELIZABETH EMERY, SYLVIA HUOT, MARILYN LAWRENCE, KATHLEEN A. LOYSEN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, EDWARD H. ROESNER, SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG, LUCY FREEMAN SANDLER, PAMELA SHEINGORN, HELEN SOLTERER, JANE H. M. TAYLOR, EVELYN BIRGE VITZ, LORI J. WALTERS, AND MICHEL ZINK.
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). 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.
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.
(He will meet his end, for he cannot live for ever)
The ensemble of texts brought together in the celebrated MS 146 of the fonds français in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, makes up a complex and many-sided essay on government and kingship, one directed to the French monarch Philip V (1317–22) at or near the beginning of his reign. Its various elements reflect on the problem-laden final years of the rule of his father, Philip IV ‘le Bel’ (1285-1314), and the troubled succession that followed in 1315 and 1316. Each fascicle of the manuscript, the so-called Roman de Fauvel, the dits of Geffroi de Paris, the collection of songs and dits ascribed to Jehannot de Lescurel, and the anonymous verse chronicle of the years 1300–16, interacts with the others in myriad ways and on many levels to yield a collective commentary on the state of the monarchy and the realm, and an admonitio on wise rule.
Without question, one of the most familiar texts to students of medieval music is the often-cited passage in the treatise of Anonymous IV that offers an account of the historical development of the Notre-Dame tradition. I introduce my own discussion of the ‘making’ of the Parisian liber organi with a brief consideration of this famous text.The Latin is, with minor adjustments, that of F. Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 4-5; Wiesbaden, 1967), i, pp.
45-6. The translation is my own, but it has benefited from suggestions by Leofranc
Holford-Strevens (most important among them, the readings of ‘optimus organista’ and
‘optimus discantor’ as ‘an excellent organista’ and ‘an excellent discantor’).
The extraordinary dissemination of the Parisian repertory, resulting in its establishment in the thirteenth century as a kind of ‘Classical’ style (and later as an ars antiqua), was greatly abetted – if not made possible in the fist place – by what may have been an exclusively written mode of transmission. This is apparently the earliest body of polyphony to have been conceived, preserved and circulated entirely in writing. Equally important for the impact of the music of Paris, however, is the fact that it spawned a didactic tradition. It provided the foundation for a group of treatises that were the first to elucidate an already existing polyphonic repertory. Rather than instructing the singer how to generate polyphonic embellishments of plainchant ex tempore, these theoretical texts provided him with the information he needed to transform the written symbols in the manuscript before him into sounding music consistent with the intentions of the composer (or, at least, of the scribe), and they offered guidance to the organista wishing to create other works in a similar idiom. To be sure, these treaties did not transmit the Paris style intact.
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