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Edited by
Laurie Postlewate, Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College,Kathryn A. Duys, Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis,Elizabeth Emery, Professor of French, Montclair State University
A good story is hard to forget. It doesn't let you tell it only once and then shelve it forever. Nor does it suffer immutability. It wants to be told repeatedly, and each new telling is somehow, deliberately or not, different from those that have gone before. A good story evolves over time, changing language and medium, shifting audience, altering focus, recasting its purpose and motivation. Surely, no tale in Western literature has undergone so many tellings, retellings, adaptations, reshapings, revisions and translations as the many-faceted tale of King Arthur and his knights. This creative and recreative work began in the High Middle Ages and has never stopped, so alluring is the myth of that incandescent court. Whatever its origin, the Arthurian matter came to full bloom in thirteenth-century France. Across the Channel in what, after all, was its legendary homeland, it eventually underwent what is arguably its most memorable transmutation at the hands of the fifteenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Malory. To the hundreds of Arthurian titles already published – in tongues as varied as Dutch and Russian, Italian and Yiddish, Catalan and German, and Hebrew, Welsh and Armenian – the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have added countless more, spurred on by one another but in part, too, by the remarkable success of Joseph Bédier's recreation of the story of Tristan and Iseut (1900). Such proliferation has included a more extensive set of genres than ever before: not only novels, poems and operas, but films and games, plays and musical shows…
To take only prose retellings in French, a choice further narrowed to the story of Sir Lancelot alone, at least three narratives appeared in the last two decades of the twentieth century: Florence Trystram's Lancelot in 1987 and, in 1993, both Jean Markale's Lancelot du Lac and Jacques Boulenger's Les Amours de Lancelot. Still, that was hardly the final word on even so limited an Arthurian subject, and a significant Old French source made it clear that there was room for further reworking of the Lancelot story. Why, indeed, would a contemporary writer wish to recount such a tale, were there not something new to say, some new facet to explore? Trystram offers no explanation for her effort, letting her prose provide its own raison d’être. Boulenger proceeds similarly, taking for granted that the story is too compelling not to warrant transmission to a new readership.
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.
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. 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 chanté le muset / Par grant amour (And out of great love I sang her the song). At the same time, the word carries resonances of lightness and gayety.