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Mireio (Occitan)
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The chansonnier Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, f. fr. 22543 (known as “R”) has been recognized for over 200 years as a precious repository of the literature of the medieval troubadours of southern France. It transmits almost 950 lyric poems and 160 melodies, along with many other important writings in the Occitan language, many of which are unica.
The paleography, decoration, and dialect of the manuscript are described thoroughly, and their distinctive features are seen to support the hypothesis that R was compiled in northern Languedoc or western Provence around 1300. While most of the texts of R were copied by one scribe, the relatively few melodies it contains were probably notated by at least four different copyists. Over eighty percent of the poems were never supplied with their melodies, even though musical staves were provided; these staves were left empty. The notation is in the style of the so-called Notre Dame school of Paris, and the rhythms of the notes are not apparent, although a few seem to be in rudimentary mensural notation.
The manuscript contains some works of the troubadours of the early twelfth century, and also a large number of works by late thirteenth-century poets. By examining internal paleographical data and making comparisons with other extant codices, it is possible to offer suggestions on the nature of the exemplars of this heterogeneous collection. The problems of determining how the texts and melodies were transmitted are investigated, including the issues of oral transmission, the lack of extant autographs, the disparity in the origins of the surviving manuscripts, and the variant attributions. The musical transmission is especially problematic, since only three other sources containing music survive. The forty-five concordances that R shares with these other codices are discussed.
A review of the modern history of the manuscript shows that the earliest known owner was the Marquise d’Urfe of the early eighteenth century. The commonly accepted belief that R was in the library of her ancestor the poet Honore d’Urfe in the seventeenth century is found to be unsupported by the available evidence.
“Singing to another tune” is from Las Leys d’amors (The Laws of Love), a poetic treatise compiled by Guilhem Molinier in the first half of the fourteenth century. Guilhem’s phrase pertains to a compositional technique known to modern scholars as contrafacture, in which the troubadour fashions new lyrics after the poetic structure of a preexistent song, thereby allowing his work to be sung to the earlier melody. The technique of contrafacture is documented not only by Guilhem and contemporaneous theorists but also by the troubadours themselves, who on a number of occasions acknowledge composing a poem “el so de,” or “to the tune of” another composer. Both theory and practice demonstrate that structural imitation came to be most closely associated with several specific genres, including the sirventes (moralizing piece), tenso (debate song), coblas (song of few strophes), and planh (lament), their poetic structures commonly modeled after those of the canso, the dominant genre of troubadour composition. Despite abundant structural indications of contrafacture within the troubadour repertoire, melodic traces of the practice are surprisingly scant. Confirmation of melodic borrowing depends upon the preservation of a model and its contrafactum with their concordant musical readings, yet the small proportion of surviving troubadour melodies (with only one in ten lyric texts transmitted with its tune) poses a significant impediment to melodic corroboration. Only three sirventes have been preserved with melodies that duplicate those of preexistent cansos. In the remaining instances in which a sirventes, tenso, or other imitative type is preserved with a melodic unicum, scholars of troubadour song have tended to maintain that, absent melodic corroboration, the tune must be presumed original rather than borrowed. In view of the sparseness of the musical record, however, one should give consideration to an alternate interpretation, namely that the tune preserved exclusively with a given troubadour’s sirventes and thereafter transmitted as his invention may actually have been borrowed from a preexistent canso whose melody is no longer extant in its original setting. Isolating viable structural models for such suspected contrafacta allows the possibility of reascribing potentially borrowed melodies to their original composers. The study of contrafacture can thus lead us to question the received attributions of a number of tunes, thereby posing a challenge to the readily made assumption that the manuscript rubrics consistently pertain to both text and melody. By examining several suspected cases of contrafacture within a web of relevant indices– e.g., generic norms, intertextual correlations, socio-historic context, rhetorical motivation, transmission, and melodic style– we gain greater insight into a compositional technique that indelibly marked the art of the troubadours.
This dissertation compares the works of select troubadours with three mystical tracts in order to present the similarities found in these two literary traditions. Mystical writings have a far longer history reaching into antiquity and continuing until the present day. The traces in the manuscript traditions situate in the late eleventh century a new poetic form in Occitan with a focus on earthly love. The love as it is described in the songs of the composers who write or sing about it comes to be called bon amors or fin’ amors, the term we use today to name the love of the troubadour tradition. The period of lyrical production in Occitan by troubadours speaking of fin’ amors does not endure more than three centuries if we begin our count with Guilhem IX (1071-1126) and close with the poet so often called the last of the troubadours, Guiraut Riquier (1254-1292). These two traditions of love literature are thus distinguished by the nature of their literary histories and also by the loves they describe. Despite this, the shape of the loves they discuss as well as the language used to speak about love are not so different.
Some of medieval culture’s most arresting images and stories inextricably associate love and death. Thus the troubadour Jaufre Rudel dies in the arms of the countess of Tripoli, having loved her from afar without ever having seen her. Or in Marie de France’s Chevrefoil, Tristan and Iseult’s fatal love is hauntingly symbolized by the fatally entwined honeysuckle and hazel. And who could forget the ethereal spectacle of the Damoisele of Escalot’s body carried to Camelot on a supernatural funerary boat with a letter on her breast explaining how her unrequited love for Lancelot killed her? Medieval literature is fascinated with the idea that love may be a fatal affliction. Indeed, it is frequently suggested that true love requires sacrifice, that you must be ready to die for, from, and in love. Love, in other words, is represented, sometimes explicitly, as a form of martyrdom, a notion that is repeatedly reinforced by courtly literature’s borrowing of religious vocabulary and imagery. The paradigm of the martyr to love has of course remained compelling in the early modern and modern period.
This book seeks to explore what is at stake in medieval literature’s preoccupation with love’s martyrdom. Informed by modern theoretical approaches, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida’s work on ethics, it offers new readings of a wide range of French and Occitan courtly texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and argues that a new secular ethics of desire emerges from courtly literature because of its fascination with death. This book also examines the interplay between lyric and romance in courtly literary culture and shows how courtly literature’s predilection for sacrificial desire imposes a repressive sex-gender system that may then be subverted by fictional women and queers who either fail to die on cue, or who die in troublesome and disruptive ways.
This major reference work is the fourth volume in the series “Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages”. Its intention is to update the French and Occitan chapters in R.S. Loomis’ “Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History” (Oxford, 1959) and to provide a volume which will serve the needs of students and scholars of Arthurian literature. The principal focus is the production, dissemination and evolution of Arthurian material in French and Occitan from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Beginning with a substantial overview of Arthurian manuscripts, the volume covers writing in both verse (Wace, the Tristan legend, Chretien de Troyes and the Grail Continuations, Marie de France and the anonymous lays, the lesser known romances) and prose (the Vulgate Cycle, the prose Tristan, the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, etc.).
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