Performing Medieval Narrative

PERFORMING MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE

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Boccaccio, Decameron. Paris, BnF ms. It. 482, fol. 4v, late 14th century (Cliché: Bibliothèque nationale de France). This image shows the circle of ten storytellers in a garden; the queen of the day holds a scepter in her hand and wears a laurel wreath; in the foreground, a servant girl draws water from a large fountain. (Reproduced in Boccaccio visualizzato, ed.Vittore Branca [Turin, Giulio Einaudi, 1999] I, 68).

PERFORMING MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE

Edited by Evelyn Birge Vitz Nancy Freeman Regalado Marilyn Lawrence

D. S. BREWER

© Editors and Contributors 2005 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 2005 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 1 84384 039 1

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 CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Performing medieval narrative / edited by Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Marilyn Lawrence. p. cm. Summary: “A survey of and investigation into the important question of whether or not medieval narrative was designed for performance” – Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–84384–039–1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Literature, Medieval – History and criticism. 2. Oral interpretation – History – To 1500. I. Vitz, Evelyn Birge. II. Regalado, Nancy Freeman. III. Lawrence, Marilyn. PN671.P47 2005 809'.02–dc22 2004022272

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

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Contents List of illustrations

vii

Contributors

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I

xiii 1

Medieval performers of narrative and their art

Sioned Davies “He was the best teller of tales in the world”: Performing medieval Welsh narrative

15

Joyce Coleman The complaint of the makers: Wynnere and Wastoure and the “misperformance topos” in medieval England

27

John Ahern Dioneo’s repertory: Performance and writing in Boccaccio’s Decameron Part II

41

Medieval performance and the book

Keith Busby Mise en texte as indicator of oral performance in Old French verse narrative 61 Evelyn Birge Vitz Erotic reading in the Middle Ages: Performance and re-performance of romance

73

Marilyn Lawrence Oral performance of written narrative in the medieval French romance Ysaÿe le Triste

89

Nancy Freeman Regalado Performing romance: Arthurian interludes in Sarrasin’s Le roman du Hem (1278)

103

Part III

Performability and medieval narrative genres

† Brian J. Levy Performing fabliaux

123

Adrian P. Tudor Preaching, storytelling, and the performance of short pious narratives

141

Kenneth Varty Reading, reciting, and performing the Renart

155

Karl Reichl Turkic bard and medieval entertainer: What a living epic tradition can tell 167 us about oral performance of narrative in the Middle Ages Part IV

Perspectives from contemporary performers

Benjamin Bagby Beowulf, the Edda, and the performance of medieval epic: Notes from the 181 workshop of a reconstructed “singer of tales” Linda Marie Zaerr The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell: Performance and intertextuality in Middle English popular romance

193

Anne Azéma “Une aventure vous dirai”: Performing medieval narrative

209

Afterword

223

Works cited

225

Index

245

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Illustrations The circle of storytellers from Boccaccio’s Decameron

frontispiece

Calogrenant tells his story to Queen Guinevere and the court of King Arthur, from Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion (Yvain)

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A manuscript of Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès shows word-clustering

68

A performer with twin drums and cord belt, from the Luttrell Psalter

138

A musical example from de la Borde, Musique ancienne et moderne, 1780

185

Reconstruction of a Germanic harp

189

Reconstruction of a swanbone flute

192

Anna Azéma and Shira Kammen in concert

216

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Contributors John Ahern’s numerous articles and essays on Dante and medieval Italian literature have appeared in PMLA, Romanic Review, Dante Studies, Letture Classensi, and Parnassus. He is Chair of the Italian Department at Vassar College where he holds the Dante Antolini Chair of Italian Letters. He is working on a study of the format and textual reception of the Vita Nuova. Anne Azéma, the French vocalist, is a leading interpreter of early music. She is a featured soloist with The Boston Camerata and other ensembles, and a founding member of Camerata Mediterranea. Her discography includes over thirty-five recordings (Grand Prix du Disque, Edison Prize). She has been acclaimed by critics for her original, passionate, and vivid approach to songs and texts of the Middle Ages, as well as other repertories. Azéma’s many teaching engagements and residencies include invitations to Yale University, the University of Georgia, the University of Oregon, and numerous European conservatories including Amsterdam, The Hague, Metz, and Strasbourg. Recent recordings include The Unicorn: The Art of Storytelling in the Middle Ages (1994), Le Jeu d’Amour (1996), Provence Mystique (1999), Etoile du Nord: Mysteries and Miracles of Medieval France (2003). Benjamin Bagby, American vocalist, harpist, and scholar, has been an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance for over twenty-five years. Trained in voice and in German literature, he also received an advanced degree in medieval music performance from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basel, Switzerland). In 1977 he co-founded, with the late Barbara Thornton, the medieval music ensemble Sequentia, which he continues to direct. Sequentia has created many innovative concert programs that encompass the entire spectrum of medieval music and has produced more than two dozen recordings. Bagby has also achieved international recognition for his solo performances of the Beowulf epic and stories from the Icelandic Edda. He lives in Paris. Keith Busby is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published widely on medieval French literature, including a study of Gauvain in Old French Literature (1980), a critical edition of Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval (1993), The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (1993, with Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters), Codex and Context (2002), and numerous articles. His principal scholarly interest is in the reading of medieval literature in manuscript. Joyce Coleman is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Dakota. In fall of 2005, she will become the Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1993. Her research centers on literary performance and reception. Her book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (1996; rpt. paperback 2005), has been followed most recently by articles reconstructing the performance context of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Robert Mannyng’s Story of England, and Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Sioned Davies is Professor and Head of the School of Welsh at Cardiff University, Wales. She has published extensively on medieval storytelling, and in particular on the relationship between orality, literacy, and performance as reflected in the tales of the Mabinogion. Working within a similar theoretical framework, her current research project, Performing from the Pulpit, examines the dramatic preaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wales. Marilyn Lawrence has published on performance, dance, and disguise in medieval literature, as well as on contemporary performing arts. She is currently preparing for publication a book on The Minstrel and Medieval Identity and a volume on Recognition in Narrative, Film, and Music: Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (with Philip F. Kennedy). She holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD from New York University (2001), where she is a Visiting Scholar. † Brian Levy was Reader in Medieval French Studies at the University of Hull (UK). His research covered medieval comic, satirical, moralizing, and epic literature; vernacular historiography; and Anglo-Norman texts. His most recent books are The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (2000) and La tapisserie de Bayeux: l’art de broder l’histoire (2004). He had begun to add film studies to his more traditional work, and at the time of his death was engaged on a volume entitled The Screening of History: The Medieval Discourse of Film. Nancy Freeman Regalado is Professor of French at New York University. She has published Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf (1970), Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain (1990, with Edward Roesner and François Avril), and Contexts: Styles and Values in the Art and Literature of Medieval France, special issue of Yale French Studies (1991, with Daniel Poirion). She is currently working on accounts of medieval festive celebrations. Karl Reichl is Professor and Chair of English Philology at the University of Bonn. His teaching and research areas are medieval English literature, history of the English language, and oral poetry. His most recent book publications are Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Heroic Poetry (2000) and an edition and German translation of the Uzbek epic Alpamish (2001); he has also edited and contributed to The Oral Epic: Performance and Music (2000). Adrian Tudor is Lecturer in French at the University of Hull (UK) and was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His works include a monograph, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French Vie des Pères (2005); a translation into English of Jehan Renart’s Lay de l’ombre (2004); a number of edited volumes, articles and chapters; and a CD recording of Old French short narratives (2004, x

CONTRIBUTORS

with Brian J. Levy). He has delivered guest lectures at the Collège de France and Trinity College Dublin. Kenneth Varty, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow, has published on many aspects of medieval literature. He has focused particularly on stories of Renard the Fox, and is founder of the International Reynard Society. Recent books include Reynard, Renart, Reinaert, and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence (1999); Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present (2000); and the Earliest Branches of the Roman de Renart (2001, with R. Anthony Lodge). Evelyn (Timmie) Birge Vitz is Professor of French and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at New York University. She has published on lives of the saints and liturgy, gender, narrative theory, oral and written tradition, and performance. Among her books are Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (1985) and Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (1999). She is currently writing a book assessing the performability of various medieval works. Linda Marie Zaerr specializes in the interdisciplinary study of medieval romance. She uses live performance and recordings to explore principles of historical performance. She has recorded with Psallite and the Quill Consort and has produced videos of Middle English romances for The Chaucer Studio. She received an MA in Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies from the University of York and a PhD in Middle English Literature from the University of Washington.

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Acknowledgments This book is the fruit of many conversations—and many stories. We thank the contributors for generously sharing their work, as well as for countless interesting discussions during preparation of the volume. We also benefited from the fellowship and conversations that we three have enjoyed as we worked together on the book. We wish to express our appreciation for the support and good advice of Caroline Palmer, our editor at Boydell & Brewer, and for the useful suggestions of the anonymous reader for the press. We are grateful for the support of New York University, and thank in particular the Dean of Humanities of the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Department of French, and the Medieval and Renaissance Center. We thank Rachel Corkle for her copy-editing of this complex manuscript, and Daniel Vitz for his many hours of work on the Index. Finally, we are grateful to our husbands and families for their encouragement.

On August 10, 2004, Brian Levy died suddenly and unexpectedly. We will all miss this remarkable friend and colleague for his ebullience, his intellectual and human generosity, and his wide learning. He was a dear friend and a wonderful participant in this volume to which his contributions were many and continued until just days before his death. We dedicate this volume to his memory, taking some comfort in the thought that his work and his lively spirit will continue to speak to new generations of students and scholars.

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We dedicate this book with love to Cecilia, Charlotte, Emma, James, Julia, Lily, Max, and William

and in memory of Brian J. Levy

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.

Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion (Yvain). Garrett Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts no. 125, fol. 40; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (by permission of the Princeton University Library). Calogrenant tells his story to Queen Guinevere and the court of King Arthur.

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Introduction It is the feast of Pentecost at King Arthur’s castle at Carduel in Wales. In the great hall, knights, ladies, and maidens tell stories and talk of love, while Arthur has lingered and fallen to sleep in the adjoining bedchamber. Guinevere, however, has arisen and returns to listen to Calogrenant tell how he was shamed by the Knight of the Fountain, Esclados le Roux. Calogrenant invites his hearers to listen well: “Cuer et oroeilles me rendés . . . Give me your hearts and ears, for words are lost unless they are heard in the heart.” Calogrenant then begins his tale, in true storyteller fashion: “Il avint, pres a de .vi. anz . . . It happened some six years ago that I wandered alone, fully armed to seek adventure as a knight should . . . After I turned right through a thick forest, I rode out into Brocéliande.” While Calogrenant’s story moves his hearers to talk of action, it inspires Yvain to set off alone with his squire to seek out the fountain and avenge his cousin, Calogrenant.

This scene, which opens Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Le chevalier au lion (Yvain),1 is a striking medieval depiction of a narrative in performance. It tells us much about the content and purpose of this moment of storytelling. It displays a courtly entertainment performed here by one member of an elegant group of knights and ladies; the story is intended to touch the valiant heart of its hearers. Yet the artist who illustrated the key episodes of Le chevalier au lion so richly in Paris, BnF MS Fr. 1433 passes over Calogrenant’s performance before the assembly of knights and ladies, beginning rather with his combat with Esclados.2 These miniatures show not the telling, but the tale. In like manner, modern critics have often yielded to the illusion of direct access to medieval narrative. They have tended to look right through evidence of medieval and contemporary performances of narrative to focus on the texts of the tales themselves as they were transmitted in writing. It is true that scholars have long recognized the significance of certain types of narrative performance. Medieval epics in Britain, Scandinavia, France, and elsewhere, are known to have been sung from memory by professional performers who accompanied themselves on a stringed instrument such as a harp or a vielle. But sung epics such as Beowulf, the Edda, and the Chanson de Roland have a special status. Until recently, these were virtually the only medieval narratives whose performance attracted

1 Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion (Yvain) d’après le manuscript B.N. fr. 1433, ed. and trans. David Hult (Paris, Livre de Poche-Classiques Modernes, 1994) lines 150–2, 175–9, 187–9. 2 Miniatures reproduced in Sandra Hindman, Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994) 49–87 and figs. 25–36.

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scholarly attention comparable to the widespread interest in performances of medieval drama, lyric, and minstrelsy.3 Moreover, Western culture has marginalized the art of storytelling, which is now usually relegated to the domains of children and folklorists, while its entertainment function has been assumed by radio, television, and film. Now, however, scholarly attention is turning to modalities and circumstances of performance of medieval narrative beyond the oral epic.4 Such evidence had been passed over, as though private, silent reading in books were the natural way to receive stories. Yet there are abundant grounds for believing that medieval audiences delighted in stories told or read aloud and reveled in the art of performance. Indeed, the artist who illustrated Chrétien’s Knight of the Lion in Princeton, Garrett MS 125 begins the romance with a historiated initial depicting Calogrenant recounting his adventure at Arthur’s court5 (fig. p. xvi) that marks the dialogic exchanges between teller and listener. Moreover, medieval authors such as Chrétien lavished attention on descriptions of storytelling performances that brought their own narrative art to the foreground. There are many remarkable representations of narrative performances like that of Calogrenant, such as the torchlit scene where grim tales are sung in Hrothgar’s hall in Beowulf (lines 1062–8), or the seductively persuasive storytelling of Tristan in La folie Tristan and of Renart the fox in Le roman de Renart;6 storytellers are featured characters in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We have attended 3 See Works Cited in this volume, and the review of the relevant literature in the essays by Davies and Zaerr. 4 Recent work on performance of medieval narrative includes the following titles: Joyce Coleman, “The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps’ Prelection of Machaut’s Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 31 (2000): 233–48; Kathryn A. Duys, “Captenh: Jongleurs et hiérarchie professionnelle,” Cahiers de littérature orale 36 (1994): 65–90; Dennis Howard Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 47 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kathleen Loysen, Conversation and Storytelling in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century French Nouvelles, Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literature (New York, Peter Lang, 2004); Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1989); Laurie Postlewate, ed., Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Acts and Texts, Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theater and Drama (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005); Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999) and her “Old French Literature,” Teaching Oral Traditions, ed. John Miles Foley, Modern Language Association of America Options for Teaching (New York, Modern Language Association, 1998) 373–81; Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix: de la “littérature” médiévale, Poétique (Paris, Seuil, 1987). Study of Chaucer and performance has burgeoned in the past two decades: see, for example, Betsy Bowden, Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 26 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); William A. Quinn, Chaucer’s Rehersynges: The Performability of The Legend of Good Women (Washington, Catholic University of America Press, 1994). 5 Hindman 83–4 and fig. 35. 6 See Marilyn Lawrence, “Parole, pouvoir, plaisir et déguisement du goupil dans Renart jongleur,” Reinardus 14 (2001): 173–88 and Brian J. Levy, “Du fabliau à la farce: encore la question performancielle?” Reinardus 15 (2002): 87–100.

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INTRODUCTION

to the stories themselves, to the art of narrative, to the authors, and to the material books. It is time now for us to attend to the art of the tellers poised between the work, the circumstances, and the audience in the creative moment of performance. In this collection of essays, we define performance of narrative by the four fundamental elements seen in Calogrenant’s tale: a performer (or performers) tells or enacts a story for an audience. Narrative may be recognized by its representations of stylized fictional worlds such as those of Arthur or Renart, proclaimed by a storyteller’s formula (“Once upon a time . . .”), or defined by its characteristic content (the recounting of a sequence of events). 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. Our focus in this volume, however, is on performance in its more interpersonal, dramatic, and physical dimensions: visual, auditory, musical. The most visible signs of performance in the documents and depictions that survive from the Middle Ages are representations of the communicative bodily presence of a performer and of a receptive audience. Such a definition of performance of narrative allow us to move beyond the dichotomy between the oral and the written, which has preoccupied recent generations of scholars.7 In many respects, this important question prepared the way for consideration of performance in all its manifestations: oral, aural, and pictorial, along a continuum of possibilities, ranging from private or public reading from books, recitation of memorized stories, improvised retellings, to full dramatic reenactment. Narrative swings the doors of performance open wider than any other medieval genre. Whereas song cannot exist without music, stories may be sung, spoken, acted out, or played in wordless mimicry. Readers of drama have long been accustomed to considering performance as a staple of interpretation. Paradoxically, the very multiplicity of ways of performing medieval narrative may have obscured the significance of narrative as a performance genre. Storytellers cannot be confined to a single role: they are shapeshifters, who can step back and forth over the borderlines of narrative; they may tell or read narratives, act out roles within their stories by using gestures and actions, address their audience or comment on their tales from a position outside the fictional world. Readers too may assume the role of storyteller, performing narratives silently in their imagination, seeing the story unfold in their mind’s eye. Why is it not enough to study medieval narratives as written works of literature? What is gained by considering them in performance? First, and most important, is pleasure. We all know that narrative comes to life in performance, since we have all at some time enjoyed the experience of an engrossing book read aloud, a well-told story, a dramatic recitation, or a film based on a favorite novel. 7 See, for example, Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993); Dennis Howard Green, “Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 267–80; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; London, Routledge, 1991).

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Questions of performance can revitalize our scholarly readings of medieval narrative. The essays in this volume take a direct approach, asking how performances of narrative are represented or reported in the written record and how works surviving in writing invited, and indeed still do invite, performance. Undertaking such analysis requires a methodology—a systematic assessment of the internal textual evidence and external historical or documentary records to show how medieval narrative was conceived for performance and shaped by performance. Indeed, many characteristics of medieval narrative texts can be best understood in terms of their performance potential. Moreover, performancestudies theory has shown how analysis of narrative in performance can reveal social, political, and ideological forces around a work as it was performed and received.8 Study of performance can yield precious information about the circumstances of creation, patronage, reception, circulation, and—especially—about the value and significance of the work as it was performed for and received by medieval audiences. Our goal is to establish the importance of exploring performance traditions of medieval narrative and to achieve the fullest possible knowledge of all their circumstances. Whether they be a residue of oral tradition or elements of a script intended for performance, many performance features are inscribed in written texts: requests for silence, remarks to the audience, mentions of particular times and places, rubrics identifying speakers, direct speech, or dialogue used to differentiate characters. There are also textual elements that would necessarily be actualized by the voice of a speaker or speakers, such as dialects, accent, pauses, and figures of sound such as rhyme and alliteration. Rhythmic patterns may evoke the dramatic vocal performance of a storyteller, hint at suggestive intonations, or dramatize emotions. If musical or metrical form or an instrument is mentioned, we should think about the relationship of the story to the song and of voice to musical accompaniment. Other narrative elements such as repetition or character names may help hearers follow a story in performance. Where possible we should also consider the storytellers and hearers who may have been physically present at a performance in a particular place and moment. Who speaks and to whom? Are the performers professionals or amateurs? Do they perform alone or with others? How do storytellers use their bodies in space—with gestures? movements? mime? props? musical accompaniment? dramatic enactments? Do they improvise, recite from memory, or read aloud? What is the social makeup of the audience? Is the occasion a festive event or a private encounter? What do we know about particular patrons or the tastes and interests of various courts and other milieus where stories are performed? How do texts represent the effect of performance on the bodies and souls of spectators and hearers? Fabliaux often state their aim to bring forth belly laughs, and romances 8 See, for example, Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1991): 59–88; Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York, Routledge, 1996); Mark Franko and Annette Richards, eds., Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

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INTRODUCTION

are shown to arouse physical and emotional desire in the reader, while chivalric stories and pious tales seek to inspire the highest forms of social, moral, or spiritual behavior and belief. These essays cast their net widely for historical and textual evidence of performance practices. Some draw on the wealth of yet-unstudied representations of medieval performances in fiction; some draw on documentary records of performance events and their impact on those who witnessed or participated in them. Others engage the material evidence in manuscripts—word-groupings, variants, and compilation—which show where performance has left its mark, shaping the written text as we know it. One of the most rewarding approaches to narrative in this collection is the concept of performability, which opens many levels of analysis, ranging from internal evidence of performance potential to interpretation by scholars who draw on their knowledge of analogous traditions to reconstruct medieval narrative in performance. Some essays read between the lines to imagine possible gestures, vocal modulations, and enactment. Such imagined performances are fully realized by contemporary performers of medieval narrative whose essays show how they reconstruct a text and bring it to life using their voice and body in performance before an audience. Just as we may keep performance potential in mind when reading Shakespeare’s plays, we should do so when reading medieval stories. Analysis of performance is essential for understanding and appreciating medieval narratives because they are intended for performance. Thinking in terms of performability, moreover, can give present-day readers a sense of the artistry and vitality of medieval narratives. Contemporary performers of medieval narrative rediscover and reveal to their audiences the dynamic force contained within the words on the page. Works spring to life in performance and enchant us again. The purpose of this collection of essays is threefold. First, it seeks to engage scholars from all fields of medieval literature in consideration of performance of narrative, including those interested in issues of orality, the material book, storytelling, public and private reading, drama, and life in medieval courts and cities. It covers a broad array of narratives from throughout medieval Europe whose performance possibilities and valuable evidence have not yet been fully examined. Second, this volume aims to inspire further study by conceptualizing and illustrating strategies for analysis of medieval narrative in performance. It provides examples and methods that can make such analysis a regular feature of critical study of narrative works, just as the new codicology has encouraged systematic investigation of works in their manuscript context. Finally, we intend to encourage new performances of these old stories by including accounts of the experiences and reflections of present-day performers. The fourteen essays in this collection address one overarching question: by what modes and means were narratives performed and received in the Middle Ages? The essays are grouped to respond to this question in four ways. Those in Part I examine evidence of medieval appreciation of the art of narrative performance; those in Part II analyze some of the many records and representations of the use of books and writing in performance; those in Part III study features of performability, including analogies with narrative performances in contemporary 5

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culture; and finally, Part IV offers accounts of the experiences of today’s performers of medieval narrative. Part I: Medieval performers of narrative and their art The three essays in Part I show how important the art of the performer was to medieval narrative. The first article, by Sioned Davies, studies praise accorded to a professional entertainer’s successful performance; the second, by Joyce Coleman, explores disgruntled grumbling about performances that roused disapproval; and the third, by John Ahern, examines representations of artful performances by courtly tellers in a privileged social position. In “ ‘He was the best teller of tales in the world’: Performing Medieval Welsh Narrative,” an article enriched by references to a variety of traditions, Sioned Davies writes about an admired performer of tales and aims to discover what features made both a good story and a good storyteller. She reconfigures the question of orality by showing how the authors of the Mabinogi, Welsh prose tales preserved in writing, incorporated its stylistic and structural, memory-friendly features—episodic structure, repetitive events, formulaic patterns of motifs or phrasing, onomastic tags and place-names—to compose written works intended for oral delivery. Performance, she concludes, makes the written words come alive, not only with the performer’s voice, but with the listeners’ reactions. While Davies stresses elements that make a performer successful—an exciting story, good memory, acting abilities, and interaction with the audience—Joyce Coleman tells a very different tale in “The Complaint of the Makers: Wynnere and Wastoure and the ‘Misperformance Topos’ in Medieval England.” Wynnere and Wastoure is a poet’s complaint about bad performances by those whose chattering style and youthful inexperience make them inferior to mature poetperformers. Rejecting the notion that such criticisms are meaningless conventions, Coleman shows the impact of inevitable shifts in performance styles and tastes as patrons die and the wise old poets are replaced by “jangling young jays.” Coleman concludes that the poet’s complaints about incompetent performance in Wynnere and Wastoure (and subsequently in the Anglo-Norman Vie du Prince Noir) are not clerical fulminations against secular entertainment, nor laments about misdirected patronage, bad genres, or evil times. Rather they reflect one author’s concern with the decline of performance standards and fears for his own professional status; they also reveal the co-existence of a multitude of performance modes. In “Dioneo’s Repertory: Performance and Writing in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” John Ahern describes practices of oral performance and textual production in northern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A wide array of people—preachers, professional entertainers (dicitori, giullari), and ordinary citizens—performed a broad range of vernacular songs, proverbs, riddles, jokes, and novelle in public spaces of the communes, political courts, and private homes. Effective delivery required close attention to the audience and a large repertory from which speakers could choose appropriate stories to perform. By the end of the thirteenth century, written collections of tales in the vernacular 6

INTRODUCTION

began to appear to serve such needs. The narrative frame of Boccaccio’s Decameron makes visible the social context of such performance of novelle by courtly men and women gathered in a garden outside Florence. Speaking within a shared tradition, Boccaccio’s performers select from their personal repertories stories on a given theme or in response to other tellers. Ahern highlights the role of Dioneo who dominates the storytelling and brings the art of the narrative performer—and the literariness of Boccaccio’s book—to the fore. Part II: Medieval performance and the book Vernacular codices of the Middle Ages may be seen as a revolving door: performances are written down into books, and written texts give rise to performance. The essays in this section address relationships between performance and the book. Keith Busby demonstrates how page layout facilitates oral peformance. Evelyn Birge Vitz and Nancy Freeman Regalado show how the romance book inspires and generates various kinds of new performances. Marilyn Lawrence analyses a medieval romance that spotlights the many modes of performance of written narratives. Keith Busby’s article, “Mise en texte as Indicator of Oral Performance in Old French Verse Narrative,” moves close to the written page to study the phenomenon of word-clustering in vernacular manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Word-clustering prepares the written text for oral performance by trained readers. Performance in this sense consists initially of the breath of scribes muttering as they copy words down and the voice of readers deciphering syntax and rhythms from these inky markings. Word-clustering makes silent reading difficult, but it facilitates reading aloud, especially by professionals. It also enables a person reading aloud to anticipate accurately the grammatical sense of a phrase and the rhythmic movement of a verse. The conjoining of words is, therefore, a visible, material sign of performance: it characterizes pages designed for oral delivery. Patterns of word-clustering are also related to prosodic features of different narrative genres. Two-syllable word-clusters serve the underlying rhythms of octosyllabic verse narratives. In the epic, however, word-clusters emphasize metrical breaks at the cæsura and line endings, thus highlighting the interplay of the hemistiches and the effects of assonance. In “Erotic Reading in the Middle Ages: Performance and Re-performance of Romance,” Evelyn Birge Vitz examines the phenomenon of erotic reading as a kind of performance, and as a particular relationship between performance and the book. She shows that romances may represent a woman and a man alone in an intimate scene, reading to each other from a love-romance. The pair may then re-perform the love scene in their own (fictional) lives. The act of reading aloud, with its emphasis on mouth, lips, and eye contact, is represented as inviting the readers’ imitation of the love-story. Works discussed include Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion, Robert de Blois’s Floris et Liriope, Floire et Blancheflor, Le roman de la rose, Dante’s Inferno, and Froissart’s L’espinette amoureuse. Vitz suggests that the practice of erotic reading promoted the rise of the romance genre in the Middle Ages. 7

PERFORMING MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE

In “Oral Performance of Written Narrative in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste,” Marilyn Lawrence focuses on the art and function of the performer of narrative represented in a late-medieval romance, Ysaÿe le Triste. Its heroine, Marthe, is a gifted composer and performer of narrative songs and stories, as well as a writer of romance. As a noblewoman, Marthe is initially an amateur author and performer, but she then spends over fifteen years disguised as a professional minstrel, earning her livelihood performing narratives while she searches for her lost fiancé, Ysaÿe, son of Tristan and Yseut. The lovers ultimately reunite after Ysaÿe’s attendant reads aloud to him the romance-book that Marthe has written. Through the story of Marthe, Ysaÿe le Triste reveals the complex relations between the producer and performer, and between the creation and transmission of orally composed and written narratives. Nancy Freeman Regalado’s article, “Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le roman du Hem (1278),” examines an extraordinary historical document that describes interludes—scenes staging characters and episodes drawn from Arthurian fiction—which were performed during the banquet and jousts of a French tournament. The interludes are described by Sarrasin in Le roman du Hem, a book commissioned to record two kinds of spectacle at the tournament: the chivalric jousts and the Arthurian scenes played by men and women of the court (including professional entertainers). The most important historical persons present played starring roles: Robert, Count of Artois, was “the Knight with the Lion”; costumes were the participants’ own most splendid garments; the organizer’s sister presided as “Queen Guinevere.” The courtly world was thus glorified by being conceived in terms of Arthurian themes and identities. Besides demonstrating the honorific and still-entertaining power of the Arthurian narrative framework, such enactments remind us how blurred the line between narrative and drama could be in the Middle Ages. Part III: Performability and medieval narrative genres The notion of performability can spotlight for today’s readers elements of performance in the written narratives of the Middle Ages. Appeals for silence, direct address to an audience, direct speech, dialogue, allusions to gestures or movements, or references to the performer’s repertory—all of these may be rhetorically stylized residue of oral traditions, records of performance, or verbal features intended to facilitate performance. Genre, moreover, was crucial in determining performance. Brian Levy, Adrian Tutor, and Kenneth Varty show that the repertory of short narratives such as fabliaux, pious tales, and the stories of Renart the fox opens the way for performers to embody characters by means of voice changes, facial expressions, gestures, and physical movements.9 Karl Reichl reveals that the formal constraints of the medieval epic raise further issues of improvisation, and voicing (song, recitative, or dramatic recreation) in relation to musical form. Moreover, continuities in epic traditions enable scholars such as 9 These features comprise what actors call “externals”; see Melissa Bruder et al., A Practical Handbook for the Actor, introd. David Mamet (New York, Vintage-Random, 1986).

8

INTRODUCTION

Reichl to draw productively on comparisons between medieval works and live performances of contemporary epics. In “Performing Fabliaux,” Brian Levy points to the performance potential of comic tales disseminated in sermons and miscellany collections of short narratives. Whether performed from memory, improvised from brief written summaries, or read aloud as well-wrought tales, fabliaux exhibit stylistic features that Levy calls “indicators of performance,” such as dramatic speech and direct address to audiences. He proposes a repertory of elements that would have been part of the performance: physical gestures, stage business, and vocal modulations of intonation for ironic effect or lewd innuendo. Levy offers a line-by-line reading of the fabliau Les perdriz that shows how an imaginative reading of narrative details reveals the performance potential of written texts. In “Preaching, Storytelling, and the Performance of Short Pious Narratives,” Adrian Tudor seeks out the performable in brief pious narratives of the thirteenth century such as the Miracles of Gautier de Coinci and La vie des Pères, which tell good stories, as well as stories about goodness. Pious tales and miracles cross easily over the generic boundaries that distinguish fabliaux, exempla, and saints’ lives. Furthermore, the use of octosyllabic couplets and the presence of direct speech and dialogue suggest dynamic delivery and invite gestures, props, and enactment. Tudor maintains that sermons are a genre that needs to be performed, showing how the oral modes of vernacular preaching ensure that stories in sermons pass readily into performance. Kenneth Varty’s essay, “Reading, Reciting, and Performing the Renart,” begins his discussion of performability by citing the picturesque scene from Noël du Fail’s Propos rustiques (1548), where the farmer Robin Chevet tells Renart stories after dinner to his family circle. This storytelling session points to the many signs of orality and the numerous performable features in the fox tales. These include injunctions to auditors, an appeal for commiting one story to memory, and references to oral performance. Varty considers the argument that such allusions may merely be themes that survive in stories conceived in writing and intended for reading. He concludes that whatever the oral or written origins of these works, all contain easily performable elements such as the many dramatic speeches and passages in lively dialogue. Varty ends with a catalogue of modern recordings and dramatic adaptations in French that all confirm the performability of the Roman de Renart. Karl Reichl compares medieval and contemporary oral epic in “Turkic Bard and Medieval Entertainer: What a Living Epic Tradition Can Tell Us about Oral Performance of Narrative in the Middle Ages.” He finds similar features of plot, music, gesture, and performance event in epics of the Middle Ages and in those performed today in analogous Turkic traditions. Epics are sung and typically accompanied by a stringed instrument. The singers Reichl has observed emphasize the narrative over musical features and dramatic elements. Gestures tend to be conventional and declamatory, emphasizing words rather than illustrating actions. Although singers may use vocal variations of speed, loudness, or register, these are traditional rather than personal in nature. Each performance event is particularized—by a singer, an audience, a place, and an occasion. Scholars 9

PERFORMING MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE

reconstructing epic performance must conceive of the length of performance of a sung epic as it unfolds, a listening experience vastly different from reading a text or even hearing a spoken poem. Part IV: Perspectives from contemporary performers Three essays by contemporary performers of medieval narrative show how they reconstruct the moment when they bring a text to life with their voice and body before an audience. These articles show musicians and storytellers at work within medieval narrative, all seeking to shape a performance that deeply engages today’s audiences. Benjamin Bagby lays out the technical and formal considerations that enable reconstruction of musical performances of oral epics. Within a medieval verse narrative, Linda Marie Zaerr finds features that allow her to adjust a memorized text to the circumstances of live performance. Finally, Anne Azéma seeks to draw her audience into the stories she tells by exploring character and by combining narrative and lyric texts that have long lain silent in writing. All three address the underlying formal structures that inform and shape the performance of narrative. In “Beowulf, the Edda, and the Performance of Medieval Epic: Notes from the Workshop of a Reconstructed ‘Singer of Tales,’ ” Benjamin Bagby describes his search for fundamental sound patterns to use for performing the Eddic poems, the Old Icelandic songs of Norse mythology. While no written records of notation remain to document performance practices of the Edda, Bagby has used an array of reconstructive tools to create music for these epics. He builds on the structures of modes, that is, easily recognizable formulaic systems of melody that lend themselves to great variety. Bagby calls modes “collections of gestures, codes, and signs”; these are structural vocabularies that can be repeated and modified to perform many sung narratives. Instruments—the harp, vielle, and flute, whose construction and use are based on evidence found in burial sites and also from surviving performance practices—reiterate the modal gestures of this singer’s recreation of medieval oral epic. Linda Marie Zaerr seeks to establish a performance-based criticism that can lead to a better theoretical understanding of textual variation. In “The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell: Performance and Intertextuality in Middle English Popular Romance,” Zaerr looks closely at variants within her own memorized performances of The Weddynge. She shows that variants reveal underlying formal structures within the work itself—structures that a performer can exploit spontaneously and creatively in response to an audience. Zaerr contrasts the meticulously refined precision of verse compositions by Chaucer and Gower to the loose rhyme and rhythmic schemes of The Weddynge, which are more open to improvisation in performance. In “ ‘Une aventure vous dirai’: Performing Medieval Narrative,” Anne Azéma invites us to accompany her onstage as she forges performances of medieval narratives, some transmitted without music. Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the medieval religious and courtly lyric in several languages and on her lively sense of storytelling, she becomes the poet during her performances, creating the 10

INTRODUCTION

work anew. Musical constraints of “beautiful sound” are relaxed, for stories invite a “wider range of vocal sounds”; yet the strict formal structures of verse support the performer’s memory and spontaneous interpretation. While Azéma delights in stories and songs in her native French and the “word music” of medieval German and French, she uses translation, summary, familiar story-lines as well as emotions, and her sheer pleasure in the play of sounds, to communicate with audiences. Storytelling and gesture transform time and space without elaborate theatrical costuming and staging, engaging spectators in the story. This collection of essays shows some of the ways that performance carried narrative texts into the medieval world of time, space, and human experience. When Calogrenant speaks—together with his fellow storytellers—readers, listeners, and spectators venture forth from the written page into the dynamic life of the story. These essays invite us to reread each medieval narrative toward performance. The power and pleasure of medieval narrative in performance opens pathways for us as it did for medieval audiences—to Hrothgar’s hall, to the forest of Brocéliande, to a country garden outside Boccaccio’s Florence—where we may hear the old stories made new through performance. Evelyn Birge Vitz Nancy Freeman Regalado Marilyn Lawrence

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Part I MEDIEVAL PERFORMERS OF NARRATIVE AND THEIR ART

“He was the best teller of tales in the world”: Performing Medieval Welsh Narrative Sioned Davies

The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi contains two passages that give a tantalising glimpse of the performance of medieval Welsh narrative. The first tells how Gwydion and his men enter the court of Pryderi, disguised as poets. They receive a great welcome, and Gwydion is given the place of honour at the table, next to Pryderi. When asked for cyfarwyddyd, Gwydion “entertains the court with pleasing ymdiddanau and cyfarwyddyd”; everyone is pleased, because Gwydion is the best cyfarwydd in the world. Later in the tale, and again in the guise of a poet, Gwydion and his host Arianrhod entertain each other with chwedlau and cyfarwyddyd, and again we are informed that Gwydion was a good cyfarwydd.1 These passages have been the source of much debate. It is generally held that the term cyfarwyddyd developed from its original sense of “lore, the stuff of stories” to mean simply “tale,” while the cyfarwydd, “the well-informed person, expert,” came to mean simply “storyteller.” The term chwedl (pl. chwedlau), related to the Welsh verb heb, meaning “says, speaks,” is a common word for “tale,” while ymddiddan, “conversation” in Modern Welsh,2 suggests a specific type of narration—the term occurs in dialogue poems such as Ymddiddan Arthur a’r Eryr [The Dialogue between Arthur and the Eagle], implying perhaps a dramatic performance by two speakers; in the tale of The Lady of the Fountain, on the other hand, ymddiddan is a prose monologue of some length, where Cynon narrates a memorate, a personal experience, to Arthur’s knights but directs his comments at Cai, hence it is a dialogue of sorts (although elicits no response from the listener).3 Ymddiddan, in the sense of conversation, also occurs informally between characters at table. Sometimes, however, a memorate can arise out of such a conversation—as in the case of Matholwch, King of Ireland, who tells his table-companion Bendigeidfran the story of the Cauldron of Rebirth,4 framing his performance with “I was hunting in Ireland one day,” and signalling an end when 1 The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, rev. ed. (1948; London, Everyman’s Library-Dent, 1974) 56–7, 66–6. Quotations throughout will be from Jones and Jones, with a few adaptations when deemed necessary. 2 ymddiddan < ym + diddan(u) meaning “to entertain each other.” 3 Note that both chwedl and ymddiddan convey the sense of spoken material. 4 Jones and Jones 30–1.

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he draws the listener back into the conversation with “ ‘And it was then, I suppose, lord,’ said Matholwch to Bendigeidfran, ‘he came over to you.’ ”5 What becomes immediately apparent is that storytelling was a common occurrence in medieval Wales, and was the domain of both the professional, and the amateur. Moreover, the numerous words for “story, tale” reflect the variety of forms within the genre.6 It would be misleading, therefore, to seek one answer to the question: “How was medieval Welsh narrative performed?”—we should be thinking in terms of a continuum, from “festive” events to “ordinary” moments and from recitation from memory to public reading.7 It is also difficult to comment on the performance of medieval Welsh narrative without reference to the poetry of the period—indeed, a relationship between the poet and storytelling is implied in the references to Gwydion discussed above.8 According to the Welsh laws, there were three types of poet—the pencerdd [chief poet], the bardd teulu [household bard] and cerddor [joculator], a generic term for poets and musicians, rather than the more specific “jester” or “buffoon.”9 The law tracts give details of the poets’ performances: It was the pencerdd’s duty to present two poems, “the first to God and the second to the king.” The third song was to be sung by the bardd teulu . . . He should also sing “Unbeiniaeth Prydein” [The Chieftainship of Britain] when the king’s followers prepared for battle, and if he sang to them during a raid he was entitled to the finest beast. His other function was to entertain the queen “in a quiet voice, so as not to disturb the court,” and according to the Demetian version of the laws three songs should be sung to her in her own room (which accounts for the name bardd stafell in one of the Latin texts).10

However, the laws make no reference at all to storytelling, implying perhaps that this was a secondary bardic function, given much less priority than elegy and eulogy. Certainly, poets were acquainted with traditional stories, as reflected in

5 On “framing” as a characteristic of performance, see, for example, Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, Illinois, Waveland Press, 1977). 6 See Brynley F. Roberts, Studies on Middle Welsh Literature (Lewiston, New York, 1992) 11–12; Sioned Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd: Astudiaeth o dechnegau naratif yn Y Mabinogion (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1995) 16–20. 7 Compare Evelyn Birge Vitz’s discussion on “modalities of performance” in Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999) 164–227. 8 See P. K. Ford, “The Poet as Cyfarwydd in Early Welsh Tradition,” Studia Celtica 10–11 (1975): 152–62; Roberts 2–4. Recently, Ford has argued that Gwydion “was not a storyteller but someone whose performances were informed and amplified by his acquired knowledge of such matters” (“Gwydion: Prydydd y Moch,” paper, UCLA Celtic Colloquium, March 2002). 9 For a detailed discussion on performing medieval Welsh poetry, see Huw M. Edwards’ extremely useful chapter on “Popular Entertainers in Medieval Wales,” Dafydd ap Gwilym: Influences and Analogues (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996) 1–37. The laws were originally codified in the tenth century, but the earliest manuscript versions (in Latin and in Welsh) date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see T. M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen and Paul Russell, eds., The Welsh King and his Court (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000) and The Law of Hywel Dda, ed. and trans. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul, Gwasg Gomer, 1990). 10 Edwards 5.

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“HE WAS THE BEST TELLER OF TALES IN THE WORLD”

their work; yet it would seem from the surviving corpus that verse itself was not used for extended narrative in medieval Wales—the preferred medium, unlike most Indo-European countries, was prose. The situation, therefore, was not only a complex, but also a dynamic one; despite the hierarchical structure, one could expect a certain degree of interaction between the various professional “performers,” as they entertained at feasts and gatherings. Although we have some evidence regarding the performance of poetry in medieval Wales, together with references to musicians such as harpists, crowthers and pipers, and entertainers such as tumblers and magicians, very little is known of the performance of narrative. We must depend on internal, rather than external, evidence as found in the surviving corpus—the Mabinogion, a collection of eleven medieval Welsh prose tales.11 This title was popularised by Lady Charlotte Guest in her nineteenth-century translation,12 but the term is almost certainly a scribal error for the authentic mabinogi, and found in a single manuscript only. However, since the suffix -(i)on is a very common plural ending in Welsh, mabinogion has become an extremely convenient label to describe this corpus and, although a misnomer, it is by now well-established. Though found in the White and Red Book manuscripts (and fragments elsewhere),13 the tales were not originally conceived as a collection—they all vary in date, authorship, sources, background and content. The dating and chronology of the tales is problematic; even so, we can assume that they were written down some time between the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. Resonances of Celtic mythology are apparent in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi as the author uses traditional material to reinforce his own views regarding proper social conduct; he draws on cyfarwyddyd for his material, and states this categorically on three separate occasions.14 Culhwch and Olwen is the earliest surviving tale in any language in which King Arthur and his warriors play a prominent role. Here, a dove-tailing of two well-known international themes, the Giant’s Daughter and the Jealous Stepmother, serves as a frame work for a series of independent tales in which Arthur, together with warriors such as Cai and Bedwyr, help Culhwch win his bride. Peredur, Geraint and The Lady of the Fountain (or Owain) also draw on Arthurian material, although it is Arthur’s

11 For translations of the texts, see Jones and Jones; The Mabinogion, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (London, Penguin, 1976); The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, ed. and trans. P. K. Ford (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977). For a general introduction to all eleven tales, see Proinsias Mac Cana, The Mabinogi, rev. ed. (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1992). 12 The Mabinogion from the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, and other ancient Welsh manuscripts, with an English Translation and Notes, ed. and trans. Charlotte Guest (London, Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1838–49). For a discussion of Guest’s translation, see Sioned Davies, “A Charming Guest: Translating the Mabinogion,” Studia Celtica 38 (2004): 157–78. 13 The White Book of Rhydderch (National Library of Wales, Peniarth 4 and 5) is dated c.1350, and the Red Book of Hergest (Jesus College, Oxford, MS. CXI) is dated between 1382 and c.1410. For a discussion of medieval Welsh manuscripts, see Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000). 14 Jones and Jones 40, 54, 75.

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knights who are the central figures, rather than Arthur himself. These betray foreign influences, and correspond in varying ways to the French metrical romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Even so, they remain stylistically and structurally within the Welsh narrative tradition. The Encounter of Lludd and Llefelys first appears, in an abbreviated form, in a thirteenth-century translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. The story relates how Lludd overcomes three oppressions that came to Britain, and draws on the same pseudo-historical background as The Dream of Maxen, in which the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus meets a maiden whom he eventually marries, followed by a collection of onomastic tales and an account of the founding of Brittany. A second dream, The Dream of Rhonabwy, presents a satirical view of the Arthurian past, and is an extremely sophisticated piece of writing, arguably a parody on traditional narrative techniques. Its colophon suggests that it was always a written text, intended to be read: And here is the reason why no one, neither bard nor storyteller, knows the Dream without a book—by reasons of the number of colours that were on the horses, and all that variety of rare colours both on the arms and their trappings, and on the precious mantles, and the magic stones.15

Despite their differences, the eleven tales of the Mabinogion draw heavily on oral material and on the oral storytelling conventions of the medieval cyfarwydd. Performance features are an integral part of their fabric, partly because the “authors” inherited pre-literary modes of narrating, and partly because the written tales were composed for oral delivery, so that their reception and dissemination continued to have an influence on both style and structure.16 There is little evidence within the tales themselves regarding their mode of performance—there are no requests for silence, no introductory remarks to the audience and very few authorial asides. Yet, the world depicted is clearly an oral one—throughout the eleven tales there are only three references to books/letters or to reading.17 Moreover, unlike the poetry of the period, the “authors” of our tales are anonymous, suggesting that there was no sense of “ownership” as such, and that the texts were viewed as part of the collective memory. But, above all, it is the stylistic and structural features of the Mabinogion that betray a dependency on orality, aurality and performance.18 As regards structure, the tales are highly 15

Jones and Jones 152. On the general significance of reading aloud, and the idea of “interactive parchment,” see Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). Regarding the reading aloud of texts in medieval Wales, see Sioned Davies, “Written Text as Performance: The Implications for Middle Welsh Prose Narratives,” Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies, ed. Huw Pryce (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 136. 17 See Jones and Jones 32, 86, 152. Note also that nothing in the Welsh text of The Lady of the Fountain corresponds to the daughter reading aloud to her parents in Yvain, and Laudine reading a Psalter with gold letters (see Vitz, Orality and Performance 113–14). 18 For a detailed analysis of the style and structure of the eleven tales, see Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd [meaning “The Art of the Storyteller”]. 16

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“HE WAS THE BEST TELLER OF TALES IN THE WORLD”

episodic. This is reflected in manuscript layout and decoration, where large initials divide the texts in many instances. A more common technique is for tales to be divided by “scene-setting” phrases19 such as “one day,” “one afternoon,” which function as a boundary between one event and the next, or for episodes to be framed by verbal repetition which acts as a “chorus” of sorts and functions as a signal to a listening audience.20 Indeed, one could argue that the episode was the all-important narrative unit, and that the “authors” were the first to combine such units into a long composite text, although the audience might well have been aware of an immanent whole.21 Clover, drawing on the evidence of medieval Icelandic prose sagas, as well as twentieth-century African narratives, argues that the long prose form came into existence only with the emergence of a reading class—it was perhaps a phenomenon linked to memory, for the composer cannot compose or the audience remember tales that are beyond a certain length.22 Ruth Finnegan’s remarks on the Lianja bear further witness to this argument: “It is not at all certain that the traditional pattern was not in fact a very loosely related bundle of separate episodes, told on separate occasions and not necessarily thought of as one single work of art.”23 This may well be so in the case of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Culhwch and Olwen and the three so-called “romances” of Peredur, Geraint and The Lady of the Fountain.24 Attention should also be drawn to the onomastic element that underlies several episodes, another feature that makes the narrative “memory-friendly,” to use Vitz’s term.25 Hunter has emphasised the importance of the onomastic tag as an aide-mémoire to the oral storyteller in the context of the Mabinogion tales;26 he 19

For a discussion of the term, see Bauman, Verbal Art 21. For example, the beginning of the second major episode in the First Branch of the Mabinogi echoes the opening of the tale: “And once upon a time he was at Arberth, a chief court of his” (Jones and Jones 9). 21 Although the episode was the all-important narrative unit, it could be argued that the “whole” did exist as an immanent or potential entity: “Every performance of traditional narrative takes place in a vast context of story . . . I am left, therefore, with scepticism that a long narrative can exist in oral tradition as a single ‘work’ separate from the tradition as a whole . . . The usual instruction to the performer would be ‘sing us the episode of such and such,’ with its fit into the unperformed whole being a task for members of the audience, accomplished more or less satisfactorily depending on their knowledge of tradition” (Robert Kellogg, “Varieties of Tradition in Medieval Narrative,” Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, eds. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. [Odense, Odense University Press, 1979] 124–5). 22 J. Carol Clover, “The Long Prose Form,” Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 101 (1986): 10–39. 23 R. H. Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977) 109–10. See also D. Biebuyck, “The Epic as a Genre in Congo Oral Literature,” African Folklore, ed. R. M. Dorson (New York, Doubleday, 1972) 257–73 and Isidore Okpewho, “Does the Epic Exist in Africa? Some Formal Considerations,” Research in African Literatures 8 (1977): 171–200. 24 For a detailed analysis of episodic structure in the Mabinogion, see Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd, and “Written Text as Performance” 139–42. Davies has also attempted to analyse the length of episodic units in the Mabinogion in a search for symmetrical composition; however, more research needs to be undertaken before we can say anything definite in that direction. 25 See Vitz, Orality and Performance. 26 T. G. Hunter, “Onomastic Lore in the Native Middle Welsh Prose Tales,” MPhil thesis, University of Wales, 1988. 20

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shows, for example, how the First Branch of the Mabinogi can be remembered by recourse to three onomastic explanations: (i) Why was Pwyll called Head of Annwfn? (ii) When was “badger-in-the-bag” first played? (iii) How did Pryderi get his name? The answers supply the content of the tale’s three major episodes. Onomastic tales linked with place names are also a common feature of much of the corpus, and have a direct link with the memorability of the tale elements. As noted by Honko, place names constitute a powerful guarantee for the perpetuation of tradition—they are a constant reminder of the significance of the place and the legends connected with it.27 Repetition of events, with a high dependency on verbal repetition, is another feature of the tales’ macro-structure that is linked to memory. This makes sense in practice, due to the ephemeral nature of oral prose or poetry. Tripartite repetition is particularly prevalent, employed to create suspense, and to focus attention.28 Repetition arising from the giving of advice and instructions also features prominently in the tales; very often, the instructions demand absolute adherence if the dangerous task is to be accomplished successfully, a feature common to Irish folktales as noted by Nicolaisen.29 As well as verbal repetition within individual tales, one finds that certain phrases are common to more than one tale, suggesting that the authors are drawing on a common pool of formulae or traditional patterns. Much has been written on the significance of the formula in oral poetry, ever since the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on Homeric diction and South Slavic heroic songs.30 Although metre is an integral part of the Parry-Lord formula, many scholars have shown that formulae, or stereotyped forms of expression, are also a distinctive feature of orally transmitted prose.31 In the Mabinogion texts, they are employed to describe such things as physical appearance, combat, horses, approach to a building, feasting, transition from one day to the next, openings and endings of tales.32 Although the composition of our medieval Welsh tales was in 27 Lauri Honko, “Four Forms of Adaptation of Tradition,” Studia Fennica 26 (1981): 22. See also Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1973) 38. 28 See Axel Olrik, “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” The Study of Folklore, ed. A. Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965) 129–41. M. Lüthi, on the other hand, prefers to discuss tripartite repetition in terms of imitation and anticipation (“Imitation and Anticipation in Folktales,” Folklore on Two Continents, eds. N. Burlakoff and C. Lindahl [Bloomington, Indiana, Trickster Press, 1980] 3–13). 29 W. F. H. Nicolaisen, “Concepts of Time and Space in Irish Folktales,” Celtic Folklore and Christianity: Studies in Memory of William B. Heist, ed. P. K. Ford (Santa Barbara, McNally and Loftin, 1983) 150–8. 30 Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. A. Parry (Oxford, Clarendon, 1971); A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960). See also J. M. Foley, ed., Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography (New York, Garland, 1985). 31 See, for example, R. H. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford, Clarendon, 1970); Alan Bruford, Gaelic Folk-tales and Mediaeval Romances (Dublin, The Folklore of Ireland Society, 1969); Okpewho, “Does the Epic Exist in Africa?”; Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd and The Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Llandysul, Gwasg Gomer, 1993). 32 For a detailed analysis of the formulaic content of the Mabinogion tales, see Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd.

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writing, formulae facilitated the retention, and therefore the reception, of the written text, when read or heard.33 It has been argued that memory is also the reason why oral tales, and orally-derived narratives, tend to have a chronological structure inclined towards conjunctive cohesion. Rosenberg recognised this in his work on American sermons, for example,34 and Bruford and Macdonald in their research on the storytellers of South Uist.35 Conjunctive cohesion, it has been argued, is a reflection of the fragmented nature of spoken language, and of the theory that spoken language is produced in spurts, or idea units.36 The following passage, taken at random, reflects these features clearly: And then the Irish began to kindle a fire under the cauldron of rebirth. And then the dead bodies were cast into the cauldron until it was full. And on the morrow they would arise as good fighting men as before, save that they were not able to speak. And then when Efnysien saw the dead bodies, without room being found anywhere for the men of the Island of the Mighty, he said in his heart, “Alas, God,” said he, “woe is me that I should be the cause of this heap of the men of the Island of the Mighty. And shame on me,” said he, “if I seek no deliverance therefrom.” And he creeps in among the dead bodies of the Irish. And two bare-breeched Irishmen come to him and cast him into the cauldron as though he were an Irishman. He stretches himself out in the cauldron until the cauldron breaks into four pieces, and until his heart also breaks.37

Note that the above passage also makes use of the present tense as the action intensifies, a common feature in contemporary storytelling,38 and one which reminds us yet again of the crucial role played by oral performance in shaping the grammar and linguistic structure of vernacular narratives from the Middle Ages.39 A further feature of the passage quoted above is direct speech; Efnysien speaks his thoughts out loud. This narrative technique is widely used by the authors of

33 See F. H. Bäuml, “Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory,” New Literary History 16 (1984): 31–49. 34 Bruce Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? The Art of the American Folk Preacher, rev. ed. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1990). 35 Alan Bruford, “Memory, Performance and Structure in Traditional Tales,” ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 37 (1981): 103–9; D. A. Macdonald, “Some Aspects of Visual and Verbal Memory in Gaelic Storytelling,” ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 37 (1981): 117–24. 36 W. L. Chafe, “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature,” Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, ed. Deborah Tannen (New Jersey, Ablex, 1982) 35–53. 37 Jones and Jones 37. 38 See, for example, Richard Leith, “The Use of the Historic Present Tense in Scottish Traveller Folktales,” Lore and Language 13 (1995): 1–31. 39 See Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval to Modern Fiction (London, Routledge, 1990). She argues that “many of the disconcerting properties of medieval textuality, including its extraordinary parataxis, conspicuous anaphora and repetition, and striking alternations of tense, can . . . find more satisfying explanations through appeal to the incontrovertible orality of medieval culture” (9–10).

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Mabinogion,40

the helping to create involvement between the storyteller and his audience.41 The speaker is usually identified by means of a tag (e.g. pronoun/ proper name + “said”) which often occurs in conjunction with the name of the person being addressed, or a reference to his/her status:42 “Lord, good day to thee,” he said. “God prosper thee,” said Manawydan, “and thy blessing.” “The blessing of God be upon thee. And what kind of work art thou doing, lord?” “Hanging a thief whom I caught thieving from me,” he said. “What kind of a thief, lord?” he said. “A creature,” he said, “in the shape of a mouse. And it has thieved from me, and the doom of a thief will I execute upon it.”43

The use of the verb “say” as a dialogue introducer, rather than graphic introducers,44 is again a feature of orality. As noted by Tannen, such verbs are needed in literary narrative to compensate for the loss of expressive voice quality: “more work is done by the meanings of the words, less by the way they are spoken.”45 Sometimes there are no quotative frames at all,46 especially in the case of recognizable conversational structures such as question and answer,47 although in some cases, the scribes use rubrication, in the absence of dialogue introducers, to highlight character switching.48 This would surely make more demands on a storyteller/reader who would have to rely on his vocal performance to differentiate between characters. Even where tags are in evidence, a vocal performance is 40 In eight of the eleven tales, approximately 40% of the narrative is in direct speech. In The Dream of Maxen, The Encounter of Lludd and Llefelys and The Dream of Rhonabwy, on the other hand, the average is far lower (16%, 20% and 21.5% respectively), suggesting perhaps a greater distance between them and the oral performance—they are literary, artistic developments. 41 See, for example, W. L. Chafe, “Integration and Involvement,” and Deborah Tannen, “Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives,” Language 58 (1982): 1–21. 42 For a detailed analysis of direct speech in the Mabinogion, see Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd 189–232. 43 Jones and Jones 51. 44 Graphic introducers such as “whisper,” “shout,” “suggest,” “warn” give a further insight into a character’s personality and state of mind, and the relationship between the speakers. 45 Deborah Tannen, “Introducing Constructed Dialogue in Greek and American Conversational and Literary Narrative,” Direct and Indirect Speech, ed. F. Coulmas (Amsterdam, Mouton de Gruyter, 1986) 323. 46 I.e. dialogue is presented with no lexicalized introducer. 47 See Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986) 66–7. 48 See, for example, the Red Book version of The Dream of Rhonabwy, where the scribe will sometimes mark a new speech with a rubricated capital (Davies, Crefft y Cyfarwydd 225–6). This feature raises questions regarding the editing of medieval texts, and to what extent one should “interfere” with manuscript punctuation. Peter Wynn Thomas, in his recent edition of Peredur (2000, Department of Welsh, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, 7 January 2005 ), attempts to allow the text to speak for itself by adhering to the manuscript’s punctuation, adding only quotation marks to differentiate between speakers. The resulting minimalist use of modern-day punctuation gives a strong insight into the oral rhythms of the text as it is read out aloud.

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“HE WAS THE BEST TELLER OF TALES IN THE WORLD”

implicit in the text; the subject-matter of each tale is highly dramatic, calling for a wide range of voices from Ysbaddaden Chief Giant to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, from the drunken Peredur to the whispered thoughts of Enid. Indeed, characters come alive through their words rather than through any descriptions which, if they exist at all, are highly stereotyped. Apart from the passages of dialogue that call for a voiced performance, there are many other examples in the tales where a silent reading does not do them justice. This is particularly so in the case of Culhwch and Olwen of whom it has often been said is a tale to be heard. Culhwch sets out to Arthur’s court: “Mynet a oruc y mab ar orwyd penllùchlwyt pedwar gàyaf gauylg&gwng carngràgen.”49 [Off went the boy on a steed with light-grey head, four winters old, with well-knit fork, shell-hoofed.50] The noun (g)orwyd [steed] has four compound adjectives, each with three syllables of which the central syllable is stressed, imitating the sound of the horse’s hoofs as the young hero goes on his way. This long rhetorical passage, describing in detail Culhwch’s steed, hounds and equipment in a rhythmical fashion is highly reminiscent of the elaborate style of the court poets of medieval Wales, a style linked inexorably with public declamation. As noted by Roberts, a similar device is used elsewhere throughout the corpus, not in extended paragraphs but as isolated descriptive phrases, especially with reference to horses, knights, squires and in descriptions of combats, physical or verbal.51 When Culhwch arrives at Arthur’s court, he demands a gift from Arthur, and invokes as guarantors the men and women assembled there. The resultant list, occupying some 200 lines of the text and including some 260 names, deriving from a wide variety of sources, is a passage consistently skipped over by undergraduates studying the tale! Whether such a long list would have existed in an oral version is debatable—Bromwich and Evans argue that it may have received progressive accretions at the hands of successive copyists of the tale.52 Even so, the list needs to be read out aloud for full effect: Alliteration is frequent between names of father and son (Greidawl Gallddofydd and Gwythyr fab Greidawl), between two brothers (Gwalchmai and Gwalhafed, Yskyrdaf and Yscudyd), or two sisters (Gwenhwyfar and Gwenhwyfach; compare Esyllt Vynwen and Esyllt Vyngul). There are also triads: Duach, Brathach, and Nerthach; Bwlch and Cyfwlch and Sefwlch.53

There are also larger groups of names where alliteration and rhyme are found, and where rhetorical effect seems more important than the personalities themselves. The list even descends into farce at times: 49 Culhwch and Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale, eds. Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1992) 3, lines 60–1. 50 Jones and Jones 97. 51 Roberts 87. See also Sioned Davies, “Horses in the Mabinogion,” The Horse in Celtic Culture: Medieval Welsh Perspectives, eds. Sioned Davies and Nerys Ann Jones (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1997) 121–40. 52 Bromwich and Evans xlv. Compare the lists of men assembled at Arthur’s court in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide (lines 1647–746). 53 Bromwich and Evans xxxviii.

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Bwlch and Cyfwlch and Syfwlch, sons of Cleddyf Cyfwlch, grandsons of Cleddyf Difwlch (three gleaming glitterers their three shields; three pointed piercers their three spears; three keen carvers their three swords); Glas, Glesig, Gleisad, their three dogs; Call, Cuall, Cafall, their three horses; Hwyrddyddwg and Drwgddyddwg and Llwyrddyddwg, their three wives; Och and Garym and Diasbad, their three grandchildren; Drwg and Gwaeth and Gwaethaf Oll, their three maidservants.54

Inserted in the list, too, are tantalising fragments of narrative—the triad of the three men who escaped from the battle of Camlan, for example, or Teithi Hen whose lands were submerged by the sea. One can agree with Bromwich and Evans that such diversions “counteract any monotony in the long list and enhance its verisimilitude by directing attention to familiar narratives or—it may be—to narrative details which have been invented for this purpose.”55 This feature, together with the humour and the strongly rhetorical passages (descending almost into tongue-twisters at times) would certainly increase the interactive potential of the performance, challenging the listeners’ knowledge of traditional narrative and no doubt inciting some to make an attempt at memorising the list itself. A further rhetorical passage occurs in the tale when Ysbaddaden the giant demands forty anoethau [marvels, things difficult to obtain] from Culhwch in return for the hand of Olwen, his daughter. This catalogue of seemingly impossible tasks is placed within a formulaic dialogue; upon hearing each task, Culhwch replies, “It is easy for me to get that, though thou think it is not easy,” to which the giant retorts, “Though thou get that, there is that thou wilt not get,” and proceeds to describe the next challenge.56 The formulas therefore act as a chorus of sorts between the naming of each task, easing the listing, and also the listening, process. Indeed, one can imagine an audience joining in with the performer as he recites the chorus. Although prolonged dramatic scenes and episodes are embedded in most of the Mabinogion tales, it is not known whether these would have been mediated via actors in any way.57 But there would, surely, have been a need for gestures on the part of the performer. The “killing” of Lleu in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, 54 Jones and Jones 103–4. Passages such as these certainly present a challenge to the translator! Note that Jones and Jones chose to use a footnote to amplify this passage: “Late-bearer and Ill-bearer and Full-bearer, their three wives; Och and Scream and Shriek, their three grandchildren; Plague and Want and Penury, their three daughters; Bad and Worse and Worst of All, their three maid-servants.” One can agree with Patrick Ford who comments: “It is as if the redactor took a perverse delight in sneaking in a perfectly ridiculous unit every now and then, so apt in rhythm that it was virtually indistinct from the authentic lore conveyed in this section” (The Mabinogi 120). On translating the Mabinogion, see Sioned Davies, “Cyfieithu’r Mabinogion,” Ysgrifau Beirniadol XXIII, ed. J. E. Caerwyn Williams (Dinbych, Gwasg Gee, 1997) 16–30. 55 Bromwich and Evans xxxix. 56 See Jones and Jones 113–21. 57 A recent animated version of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, produced by Cart n Cymru for S4C (2002), shows how easily the medieval text translates into dramatic dialogue. For a discussion of the adaptation, see Martin Lamb and Penelope Middleboe, “Addasu y Mabinogi yn Ffilm Animeiddiedig,” Chwileniwm: Technoleg a Llenyddiaeth, ed. Angharad Price (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2002), and Sioned Davies, “From Manuscript to Multiplex: Re-creating the Mabinogi,” lecture, Celtic Studies Association of North America, Berkeley, 2003.

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“HE WAS THE BEST TELLER OF TALES IN THE WORLD”

for example, calls for the theatrical. He informs his wife that he cannot be slain within a house, or outside, neither on horseback nor on foot. He then foolishly tells her the answer to the riddle: “By making a bath for me on a river bank, and making a vaulted frame over the tub, and thatching it well and snugly too thereafter, and bringing a he-goat,” said he, “and setting it beside the tub, and myself placing one foot on the back of the he-goat and the other on the edge of the tub. Whoever should smite me when so, he would bring about my death.”58

She immediately sends word to her lover, and together they conspire to bring about Lleu’s death. In the event, he is not killed but transformed into an eagle, and flies away giving a “horrible scream.” This episode not only has great dramatic potential, but also invites thought and discussion as the listeners ponder how the riddle can be solved. They are involved in a different way again when, in the First Branch, Pwyll exchanges places with Arawn, King of the Otherworld, having insulted him by feeding his own dogs on the stag killed by Arawn’s hounds. The two men change shape and form, and Pwyll is given specific instructions to kill Hafgan, Arawn’s adversary: And one blow only thou art to give him; that he will not survive. And though he ask thee to give him another, give it not, however he entreat thee. For despite aught I might give him, as well as before would he fight with me on the morrow.59

Will Pwyll remember Arawn’s warning? And what of the audience’s reaction to poor Macsen, Emperor of Rome, who takes a siesta while out hunting one day, and in his dream travels to the ends of the earth where he finds a beautiful maiden: And the maiden arose to meet him from the chair of gold, and he threw his arms around the maiden’s neck, and they both sat down in the chair of gold. And the chair was not straighter for them both than for the maiden alone. And when he had his arms around the maiden’s neck, and his cheek against her cheek, what with the dogs straining at their leashes, and the shoulders of the shields coming against each other, and the spear shafts striking together, and the neighing and the stamping of the horses, the emperor awoke.60

Such passages invite immediate audience response and the manuscript comes alive, not only with the performer’s voice but with the listeners’ reactions.61 The tales of the Mabinogion not only produced mixed emotions in the hearts of the listeners, but also often provided them with ethical dilemmas concerning moral, political and legal issues. The court itself, with its range of social and 58

Jones and Jones 70. Jones and Jones 5. 60 Jones and Jones 81. 61 See in particular Coleman, Public Reading, and D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800–1300 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). 59

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cultural events, was the common performance arena, and many of the tales raise difficulties that would have been of direct relevance to their audience, “resolving the problem symbolically—that is, in the story—or at least playing the problem through to its, often dire, consequences.”62 Culhwch and Olwen, it has been argued: “creates in its narrative a whole range of alarming threats and then provides resolutions to them which both console and confirm the position of the élite who model for the text and support its production.”63 The Welsh “romances,” on the other hand, like their French counterparts, pose questions concerning chivalric modes of behaviour and knightly virtues, with particular emphasis in The Lady of the Fountain and Geraint on the potential conflicts between love and military prowess. However, of all the Welsh tales, it is probably the Four Branches of the Mabinogi that convey most effectively the appropriate moral behaviour that is essential for a society to survive.64 In the first three branches, the nature of insult, compensation and friendship are explored, and acts of revenge shown to be totally destructive—legal settlement and hard bargaining are to be preferred. In the Fourth Branch, however, further considerations are raised. Math, Lord of Gwynedd, is not only insulted, but also dishonoured—his virgin foot-holder is raped,65 and his dignity as a person is attacked. The offenders, his own nephews, are transformed into animals—male and female— and are shamed by having offspring from one another. However, once their punishment is complete, Math forgives them in the spirit of reconciliation. As noted by Roberts: “legal justice is necessary for the smooth working of society, but without the graces of forgetting and forgiving, human pride will render the best systems unworkable.”66 Throughout the Four Branches, therefore, the author conveys a scale of values that he commends to contemporary society, doing so by implication rather than by any direct commentary. The listeners are left to draw their own conclusions, and to realise that the image of a man alone, at the end of the Fourth Branch, with no wife and no heirs, does not make for a promising future. Why then was Gwydion “the best teller of tales”? He had an exciting story to tell; he had a good memory; he was a good actor; he interacted with his audience; and, above all, he could communicate—through performance.

62

Vitz, Orality and Performance 272. Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (London, Macmillan, 1983) 34. 64 See, for example, Sioned Davies, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Llandysul, Gwasg Gomer, 1993); J. K. Bollard, “The Structure of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi,” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1975): 250–76; Rhiannon M. M. Davies, “The Moral Structure of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi,” diss., University of Wales, 1993; Andrew Welsh, “Manawydan fab Llyr: Wales, England, and the ‘New Man,’ ” Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. C. W. Sullivan III (New York, Garland Publishing, 1996) 121–41. 65 There was a taboo regarding Math—he could only live while his feet were in the lap of a virgin. 66 Roberts 101. 63

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The Complaint of the Makers: Wynnere and Wastoure and the “Misperformance Topos” in Medieval England1 Joyce Coleman

‘Rap was looked at, back in the day, as something creative, something new . . .’ I’m reading a local arts weekly at the food court in my university’s student union, taking a break from writing an article, this article, about medieval texts in which the author denounces performers who somehow misperform: who mangle texts or degrade the profession in some manner. These texts are frequently described, by editors and scholars of medieval English literature, as “conventional.” Usually discussion stops there, as if the conventional were simply meaningless. Trugoy the Dove’s group, De La Soul, was big in the 1990s, and has been struggling since. “Nowadays,” he goes on, it’s like the total reverse of that. Now rap is like, “You gotta go pop! You gotta hit the Top 40!” . . . Nowadays . . . guys are superstars even before they pay their dues. It’s kinda hard for De La Soul to step to a Ja Rule and say, “Yo, if you wanna rock the crowd, man, you gotta do x, y, and z.” They’ll probably look at me like, “Listen, man. I’ve sold over 12 million records. I don’t need your help.”2

Is Trugoy indulging in a conventional rhetorical exercise devoid of historical relevance designed to convince the reader of his music’s superiority? Some inquiries among rap-friendly students quickly establish that the music, and its audience, have indeed changed; De La Soul’s kind of rap belongs to an older, less commercialized, and less verbally defiant generation. This modern example adds support to my working hypothesis; along with its rhetorical effects, the misperformance topos in medieval English literature often also reflects some historic shift or tension in the nature of performance and audience. In no case, unfortunately, do we have sufficient data to reconstruct the

1 I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer grant in 1997, which launched me on the research for this article. 2 Randy Schwartz, “Soul Power,” High Plains Reader [Fargo, North Dakota] 29 August 2002: 13.

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precise historical context, as I could do so easily with rap. But it takes only a little investigation to discover that these “conventional” complaints actually occur only sporadically in England, over an extended period, and by no means simply parrot the French cognates or each other. I would argue, instead, that each misperformance topos presents an author responding vigorously to some stimulus in his or her particular historical, linguistic, and literary environment. While I cannot fill in all the gaps in the views projected by these texts, I hope at least to reframe the inquiry.

The misperformance topos in action: Wynnere and Wastoure The misperformance topos could be considered as a subset of the more general topic of literary reception, whose native habitat (as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. have shown)3 is the prologue. Ernst Curtius defines another subset, the “standing complaint . . . that mimes and buffoons are better rewarded and cared for by the powerful than are poets.”4 We could perhaps call this the “misdirected patronage” topos; it focuses not on performance but on how patrons are distributing their “entertainment dollars.” Another subset could be the “bad-genre” topos, in which the poet focuses on why the genres he or she represents are superior to those of other performers. The “misperformance topos,” the subset I will be discussing here, specifically critiques a kind of performer or performance. The boundaries between these subgroups are obviously fluid; a given text may combine two or more. For an investigation of performance, however, it is worthwhile to try to keep to a fairly strict definition of what constitutes a misperformance topos. The core element, then, is a negative comment on the performance of texts by some class of performers from which the author is distinguishing him or herself. The author may further dichotomize between the genres, content, or styles of “good” and “bad” performance, and between the ages, experience, or class of the performers—with the author, of course, always exemplifying the worthy texts and traits and the “antagonist” the corrupt or frivolous ones. The author may conceive the dichotomous elements as coeval or as separated by time; in the latter case the comment takes on the character of Curtius’ “complaint against the times.”5 In such statements, the author invariably presents him or herself as a defender of the good old way of doing things—a trope that, as the rap example demonstrates, has survived even into our progressive modern age. Space does not permit a detailed survey of this topos in late-medieval English literature. Rather, I will look at one example in depth, using the mid-fourteenth-

3 The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 4 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, Pantheon, 1953) 472. 5 Curtius 95.

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century Wynnere and Wastoure as a lens through which to examine the hypothesis that the topos reflects some actuality of each poet’s experience.6 Wynnere and Wastoure is an economics treatise presented as an alliterative dream vision, in which the sleeping narrator watches as two allegorical figures, Winner (who hoards everything he has) and Waster (who spends everything he has), debate monetary policy before a king. All that we know about the poet is that he describes himself, or his persona, as a “Western wy [man]” (line 7), yet seems well acquainted with London and with national and international politics. Most scholars trace his origin to the northwestern provinces of Cheshire or Lancashire.7 The author prefaces his economics debate with a series of laments and apocalyptic predictions. After denouncing the corruption of England’s decadent South, and recording a variety of millennarian signs, he moves on to the parlous state of contemporary poetry. My translation, below, stays as close to the original as possible, leaving intact its ambiguities and possible textual corruptions: Whylome were lordes in londe þat loued in thaire hertis To here makers of myrthes þat matirs couthe fynde And now es no frenchipe in fere bot fayntnesse of hert, Wyse wordes withinn þat wroghte were neuer Ne redde in no romance þat euer renke herde. Bot now a childe appon chere withowtten chyn-wedys Þat neuer wroghte thurgh witt thies wordes togedire Fro he can jangle als a jaye and japes telle He schall be lenede and louede and lett of a while Wele more þan þe man that made it hymseluen. Bot neuer þe lattere at the laste when ledys [men] bene knawen; Werke witnesse will bere who wirche kane beste. (lines 19–30) [Once there were lords in the land who loved in their hearts To hear makers of mirths that matters could find And now there is no friendship among men but faintness of heart, Wise words within that wrought were never Nor read in any romance that ever man heard. But now a child in face without chin-weeds [beard] That never wrought through wit these words together If he can jangle [chatter] like a jay and tell japes He will be listened to and loved and indulged for a while Well more than the man that made it himself.

6 Quotations from Wynnere and Wastoure are taken from the edition by Stephanie Trigg, Early English Text Society 297 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990). The poem survives in only one manuscript: London, British Library Add. 31042 (fols. 176v–181v), a miscellany created by the Yorkshire squire Robert Thornton in the mid fifteenth century. The end of the poem is missing (Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction,” Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Trigg, Early English Text Society 297 [Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990] xiii–xvi). 7 Trigg xxii; Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure: When and Where?” Loyal Letters: Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, eds. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, Forsten, 1994) 164.

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But nevertheless, at the last, when men are known, Work will bear witness who can work best.]8

Two approaches have dominated interpretation of these lines. One is to analyze them as recording an evolution from orality to literacy; the other is to dismiss them as “conventional.” Mirths to japes: the evolutionary view The evolutionary argument was suggested by the poem’s first editor. In his aggressively edited version of 1920, Israel Gollancz changed “wroghte” in line 22 to “wr[iten],” and moved line 21 to follow line 6. Thus emended, the words of the “makers of myrthes” were never written, and the “makers of myrthes” are transformed into unambiguously oral poets. Next Gollancz changed “thies” in line 24 to “th[ree],” and “made it hymseluen” in line 28 to “ma[kes] hym-seluen.” He thus created a juxtaposition between the beardless boy, who could never put three words together by himself, and “the man who himself wrote verse.”9 Gollancz does not actually state that the boy was reciting this man’s verses, but later scholars made that connection. In the Manual of the Writings in Middle English, for example, Rossell Hope Robbins has the Wynnere-author complaining “of the prevalent neglect of the true poet for the mere prattler of the words of others,”10 while Janet Coleman picks up Albert Lord’s terminology11 in claiming that “the former role of the minstrel, the singer of tales, was gradually being replaced by the private reader or the raconteur, who read what someone else had written.”12 Either with Gollancz’s emendations—the last two of which are still sometimes endorsed—or without them, this reading does not hold up. Why would the Wynnere-poet care whose japes the boy is performing, since he despises japing anyway? If he were really concerned about the advent of written verse, why didn’t he talk in some clearer way about it, instead of harping jealously on the loving treatment given the child-performer? If the boy really couldn’t put three words together (line 25, as emended), how could he improvise, apparently successfully, his jay-like jangling, or comic patter? Was every word of it scripted? A reading that stays closer to the text finds little support for any oral-to-literate evolution. The “maker of myrthes” clearly expects his poetry to be performed 8 For other translations or paraphrases, see, e.g., Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers: 1350–1400 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1981) 56; Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre, Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition, ed. Boris Ford, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982) 399n12; Thorlac Turville-Petre, “The Prologue of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Leeds Studies in English 18 (1987): 24–6; Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Trigg 19, note to lines 19–23. 9 Gollancz’s translation of line 28 (A Good Short Debate Between Winner and Waster, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz [London, Oxford University Press, 1920] note to lines 22–8). 10 Russell Hope Robbins, “Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions,” A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung, vol. 5 (New Haven, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975) 1500. 11 Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1973; New York, Atheneum, 1960). 12 Janet Coleman 56.

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(from memory or read aloud), but his vocabulary is simply neutral as to means of composition. To “make” or “work” (the verb of which “wrought” is the past tense) could apply equally to oral or written composition.13 If line 22 refers to the “maker of myrths,” he is presumably holding his wise words “withinn,” unwrought, because he no longer has a patron willing to hear them. He seems to regard the reading aloud of a written text as normal, since line 23 says the wise words were never “redde in no romance þat euer renke herde.” This could be “redde” merely in the sense of “narrated,” but more likely refers to the common practice of reading books aloud.14 Thus he is acknowledging, without concern, the use of writing to record worthwhile texts. Given the political awareness and sophistication of the actual poet, if not of his persona, we would expect him to have been literate; in addition, his text, Wynnere and Wastoure, has certainly survived in writing, with evidence of a manuscript history behind it15 —while the jangling and the japes have evaporated. Thus we could say that the actual author, and possibly his fictional counterpart, fit the category of “aural” author,16 that is, one who wrote in the expectation that most if not all of his audience would hear his work read aloud or recited. It is unlikely that all the fuss about the jangling boy is meant as a denunciation of writing poets and written poetry. The boy is not described as a writer; in fact, the words “write” or “writing” appear nowhere in the passage. The writing poet who supposedly provided the boy’s material is, as noted above, a myth propagated by Gollancz’s emendations and other scholars’ ready acceptance. The contrast at issue is not mode of composition but nobility of content and delivery, serious “making” versus frivolous “jangling.” The passage might suggest a neglected writer in the background, feeding texts to the boy, but such an assumption seems to multiply entities needlessly. Occam’s Razor would favor identifying the neglected maker as the one we’ve already been hearing from, that is, the persona/poet of this passage of Wynnere and Wastoure. Despite these logical flaws, and despite subsequent editors’ restoration of the manuscript readings, Gollancz’s evolutionary interpretation fed so easily into scholarly prejudices that it has survived into recent times.17 With the evolutionary 13 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to make,” in sense 5a, as “To compose, write as the author (a book, poem, or other literary work, a letter),” with the first citation c.1175. Sense 5b is “To compose verses; to write poetry; to rime,” with the first citation from Langland, in 1377. The Middle English Dictionary defines “maken,” sense 5a, as “To write or compose (a book, poem, song, prayer, letter, etc.),” beginning from 1225 (vol. M–N, 57). For the OED, “to work,” sense 4, means “To compose (a book or writing), to write,” with citations beginning c.900; for the MED, “werken” means, sense 12b, “To compose a written work,” from c.1200, and 12c, “To utter (spoken words); produce (song, music), compose,” from c.1275 (vol. W–Z, 358). 14 Sense 5a(a) of “reden” in the Middle English Dictionary is defined as “to relate (a narrative), tell (a story)” (vol. R.2, 286). Sense 2a defines “reden” as “to read aloud” (vol. R.2, 282). On the popularity of reading aloud, see Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 15 Trigg l. 16 Coleman, Public Reading 34–51. 17 See, e.g., in addition to those quoted above: Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1965) 118–19; Thomas H.

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lumber cleared away, however, it should be obvious that this passage is contrasting neither orality and literacy, nor minstrels and writers, but rather two kinds of oral performance. These categories differ on a number of dimensions. Then was a time when lords patronized mature poet-performers and their wise words; now is a time when those lords, or their descendants, prefer the chatter of young, callow performers. The wise old men have to sit in silence, keeping their thoughts to themselves; the romances full of instructive historical exempla go unread. The jangling boys may be telling jokes, reciting light verse, parodying the texts of weightier poets, or simply dithering away like fourteenth-century Robin Williamses. Written texts may or may not be involved in either performance; the issue does not seem to concern the author. If there has been an evolution, or a shift, it is in the relative popularity of two different forms of oral performance. This interpretation disrupts the perception of orality as one vague, monolithic, and soon-to-be extinct entity, forcing us to recognize that orality (and literacy) can come in a multiplicity of co-existing, interacting forms. The conventional view The other common critical explanation for the Wynnere and Wastoure lines is to classify, and usually dismiss, them as “conventional”: “The topic in general is related to the conventional idea that in times gone by letters were better appreciated;”18 it is “a commonplace of mediaeval literary tradition”;19 “Wynnere and Wastoure’s nostalgia for the days of old is . . . conventional.”20 In her recent edition, Stephanie Trigg notes, for lines 24–30: The poet’s abuse of other more popular entertainers is a familiar medieval topos, found in works as diverse as Deor, Piers Plowman, the Chandos Herald’s Life of the Black Prince, and Froissart’s Chroniques. M. Gsteiger traces its origins to the Rhetorica ad Herennium.21

Trigg could as well add rap artist Trugoy the Dove to her list. There is no doubt that the remark is often made; the question is, should discussion end there? Closer investigation of Trigg’s cited texts suggests not. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BCE) offers the generally applicable advice that “we shall render the hearer well-disposed by extolling our own cause with praise and by contemptuously disparaging that of our adversaries.”22 So obvious is the device that its use hardly requires a rhetorical education. The apparently autobiographical AngloBestul, Satire and Allegory in “Wynnere and Wastoure” (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1974) 59; Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Turville-Petre, 399n12; Nicolas Jacobs, “The Typology of Debate and the Interpretation of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Review of English Studies n.s. 36 (1985): 498–9. 18 Bestul 59. 19 Elizabeth Salter, “The Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Medium Aevum 47 (1978): 60. 20 Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge, Brewer, 1977) 28. 21 Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Trigg 19; Trigg is citing Manfred Gsteiger, “Note sur les préambules des chansons de geste,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 2 (1959): 213–20. 22 “. . . benivolum efficiemus auditorem si nostram causam laudando extollemus, adversariorum

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Saxon Deor (eighth century) laments the poet’s displacement by a younger rival. However, Deor neither disparages his successor (he calls him “leoðcræftig” [line 40], “skilled in song”), nor associates him with new or different forms of performance. Coming into the fourteenth century, Langland’s Piers Plowman urges his audience to shun romances and other secular literature in favor of devotional texts or pious deeds.23 Langland’s comments combine the “bad-genre” and “misdirected patronage” topoi; performance is not really the issue. Froissart, like Jean le Bel before him,24 is similarly harsh on poets and poetry, but in his case because poets allegedly distort events in order to fit metrical constraints and to embellish their verse. Only prose can satisfy the scrupulous chronicler: Pluiseur gongleour et enchanteour en place ont chanté et rimet les guerres de Bretagne et corrumput par les chançons et rimes controuvées le just et vraie histoire.25 [Various jongleurs and marketplace entertainers have sung and rhymed the wars of Britain, corrupting the just and true history with their songs and overworked rhymes.]

None of these categories precisely matches the Wynnere and Wastoure topos. Its author isn’t simply lamenting the end of his career, like Deor. He is not concerned with the role of poetry in spiritual salvation, like Langland, or with the mishandling of historical information, like the chroniclers. Nor is he following the model of the few preceding examples in England. Denis Piramus’ Vie de Saint Edmond le Rei (between 1170–1200) offers, like Piers Plowman, comments about good and bad genres. The first real “misperformance topos” in England occurs in the prologue of Robert Mannyng de Brunne’s Story of England (1338). Uniquely, Mannyng complains about reciters or prelectors (readers-aloud), who garble the sophisticated prosodics of works such as Sir Tristrem.26 Mannyng’s comments reflect not rivalry but his fears for the misperformance of his own poetry, in the mouths of these incompetent nonprofessionals. The Wynnere-poet is the first, as far as I know, to configure the misperformance topos as a clash of performances and genres, aligned along the axis of the “complaint against the per contemptionem deprimemus” (Ad C. Herennium, de ratione dicendi, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library [London, Heinemann, 1954] 16–17). 23 See, e.g., Piers Plowman B x: 30–47, xiii: 421–56. Langland’s view of minstrelsy and minstrels is complex, and shifts within and across the three different versions of Piers Plowman. For discussion see, e.g., E. Talbot Donaldson, “Piers Plowman”: The C-Text and Its Poet, rev. ed. (London, Cass, 1966) 143–55; A. V. C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art (Cambridge, Brewer, 1987) 5–11. 24 Jean le Bel, Chronique, eds. Jules Viard and Eugène Déprez, 2 vols. (Paris, Renouard, 1904–05) I, 1–4. 25 Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Siméon Luce, 8 vols. (Paris, Société de l’Histoire de France, 1869–88) II, 265. 26 For a discussion of this prologue, see Joyce Coleman, “Strange Rhyme: Prosody and Nationhood in Robert Mannyng’s Story of England,” Speculum 78 (2003): 1214–38, and sources referenced there.

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times.” While the general sort of comment is widespread, each version has a unique focus that communicates something of importance to the poet and the period—whether this involves an actual development of some sort, a perception, an ambition, or a private obsession. Any and all of these meanings are interesting and worth investigating as evidence of literary culture in the Middle Ages. The Wynnere and Wastoure topos, the Vie du Prince Noir, and oral performance in fourteenth-century England I have been postponing discussion of one final misperformance topos in England: that of the Vie et gestes du Prince Noir [Life and Deeds of the Black Prince].27 The work was written by a Hainaulter who began his career as herald to Sir John Chandos and became English King of Arms in 1377.28 The Vie’s comments read like an expanded version of the Wynnere and Wastoure topos:

5

15

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30

Ore veit homme du temps jadis Qe ceux qui faisoient beaux ditz Estoient tenu pur aucteur Ou pur ascun amenteveur De moustrer lez bons conaissance Pur prendre en lour coers remembrance De bien et de honour receivoir. ... Car combien qe homme n’en face compte Et qe homme tiendroit plus grant acompte D’un jangelour ou d’un faux menteur, D’un jogelour ou d’un bourdeur Qui voudroit faire une grimache Ou contreferoit le lymache Dount homme purroit faire un risée Qe homme ne ferroit sanz demoerée D’un autre qui saveroit bien dire! ... Si ne se doit homme pas tenir De beaux ditz faire et retenir ... Qar bien ne fust unqes perduz Q’en ascun temps ne feust renduz.29 [Now, men in former times saw That those who made fair dits Were esteemed as author(itie)s Or as news-bearers

27 The Black Prince (Prince Edward) was oldest son and heir apparent to Edward III. Since he died in 1376, a year before his father, the crown ended up passing to his son, Richard II. 28 Diana B. Tyson, “Introduction,” in Chandos Herald, La Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1975) 16–17. 29 Chandos Herald, La Vie du Prince Noir, lines 1–7, 15–23, 29–30, 37–8.

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Who taught good men the lesson That they should keep in their hearts the memory Of good and receive honor. ... For how much store men set And how much more heed they take Of a jangler or a false liar, Of a jongleur or a jester Who would willingly make a face Or imitate a snail, At which men can laugh, As they’ll do without delay Than of someone who knows how to speak well! ... Nonetheless men shouldn’t fail To make and remember fair poems, ... For no good was ever lost That was once recorded.]

Exactly the same “moves” motivate the topos in the alliterative English dream-poem and the Anglo-French verse biography: in old days true poets were esteemed; now janglers who joke around and do imitations have taken their place. Still, the true poets should carry on, for good work will be rewarded in the end. If the misperformance topos were simply conventional, it would be no surprise to find the same statement in two such different contexts. But as we have seen, that topos, closely examined, breaks down into a number of distinct sub-topoi whose distribution is neither random nor meaningless. Here we have two disparate works in later-fourteenth-century England, both by men evidently associated with royal or noble courts, making a pattern not seen in any other “topos cluster.” Could the complaint record some actual battle of the performers, in which different styles of oral performance competed for the same elite audience? Complicating any answer is the timespan between the two poems. The date of 1385 or slightly earlier is generally accepted for the Vie, based on the Herald’s remark that the conquest of Castile in 1366 had happened “not twenty years ago” (“ne passa mie des ans vint” [line 1816]), and on his use of the present tense for Joan of Kent (line 2142), who died in September 1385.30 Most scholars date Wynnere and Wastoure to 1352–53, citing references within the text to the Statute of Treasons, promulgated in 1352 (lines 126–33, 317–18), and to the drafter of that law, Chief Justice William Shareshull (line 317). Various other points in the text could be read as referring to other parliamentary business of 1352. Elizabeth Salter and Trigg have each challenged these interpretations, noting, for example, that the poem’s representation of the treason laws would not have matched official policy until 1381.31 It would be delightful to ease the Vie back in time and 30

Tyson 4. Salter 41–6; Trigg xxii–xxvii; Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Trigg 25–6 note to lines 126ff., 30 note to lines 205–6, 37 note to lines 316–17. 31

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Wynnere and Wastoure forward, so that they would meet, in the early 1380s perhaps—and solve the dilemma of two very similar misperformance topoi occurring thirty or more years apart. On balance, however, the early date seems most likely for Wynnere and Wastoure. As John Scattergood wisely observed, after reviewing all the historical references: “None of this evidence is entirely conclusive, and most of it has been questioned from time to time, but taken as a whole the case for dating the poem 1352–53 is a strong one.”32 Moreover, in her search for datable elements in the poem, Salter came up with a suggestion that Thorlac Turville-Petre has developed into an attractive hypothesis about the poem’s origin—and one that may help explain the Vie’s recapitulation of Wynnere and Wastoure’s topos. The king in Wynnere and Wastoure is served by a knight who bears a charge of “thre wynges inwith wroghte in þe kynde” (line 117) [“three wings within, depicted after nature”]. Salter pointed to the Wingfield family of Suffolk, whose coat of arms featured “three pairs of wings conjoined.”33 She suggested that the poet may have been a clerk employed in the family. Such service, she noted, “would of necessity involve [him] in travel between the west-country and the capital, and substantial residence in both areas,” explaining both his self-identification with the west and his obvious knowledge of London and English politics.34 Salter reviewed a number of possible Wingfield patrons, across an extended timespan.35 Sixteen years later, Turville-Petre focused in on Sir John Wingfield, in 1351 steward of the Black Prince’s lands and as such involved in administration of Cheshire, since the prince was earl of Chester. Turville-Petre imagines the Wynnere-poet traveling with Wingfield and Justice Shareshull, who acted as chief legal officer to the Black Prince, to conduct a general eyre (a form of judicial inquiry) in Cheshire in 1353. The poem would have been an appropriate entertainment for the banquet that the prince held in Chester Castle for his council and the local administrators.36 Whether that was the exact context that inspired the poem or not, Turville-Petre’s account is certainly interesting. It also allows us to establish a link to the Vie, because from about the mid-1350s the Black Prince’s closest confidant and friend was none other than Sir John Chandos, patron of the Chandos Herald. The Vie’s editor, Diana Tyson, notes a record from the prince’s Register dated 1355—only a couple of years after the putatitve composition date of Wynnere and Wastoure. “On the information of Sir John de Wengefeld,” 55s.10d. was paid “as a gift from the Prince to Haneray, herald-of-arms who came from beyond the seas in the company of Sir John Chaundos.”37 Haneray could not have been Chandos’ herald in 1355, since the young lord was not yet a banneret, and the name has not been found elsewhere, which produces some scholarly 32 J. Scattergood, “Winner and Waster and the Mid-Fourteenth-Century Economy,” The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork, Cork University Press, 1987) 51. 33 Salter 53–4. 34 Salter 57. 35 Salter 56–9. 36 Turville-Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure: When and Where?” 156, 160, 164–6. 37 Tyson 17.

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caution about identifying this herald with the man later called the Chandos Herald. The earliest definite reference to the Vie’s author comes from September 1363, two years after Wingfield’s death.38 Even without a “paper trail,” however, it cannot be doubted that Wingfield and Chandos knew each other,39 and that they, along with their household officers, interacted at times on the prince’s business. A literary debate on economic affairs produced within this circle would surely have circulated among its members (at about 500 lines, the poem could be conveniently copied). It is easy to believe that Chandos had the text, and that his herald had access to it and found himself in sympathy with its opening complaint about the decline of performance standards. He didn’t have occasion to recap that topos until considerably later, when he was commissioned—either by John of Gaunt40 or by Richard II himself41—to produce a biography of the young king’s father. Does this, then, mean that performance standards really were in disarray, all the way from 1353 to 1385? Or was the Chandos Herald meaninglessly parroting a complaint that no longer had force? The latter alternative may seem more likely given that the Herald was not a practicing poet; his only surviving work is this text, commissioned because he had a unique knowledge of the subject. Tyson notes that the verse is definitely of amateur quality, and hypothesizes that the work took a poetic form at the commissioner’s request.42 Other points suggest, however, that the Herald re-imagined the topos in recycling it. He writes himself into the story by allying the “aucteur” [author] to the “amenteveur” [news-bearer] (lines 3–4)—a role he fulfilled as herald. He adds vivid details to the Wynnere-poet’s script—such as the jongleur who imitates a snail. After over twenty years in noble and royal households, he was surely in a position to gauge performance trends. To contextualize this phenomenon, it will help to broaden our perspective beyond the prologues of literary texts. If we look at the writings of English clerics, we find that this battle of the performers had been going on for at least a century beforehand. In his late-thirteenth-century Penitential, Thomas de Cabham, subdean of Salisbury and later archbishop of Canterbury, decried performers who mimed or sang indecencies, or who satirized their betters. Thomas reserved his approval for those who sang of great men’s deeds or the lives of the saints.43 The early-fourteenth-century Summa predicantium of John Bromyard complained about mimi [“mimes,” or performers] who amuse banqueters with indecent stories and comments rather than, as they ought, with tales of noble knights.44 38

Tyson 16, 18. Salter 65n128. 40 J. J. N. Palmer, “Froissart et le Héraut Chandos,” Le Moyen Age 88 (1982): 277–84. 41 Tyson 31–3; Patricia Eberle, “Richard II and the Literary Arts,” Richard II: The Art of Kingship, eds. Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999) 236–7. 42 Tyson 29. 43 E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. in one (1903; Mineola, New York, Dover, 1996) I, 59–62; II, 262–3. 44 Quoted in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Oxford, Blackwell, 1961) 11–12. 39

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John of Salisbury, Robert Grosseteste, and Robert Mannyng de Brunne are other religious figures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who decried scurrilous performers.45 It seems that the clash of performance genre was long-running and endemic. What the Wynnere and Wastoure topos reports, perhaps, is not (merely) a rhetorical commonplace, still less an evolution from orality to literacy, but a moment in the eternal fluctuation of taste. If we assume that jangling boys and snailimitations appealed more to juvenile (or senile) minds, and the wise old poets to more mature audiences, it is quickly obvious that at any given court, royal, noble, or gentry, the succession of generations would produce a turnover in patronage. A poet esteemed by an older lord would find himself shunted aside when that lord died, or went into decline (as did Edward III towards the end of his life), and the young heir took over. It is easy to imagine the Wynnere-author, returned to his native Cheshire and prelecting or reciting his poem, reminded both of his own younger days and of the corrupted tastes of the capital. Even more importantly, the Wynnere-poet gives us a view of that experience from inside the performance community. Instead of clerical fulmination, we get a second glimpse (following Mannyng) into the artistic anxieties of an emerging vernacular tradition. Like Mannyng,46 the Wynnere-poet may be seeking to jump-start a literary tradition by differentiating his work from the “background noise” of ongoing entertainment. It is a symptom of the “new consciousness of and interest in the nature and status of literature” that A. C. Spearing dates from this time, and associates with the dream-vision genre, and in fact with Wynnere and Wastoure—although in doing so he reverts to the evolutionary fallacy. “[E]ven the author of Winner and Waster,” Spearing notes, “embarks on a brief discussion of the difference between mere entertainers and genuinely creative writers.”47 The impression left is that the creative writers are the new event, the evolutionary advance. But the Wynnere-author himself does not see it that way. The new, and regrettable, development in his view is that serious authors are giving way to mere entertainers. From the pain he feels on witnessing this transition, or fluctuation, emerges his sense of artistic selfhood. Thirty or so years later, the Chandos Herald mimics this stance, both as a means of authorizing himself, as an inexperienced poet, to undertake his task, and as a vehicle for his own observations about the state of society and literature. Why, given the reinforcement provided by the clerical observers, have scholars been so ready to classify Wynnere and Wastoure’s misperformance topos as proof of performance’s obsolescence, or to dismiss it as conventional? The answer may involve a figure who, within a few years of Wynnere and Wastoure’s composition, was “in the floures of his youthe,” hailed by Venus (according to John Gower) “As mi disciple and mi poete” and producing for her sake

45 46 47

Chambers I, 39–40. See Coleman, “Strange Rhyme.” A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976) 5.

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In sondri wise, as he wel couthe, Of Ditees and of songes glade48 [In various ways, as he well knew how, Poems and glad songs]

One can pity any hoary maker of mirths set to compete with the young Chaucer’s improvisatory chatter and glad songs, at the court of Elizabeth of Ulster; her husband, Lionel of Antwerp; or his father, Edward III.49 Yet this is not an image that Chaucerians have, by and large, cared to entertain. Rather, scholarship has emphasized the mature Chaucer, viewed as the epitome of literate, written, privately read poetry, the end-point of literary evolution in medieval England. Evidence of the persistence of orality, aurality, and performance within his lifetime, and within the courtly milieu of his youth, tends to disappear under the waves of scholarly cognitive dissonance..50 Hence, perhaps, the tendency to deplete the misperformance topos of its force: if it means something, it means that “orality” is disappearing; if it means that orality is not disappearing, then it means nothing. This article has attempted to restore meaning to the misperformance topos. Though efforts to reconstruct the precise context of the topos in Wynnere and Wastoure and the Vie du Prince Noir must remain speculative, those passages should still have validity, along with other, supporting evidence, in demonstrating the complexity of performance and reception formats available to the literatureconsuming public of Chaucer’s time. Read sympathetically, the “misperformance complaints” open a window for us onto a richly variegated range of performances. Instead of a unilinear progression from undifferentiated “orality” to undifferentiated “literacy,” we can conceptualize late-medieval literary reception as a multitude of co-existing, interacting oralities, auralities, and literacies adapted to a variety of audiences in a variety of moods.

48 John Gower, Confessio Amantis in Complete Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vols. 2–3 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1901) 8: *2942–5. 49 Records show that by 1357 (when he was about 17), Chaucer was a page in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel of Antwerp, the second son of Edward III. By 1359 he was in Lionel’s service, and by 1367 he was an esquire in the king’s own household (Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography [Oxford, Blackwell, 1992] 306–8). 50 See Coleman, Public Reading 148–78.

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Dioneo’s Repertory: Performance and Writing in Boccaccio’s Decameron John Ahern

Introduction Many studies of the Decameron quite rightly assume its status as a major literary text—an assumption which would have surprised Boccaccio’s contemporaries but not the author himself. The very ease with which the text lent itself to performance blinded readers to its literariness. What follows is an attempt to situate the Decameron in relation to oral performance and textual production. Evidence is drawn from the book itself, which purports to record a ten-day-long oral performance, as well as from what we know of oral performance and manuscript production in medieval Italy. In Boccaccio’s world silent reading was gradually assuming greater importance even while traditions of oral performance remained vigorous at all levels of society. After an overview of the inter-relations of reading and performance and Boccaccio’s relation to them, I turn to the key role which Dioneo plays both in the Decameron’s unfolding performance and also in the articulation of the Decameron as a literary text. Texts and performance 1220–1350 The vitality of public speech and its conventions in the communes of northern and central Italy astounded outsiders. Salimbene relates Frederick II’s sarcastic observations on long-winded Roman ambassadors.1 Local elites of Latin literates derided the speech of the illiterate. The jurist Odofredo (active 1228–65) mocked the gesticulating eloquence and the written laws of the “plebei” [common

1 Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Scalia, vol. 1 (Bari, Laterza, 1966) 515–16. For the role of speech in public life in medieval Italy see Mark D. Johnston, “The Treatment of Speech in Medieval Ethical and Courtesy Literature,” Rhetorica 4.1 (1986): 21–46; Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchi, I peccati della lingua. Disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987); Enrico Artifoni, “Sull’eloquenza politica del Duecento italiano,” Quaderni medievali 35 (1993): 57–78; Carlo Delcorno, “Professionisti della parola: predicatori, giullari, concionatori,” Tra storia e simbolo: Studi dedicati a Ezio Raimondi dai direttori, redattori e dall’editore di Lettere Italiane (Florence, Olschki, 1993) 1–21.

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people], whom he likened to jack asses.2 Boncompagno da Signa (c.1235) observed that “plebeian erudition” (plebeia doctrina) should be left to uneducated Italians (laicis Italiae) who learn not through writing but through custom (consuetudo) alone.3 “Consuetudo” denotes the practices of public verbal performance familiar to all citizens. It corresponds to what Brunetto Latini (c.1260–65) termed “les us as ytaliens” [the customs of the Italians].4 Beginning in the early thirteenth century, literati mediated the wealth of Latin written traditions to an unschooled public. “Simplicitas est amica laicis rudibus et modice litteratis” [Simplicity is a friend to rude lay people and the moderately lettered], said the author of the Oculus Pastoralis.5 Albertano of Brescia (1243) declared that notaries and the writing class are the salt of the earth without whom laici “can do nothing.”6 Latin treatises, such as Oculus Pastoralis (1229), Jacques Dinant’s Ars arengandi (1230–35), Albertano da Brescia’s De arte loquendi et tacendi (1245), and Giovanni da Viterbo’s Liber de regimine civitatum (1253) provided politicians with model speeches in Latin for delivery to popular assemblies on the piazza, at meetings with advisors, and on ambassadorial missions. Guido Faba’s Parlamenta et epistole (c.1243) included discourses for private life. To meet the needs of a growing public, texts called dicerie [talks or discourses], began to appear in Italian. Guidotto da Bologna (c.1254–66) defines this audience as “uomini valenti, laici,” “non aliterati,” “che vogliono ornatamente e piacevolmente sapere favellare.” [talented men, laymen, not literate . . . who wish to learn how to speak pleasingly and eloquently].7 The title of Filippo Ceffi’s diceria expresses the producers’ disdain for users of such texts: “Dicerie da imparare a dire a huomini giovani e rozzi” [Discourses to be learned to be said by crude young men].8 Literati thought of themselves as speaking from the far side 2 See Nino Tamassia, Odofredo: studio storico-giuridico (1894), rpt. in Scritti di Storia giuridica, vol. 2 (Padua, CEDAM, 1967) 341, 368, 444. 3 “Verum quia contionandi officium rarissime ad viros pertinet litteratos, idcirco hec plebeia doctrina est laicis Italiae reliquenda qui ad narrandum magnalia contionum a sola consuetudine sunt instructi.” (Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica novissima Boncompagni, ed. A. Gaudenzi, Biblioteca Iuridica Medii Aevi, vol. 2 [Bologna, In aedibus Petri Virano olim fratrum Treves, 1892] 249–97) [Truly because the office of giving political speeches rarely falls to lettered men, this lower-class learning should consequently be left to the unlettered people of Italy who are trained solely by custom to narrate the great deeds of their discourses.] All translations are mine except where stated otherwise. 4 Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor de Brunetto Latini, ed. F. J. Carmody, vol. 1 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1948) 4. 5 Oculus pastoralis pascens officia et continens radium dulcis pomibus suis, ed. D. Franceschi (Turin, Memorie dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, 1966) 23. 6 “Dicere possunt laici: sine vobis litteratis nihil possumus facere.” [And lay people can say: without you lettered people we can do nothing.] (Albertanus of Brescia, Sermone inedito di Albertano giudice di Brescia, ed. L. F. Fè (Brescia, 1874); text accessible at . James M. Powell provides a useful introduction to Albertanus in his Albertanus of Brescia: the Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 7 Guidotto da Bologna, “Il fiore di rettorica, Trattato primo,” La Prosa del Duecento, eds. C. Segre and M. Marti (Milan, Ricciardi, 1959) 106–7. 8 Eleonora Vincenti, “Matteo dei libri e l’oratoria pubblica e privata nel ’200,” Archivio glottologico italiano 54 (1969): 227–37.

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of the cultural divide between Latin and the vernacular. They even feigned ignorance of the conventions and genres of the speech world they inhabited, as Lovato dei Lovati does in his account of a performance of part of the Roland cycle in Treviso in 1307.9 All citizens needed repertories of songs, proverbs, riddles, jokes, and especially novelle, i.e. brief narratives including news, gossip, and traditional tales. No sharp line separated ordinary citizens from professional perfomers: such as the reciters of tales (dicitori, uomini di corte, novellatori, novellieri, favellatori, romanzieri), and singers of traditional epics and cantari (giullari, canterini, and cantimpanche). Performances of many kinds took place in the city streets, cross roads, markets, and piazzas large and small, not to mention the homes and the courts of political leaders. Professional performers like Ruggiero Apugliese, “un gran predikatore, novelliero e dicitore” [a great preacher, teller of novelle, and talker/performer]10 and the anonymous author of the fifteenth-century “Cantare de’ cantari”11 boasted of large and varied repertories.12 But non-professionals could also have formidable repertories, like the friar and grammarian Hugh of Reggio (c.1239): Hic erat totus plenus proverbiis, fabulis et exemplis, et optime sonabant in ore suo, quia hec omnia reducebat ad mores, et habebat linguam disertam et gratiosam, et libenter audiebatur a populo. [This man was completely filled with proverbs, stories, and examples, and they sounded really well in his mouth because he could turn them all into morals and

9 “Fontibus irriguam spatiabar forte per urbem, / que tribus a vici nomen tenet, ocia passu / castigans modico, cum celsa in sede theatri / karoleas acies et gallica gesta boantem / cantorem aspitio; pendet plebecula circum, / auribus arrectis; illam suus allcit Orpheus. / Ausculto tacitus: Francorum dedita lingue / carmina barbarico passim deformat hiatus, / tramite nulla suo, nulli innitentia penso / ad libitum volvens; vulgo tamen illa placebant.” (Guido Billanovich, “Lovato Lovati: l’epistola a Bellino, gli echi da Catullo,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 32 [1989]: 101–53.) [I was walking at random through a city watered by fountains / and named for three alleys, criticizing leisure time / at a moderate pace, when high on a stage, / roaring about Carolingian battle order and Gallic deeds / I spy a singer. The little people hang on all sides, / ears alert as their Orpheus entrances them. / I listen in silence: songs consigned to the Franks’ tongue / he ruins with barbaric interruptions everywhere; / songs with no plot, dependent on no thread, / he spins spontaneously, and yet the crowd liked them.] For an analysis of this passage see my “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy,” Annals of Scholarship 2 (1981): 17–40, rpt. in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. A. Iannucci (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1997), 214–39. 10 Poeti del Duecento, ed. G. Contini, vol. 1 (Milan, Ricciardi, 1960): 905. 11 Ezio Levi, I cantari leggendari del popolo italiano nei secoli XIV e XV, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 16 (Turin, E. Loescher, [1914?]). 12 The definition is that of his antagonist in his “Passion,” “Genti, intendete questo sermone” (Poeti, 905 lines 62–3) [People, hear this sermon]. The poem in which he boasts of his repertory, “Tant’aggio ardire e conoscenza” (Poeti 890–901) [I have so much ardor and knowledge], was recalled many decades later in a sermon in Florence by Fra Giordano da Pisa: “Il giullare le mentova tutte ne la canzone!” (Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale fiorentino 1305–1306, ed. C. Delcorno [Florence, Sansoni, 1974] Sermon XV, 75) [The oral performer mentions them all in the song.] For a reading of Ruggiero, see Michelangelo Picone, “La carriera di un giullare medievale: il caso di Ruggiero Apugliese,” Versants 25 (1994): 27–51.

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had a tongue that was skilled in speaking and agreeable, and he was gladly listened to by the people.]13

Like many preachers, Hugh used stories and proverbs in his sermons. This was a culture that organized and preserved collective and personal experience in novelle. Dino Compagni reduced the complex origins of the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict to a vivid anecdote of the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti.14 Merchants in correspondence and ricordanze referred to well known novelle and also told novelle of their own.15 Novelle served many purposes: winning arguments, silencing opponents, obtaining favors, getting out of difficult situations, entertaining peers, instructing the young, affirming group values, memorializing important family and local events. Effective performance of novelle required close identification with the audience, as Brunetto Latini advised (c.1260–66): E quando se’ in brigata, seguisci ogni fiata lor via e lor piacere, ché tu non déi volere pur far a la tua guisa, né far di lor divisa. [And when you are in company / follow on every occasion, / their way and their pleasure, / for you shouldn’t want / to do things in your own way, / nor should you separate from them.]16

One told the “good” tales that affirmed the values of the group (brigata) and so doing enhanced one’s social status. Individuality and originality were not highly prized. The brigata was all-powerful. An inappropriate novella would damage one’s reputation: Però non dir novella se non par buona e bella a ciascun che la ‘ntende, ché tal te ne riprende che aggiunge bugia, quando se’ ito via, che ti déi ben dolere.

13

Salimbene, Cronica 278, I, 239. Dino Compagni, Cronica, ed. Gino Luzzatto (Turin, Einaudi, 1968) I, 2. For discussion of the relations between novelle and chronicles, see Alberto Vàrvaro, “Tra cronaca e novella,” La novella italiana, Atti del Convegno di Caprarola, 19–24 settembre 1988, vol. 1 (Rome, Salerno, 1989) 155–71 and Massimo Miglio, “Parola e gesto nella società comunale,” Ceti sociali ed ambienti urbani nel teatro relgioso europeo del ’300 e del ’400, Viterbo, 30 maggio-2 giugno 1985 (Viterbo, Centro di Studi sul Teatro Medioevale e Rinascimentale, 1986) 41–58. 15 Christian Bec, Les marchands écrivains à Florence 1375–1434 (Paris, Mouton, 1967) 102, 175. 16 “Il Tesoretto,” Poeti II, 175–284, lines 1825–30. 14

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[But do not tell a tale, / unless it seems good and pleasant / to each one who hears it / for someone might criticize you for it, / and add a lie, / when you’ve gone away, / that must hurt you a lot.]17

Sixty years later, c.1310, Francesco da Barberino specifies that one should tell women tales “di nettezza / e d’onestà, con belle novellette / che non sieno spesso dette” [about cleanliness and honesty, in pleasant little tales that are not often told].18 To do so, a large personal repertory of tales was indispensable. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, urban elites in increasing numbers sought to expand their repertories through collections of brief moral, religious, and courtly narrations, contained in personal anthologies or miscellanies. The Conti di antichi cavalieri (1270–75) offered courtly tales, often in rhythmic prose close to verse. The Libro de li exempli (c.1290–1310) and the Dodici conti morali (late thirteenth century) provided preachers with edifying examples. Tommaso Gozzadini’s widely copied Fiori di virtù, contained moral maxims that often morph into brief novelle.19 The Fiori e vita di filosafi presented brief exemplary lives of kings and philosophers. We know of four lost collections of novelle from the early fourteenth century: Dino Compagni’s brevia dicta et facta, mentioned by Francesco da Barberino, Francesco da Barberino’s own Flores novellarum, the Libro di motti (c.1290–1300) and Iacopo Cessole’s Ludus scaccorum (c.1300–10). Around 1290–1300 a Florentine, perhaps a Ghibelline aristocrat, in Pan1 sandwiched eighty novelle between a pilgrim’s guide to Palestine, parts of the Fiori di filosafi, and the Wisdom of Sidrach.20 The introduction of this compiler demonstrates that the collection was intended to be copied by a “courtly” 17

“Il Tesoretto,” lines 1757–63. Francesco da Barberino, I documenti d’amore secondi i manoscritti originali, ed. F. Egidi, 4 vols. (Rome, Società filologica romana, 1905) Pars prima, I, 89. In his Del reggimento e costumi di donna, ed. G. E. Sansone, 2nd ed. (Rome, Zauli, 1995), a work which includes several novelle, he counsels young women, “Fugga d’udire tutti libri e novelle, canzoni e ancor trattati d’amore” (Parte terza, I, 39) [Flee from hearing all books and novelle, songs, and also love treatises]. One may wonder if such an injunction could ever have really been followed. Claude Cazalé provides an excellent discussion of this work’s relation to its public in “Le Reggimento e Costume di Donna de Francesco da Barberino. Un miroir trucqué,” Mediaevales 6 (1984): 69–84. 19 Maria Corti, “Le fonti del Fiore di virtù e la teoria della nobilità nel Duecento,” Giornale storico della letteratura Italiana 136 (1959): 1–82. 20 For a description of Pan1, the first part of Panciatichiano 32 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale), see Mostra di codici romanzi delle biblioteche fiorentine. Ottavo congresso di studi romanzi, 3–8 aprile 1956, (Florence, Sansoni, 1957) 122–4 (hereafter MCR). For the broader question of the origins, structure, and social functions of the novella see Enrico Malato, “La nascita della novella italiana: un’alternativa letteraria borghese alla tradizione cortese,” La novella italiana I, 3–45, rpt. in his Lo fedele consiglio de la ragione. Studi e richerche di letteratura italiana (Rome, Salerno, 1989) 321–72; Michelangelo Picone, “L’invenzione della novella italiana. Tradizione e innovazione,” La novella italiana I, 119–54, and his “La cornice del Novellino,” Studi di filologia e letteratura italiana in onore di Maria Picchio Simonelli, ed. P. Frassica (Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992) 221–37; Cesare Segré, “La novella e i generi letterari,” La novella italiana I, 47–57; Marina Beer, “Alcune osservazioni su oralità e la novella italiana in versi (XIV–XV secolo),” La novella, la voce, il libro. Dal cantare trecentesco alla penna narratrice barocca (Naples, Liguori, 1996) 5–35; as well as the various essays in both La novella italiana and La novella, la voce, il libro. 18

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audience of aristocrats and borghesi who would read it in private, perform it in public, and so reach a broader audience: E chi avrà cuore nobile e intelligente sottile, sì l[i] potrà simigliare per lo tempo che verrà per innanzi, e argomentare e dire e raccontare in quelle parti dove avranno luogo, a prode e a piacere di coloro che non sanno e desiderano di sapere. [And those with noble hearts and subtle intelligence will thus be able to imitate them (i.e. the tales) in the time to come and construct arguments and tell and narrate in those places where they will be for the advantage and pleasure of those who do not know them (i.e. the tales) and are desirous to know them.]21

A diverse audience made and read such collections. Many of these same novelle appear in another but later pre-1350 manuscript, Palatino 566 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale) which consists entirely of novelle and appears to have been produced by merchants.22 Another, quite different manuscript, Gaddiano reliqui 193 (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, after 1315), reflects the moralizing, heterogeneous interests of its public, and contains two dozen novelle, the Fiori e vita di filosafi, an Italian version of the popular gnomic text, Disticha Catonis, the Seven Modes of Fear, Dino Compagni’s didactic Canzone del pregio, and a rhymed alphabet (MCR 31–3). By the 1330s miscellanies were mixing novelle with literary texts. The elegant Martelli (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana) combines the Conti di antichi cavalieri with poems by Dante and Cavalcanti and the Vita Nuova. In this same period, a later owner of Pan1 added to it twenty-seven novelle, presumably from another (lost) collection of novelle, as well as part of the Fiore dei filosafi, and the Wisdom of Sidrach.23 The text known today as Il Novellino, containing one hundred thematically arranged novelle, also dates to this period and may have served Boccaccio as a remote model for the Decameron.24 Boccaccio Like his peers Boccaccio would have read libri di novelle in the 1330s for pleasure and to expand his repertory. Introducing the Fourth Day of the Decameron he shows familiarity with the kind of novelle that appeared in the Fiori e vita di filosafi and other collections, saying that his book’s structure prevented him from

21

“Il Novellino,” La Prosa del Duecento 797. MCR 124–5. 23 MCR 30–1. 24 Important discussions of Pan1, Pan2, and the closely related text known as the Novellino appear in Alessandro D’Ancona, “Del Novellino e delle sue fonti,” Studi di storia e critica letteraria, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Bologna, Zanichelli, 1912) 1–163; Angelo Monteverdi, “Che cos’è Il Novellino?” Studi e saggi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli (Milan, Ricciardi, 1954); Cesare Segrè, “Sull’ordine delle novelle del Novellino,” Dal Medioevo al Petrarca. Miscellanea di Studi in onore di Vittore Branca, vol. 1 (Florence, Olshcki, 1983) 129–39; Luisa Mulas, Lettura del Novellino (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984) and Michelangelo Picone, “La cornice del Novellino.” 22

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putting forward “istorie . . . quelle tutte piene . . . d’antichi uomini e valorosi, ne’ loro piú maturi anni sommamente avere studiato di compiacere alle donne [historical examples . . . the ones completely full of ancient and valorous men who in their ripest years sought to win the favor of women].25 He himself also produced personal miscellanies, but of a more literary and idiosyncratic nature. In an eclogue he presents himself as an accomplished public performer, Aristaeus, who answers affirmatively the question “Non ego te vidi pridem vulgare canentem / triviis carmen, mero plaudente popello?” [Didn’t I see you a long time ago singing a vernacular song in the crossroads where only the little people applauded?].26 As the Narrator-Author of the Decameron, he distinguishes his personal tales from those of his book’s ten narrators: “accio che non paia che io voglia le mie novelle con quelle di cosí laudevole compagnia . . . mescolare” [lest it seem that I want to mix my novelle with those of such a praiseworthy company].27 He also boasts of his success as a performer of novelle, mentioning a woman neighbor who praised his tongue (lingua) as the “best and sweetest in the world,” a reference to his voice and delivery style.28 Boccaccio addressed in an utterly new way this audience of producers of collections of novelle.29 He placed ten novelle in the mouths of a brigata of specific fictional narrators. The resulting text, too long to be included in miscellanies, consisted of one hundred tales locked in a tamper-resistant frame. Each day, before the storytelling began, the ten young Florentines played music on various instruments (viuola, liuto, cembalo). They danced (balli da capo, danzette, stampite, ridde), and sang canzoni, canzonette, ballatette, carole, and stampite, as well as popular songs (IV, 5, 24; VIII, 2, 9), but at the day’s end sang literary ones. Dioneo played lute and cembalo, Fiammetta the viuola (I, Introduction, 106). It was hardly unusual for people of high social status to be accomplished performers. Salimbene mentions an archbishop who claimed to sing and play the viol better than a giullare; some played and sang “extremely well” (Cronica I, 470). Behind Lauretta’s humble protestations when asked to perform a canzone, we 25

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin, Einaudi, 1980) 467. Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere latine minori, ed. A. F. Massèra (Bari, Laterza, 1928) 57. 27 IV, Introduzione, 11; the first number indicates the Giornata [Day], the second the tale, and the third (when it appears) the sentence according to the numeration of Branca’s edition, which I cite throughout. 28 Author’s Conclusion, 27. 29 My discussion of the composition, publication, and diffusion of the Decameron is indebted to Vittore Branca, “Per il testo del Decameron I. La prima diffusione del Decameron,” Studi di filologia italiana 8 (1950): 29–143, rpt. in part in his Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio II (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991) 147–210; Giorgio Padoan, “Sulla genesi e la pubblicazione del Decameron,” Boccaccio: Secoli di vita, eds. M. Cottino-Jones and E. F. Tuttle (Ravenna, Longo, 1977) 143–76, rpt. in his Il Boccaccio, le muse, il Parnasso e l’Arno (Florence, Olschki, 1978) 93–121; Corrado Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna dei classici italiani. I. Dalle origini al Tasso (Turin, Einaudi, 1993); Lucia Battaglia Ricci, “Giovanni Boccaccio,” Storia della letteratura italiana, II: Il Trecento, ed. E. Malato (Rome, Salerno, 1995) 727–879, and Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. C. M. Radding (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995). 26

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glimpse a respectable repertory: “Signor mio, dell’altrui canzoni io non so, né delle mie alcuna n’ho alla mente che sia assai convenevole a cosí lieta brigata; se voi di quelle ch’io so volete, io ne dirò volontieri” (III, Conclusion, 9, 453) [My lord, I do not know songs by other people, nor do I have any of my own in mind which might be very appropriate to so happy a group; if you wish some of the ones I do know, I will say them gladly]. Everyone has a repertory of tales. Even the book’s poorest performer, the cavaliere in Madonna Oretta’s tale, can “put his hand on other tales” (VI, 1, 12). The brigata members draw upon a common public repertory of novelle. The requirement to tell stories on set themes presumes substantial personal repertories. Elissa observes that others have told two tales she planned to tell (VI, 5). Pampinea asks Panfilo to tell them “one of his tales” (I, 115). Reference is made to the repertories of Filostrato (IV, Conclusion, 9), Filomena (VI, 6, 3), Lauretta (III, Conclusion, 9) and especially, as we shall see, Dioneo. Pampinea, like her peers, chooses carefully from her repertory: “in se stessa recatasi quel che dovesse dire cominciò a pensare” (II, 3, 3) [having withdrawn into herself, she started to think over what she was going to say]. Believing the group’s emotional needs outweigh the obligation to follow the theme, she abandons her intended story for a funny one (IV, 2). Emilia tells a shorter tale than planned (VI, 8, 4). Dioneo hastily changes his tale because of “part” of Filomena’s tale (II, 10, 3). Fiammetta says that Lauretta’s tale suggests a similar one (II, 5, 2). A tale by Panfilo suggests to Emilia a contrary tale (IV, 7, 3). They notice each other’s repertories. Fiammetta tells Filostrato “your songs are like your novelle” (IV, Conclusion, 9). Lauretta mentions two stories by Pampinea (VIII, 9, 3). Filostrato refers to an earlier story of his (IX, 3). Lauretta (IX, 8, 3) recalls a story by Pampinea (VIII, 7). They are highly competitive. Filostrato challenges the others to surpass Pampinea’s novella (III, 9, 2); Neifile does the same with Lauretta’s novella (IV, 3, 2). They operate creatively within a shared tradition. Fiammetta could change her characters’ names but does not because “il partirsi dall verità delle cose state nel novellare è gran diminuire di diletto negli’intendenti” (IX, 5, 5) [Departure from the truth of things in telling novelle greatly diminishes the listeners’ pleasure]. Dioneo Dioneo is the strongest performer of both tales and songs: “oltre a ogni altro era piacevole giovane e pieno di motti” (I, Introduction, 92) [beyond every one else, he was an attractive youth and full of witticisms]. He names eight popular obscene songs, boasting he knows over a thousand (V, Conclusion, 6–14). He is proud that his large repertory of novelle allows him to change tales at the last minute. He brags that he will tell the best novella about a beffa or practical joke (VIII, 10). He fears that the privilege not to follow the day’s theme will lead some to think he has a poor repertory: “E acciò che alcun non creda che io questa grazia voglia sí come uomo che delle novelle non abbia alle mani, infino da ora son contento d’esser sempre l’ultimo che ragioni” (I, Conclusion, 13) [And lest any one think I am requesting this privilege like somebody with no available tales, I 48

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am happy to be the last to talk from now on]. He can barely wait for the response to the previous story to end before beginning his own tale. He knows in advance how his tale relates to the others and what reaction it will probably elicit. Many of the following days’ themes grow out of the matrix of his stories. His repertory also includes three sung literary texts: a cantare,30 the Dama del Vergiú, sung with Fiammetta (III, Conclusion, 8), and parts of two poems by Boccaccio, Filostrato (1334–35), sung with Lauretta (VI, Introduction, 3), and Teseida sung with Fiammetta (VII, Conclusion, 6). They probably sang these texts to a repetitive chant rather than a melody, and alternating rather than singing in unison.31 It is not clear whether they sang from memory or from a book. By inscribing these three performances into his text Boccaccio defines his audience

30 Cantari, which are narrative poems in ottava rima, began to appear in manuscripts in the 1330s. Franco Sacchetti tells how a blacksmith hammering on his anvil sang Dante’s Comedy “come si cantava uno cantare” (Trecento novelle, ed. Faccioli [Turin, Einaudi, 1976] Novella 115) [as one sang a cantare]. Cantari are often recycled chivalric narratives, fabliaux, novelle, and the Roland cycle. The Dama di Vergiù is based on a French lai. In this period cantari were performed apparently both with and without instrumental accompaniment. A Florentine preacher in 1354 complained about other preachers who were like “giullari, romanzieri e buffoni, a’ quali concorrono gli uditori come a coloro che cantano de’ paladini, che fanno i grandi colpi pure con l’archetto della viuola.” (Jacopo Passavanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenza in Prosatori minori del Trecento, ed. Giuseppe De Luca [Milan, Ricciardi, 1954]) [jongleurs, romancers, and buffoons to whom listeners run as to those who sing about Paladins who strike great blows even with the bow of the viuola.] As Sylvia Huot (“Voices and Instruments in Medieval French Secular Music: On the Use of Literary Texts as Evidence for Performance Practice,” Musica Disciplina 43 [1989]: 63–113) and Evelyn Birge Vitz (Orality and Performance in Early French Romance [Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999]) have shown, the viuola, in fact, traditionally accompanied public performance of rhymed vernacular narratives in France. Nevertheless, Dioneo and his partners sang these three texts without accompaniment. He reserved his lute for canzoni (I, Conclusion, 17). For the relations of novelle and cantari, see Armando Balduino, “Letteratura canterina,” Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri poeti del Trecento (Florence, Olschki, 1984) 57–92 and Giorgio Varanini, “Cantari e novelle,” La novella italiana, I, 407–30. 31 Alberto da Rosciate in his commentary on Dante’s Comedy in the 1340s describes how two professional performers in northern Italy sang in alternation narrative poems about great events and great lords in the past—a description which suggests the Carolingian epics sung in mono-rhymed Franco-Venetian laisses, but which could also include many cantari. His word for the performed texts, “ritmus,” fits both genres. Even allowing for possible differences in genres, this account suggests that Dioneo and the women may have sung alternately rather than together: Unde postea apparuerunt comedi, idest socij qui pariter recitabant comedias, idest magnalia que occurebant, unus cantando, alter succidendo et rispondendo. Et isti comedi adhuc sunt in usu nostro et apparent maxime in partibus Lombardie aliqui cantatores qui magnorum dominorum in rithmis cantant gesta, unus proponendo, alius rispondendo. (Levi 10) [Thence afterwards actors appeared, i.e. fellows who performed plays together, i.e. great deeds which happened, one singing, the other following and answering. And these actors are still in our use and some singers who sing of the deeds of great lords in rhythms, one proposing, the other answering, appear especially in parts of Lombardy.] For further discussion of this text see Henry A. Kelly, From Dante to Pseudo-Dante (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989) 23–33 and Peter Armour, “Comedy and the origins of Italian theatre around the time of Dante,” Writers and Performers in Italian Drama from the Time of Dante to Pirandello: Essays in Honour of G. H. McWilliam, eds. J. R. Dashwood and J. E. Everson (Lewiston, New York, Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) 1–31.

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as literate performers, readers of singable literary texts in ottava rima, for whom there is no “divorce” between reading and performance, or poetry and music.32 As a reader/performer of cantari and of Boccaccio’s narrative poems, Dioneo represents the mid to upper levels of readers who knew Italian but not Latin. His range far exceeds that of low-end literates like the wool-worker Gianni Lotteringhi and his modest collection of rhymed vernacular religious texts (VII, 1, 4–5), or the “applauding little people” surrounding the vernacular singer in Eclogue 12. But Dioneo is no literatus or clericus. He has no access to the world of Latin culture. What is most significant about him is the aggressive, transgressive role which he and his repertory play in the ten days of storytelling. He is overtly and covertly disingenuous, a consummate actor, more vividly aware of the implications of narratives than his peers, and unwilling to allow the day’s narratives to wander off in directions he loathes. He rejects the taboo against telling “dishonest” tales to “honest” women and subverts the above-cited constraints on speech and storytelling within a brigata mentioned by Brunetto Latini and Francesco da Barberino. Contradiction is his motivating force. He knows full well that his first tale, which is about saving the body, rather than the soul or wealth—the subjects respectively of the two preceding tales (I, 2; I, 3)—will cause embarrassment (vergogna) to the women who laughingly tell him not to tell such stories again (I, 5, 2–3). Shortly thereafter he moves to dominate all the storytelling by requesting and receiving the privilege not to follow the day’s theme and to speak last (I, Conclusion, 12–13). On the Second Day the “bestiality” of Bernabò in Filomena’s tale so disturbs him that he abandons his intended tale for another (II,10, 3), which makes the women laugh until their jaws ache (II, Conclusion,1). His third story about Alibech likewise elicited great laughter among the “honest women” (III, Conclusion, 1). His fourth story travesties the day’s theme of tragic love stories and specifically contradicts Panfilo’s story (IV, 6). Again the women laugh, focusing on the prosecutor and his “hook” (IV, Conclusion, 1). When he off-handedly claims the privilege of setting the next day’s theme (love stories with happy endings [IV, 10, 3]), Fiammetta graciously concurs (IV, Conclusion, 6). He is already shaping and directing the collective storytelling. At this point the brigata is honoring the onestà taboo more in the breach than in the observance. Nevertheless, in his fifth story Dioneo disingenuously claims to fear a negative reaction because his delightful tale about a ménage à trois is “less than honest” (V, 10, 4). Unlike his previous tales, this one derives directly from a classical Latin source, Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9, 14–28, whose text (recently discovered at Monte Cassino) Boccaccio had himself copied (Laurenziano 54,

32 Aurelio Roncaglia demonstrated how the close connection between singing and written poetry began to weaken at the court of Frederick II, c.1230–50 in “Sul ‘Divorzio tra musica e poesia’ nel Duecento italiano,” L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, ed. A. Ziino (Certaldo, Edizioni di Studi sul Ars Nova Italian del Trecento, 1978) 365–97. However, it has come increasingly to be recognized that written poetry continued to be sung well into the Trecento. Dante, for example, sent poems to musicians to be set to music and he portrayed his canzone. “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona” as sung in public in Purgatorio II (see Ahern and Armour).

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32).33

Dioneo transfers the tale to contemporary Perugia, nowhere hinting at its classical origin. Perhaps Boccaccio concealed this classical Latin source lest Dioneo be revealed as a literatus in contradiction of his assigned role. Boccaccio’s secret gift to Dioneo—a splendid tale he undoubtedly found congenial—suggests that he is the author’s alter ego. Dioneo’s fears of a negative response from the brigata are confirmed to a degree when shame (vergogna) leads the women to laugh less than they would like (V, Conclusion, 1). Dioneo’s power over the brigata is now at its apogee. His six laughterprovoking tales have loosened the self-imposed constraints of his peers. He is about to set the theme for the Seventh Day over which he himself will preside when an incident occurs that changes everything. Earlier that same day, after he and Lauretta sang the Filostrato, two servants, Licisca and Tindaro, bickered loudly (VI, Introduction, 4–15). The indignant Licisca explains to the laughing women Tindaro’s claim that local women are virgins when they marry. When Fiammetta asks Dioneo to adjudicate, he sides with Licisca. He bases the next day’s theme on her outburst. Claiming all possible topics have been exhausted and thinking of Licisca, he decides on tricks (beffe) which wives play on their husbands (VI, Conclusion, 4–6). Some women ask Dioneo to change this theme, fearing that telling such stories will harm their reputations. Dioneo refuses, saying that the anarchy of the times gives them a certain license, adding that their “honest” behavior will protect their reputations. The plague-caused collapse of the social order allows them to tell freer stories, unlike those in the libri di novelle which favor paradigms of noble behavior. At day’s end Dioneo directs Tindaro to play the bagpipes, a low-class instrument which no member of the brigata would play (VI, Conclusion, 48). The brigata has begun to hear new music. The next day some women tell “disoneste novelle,” but avoid equivocal language. Previously only men told such tales. The irruption of quarrelling plebeian voices and Dioneo’s response to them have liberated the women and altered Dioneo’s relation to the group in ways that gradually become clear. To the disappointment of his listeners, Dioneo strikes off in a new narrative direction. His next two tales provoke no laughter. His seventh story seems to begin badly. Because someone has told his intended story he claims to have run out of tales. He apologizes for telling a tale outside his own theme (VII, 10, 5–10). In his improvised tale, based on the motif of the friend returned from the dead, he adds illicit love triangles (four had already appeared that day). This parody of Elissa’s novella (VIII, 3) is also set in Siena, and also presents a man who makes love to his godson’s mother, as Dioneo twice observes (VII, 10, 3 and 30). This send-up of tales about a man come back from the otherworld allays rather than exacerbates fear of infernal punishment for sexual misbehavior. His performance soon afterwards of the Teseida (VII, Conclusion, 6) would nudge readers of Boccaccio’s poem (both in the brigata and among the Decameron’s actual readers) to notice 33 For Boccaccio and the text of Apuleius, see Laura Sanguineti White, Boccaccio e Apuleio. Caratteri differenziali nella struttura narrativa del Decameron (Bologna, Edizioni Italiane Moderne, 1979) and Maurizio Fiorillo, “La lettura apuleiana del Boccaccio e le note ai manoscritti laurenziani 29,2 e 54,32,” Aevum 73 (1999): 635–60.

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how that poem’s central situation has been moved to a lower social class. Underscoring this downward transposition, Tindaro again plays his bagpipes while the brigata, for the only time in the book, dances to plebeian music (VII, Conclusion, 9). Dioneo has introduced new rhythms and tonalities into their narrative music. He has shifted the focus of his peers. Beginning the next day, they tell more tales tales about popolani: the “amoruzzo contadino” [little rustic love affair] of the priest of Varlungo and monna Belcolore (VIII, 2), the Calandrino tales (VIII, 3 and 6, and IX, 3), the Sienese love triangle of Zeppa di Mino and Spineloccio Tavena (VIII, 8). In his eighth story Dioneo’s seems to rewrite Fiammetta’s tale of Andreuccio (II, 5) but with a female trickster. He focuses more sharply on details of trade and commerce and blurs the line between business practice and fraud so that the vengeful beffa appears almost as business as usual. Despite Dioneo’s initial boast, his tale is less amusing than Fiammetta’s tale or most of the other tales about beffe. None of the characters seems to have any fun. Despite his boast that his tale will give more pleasure than the others’ beffa tales (VIII, 10, 3), this disenchantment of a familiar genre elicits no response at all from the brigata, aside from Lauretta’s mild praise of Pietro Canigiano and Salabaetto. On the Ninth Day, a free day with no set theme, as he introduces his relatively short tale, he likens himself to a black crow among white doves, declaring he is no wise man (savio) but a fool (scemo), and consequently begs still further license (arbitrio) in telling his tale (IX, 10, 3–4). He does so because he knows that his tale will be misunderstood. He calls himself a fool not out of humility but because he knows this tale will further challenge the brigata’s fictive world at whose distant social and geographic margins his story unfolds.34 The desperately poor peasants in Puglia, in Dioneo’s ninth tale, share little with Florentine elites to which both the brigata and the book’s readers belong. The familiar trio—older man, young wife, and priest—reappears but without the intelligence, verbal dexterity, and sexual drive of preceding tales. Dioneo has moved far beyond the world of Tuscan peasants like Licisca and Tindaro. Here the human and the animal live side by side. The priest refuses the wife’s offer of her place in bed while she stays with a neighbor, jokingly saying he prefers the stall next to his mare which he can easily transform into a pretty young girl. The naïve wife convinces her husband to learn the priest’s magic spell so that they, who own only a donkey, might have the economic advantage of a superior beast. When they no longer need the mare, Pietro can change it back into his wife. The only solution they can imagine for their difficulties is magic. The priest, trapped by his polite joke, agrees to teach them the spell. Pietro holds a lantern while the priest, clad only in a shirt, touches the wife’s naked body. Sexually excited after touching her breast, he penetrates her. When Pietro feebly protests, Donno Gianni withdraws, having climaxed. Gemmata, unaware of all this, berates her husband 34 For acute analyses of Dioneo as a narrator and of his ninth tale in particular, see Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, “Le antifrasi di Dioneo,” Studi filologici letterari e storici in memoria di Guido Favati (Padua, Antenore, 1977) 69–89 and Alessandro Duranti, “Le novelle di Dioneo,” Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti (Rome, Salerno, 1985) I, 1–38.

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for breaking the spell, and condemning them to a life of poverty. The two men remain good friends and never discuss the incident. Immediately after Dioneo concludes his tale of inconsequential ineptitude, Boccaccio the Narrator intervenes with a teasing elliptical address to future readers. Quanto di questa novella si ridesse, meglio dalle donne intese che Dioneo non voleva, colei sel pensi che ancora ne riderà. (IX, Conclusion, 1) [How much laughter there was about this tale which was better understood by the women than Dioneo wanted, let the woman who will laugh over it again, figure out for herself.]

Boccaccio intervenes unprecedentedly in the Decameron because the brigata’s excessive laughter indicates a “better” understanding, i.e. a misinterpretation. They laugh because once again the taboo against disoneste novelle has been violated by narrating sexual acts and using equivocal language. Clearly they think Dioneo has recovered his gifts as a teller of disoneste novelle. But given the trio’s candid naïveté, this is not a disonesta novella. The pathetic tale’s slight humor resides not in the sexual details but the ludicrous incompetence of the married couple and their friend. This wife (unlike earlier ones) neither sought nor received sexual pleasure. The priest was motivated by feckless friendship, not sexual desire. The husband is neither jealous nor a true cuckold. No one learns anything. They are indeed fools (scemi), in contrast to Dioneo who disingenuously claimed to be scemo before telling this tale. His novella moves the brigata into a world where their brilliant narrations and the values which they dramatize have no place. Once again his genial subversion has produced a tale that challenges earlier ones (VII, 3; VII, 9; and VII, 2). The women do not advance beyond Dioneo’s initial lesson that one may laugh at disoneste novelle, to his second lesson that outside their circumscribed world exist zones of experience that resist and contradict the values expressed in the stories in their repertories. The brigata as an interpretive community has failed. It can no longer serve as a model for the reader who must work out the meaning— whatever it might be—for herself. Indeed, this single slippery sentence disengages readers from interpretive dependence on the brigata. From this point on, the meanings of fictions cannot be taken as self-evident. The Decameron becomes a text for single (female) readers and is no longer merely the record of ten day’s of oral performance. Dioneo, who asked to tell the last tale each day, certainly understands the power of the last story on the last day. He frames this surprising tale with a bit of clever indirection. From the preceding tale of noble generosity he repeats a vulgar word for penis, “coda” (X, 10, 2), even though he knows that his story will contain no sexual action or equivocal language and so must disappoint the expectation of one more disonesta novella. He promises to follow the day’s theme of acts of generosity performed by kings, sultans, etc., but makes the main character another peasant woman, rather than her husband, the marchese. Exercising his privilege, he stands the day’s theme on its head. It is she who is magnanimous, 53

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while her noble husband is not. He defines the husband’s behavior as “una matta bestialità” [a crazy bestiality], a phrase of Scholastic provenance from Dante (Inferno XI, 82–3).35 The story, however, is not completely out of character. As noted earlier, his second story contradicted the “bestialità” of the husband in the preceding one. His fifth story also condemned in advance the husband’s behavior. But unlike his previous tales, this one evokes biblical comparisons: Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, the sufferings of Job, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the suffering of Mary.36 In each instance Griselda corresponds to the victim and her husband to God the Father. Dioneo’s hatred of the marchese suggests an unexpressed animus against God. When he reports Gualtieri’s words of reconciliation to Griselda, the note of sarcasm is unmistakable (X, 10, 61–3). Since Dioneo is the creator of the story he tells, one wonders whether to trust the polemical teller of the tale or the quasi-religious tale itself. The problem becomes unavoidable when, after the happy ending which he begrudges the marchese, Dioneo attacks his own story (X, 10, 68–9). Two interpretations of this story are possible: either as praise of a peasant woman who is a paradigm of superhuman patience, or as condemnation of a prosecuting feudal lord (not unlike God). The women are divided in their interpretation (X, Conclusion, 1). Ignoring this conflict, Panfilo, the day’s king, declares that the ten days of storytelling have concluded happily. The disoneste novelle have led not to dishonest behavior but “continua onestà, continua concordia, continua fraternal dimestichezza” (X, Conclusion, 5) [constant modesty, constant harmony, constant good fellowship]. The new course on which Licisca’s outburst set Dioneo has culminated in this final undecidable tale. His seventh story parodied traditional stories which reinforced codes of sexual behavior. His eighth tale questioned the exaltation of quick-witted intelligence and sharp business practice. His ninth tale produced a world whose values are totally alien to those of the brigata. Its inanely risqué conclusion mocks the disoneste novelle which he had introduced. His final tale, created once again out of familiar motifs, elicits pity, anger and disbelief, and can be read as affirming or contesting the social and religious order. He is the conflicted creator of a tale which is in conflict with itself. No other brigata member could have pulled off such a tour de force. Performance and reading These observations about Dioneo’s role as dominant narrator would perplex readers who did not read the book straight through but dipped into individual tales—the latter mode of reading being which Boccaccio, in fact, recommends:

35 Like many other Florentines of all classes in the mid Trecento, Dioneo knew Dante’s Comedy well. One source of his second story may have been Inferno 32, 8ff. He employs the Dantean neologism “sillogizzando” at the end of his Eighth Story (VIII, 10, 30). For the complex relation of the Comedy to the Decameron see Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Shaping Force of Satire (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997). 36 The Decameron has but a single tale with a biblical setting, that of Solomon (IX, 9), while the Novellino has three (6, 7, 12).

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Tuttavia chi va tra queste leggende, lasci star quelle che pungono e quelle che dilettano lega: elle, per non ingannare alcuna persona, tutte nella fronte portano segnato quello che esse dentro dal loro seno nascose tengono. (Author’s Conclusion, 19) [Anyway, let the person who goes among these legends leave alone the ones that sting and read the ones that give pleasure. In order to deceive no one, they all bear marked on their foreheads what they hide inside their breast.]

Like readers of earlier libri di novelle, Boccaccio’s audience assumed the Decameron was to be read randomly. They did not imagine they were dealing with a complex literary text. Previous novelle collections neither framed the tales nor (usually) arranged them thematically.37 The word “Fiori” which appears in many titles is an ancient metaphor: selected flowers form a garland just as selected texts form a collection. By locking his stories in a contextualizing frame Boccaccio created two texts in one: an anthology of discrete individual stories and a formidably complex verbal artifact. Few, if any, readers noticed the second text, not even the literati who formed a significant part of his audience.38 Boccaccio sought the opinion of the chief literatus of the day, Francis Petrarch, sending him a copy of the Decameron. Petrarch’s two epistles in reply, Seniles XVII, 3 and 4 (c.1372–3) illuminate the actual reception of the Decameron in the first two decades.39 It was common practice for readers to perform individual novelle for friends. Petrarch himself first heard the Griselda tale many years before: “michi sempre ante multos annos audita placuisset” (Seniles XVII, 3) [it had always pleased me after hearing it many years earlier]. Petrarch read it and decided “illam memorie mandare . . . ut et ipse eam animo quociens vellem non sine voluptate reteperem, et amicis ut fit confabulantibus renarrarem, si quando aliquid tale incidisse” (Seniles XVII, 3) [to commit it to memory . . . so that I might repeat it to myself not without pleasure whenever I wished and retell it, whenever the occasion arose, to my friends, chatting as we do]. Twice in Padua he and some of these friends read the Griselda tale, presumably aloud. The first time, the tale so overwhelmed one literatus that he had to give the book to someone else to read.40 The second time, a literatus from Verona, perhaps Gasparro Scuaro dei 37 Michelangelo Picone, “Tre tipi di cornice novellistica: modelli orientali e tradizione narrativa medievale,” Filologia e critica 13 (1988): 3–26; Picone, “Preistoria della Cornice del Decameron,” Studi di Italianistica in onore di Giovanni Cecchetti, eds. P. Cerchi and M. Picone (Ravenna, Longo, 1988) 91–104; and Picone, “La cornice des Novellino.” 38 Boccaccio contrasts his female audience with university-trained males: “per ciò che né a Atene né a Bologna o a Parigi alcuna di voi non va a studiare, piú distesamente parlar vi si conviene che a quegli che hanno negli studii gl’ingegni assottigliati” (Author’s Conclusion, 21). [Even though none of you women go to study in Athens, Bologna, or Paris, it is appropriate to speak to you at greater length than to those who have sharpened their wits through study]. 39 In the absence of a critical edition of the Latin text of the Seniles, I quote Seniles XVII, 3 and 4 from the edition in J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1942) 291ff. The cited translation is that of Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, Rerum Senilium Libri I–XVIIII, trans. A. S. Bernardo, S. Levin, and R. A. Bernardo (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) II, 655–71. 40 For a discussion of the identity of these friends, see Vittore Branca, Tradizione delle opere di

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Broaspini, having heard of this incident, asked Petrarch for the book, then read the tale unmoved, declaring it “unbelievable.” Petrarch disagreed but kept silent, “lest I lead the discussion from the jokes and the sweet merriment of friendly conversation to the bitterness of an argument” (Seniles XVII, 4). The conflicting reactions to the Griselda tale which Boccaccio inscribed into his book reappear in this incident, which further demonstrates the persistence of the group’s power to condition individual responses, as we noted earlier. It is significant that Petrarch himself read the Decameron not as a coherent literary construct but as a collection of individual tales, exactly as Boccaccio recommended: “Excucurrui eum, et festini viatoris in morem, hinc atque hinc circumspiciens, nec subsistens” (Seniles XVII, 3) [I moved quickly like a traveler in a hurry, skipping around, enjoying some stories more than others]. His Latin translation of the Griselda tale further demonstrates his blindness to the literariness of the Decameron. This text, like his earlier performances, necessarily erased the tale’s contextualization, specifically the problematical meanings generated by having a sharply defined narrator, Dioneo, recount it as the last of one hundred inter-related acts of storytelling. His version suppresses significant parts of Boccaccio’s text, such as Dioneo’s polemical introduction (X, 10, 1–3), and his hostile outburst against the marchese at the end (X, 10, 68–9). A geographical description was added for non-Italian readers. It is not surprising that the resulting, scarcely undecidable text enjoyed more success throughout Europe than the Decameron itself.41 It is surprising that Petrarch considered Boccaccio still to be the author of this new and altered Latin text: “historiam tuam meis verbis explicui, imo alicubi aut paucis in ipsa narratione mutatis verbis aut additis, quod te non ferente modo sed favente fieri credidi” (Seniles XVII, 291) [I have told your story in my own words, or rather changing or adding a few words at some points in the narrative because I believed that you not only would allow it to be done, but would approve it (Seniles II, 656)]. He fails to see that the two texts are quite different. Like so many earlier novelle, Petrarch’s tale presents a model of behavior to be imitated. In the Decameron Dioneo/Boccaccio presents instead a model to be condemned. The crucial difference eludes Petrarch because he—like most contemporary readers—sees only a collection of discrete tales, not an author’s text.

Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991) II, 172n52. The possible candidates are Lombardo della Seta or Giovanni Dondi or Paolo de Bernardo. The candidates proposed by Albert Stanburrough (“The First Two Readers of Petrarch’s Tale of Griselda,” Modern Philology 15 [1918] 129–39) have won no adherents. Likewise, A. S. Cook’s candidates (1918) have won no adherents. For Garibotto’s proposal of Broaspini as the Veronese literatus, see Guido Martellotti, Scritti petrarcheschi, eds. Michele Feo and Silvia Rizzo (Padua, Antenore, 1983) 204n26. 41 For the reception of Petrarch’s Griselda see Gabriella Albanese’s two articles, “La novella di Griselda: De insigni obedientia et fide uxoriale,” Petrarca e il Petrarchismo. Un’ideologia della letteratura, ed. M. Guglielminetti (Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 1994) and “Fortuna umanistica della Griselda,” Il Petrarca latino e le origini dell’umanesimo. Atti del convegno internazionale. Firenze. 19–22 Maggio 1991, Le Lettere, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 9–10 (1992–93): 571–627, as well as Luca Carlo Rossi, “In margine alla Griselda latina di Petrarca,” Acme 53 (2000): 3–46.

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Likewise, the merchants who were the heart of the Decameron’s audience saw the book as a splendid collection of novelle, not as “literature.” They copied and lent it with enthusiasm, treating their modest manuscripts, often on paper rather than parchment and written in merchant hands rather than book hands, as valued personal possessions in whose margins they inscribed notes and calculations.42 Like earlier makers and owners of libri di novelle, they altered the text, adding new tales, both anonymous ones as well as old favorites by Sacchetti, Masuccio Salernitano, and Leonardo Bruni. They often altered the text, changing characters’ names and replacing unfamiliar place names with familiar ones, even inserting sentences that disparaged rival cities. This was not the kind of reception that Boccaccio yearned for. In his last years (c.1370), two decades after publishing the Decameron, he laid implicit claim to the highest possible literary status for the Decameron when he produced in his own hand a large deluxe copy of his book in the format of university and scholastic texts (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Hamiltonian 90).43 Over time his commitment to the enterprise faltered. At his death in 1375 no copy of the Decameron appears to have been in his parva libraria which passed to the Convent of Santo Spirito. His contemporaries did not perceive it as an important literary text. Boccaccio operated in a cultural situation quite different from that of his predecessors. The modalities of both oral performance and vernacular textual production had evolved, as had perforce their interrelations. Unlike Dante forty years before, whose ideal audience consisted of filosofi conversant with university texts, he addressed a broader audience which included merchants but which also presented a lower cultural profile, even if some members of it could be counted upon to copy out his very lengthy text. Unlike many literati, he neither scorned nor feigned ignorance of the culture of performance. Using his own experience as a performer of novelle and reader of novelle collections, he represented in the Decameron, on a grand if idealized scale, the dynamics of performance. In textualizing oral performance he made it an object of individual study and in so doing freed it from the group’s self-censorship. In this sense, the act of textualizing performance has the same effect, as does the plague: it liberates novelle from the self-imposed constraints of traditional practice which favored exemplary figures and deeds. His agent of liberation is Dioneo. Both author and character are powerful performers with unusually large repertories. The two 42 Vittore Branca, “Per il testo del Decameron I. La prima diffusione del Decameron,” Studi di filologia italiana 8: 29–143, rpt. in part in Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 2 (Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991) 147–210; “Copisti per passione, tradizione caratterizzante, tradizione di memoria,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale. Convegno di studi di filologia italiana nel centenario della Commissione per i testi di lingua. 7–9 aprile, 1960 (Bologna, Commmissione per i testi di lingua, 1960) 69–91. 43 Armando Petrucci, “Il ms berlinese Hamiltoniano 90. Note codicologiche e paleografiche,” Decameron. Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa dell’autografo, ed. C. S. Singleton (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 647–66, and his Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. C. M. Radding (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995).

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overlap but are not coterminous for Boccaccio, unlike Dioneo, is a skilled scribe, a maker of imposing manuscripts, a seeker after lost manuscripts, with deep first-hand knowledge of classical and patristic texts. Dioneo’s experience in this area was probably limited to obtaining and perhaps copying cantari and poems like the Tesidea and Filostrato. It is precisely Dioneo’s bona fides as a strong performer with a vast repertory that wins him the respect of the brigata and ipso facto of the Decameron’s readers who for three quarters of the book naturally identify with the brigata. Through Dioneo Boccaccio expands and subverts performance by pushing into new areas, classes, and themes. As is clear from the diminished enthusiasm of the brigata’s responses to his stories starting on the Sixth Day, and also from their misunderstanding of his ninth story, as well as from their conflicted response to the tenth story, the trajectory of response to his ten tales hardly suggests that Dioneo attained complete success in his task. Nor did the first generations of readers ever regard the book as anything more than a splendid instance of a novelle collection. What began as an unprecedented replication of oral performances ends as complex readerly literary text that calls into question the conventions of that oral performance and requires hermeneutical skills and attitudes alien to the brigata.

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Part II MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE AND THE BOOK

Mise en texte as Indicator of Oral Performance in Old French Verse Narrative1 Keith Busby

Traditional arguments for oral performance of Old French narrative have generally been based either on indications within the texts themselves or on pictorial representations of reading scenes in miniatures which show a reader with a book in front of a listening audience. It would be perverse indeed to deny that the recitation, from memory or from the manuscript page, of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances or the chansons de geste was a primary form of communication for the texts, although I believe that even at a very early stage individual reading was more common than is usually thought.2 If it is true that the manufacture of illuminated manuscripts of vernacular narrative with miniature, rubric, and a growing complexity of mise en page (I am here thinking of such elements as tituli or rubrics and sub-division headings, tables of contents, etc.) argues forcefully for individual reading as an increasingly important mode of reception from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, this does not mean that the oral mode immediately became extinct when the first illuminated manuscript appeared. Nor—and this is more important—does it mean that the illuminated manuscript was used only for individual reading. As texts are copied for centuries after their date of composition, so manuscripts change hands and can be put to different uses by subsequent owners. Scholars have an endearing and irritating tendency to oversimplify such matters and discard what little commonsense they might have. It is, crudely put, most implausible to assume that individual reading put oral performers out of regular gigs overnight or indeed that the rise of the vernacular manuscript sent the improvisers of oral verse running to the dole queue, as it were. I have no desire here to revive the old debate about the “manuscrit de jongleur” or the minstrel1 This article contains sections from Chapter 3 of my Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2002). The original version of this paper also treated matters of abbreviation and punctuation, which I claim also argue for the likelihood of oral performance of certain manuscripts. 2 See the examples of Constance fitz Gilbert and Marie de Champagne referred to in Codex and Context I, 19–20. In the well-known episode from Chrétien’s Yvain, it is possible to argue that the young girl is reading aloud to herself and that her parents have come to listen. See Der Löwenritter, ed. W. Foerster (Halle, Niemeyer, 1887) lines 5362–74.

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manuscript as it is called in English, although I shall try to argue shortly that certain aspects of certain manuscripts may indicate initial possession in the ranks of professional readers. What is indubitably true, however, is that not all smallformat, unillustrated manuscripts of vernacular verse, made of poor-quality materials (the type in fact usually called “manuscrits de jongleur”), are early copies. On the contrary, some are as late as the mid-fourteenth century and continue to be produced well after various more luxurious formats become established. What I wish to do here is to look not so much at the degree of decoration or quality of production as indicators of initial ownership and function nor at evidence from the narratives themselves but rather at one technical palæographical—and generally ignored—aspect of the physical mise en texte of some Old French narrative texts in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, namely the question of word-separation and word-clustering. God (or is it the Devil?) is in the details.3 Since the specifics of the mise en texte are at least in part determined by the intended use of the manuscript, I would like to argue that close examination of these details may suggest that use, in this instance oral performance. In both Greek and Roman Antiquity, much writing was in the form of scriptura (or scriptio) continua, an uninterrupted sequence of letters without separation of words; scriptura continua was also the norm in late Antiquity and through the early Middle Ages.4 Separation of words by interpuncts (punctuation marks) is not unknown in the Classical period, but contrary to what might be expected, it was generally suppressed by the tenacity of the continuous form. Such text is extremely difficult for modern readers, and all editors of Greek and Latin works provide word-separation in their critical editions. Although it is possible to make sense of scriptura continua while reading silently, it slows down the cognitive process considerably. The reason for its persistence was almost certainly the fact that most classical texts were meant for recitation. Reading scriptura continua causes tunnel-vision and necessitates jumping back and forth in fits and starts (saccades); it requires physical pronunciation to achieve clarity, and aural retention for comprehension. Pronunciation is thus an indispensable aid, mainly through auditory memory, to the process of decoding such a text. In essence, letters are decoded into syllables, and syllables into words, whose precise semantic and syntactic functions become clear only in relation to the surrounding syllable or syllables.5 As Paul Saenger has said, the idea, practically inconceivable to the modern mind, of reading a Greek or Latin text with all its grammatical and syntactic complexities but without word-separation, was in Antiquity a basic

3 By mise en texte I simply mean the nature and disposition of letters and other marks, such as punctuation, on the manuscript page. 4 For a full study of this issue, mainly in connection with Latin texts, see Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997). 5 See Jean-Pierre Rossi, Les mécanismes de la lecture (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), passim. Although it may be difficult to read, scriptura continua is in a sense a “natural” means of representing the unbroken sounds of speech; children, until instructed to do otherwise, will write without spaces between words.

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reality.6

The lasting success of scriptura continua was dependent on a supply of qualified slaves able to function as professional readers for an intellectual class who delegated to them the task of reciting. Consequently, there was no real desire or need to render the decipherment of writing a simpler task. Word-separation was introduced into Latin, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon by Irish and British scribes and modified radically the relationship between the reader and the book.7 Its development in the British Isles is largely due to the necessity of devising a means of denoting scripturally non-Romance languages in areas which had never or never fully become part of the Roman Empire.8 A glance at almost any page of almost any Latin manuscript produced in northern Europe in, say, the thirteenth century, will reveal clear demarcation of lexical units by means of spaces in what is known as “canonical separation.”9 Well before this time, scriptura continua was already a thing of the past. Since the Latin culture of the Middle Ages is first of all largely a monastic one, later owing more to the great cathedral schools and the universities, this development is not surprising. Word-separation, knowledge of the abbreviative system, and familiarity with the type of material contained in a manuscript, permitted readers to read difficult texts more efficiently, more rapidly, and silently.10 Silent reading in the monastery was also consistent with the prescriptions of Benedict’s rule, although the need to read and understand complex scholastic arguments may have provided as great a stimulus. In practice, private reading may have been quiet rather completely silent. There was undoubtedly a variety of reading modes, but it is clear that the greater the degree of silence, the greater the increase in speed and efficiency. Another consequence of this general increase in reading speed was a concomitant expansion of the textual corpus which could be “consumed” by an individual, and an increased demand for manuscripts. This in turn was met by increased production in both Latin and the vernacular in the course of the thirteenth century. Spacing of between 1.5 and 2 times the width of an average letter seems to enable optimal recognition of words in most readers,11 but spacing in manuscripts is neither always uniform nor the only means of denoting the limits of lexical 6 Paul Saenger, “Physiologie de la lecture et séparation des mots,” Annales economies, sociétés, civilizations 44 (1989): 945, and Saenger, Space Between Words 6–7. 7 Saenger, “Physiologie de la lecture” 949; see also Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Dáibhí Ó Croínín and David Ganz (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990) 173n. 8 Saenger, “La naissance de la coupure et de la séparation des mots,” Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, eds. Henri-Jean Martin and Jean Vezin (Paris, Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie-Promodis, 1990) 447–9. 9 Saenger, Space Between Words 44. 10 Fifteen letters to the right of the point of ocular focus is the approximate limit of the eye’s ability to retain text as a single unit (parafoveal vision); word-separation therefore led to a considerable increase in the speed of both reading and copying. See Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society,” Viator 13 (1982): 378, and Space Between Words 39. On the desirability of word-separation for “difficult” Latin texts, see Saenger, “La naissance de la coupure” 451–5. 11 Saenger, Space Between Words 26–8.

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units. Often space between groups of letters will vary, either by accident or by design, and sometimes interpuncts are used to the same end as spaces.12 In addition, majuscules (capital letters) at the beginning of words may help define their graphemic limits, as may certain morphological features, such as particular verbor noun-endings which appear primarily in final position and are therefore recognized as boundary markers. It will be clear, I think, that the delimitation of words, especially by interpuncts and majuscules, is potentially significant beyond word-separation alone, as it contributes to what we now consider as punctuation. Although Old French text often demonstrates “canonical” word-separation, and sometimes consistently, in what we would regard as modern usage, many manuscripts seem to bundle words into groups of two or three. The resultant disposition on the line is what might be termed scriptura continua interrupta, although the very fact of being written in columns of verse provides fragmentation of a sort. This kind of word-grouping resembles the usage in what Saenger has recently called “aerated” manuscripts, and which, “in addition to performing a grammatical function, aided the reader to organize efficient saccadic movements and to recognize certain preliminary attributes of a word before the word as a whole was fixed in foveal vision.”13 If word-clustering seems a retrograde step when compared with the usual Latin practice of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, it may nevertheless be susceptible of multiple explanations. First of all, scribes whose native language was French would have had to pay particularly close attention to word-separation when copying complex and rigorously argued theological works in Latin; they may not have felt the same compunction copying in the vernacular, which lacked the formal grammar of Latin, especially in the case of secular works. Secondly, and most important, the problem needs to be seen in the context of the same relationship between reader and text that created the conditions for the universal acceptance of word-separation in the first place. Whereas most Latin manuscripts of this time were designed for silent or quiet reading, much Old French verse narrative was indeed intended for recitation to listening audiences. The joining of lexical items into phrases, which slows down the process of silent reading, has the opposite effect when the text is read aloud. As with abbreviations, the efficient decipherment and enunciation of the text is facilitated enormously by the familiarity of the reader with the kind of text or perhaps the very text itself. While Saenger may be to a degree correct in claiming that word-separation lagged behind in the vernacular, a case can be made in Old French for the reintroduction of clustering or aeration rather than its persistence. I would therefore hesitate to follow Saenger all the way when he claims that scribes who knew how to deal with word-separation in Latin “were often unsure where to insert space between groups of syllables or morphemes in order to constitute correctly written vernacular words.”14 I should not want to discount this entirely as a contributory factor, but many manuscripts of the fourteenth century continue to show quite consistent 12 13 14

On interpuncts, see Saenger, Space Between Words 53. Saenger, Space Between Words 32ff. Saenger, Space Between Words 266.

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word-clustering. If the lack of a grammar of written Old French causes some variation in the manner of segmentation, the necessity of producing a text designed for reading aloud from the manuscript page must have played a much larger role. The different relationship between the conditions of manuscript production and literary communication in England and France may also be relevant again here. It is very clear that Anglo-Norman manuscripts do not reveal frequently the kind of agglutination and word-clustering so common in continental codices. Could it be that the tradition of word-separation, introduced by Irish and insular scribes, persisted on the islands at the same time as it was partially eroded on the continent? This could also suggest that individual reading was more common in the Anglo-Norman domains in the early years of vernacular literary and manuscript production. I believe, then, that reading aloud and its tradition can help explain the emergence of what I have called the scriptura continua interrupta in many manuscripts of verse narratives from all centuries. The consistent use of wordseparation is certainly less significant than the conjoining of words in groups. As I have suggested, word-separation in Old French is a practice ultimately derived from the monastic scriptorium, although its later use in non-monastic productions, in conjunction with other codicological features, may suggest a manuscript destined for private reading rather than oral performance. Of course, there is nothing to prevent a manuscript with word-separation functioning as a performance text, and many must have done so. But like frequent abbreviation, the widespread use of the scriptura continua interrupta slows down the decipherment of text to a considerable degree during individual reading. I would therefore argue that its occurrence in many manuscripts reveals a text destined or once destined for oral presentation, for only when the phrasal group is pronounced and the letters and syllables entered into auditory memory does the meaning of the text become clear; the oral expansion of abbreviations functions in a similar way. Scribes producing books largely intended for silent reading may well have taken over abbreviations and word-clustering from their models, and this may go a long way in explaining the inconsistencies within the usage of a single scribe. However, this alone does not fully explain the phenomenon, for the conjoining of words into groups does not merely enable or facilitate oral performance in the simple sense of reading aloud cogently and comprehensibly. It can also be an aid to the proper and rhythmical delivery of the text in question, and as such, constitutes a form of punctuation. Such a mise en texte surely implies that reading was at least partly a matter for professionals. Peter Rickard has shown that in many instances of conjoining, the first element is usually short, and often a monosyllable.15 Most frequent is the linking to the following word of the definite article in all its forms, the subject-pronoun il, the pronouns me, te, se, le, la, en, and i, the conjunctions si and et, and the prepositions à, de (often with the contracted definite article, -l), en, and entre. Moreover, such monosyllables are actually important grammatically and semantically in the 15 Peter Rickard, “Système ou arbitraire? Quelques réflexions sur la soudure des mots dans les manuscrits français du moyen âge,” Romania 103 (1982): 484.

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phrase, and medieval scribal usage is at the root of such modern formations as delà, dedans, encontre, lendemain, jamais, désormais, pourquoi, and so on. Rickard’s data, presented in thirteen pages of tables, is based on both prose and verse manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but unfortunately, he draws no conclusions concerning its significance except for the evident importance of the brevity of the first element. More recently, Nelly Andrieux-Reix and Simone Monsonégo have re-opened the dossier, taking as their point of departure the (understandable) failure of text-editors to reproduce this aspect of the medieval mise en texte.16 It is clear that while the frequency and nature of word-separation varies from manuscript to manuscript, its recurrence and density is such that we must go beyond the mere perception of it and attempt to discern the possible reasons for its presence. After all, although there is a certain automatism about the copying process, scribes must have had to choose how to arrange words within the line and where to place blank spaces between letters. I shall not repeat Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo’s data here, but the sequences discerned usually consist of either two or three elements, beginning with either a preposition (+ substantive or adjective, adverb, definite article, or pronoun), a definite article (+ substantive or adjective), or an object pronoun (+ verb or another object pronoun); various other diverse sequences also occur.17 In essence, these were also Rickard’s findings. Many factors determine this aspect of the mise en texte, such as the nature of the exemplar, possible writing from dictation, scribal training and procedures common to a particular workshop, and general concern with the aesthetic appearance of the page. The agglutination or affixing of many monosyllables (including prepositions, conjunctions, and various kinds of particles) to the word following them was common in Latin script before the mid eleventh century and remained so in vernacular languages until the end of the Middle Ages.18 While the practice is bound up with grammatical notions of enclisis and proclisis,19 equally important is scribal awareness of 16 Nelly Andrieux-Reix and Simone Monsonégo, “Écrire des phrases au moyen âge: matériaux et premières réflexions pour une étude des segments graphiques observés dans des manuscrits français médiévaux,” Romania 115 (1997): 289. Cf. also their “Les unités graphiques du français médiéval: mots et syntagmes, des représentations mouvantes et graphiques,” Langue française 119 (septembre 1998): 30–51. Of the material analysed in both articles, the following manuscripts are relevant to my purposes: BnF, fr 368, 774, 1448, and 24369–70; Milan, Trivulziana 1025; London, BL, Royal 20 D XI (all Guillaume cycle); BnF fr 2233 (Aiquin); Ars. 3351 (Garin de Monglane). The choice of solely epic manuscripts is perhaps unfortunate since particular metrical conditions would seem to govern the mise en texte of the chansons de geste, as I suggest below. 17 Some examples, nevertheless: aterre, emprison, altens, alancelot, agrant, amoy, ancelui, avostre, parleurs, atoutes, demaintenant, liemperere, lesvalees, liautres, lapute, medist, enfont, sifu, sifolemt, sibele, trestout, site, quefera, kila, nessai, neles, nevencus, adit, aige, distil, jesai, jeli, seil, alevous, beausire, sacite, nostresire, cecuit, etil, eteus, lanous, alachiere, delamer, dunepart, delameie, demacort, aupardevant, dorfin, lalevaurrai, silentendi, segenerai, gemenvois, quelecerf, etdelance, nelifu, senissent, cestassavoir. Cf. also André Eskénazi, “ ‘Variantes graphiques’ dans Guillaume de Dole,” Revue de linguistique romane 60 (1996): 147–83. 18 Saenger, Space Between Words 31–2. 19 “Enclisis” is generally defined as the attaching of a reduced form of a word (often a pronoun or an article) to the end of another existing word and “proclisis,” the attaching of a reduced form of a

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the use to which a manuscript may be put, and of the nature and abilities of the probable intended reader. If word-separation and clustering are produced during the writing process, they are equally inseparable from the act of reading, which they both facilitate and, to a degree, condition. As is the case with abbreviations, medieval practice with respect to word or phrase-separation presents an obstacle for the modern reader of manuscripts. The persistence and frequency of word-grouping would tend to suggest that it did not constitute such a problem for the medieval readers for whom a particular manuscript was intended, indeed, it would be perverse to conclude that scribes and makers of manuscripts in general provided their customers with “user-hostile” texts. In short, if word-clusters are present, they must serve a purpose, and a purpose which neutralizes their compromising of the reading process. AndrieuxReix and Monsonégo suggest that one possibility (that I have also argued in connection with abbreviations) is reader-familiarity with the text,20 and it may be true that experienced reciters, having performed a text a number of occasions, knew the work well enough to be able to anticipate it to a certain extent and use the abbreviated and clustered text in order to generate the full version. This perspective, however, while it may suggest how a medieval reader dealt with clustering cognitively, does not actually explain why it is there in the first place. If those manuscripts in which clustering is the most frequent and consistent were originally intended for recitation, then the kind of segmentation observed by Rickard and Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo may also be an aid to oral delivery and performance. Like some forms of punctuation discussed in the next section of this paper, the clustering seems to correspond not simply to grammatical units but also to rhythmic and prosodic ones.21 As such, paying attention to wordseparation can be an invaluable aid in the reconstruction of the articulated rhythms of both Old French verse and prose. The examples given below (in which I have resolved the abbreviations), have been chosen essentially at random. Ensin lojor tuit laseurent Et affichent forment et jurent Que loutraitor lirandront Oujamais terre netendront Et lirois partote bretaigne Fait crier quenus niremaigne Qui puisse armes porter enost Qui apres lui nenaille tost Tote bretaigne est esmeue Onques tex oz nefu veue Com lirois artus assambla A lesmovoir desnes sambla Quenlamer fust trestoz limondes word (often an article or preposition) to the beginning of another existing word. In the vernacular, these features are especially important in the context of developing notions of grammar. Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo pay particular attention to the issue in “Les unités graphiques.” 20 Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo, “Écrire des phrases” 317. 21 Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo, “Écrire des phrases” 328.

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Que niparoient nes les ondes Siestoient desnes covertes Ceste guerre sera acertes Enlamer sanbla porlanoise Que trestote bretaigne envoise Jasont totes lesnes passees Et lesgenz quisont amassees Sevont logent par lorivage Alixandre vint en corage Que il aille louroi proier Que il louface chevalier Car sejamais doit lox aquerre Illaquerra enceste terre Sescompaignons avoc lui prant Sicom savolentez lesprant Defaire ce quila panse Au tref louroi ensont ale (Cligès, Annonay fragments 4)22

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.

Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès. Annonay Fragments (by permission of Maître Louis Boissonnet). 22 Reproduced by Albert Pauphilet in Chrestien de Troyes, Le manuscrit d’Annonay (Paris, Droz, 1934).

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Paris toudis seconbatoit Acels degresse contendoit Alarc lesbersse .iij. et .iij. Et alespee demanois Molt enocit molt enmehaigne Devant lui chaient enlaplaigne Parlaforce dessiens lescace Grant perte iadaus enlaplace Senefuissent atheniois Durement perdisent gregois Mais socorus lesont sansfaille Ciparot sifiere bataille Dont .viic. chevaliers eslis Orent sanglans costes et pis (Roman de Troie, BN fr 1450, fol. 63va) Illesgarde voit .i. castiel Onques nushon nevit sibiel Molt fu licastiaus bienasis Molt ert rices etplentevis Unsbras demer entoir coroit Qui tote lavile ataingnoit Dautrepart lagransmers estoit Qui aupie delcastiel feroit Molt iavoit rice castiel Limur enfurent rice et biel Dont licastiaus tosclos estoit Nois blanceflors neriens qui soit Nest pas sibel conlimur sont Qui tot entor lavile vont Deblanc mabre limur estoient Qui lecastiel entor clooient Sihals conpooit uns arc traire Nus hon nepooit engien faire Qui peust ascretials tocier Traire ni puet en nelancier Et tant estoient limur halt Quilnedoutoient nul asaut (Le bel inconnu, Chantilly, Musée Condé 472, fol. 140ra)

In addition to the agglutination and grammatical conjoining visible in all of the above examples, there is a clear tendency to form bisyllabic groups where this aids the rhythm of the octosyllable. This is generally true of the disposition on the line of verse narrative in this dominant metre, but the mise en texte of the chanson de geste raises other issues, particularly relating to versification. While prosodic matters undoubtedly determine to some degree the clustering of words in octosyllables, they are quite crucial to the majority of Old French epics, whose rhythm and local meaning depend largely on the interplay between the two hemistichs of a decasyllable and between the parts of the hemistich. In practice, word-clusters never violate the cæsura. When present, they there69

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fore constitute a visible form of the rhythmical pause in the middle of a line, supporting that provided by the blank space (justified or not) at its end. The space between clusters at the cæsura therefore also functions as a kind of punctuation which on occasions, as we shall see shortly, is supported by other means. I give below two samples of clustered text from manuscripts of chansons de geste, again chosen more or less at random, and again with abbreviations expanded.23 Biaufiz garin nelerai nevosdie Endroit devos letienge a folie Et aorgoil et agrant estoutie Quiatandez denerbone partie Janenavroiz vaillisant unealie Nonpas porce quenaiez grant baillie Et richeterre et moult grant menentie Venez avant sirecevez pavie Ele est vostre oncle savroiz laseignorie Roi boniface serviroiz sanz boidie Carilnot onques nul enfant ensavie Quant il morra lera vos lonbardie Sitandroiz puille cele cite garnie Et lepais deci enromenie Assez avroiz richece (Les Narbonnais, London, BL Royal 20. B. XIX, fol. 67rb) Lidui baron sont alacort venu Devant lasale sont apie descendu Elpales montent ni sont aresteu Rois anseis nesest mie teu Ancois lora doucement respondu Dedamedieu soiez vos asolu Qui vos conduie sainz et hetiez et druz Lorsest montez niaplus atendu Lesmesconvoie quise sont esmeu Voient lirois cele part sont venu Illesaluent dedieuleroi jhesu Congie demandent nisont aresteu (Anseïs de Cartage, Lyon, Palais des Arts 59, fol. 4rb)

It could be argued, of course, that the silent or quiet decipherment of an abbreviated and clustered text by individuals may ultimately be conducive to a more analytical and thoughtful reading which approximates to monastic ruminatio. More likely, however, is the conclusion drawn by Gasparri, Hasenohr, and Ruby that frequent segmentation of the line constituted yet another obstacle to medieval readers, as it does to their modern counterparts, increasing the duration of the cognitive process and reducing the field of peripheral vision. In these conditions,

23 It should be noted that “schwa” (g) does not count before a consonant at the cæsura, but can best be regarded as an extension of the syllable providing rhythmical variation.

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professionals are more likely to have been able to produce a more fluent oral performance, while amateurs would likely have read haltingly and jerkily.24 And while it is impossible to gauge the degree of ease and fluency with which professionals read highly abbreviated and clustered text, it is possible that some may have needed to rehearse by prælectio (preparatory parsing and interpretation) before a performance. Whatever it may best be termed—word-clustering, word-blocks, segmentation, agglutination, aeration—the joining of letters across the boundaries of what we now recognize as individual words is an important and significant feature of the Old French mise en page before the fifteenth century. Further investigation could perhaps best be carried out on a manuscript-by-manuscript basis, looking for principles of usage within and between the work of individual scribes, perhaps between different literary genres. The variations discernible do arise because of the lack of a grammar of the early vernacular, as Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo have pointed out.25 Yet, despite the variations, frequency of usage does constitute a sort of norm in terms of length and the kind of parts of speech which may and may not be conjoined is a segment. One of the prime determinants of the norm is the rhythm of Old French as an oral medium. If word-separation facilitates silent, individual reading, then the clustering surely both stimulates ruminatio (pondering of meaning) and facilitates oral performance. I would make some final caveats concerning the interpretation of this feature of the mise en texte that I have just discussed. Although I am convinced that it is significant for many reasons (and particularly for reading aloud and oral performance), its use is not always consistent within a single manuscript, or even within the work of a single scribe. Much of the discrepancy can surely be explained by scribal training and the kind of texts which scribes are accustomed to copying. If one scribe who customarily copies Latin moonlights on part of a vernacular codex, the rest of which is copied by others who work mainly on the vernacular, it is not difficult to understand how variations may arise in different parts of the manuscript. I believe this is significant with regard to word-clustering, and it may also be in connection with abbreviation and punctuation, when present. It is dangerous to impose a system on material that is not entirely systematic and which does not proceed from systematic premisses, but word-clustering is sufficiently widespread in manuscripts of Old French literature as to require us to take its implications for the oral performance of the verse texts they contain with the utmost seriousness.

24 Cf. Françoise Gasparri, Geneviève Hasenohr, and Christine Ruby, “De l’écriture à la lecture: réflexion sur les manuscrits d’Erec et Enide,” Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1993) 135. 25 Andrieux-Reix and Monsonégo, “Les unités graphiques” 49.

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Erotic Reading in the Middle Ages: Performance and Re-performance of Romance1 Evelyn Birge Vitz

In Orality and Performance in Early French Romance I examined at length one important type of performance of narrative in the Middle Ages: recitation of verse romances from memory by minstrels and other performers.2 Here I will take up a very different sort of performance of romance, but one which was no less significant to medieval culture: erotic reading as a performance mode. First, some definitions: The term erotic refers both to the reading material, which is about love—typically drawn from romance—and to the effect of the reading, which results in the formation of a couple, and frequently in sexual intercourse. Thus, one might also term this an erotogenic reading; it was a sort of medieval soft pornography (pornographic in that it was sexually stimulating; soft in that it was romantic rather than obscene or hard-edged). As to performance: I am inclined to define this term very broadly, as encompassing any fashion in which verbal/literary material is actualized; thus, any and all modes by which works are brought to life and drawn to the attention of an audience can be called performance (this would include private, silent reading). In these pages, however, by the terms performance and re-performance, I especially wish to emphasize the voiced and physical elements of reading aloud, as well as the readers’ imitation of the characters whose stories they read, and then reenact in their own lives. Thus, my concerns here are with the act of reading in its physical, dramatic and interpersonal aspects—as performance in quite a strong sense of that word. In erotic reading, the voiced and embodied performance of the narrative text moves the inscribed readers, who identify with the characters, to imitate immediately the lovers whose story they have just read. The prevalence of erotic reading appears to have promoted the success of the romance genre in the Middle Ages. It is also true, however, that some authors

1 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1999, and as lectures at Rutgers University and Princeton University in fall 2003. A slightly modified version of this essay has appeared in French under the title “La lecture érotique au Moyen Age et la performance du roman,” Poétique 137 (2004): 35–51. 2 Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999).

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expressed ethical concern about this kind of reading as performance since it was often associated with immoral behavior—specifically, extra-marital sex. Three scenes exemplify the major elements of erotic reading as performance. A passage from the thirteenth-century romance Floris et Liriopé by Robert de Blois contains virtually all of the key elements of erotic reading: a couple read aloud to each other alone, away from the court in a locus amoenus; the man and woman—equal partners—read from a love story found in a romance; they read with feeling, and their reading of the story inspires them to make love on the spot: 955

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Ce fu en mai, ou tens serain, Les .II. conpaignes main a main S’asirent sous .I. olivier. Biaus fu li leus por soulacier, Desous vers, desoure floris; Li rosignors biaus et jolis En chantant les somont d’amer. Or ne doit nuns Flori blamer, S’il quiert de son mal medecine. Souef vers la bele s’encline, Doucement l’estraint a .II. bras, En mi la bouche par solas La baise .VII. fois par loisir. Li grans doucors les fait fremir, Si sont andui mout abahi De la dousor k’il ont senti. .I. romans aportei avoient, Qu’eles mout volentiers lisoient, Por ce ke tous d’amors estoit; Et au comencement avoit, Coment Piramus et Thysbe Furent de Babiloine ne, Coment li enfant s’entramerent, Coment lor pere destornerent Les mariage des enfans, Coment en avint duez si grans, Q’en une nuit furent ocis, Andui an une tombe mis. Qant ont ceste aventure lite, Floris, cui ele mout delite, Dist: “Dame, certes, se i’estoie Piramus, ie vos ameroie, Et si vos jur par toz les sains, Que ie ne vos aim mie moins Que cil fist la bele Tysbe; Or me dites vostre pense.” (lines 955–90)3

3 Robert de Blois, Floris et Liriope: altfranzösischer Roman des Robert de Blois, ed. Wolfram V. Zingerle (1891; Wiesbaden, Martin Sandig, 1968). My translation.

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[It was in May, in the gentle season. The two companions hand in hand Sat down under an olive tree. It was a beautiful place to take pleasure, Under the greenery, on the flowers; The beautiful and pretty nightingale With his singing calls them to love. No one should blame Floris, If he seeks a remedy to his pain. Gently he leans toward the beauteous one, Gently he holds her tight in his two arms. On her mouth for delight He kisses her seven times, now that it is possible. The great sweetness makes them tremble, They are both greatly taken aback By the sweetness that they have felt. They had brought a romance with them, That they read willingly, Because it was all about love; And it had at the beginning How Piramus and Thisbe Were born in Babylon, How the children loved each other, How their father refused The marriage of the children, How so great a grief came of this That one night they were killed. They were both put into a single tomb. When they have read this adventure, Floris, whom it greatly delighted, Said: “My lady, if I were Piramus, I would love you, And I swear by all the saints, That I do not love you less Than he did the beautiful Thisbe; Now tell me what you think.”]

Liriopé responds that she feels the same way—and is soon pregnant with a son whom they name Narcissus. The couple uses their mutual reading of the romance for romantic and sexual inspiration. The man and woman are walking alone together, hand in hand. A nightingale by his song “summons [them] to love” (line 961). Floris kisses Liriopé seven times; they are both taken aback—“abahi”—by the sweetness they feel. At this point, however, there is a break in the narrative. It is as though the lovers are represented as so overwhelmed by beauty and delight that they do not know what to do, how to move forward amorously. But the pair has brought along with them a romance which they “read willingly” because it is “all about love” (lines 971–3). Floris and Liriopé then re-enact—re-perform—key parts of the romance of 75

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Piramus and Thisbe. The story of the two literary lovers thus functions here not merely as an exemplary tale in some rather general sense, but in a more precise and persuasive fashion; the Ovidian lovers provide models of feeling and of behavior to Floris and Liriopé. If the invitation to love provided by the nightingale was somehow too vague to be useful, the story of Piramus and Thisbe provides concrete inspiration.4 After Floris has read, or heard, about Piramus and Thisbe and their love, he makes his declaration of love to Liriopé: “Lady, if I were / Piramus . . .” (lines 985–6). Our second scene, from Dante’s Inferno (c.1314), presents a similar picture, except that here the reading leads even more clearly and explicitly to re-performance of the story being read. This is one of the most famous reading scenes in all of medieval literature, where Francesca da Rimini tells Dante, the pilgrim, how erotic reading brought her and Paolo Malatesta to hell: 124

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“Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange et dice. Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.” Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade io venni men così com’ io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade. (V, lines 124–42)5 [“Yet if you long so much to understand the first root of our love, then I shall tell my tale to you as one who weeps and speaks. One day, for pleasure,*6 we read

4 Although Floris and Liriopé do not feel threatened by the suicide of their models, in the romance Claris et Laris (late thirteenth century), early on the hero reads the sad love stories of famous lovers and decides that he will not subject himself to such suffering. Soon afterward, however, he falls in love: Li romans de Claris et Laris, ed. Johann Alton (1847; Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1966) lines 162ff. Perhaps love stories in books are understood as possessing a sort of infectious character. 5 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, ed. and trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York, Bantam, 1980). 6 I have changed the translation here and below, as asterisked, to keep the text closer to the original Italian.

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of Lancelot—how love had overcome him. We were alone, and we suspected nothing. And time and time again that reading led our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale, and yet one point alone defeated us. When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by one who was so true a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, all trembling,* kissed my mouth. A Gallehault indeed, that book and he who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.” And while one spirit said these words to me, the other wept, so that—because of pity— I fainted, as if I had met my death. And then I fell as a dead body falls.]

These lovers do not merely take inspiration from the story they read for pleasure—“per diletto”; the very performance of reading aloud provides sexual stimulation to them. It is explicitly after they read how “the desired smile” was kissed by Lancelot, “so true a lover,” that Paolo, trembling, kissed Francesca. Leading up to that kiss, we have an emphasis on the parts of the body engaged in the reading. The passage in the romance about the kiss “defeated” them; as they read aloud, using their eyes, mouth and lips, Paolo was moved to kiss Francesca. Thus, Paolo was preoccupied not just with the body of the person he was reading or hearing about, but also with the body of the person he was looking at and reading with, and with his own body. Lips which are described as kissing inspired the lips of the reader and listener to imitate that act of kissing. The reading performance inspired the sexually aroused couple to re-enact the scene. Romance provided, here as in Floris et Liriopé, an exemplary, and indeed physically arousing, story of the pleasures of love, and more specifically, of sexual union. But here the re-performance is seen as morally wrong; moreover, it proved fatal. Francesca blames the book and its author as matchmakers, comparing them to “Galeotto” [Gallehault] who acted as the go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere in the Prose Lancelot.7 Dante represents himself as sympathizing with the story of Francesca, fainting from pity and identification. But he also apparently feels a sense of guilt at his own complicity in this sort of sin. He makes it clear that this adulterous love was sinful: the lovers are in hell, having been killed in flagrante delicto. Dante is surely warning his audience, and himself, away from the practice of erotic reading of romance, with its dangerous temptations. Whereas Robert of Blois had expressed his support for the lovers (“Or ne doit nuns Flori blamer” [line 962]), here, Dante overshadows the pleasurable impact of erotic reading with moral judgment.8 7 There appears to be an association to things French in the phenomenon of erotic literacy, perhaps because of the idea—indeed, the fact!—that love romances originally came largely from France and Anglo-Norman England. These Italian lovers read from a love scene from a French romance, as do lovers in German romances. 8 With regard to the figure of Galeotto, it is interesting to note that Boccaccio gave the

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Much of the abundant scholarship on this passage concerns issues of “misreading” and “intertextuality.” But as for the charge that Paola and Francesca “misread” the romance of Lancelot—that they did not read far enough (“That day we read no more”), or carefully enough:9 they would have had to read very far and very carefully indeed in the Prose Lancelot—farther and more carefully than anyone has ever been able to read that particular romance—in order to find adulterous love condemned. Indeed, they would have had to read a different book to find that message.10 If Francesca and Paolo were reading for erotic diletto, that is precisely what characterized much of romance reading. It was at once romantic and sexually stimulating, which is of course why it excited immediate reperformance.11 There is a highly conscious and energetic use of erotic reading to inspire immediate and repeated re-performance by youthful lovers in Floire et Blanchefleur, an anonymous early thirteenth-century romance. A boy (Floire) and girl (Blanchefleur) have been raised together. Although they already love each other, their parents disapprove of their match. Both children are highly literate, having been educated by a private tutor from infancy: 229

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En aprendre avoient boin sens, du retenir millor porpens. Livres lisoient paienors u ooient parler d’amors. En çou forment se delitoient, es engiens d’amor qu’il trovoient. Cius lires les fist molt haster en autre sens d’aus entramer que de l’amor de noureture

subtitle—rich in ambiguous meaning—of Prencipe Galeotto [Prince Gallehault] to his Decameron. (See, e.g., Robert Hollander, “The Proem of the Decameron: Boccaccio between Ovid and Dante,” Miscellanea di Studi Danteschi: in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, eds. Alfonso Paolella, Vincenzo Placella, Giovanni Turco [Naples, Federico and Ardia, 1993] 423–38.) Boccaccio had, moreover, already shown himself to be interested in the power of love reading, as intensified by Cupid, to arouse passionate desire. In his Filocolo, Venus sends her son to kindle more flames in the boy and girl who have already grown to love each other as children by reading “the holy book of Ovid.” (Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney with Thomas G. Bergin [New York, Garland, 1985] 46ff.) The Filocolo was inspired from the French story Floire et Blanchefleur, on which more below. 9 Mark Balfour presents this view in “Francesca da Rimini and Dante’s Women Readers,” Women, the Book and the Worldly, eds. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1995) 71–83. 10 In the Vulgate Cycle, only The Quest of the Holy Grail truly condemns adultery—not the Lancelot itself. 11 A number of medieval images show scenes of characters reading aloud from versions of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Michael Camille has noted that looking at pictures of kissing in books “could have an exciting, inciting effect upon those who read them.” (“Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral,” Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, eds. Daniel Poirion and Nancy Freeman Regalado, Spec. issue of Yale French Studies (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991): 164. My emphasis here is not just on looking in images in books but on the act of reading stories about love and re-enacting the roles and scenes from narratives.

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qui lor avoit esté a cure. Ensamle lisent et aprendent, a la joie d’amor entendent. Quant il repairent de l’escole, li uns baise l’autre et acole. Ensamble vont, ensamble vienent, e lor joie d’amor maintienent. (lines 229–42b)12 [In learning they had good sense, in remembering, even greater capacity. They read the books of pagans where they heard talk about love. In this they greatly delighted, in the games [tricks] of love that they found there. This reading made them hasten to love each other in a new way because from their childhood love had been their primary concern. They read and learn together, they put their thoughts to the joy of love. When they come home from school, one kisses and hugs the other. They come and go together and maintain their joy of love.]

Ethical issues are present here (the parents have forbidden the love relationship), but the narrator expresses approval of the lovers’ activity; in this regard, he is like Robert de Blois, unlike Dante. The books the lovers read are not specified as romances but contain stories about love, and come apparently from the “books of pagans” (line 231)—perhaps a reference to the romance of Énéas, or to Ovidian material such as Piramus and Thisbe. These works by pagans are perhaps to be understood as unfettered by Christian morality in the love stories they provide for imitation and re-performance by exuberant young lovers. Both the performance exemplarity of the love stories and the equal role of the sexes receive explicit expression here. While in Floris et Liriopé and the Inferno we saw couples in the process of formation, in Floire et Blancheflor an alreadyconstituted couple takes further amorous inspiration from their reading, practicing what they have read about, as homework. Floire et Blancheflor are equal partners in the activity; they are doing this together, not one dragging the other against his or her will. Such parity between the sexes has been the case in each of our three examples. More precisely, women are by no means represented as passive figures; they are no less active, skilled readers, and lovers, than men. It may be that we are to understand that in romance reading—unlike many other life activities in the medieval period—there was a level playing field between the sexes. These three passages represent erotic reading as performance in its fullest and 12

Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris, Champion, 1980). My translation.

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most complete form—and as associated with prompt re-performance of the story by the readers. Reference to love-stimulating or erotogenic reading however, can also be found in attenuated and fragmentary forms, less firmly tied to immediate re-performance of the story. Such reading also provides love stimulation, but it acts on the erotic imagination rather than on the body in an immediate and compelling sense. Characters currently without a lover may be shown reading from a romance, hoping soon to be lovers themelves and to be in a position to re-enact the love story. Re-performance of the love material is thus deferred but nonetheless anticipated. A number of interesting passages show one or more members of one sex reading romances in order to learn how to love members of the opposite sex; this is a sort of literary apprenticeship in love. A good illustration comes from the late-thirteenth-century Occitan romance Flamenca. Here, young female characters are shown as habitually reading aloud to each other, in the absence of any males. They read from a romance about love—indeed the very book they read is Floire et Blancheflor! Their reading is shown as preparing them to become lovers themselves. In one scene, two friends help the heroine, Flamenca, practice performing the liturgical kiss of peace on a book. The kiss of peace was an important moment in the medieval Mass where members of the congregation exchanged a highly ritualized kiss by kissing a sacred book, each person in turn; Flamenca needs to practice this sort of kiss because she and a young man named Guillem de Nevers are about to begin a cautious but passionate love dialogue as they kiss the book in Mass (Flamenca and Guillem must be careful because her jealous husband stands right next to her in church). Thus, erotic use of works other than romance is possible; even religious reading and liturgical books can become erotically charged. Flamenca says to Alice: 4481

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“Vai sus, Alis, et contrafai que.m dones pas si con il fai; pren lo romanz de Blancaflor.” Alis si leva tost, e cor vas una taula on estava cel romans ab qu’ella mandava qu’il dones pas, e pois s’en ven a si dons, c’a penas si ten de rire quan vi ques Alis a contrafar ap pauc non ris. Lo romanz ausa davaus destre e fa.l biaissar a senestre, e quan fes parer que.l baises il dis: “Que plans?” (lines 4481–94)13 [“Get up, Alice, and make as if you are giving me the peace, like him [Guillem]; bring The Romance of Blancheflor.” Alice got up in haste and ran

The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. E. D. Blodgett (New York, Garland, 1995).

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toward a table where the book lay from which she was told to give the peace, and then she drew near her lady, who hardly could keep from laughing when she saw Alice on the brink of laughter give an imitation. She raised the romance toward the right and leaned down to the left, and when she acted out her kissing it, she said: “Why grieve?”]

Here, re-performance of the love story of Blancheflor and Floire takes place, but there is a time lapse between the girls’ reading (which we do not actually witness in the romance but are invited to presuppose) and the re-performance. First, the young women read aloud to each other, without lovers. Then, they use the book—both the story and the physical object—as they rehearse for their own love affairs; Flamenca practices kissing this book which is associated with love and eroticism as she prepares to begin kissing her lover in an adulterous affair. Soon her friends will also take lovers as well.14 In Flamenca a band of young female romance readers prepare to re-enact the love material at the earliest opportunity. But scenes with erotic reading by solitary would-be lovers, with deferred re-performance, are more common. For example, in Jean Froissart’s Espinette amoureuse (c.1369) erotogenic reading is first carried on by a young man alone, then, somewhat later, is fulfilled or acted out in the narrative. Two scenes are especially relevant. First, the narrator tells how he used to read romances as a young man. His reading set his amorous imagination to work: 309

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Et quant li temps venoit divers Qui nous est appellés yvers, Qu’il faisoit lait et plouvieus, Par quoi je ne fuisse anoieus, A mon quois, pour esbas êslire, Ne vosisse que rommans lire. Especiaument les traitiers D’amours lisoie volentiers, Car je concevoie en lisant Toute cose qui m’iert plaisant (lines 309–18)15 [And when the season was unstable,

14 For Jean-Michel Caluwé, Floire et Blancheflor provide models of behavior for Flamenca and her friends, as for Guillem: “modèles actantiels consacrés par la fiction.” (“Flamenca et l’enjeu lyrique. La médiation de Jaufré Rudel et de Peire Rogier,” Contacts de langues, de civilisations et intertextualité [IIIème Congrés International de l’association internationale d’études occitanes], ed. Gérard Gouiran, vol. 3 [Montpellier, Centre d’études occitanes de l’Université de Montpellier, 1990] 849). 15 Jean Froissart, L’Espinette amoureuse, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Paris, Klincksieck, 1972). My translation.

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Which we call winter, When it was ugly and rainy, So that I would not be bored [or irritated], In my leisure, to find enjoyment, I wanted nothing but to read romances. Especially treatises Of love did I read willingly, For I conceived in reading Everything that was pleasing to me]

The love stimulated narrator soon meets a young woman who shares his taste, for she too is a reader of love romances. The girl’s overt romance reading indicates to the male spectator that she is open to love. 696

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Droitement sus l’eure de prime S’esbatoit une damoiselle Au lire .I. rommanc. Moi vers elle M’en ving et li dis doucement: “Par son nom ce rommanc comment L’appellés vous, ma belle et douce?” Elle cloÿ atant la bouce, Sa main dessus le livre adoise; Lors respondi comme courtoise Et me dist: “De Cleamodés Est appellés. Il fu bien fes Et dittés amoureusement. Vous l’orés, si dirés comment Vous plaira dessus vostre avis.” (lines 696–709) [Right at the hour of prime A young lady was enjoying herself Reading a romance. I came toward her And I said to her gently: “What is the name of This romance, my beautiful and sweet one?” She closed her mouth then. She placed her hand on the book; Then she answered me in a courteous fashion And said to me: “It is said to be About Cléomadés. It was well done And spoken lovingly. You will hear it, and will tell me how It pleases you, in your opinion.”]

Her mouth and hand emphasize clearly, if discreetly, the physical character of her reading aloud, and its implicitly interpersonal quality as well: her mouth is open (while she reads), then she closes it, then again (implicitly) opens it again to speak with the narrator. She places her hand on the book, which she will soon share with the narrator. We are aware in this scene not just of her book but also of her body; the two are in a metonymic relationship. Her reading combines private 82

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enjoyment with an invitation; she offers to read the romance aloud to the young man. The two of them then form a couple, reading together—and this passage turns into a more full blown scene of erotic reading. Thus, the private reading of romance by each of these two individuals was already erotogenic, and once they met and read aloud together, they began to re-enact the love stories from which they had been reading. The erotic character of reading by a solitary reader may not be explicitly acknowledged in a text, but may nonetheless be clear. In particular, we need to recognize the importance of the erotic dimensions of the body even in reading scenes where the reader currently has no lover. In this light, let us take a new look at a scene usually understood simply as a typical representation of vernacular literacy. It is the single most famous reading scene in French medieval literature, that in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain ou le chevalier au lion where the hero comes upon a young woman reading aloud to her parents from a romance: 5356

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Mesire Yvains el vergier entre Et aprés lui toute sa route; Apuyé voit deseur son coute Un prodomme qui se gesoit Seur .i. drap de soie, et lisoit Une puchele devant li En un rommans, ne sai de cui. Et pour le rommans escouter S’i estoit venue acouter Une dame, et estoit sa mere. Et li prodons estoit sen pere. Et se pooient esjoïr Mout de li veoir et oïr, Car il n’avoient plus d’enfans. Ne n’avoit pas .xvii. ans, Et s’estoit si bele et si gente Qu’en li servir meïst s’entente Li Dix d’amours, s’i le veïst; Ne ja amer ne la feïst Autrui, s’a lui meïsmes non. (lines 5356–75)16 [My lord Yvain enters into the garden And after him his companions; He sees leaning on his side A nobleman who was lying On a silken cloth, and before him A maiden was reading A romance, I don’t know about whom. And to listen to the romance A lady who was her mother Was there too, leaning on her elbows,

16 Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), Chrétien de Troyes: Romans, ed. and trans. David F. Hult (Paris, Lettres Gothiques-Poche, 1994). My translation.

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And the gentleman was her father. And they rejoiced Greatly to see and hear her, For they had no other children. She was not yet seventeen years old, And she was so beautiful and so noble That the God of Love himself would have Wished to serve her, if he had seen her; Nor would he ever have let her Love anyone but himself.]

This young girl is ostensibly reading to her parents who lie near her on silken sheets on the grass, but Yvain is there too. He is a listener and a spectator. This is an erotic temptation scene for him, a test. Will he fall in love with this lovely reader and marry a new wife? Will he take the place of the parents on that beautiful bed in the garden? The maiden is dangled in front of Yvain as a love object; she is so beautiful that the God of Love himself would have fallen in love with her, and if he had seen her he would have wanted her for himself. It is worth remembering that Yvain fell in love with his wife, Laudine, while she was holding a book in her hand, looking at or reading the psalter as she grieved over the loss of her first husband. (The structural parallel here may suggest that all solitary female readers are presented as desirable and available: a curious possibility, which bears on the parallels between erotic and devotional reading.) It is to Yvain’s credit as a married hero that he resists this temptation. True, the girl is not ostensibly reading to a lover, but couple formation is unmistakably at issue; the girl’s parents—and presumably the girl herself—expect Yvain to fall in love with her. Indeed, her father is angry and insulting when Yvain refuses to marry his daughter. This time, however, because of the Yvain’s heroic loyalty to his wife, the new couple does not form. This famous passage from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, like that from Dante’s Inferno, points to a remarkable fact: most of the passages of secular reading in medieval literature, including the most famous scenes of all, are scenes of erotic reading. Characters read, and are drawn to re-perform in their own (fictional) lives, the stories they have read. In contrast, we find in medieval works very few scenes of non-erotic secular reading. As we look at these scenes of erotic reading in the larger context of medieval performance, we must ask the question: What accounts for the differences between erotic reading and other kinds of performance? Several features make erotic reading different from other kinds of medieval performance of narrative. First, the reading is private, not public. Second, the readers are not professionals, but ordinary men and women. Third, certain body parts receive clear emphasis: the eyes, mouth and hands (in performances by professional entertainers, there is no such stress on those body parts). Fourth, the works read tend to be specifically romances, as opposed to a broader sprectrum of works. Finally, narrators may raise ethical issues in their account of the erotic performance of reading. The issue of public versus private space is important. Throughout the thirteenth 84

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century, professional minstrels often performed romances in public settings. The numerous scenes of and references to minstrel performance of romance (and other works) suggest that public, professional performances were the norm. From the mid-thirteenth century on, trained readers—“prelectors”17—read aloud from verse and prose romances (and other works) in public. In contrast, erotic reading took place in private, not in a court hall; it involved an intimate viewing of the narrative material—frequently by a man and woman who already had love on their mind. Erotic readers were typically men and women of the nobility—lovers and would-be lovers—rather than professional entertainers or readers. Though professional performers certainly made extensive use of their bodies as a whole, erotic reading threw the spotlight on the body parts by which intimacy is first established: eyes, lips and mouth and hands, and thus, implicitly, on the inner response or arousal, understood as psychological and physiological. Both the act of erotic reading itself and the literary scenes on which it focused attention emphasized the art of love; readers sought models to make them want to love, to teach them how to love, and often, more specifically, how to go about making love—how to woo. Erotic reading is also associated with love letters and with the lai, but romance appears historically to have had an especially marked relationship to erotic reading which constituted a particular kind of performance of a work, one with powerful affective, physical and interpersonal implications. The emotional power of erotic reading as performance may help us understand at least in part why romance was so successful a genre in the Middle Ages. Erotic reading was one way of performing romances. Moreover, this performance mode, to the extent that it became widely favored, may well have promoted the composition of new romances designed precisely for this kind of performance. One might call this medieval literary niche marketing: the production of romances intended for erotogenic reading by couples and would-be lovers. Some romances may owe their very existence to the practice of erotic reading. One such work is Thomas’s Tristan, written in the late twelfth century. Thomas provides not one but many models for lovers, for not only are Tristan and Iseut lovers, all the characters in his romance love, in different ways: Mark, Iseut aux blanches mains, Tristan le nain, Kaherdin, Brangien, Cariadoc. Thomas says at the end of his work: 38 40

Tumas fine ci sun escrit: A tuz amanz saluz i dit, As pensis e as amerus, As emvius, as desirus, As enveisiez e as purvers, (A tuz cels) ki orunt ces vers

17 On the former issue, see Orality and Literacy. On prelectors, see Joyce Coleman’s Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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45

50

55

38 40

45

50

55

(S)i dit n’ai a tuz lor voleir, (Le) milz ai dit a mun poeir, (E dit ai) tute la verur, (Si cum) jo pramis al primur. E diz e vers i ai retrait: Pur essample issi ai fait Pur l’estorie embelir, Que as amanz deive plaisir, E que par lieus poissent troveir Choses u se puissent recorder: Aveir em poissent grant confort, Encuntre change, encontre tort, Encuntre paine, encuntre dolur, Encuntre tuiz engins d’amur! (lines 38–57)18 [Thomas finishes here his writing: He gives his salutation to all lovers, To the pensive and to those who are in love, To the envious, to those filled with desire, To the voluptuous and to the perverse, To all those who will hear these lines. If I have not said to everyone what they would have desired, I have done the best I could, I have told all the truth, As I promised at the beginning. And I have composed the words and the verses. I have done this to give models [exempla] And to embellish the story, So that it would please lovers, And so that in places here they might find Things in which they could be reminded of themselves: That they might find therein great comfort, Against change, against wrongs, Against suffering, against sorrow, Against all the tricks of love!]

Thomas seems to be referring here to the practice of erotic reading, in its more general sense. He speaks to lovers, both to those who have a partner and desire great examples, and to those who are alone and who yearn to love or have suffered loss of love. Thomas’s book is for men and women who want to read, think, remember and fantasize about love—and learn to be lovers. This, it appears, is Thomas’s poetic commission. The same argument can be made for the most important and influential work of the French Middle Ages: Le Roman de la Rose. This romance flows naturally from and feeds into the practice of erotic reading in the general erotogenic sense; this work may well have been designed and intended for such use. The Roman de 18 Tristan et Iseut: Les poèmes français, La saga norroise, eds. and trans. Daniel Lacroix and Philippe Walter (Paris, Lettres Gothiques-Poche, 1989). My translation.

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la Rose provides models and lessons of love, which individual readers and listeners who desire to love should learn by heart and act out—re-perform—in their own lives as soon as they have the opportunity. In Guillaume de Lorris’s text, the God of Love makes his lessons explicit and memory-friendly. This is what lovers do; this is how lovers feel and behave; here are the rules, the models. This work is indeed a “mirror for lovers”—virtually a how-to manual for would-be lovers. As Guillaume says early in his work: “Ce est li romanz de la rose / Ou l’art d’amours est toute enclose” (lines 37–8) [This is the romance of the rose, where the art of love is entirely enclosed].19 Jean de Meun’s continuation of the romance often invites imitation and re-performance even more clearly—certainly more vigorously—than does Guillaume’s part. The figures of Nature and Genius, who lead into the conclusion of the work, strongly exhort the Lover—along with the readers of the book—to continue the human species by reproduction. Genius exhorts: 19703 19705 19703 19705

Metez touz voz outils en oevre: Assez s’eschauffe qui bien oevre, Arez, pour Dieu, baron, arez Et vos lignages reparez! (lines 19703–6) [All of you, put your tools to work: He who works well gets very warm. Plow, for God’s sake, lords, plow And repair your lineage!]

The erotically charged metaphors—the plow, the stylus, the hammer, the pilgrim’s staff—and the visual imagery that Jean uses to recount the taking of the castle and the final plucking/penetration of the rose were intended to serve as sexual stimuli to readers. Let us look back over the issue we have been exploring in these pages, and at its implications. Erotic reading as performance exists at a complex intersection. It is a reminder to us of the fundamental exemplarity of storytelling; the Middle Ages certainly understood that stories—whether they be about saints and other heroes, or lovers—inspired imitation by their audience of listeners or readers. To the extent that erotic reading is to be conceived as a reading practice, this is also an important part of the history of literacy; it is to be compared with devotional, learned, bureaucratic and other types of literacy.20 Its social and cultural importance has not been, and needs to be, more fully explored. 19 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. and trans. Armand Strubel (Paris, Lettres Gothiques-Poche, 1992). My translation. 20 See, for example, Michael T. Clanchy, “Looking Back from the Invention of Printing,” Literacy in Historical Perspective, ed. Daniel P. Resnick (Washington DC, Library of Congress, 1983), 16–17. Clanchy’s category of “vernacular literacy” is very general and needs further elaboration. In fact, vernacular literacy contains all the categories that Latin literacy does, plus—quite probably—some others. Paul Saenger has argued that erotic reading practices arose in the late medieval period with silent reading; see Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 274ff. I hope to have shown that erotic literacy cum performance arose quite a good deal earlier.

Footnote 20 continues on page 88

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Not only is erotic reading one of the important types of medieval literacy, it may have exercised influence on other reading and performance practices—as we are reminded by the audacious scene of the liturgical kiss of peace practiced on a romance in Flamenca. Striking similarities certainly exist between erotic and devotional reading, and this issue also deserves careful study; both kinds of literacy are intended to move the heart toward a love relationship. While devotional reading is, to be sure, spiritual in intent, Christianity is a religion of Incarnation; the body of the Lover and that of the Beloved can never truly be forgotten. As a number of recent studies have shown, many religious texts such as Books of Hours and Psalters contain strongly sexual images in the margins.21 Erotic reading is also, as we have seen at various points, part of the history of women both as readers and as lovers. How many energetically amorous women we have seen reading and being read to in these pages: Blanchefleur, Francesca, Flamenca, the young girl in Yvain, and others. Frequently, they act out the stories of the lovers about whom they read. The practice of erotic reading is a significant piece in the debate over the ethical status of fiction and more generally of profane literature. A further debate which ties these two together is that over the desirability of women’s literacy.22 But most importantly for the purposes of this current volume, erotic reading is important to the history of performance in that it highlights the body, the audience and the powerful interpersonal dimensions of reading together—indeed the strongly seductive power of this activity. The relationship between reader and listener is paramount, for the transmission of the text takes place, not just from one voice but also from one body to another. The issues raised by erotic reading bring home forcefully the fact that reading is performance.

My concerns in this article have been primarily with vernacular reading. But the phenomenon I am examining also appears to have existed in medieval Latin culture. One thinks of the story of Abelard and Heloise! See also Jan Ziolkowski, Alan de Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge, The Medieval Academy of America, 1985); Ziolkowski treats Alan’s use of sexual language in writing about grammar, but some of Alan’s readers may have read him erotically (that is, may have been sexually stimulated by reading him). 21 See, e.g., Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992). 22 The issue of women as readers has tended not to be discussed in detail until a substantially later period. See, e.g., A History of Reading in the West, eds. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Women are discussed as readers of Ovid, but not again, in this book, until the eighteenth century. Some recent volumes focus on women and the book and women as readers—but the books in question tend to be works of learning and devotion, not romances or other profane material. See Women, the Book, and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda’s Conference, 1993, eds. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Woodbridge, Suffolk, D. S. Brewer, 1995) and Woman and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, eds. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (London, British Library, 1997).

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Oral Performance of Written Narrative in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste Marilyn Lawrence

Ysaÿe le Triste, an anonymous French prose romance dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, is both a product and reflection of a literary culture where multiple modes of composition and performance of narrative flourished.1 The romance recounts the intertwined stories of Ysaÿe, the son of Tristan and Yseut; his lover, Marthe; their son, named Marc(!); and Ysaÿe’s dwarf attendant, Tronc (who is actually the fairy-king Oberon transmogrified by a curse). The substantial subplot centered on Marthe (some eighty pages out of André Giacchetti’s 460-page edition, more than one-sixth of Ysaÿe le Triste) is remarkable in its rich representation of the production and performance of both orally composed and written narratives. Marthe is both an accomplished author and a wonderfully skilled performer of narrative. When the adventure-seeking Ysaÿe abandons Marthe, unwed and (unbeknownst to them) pregnant with their son, she copes with her distress by writing and performing narratives. After two years of suffering, Marthe leaves their son and sets off in search of Ysaÿe, traveling for a full fifteen years as a professional performer—first as a male, then as a female minstrel. Along the way, she sings her own narrative compositions. Although her path crosses that of Ysaÿe multiple times, they repeatedly fail to recognize each other. Eventually, at the court of King Estrahier, Marthe overhears two men talking and learns that one is Ysaÿe. She immediately has delivered to him an autobiographical allegorical romance that she has written. When Tronc reads the artfully crafted written narrative aloud to him, Ysaÿe finally recognizes his fiancée and they reunite.2

1 Scholars disagree on the date of Ysaÿe le Triste, but generally estimate it to have been composed between 1350 and the beginning of the fifteenth century; see André Giacchetti, “Ysaÿe le Triste et l’Ecosse,” Bulletin bibliographique de la Société Internationale Arthurienne 15 (1963): 109–19 and 16 (1964): 121, and Ysaÿe le Triste: roman arthurien du Moyen Age tardif, ed. André Giacchetti, Publications de l’Université de Rouen 142 (Rouen, Université de Rouen, 1989) 26. It is preserved today in two manuscripts (Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek 2524 and Gotha, Herzoglich Gothaische Bibliothek 668) and in altered and abridged sixteenth-century editions; see André Giacchetti, “Les éditions d’Isaye le Triste au XVIe siècle,” Bulletin bibliographique de la Société Internationale Arthurienne 12 (1960): 131, and his edition (12–13). 2 For a detailed summary of Ysaÿe le Triste see Julius Zeidler, “Der Prosaroman Ysaÿe le Triste,”

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This subplot focused on Marthe provides a veritable showcase of performances of medieval narrative. It attributes to Marthe over a dozen compositions that are inserted directly into Ysaÿe le Triste and that are represented as read, recited, or sung—sometimes with, and sometimes without, musical accompaniment—either by Marthe herself or by a fellow character.3 The majority of these compositions are narrative songs and lais; her longest, most significant, and final interpolation is her thousand-verse romance. Marthe herself creates every narrative that she recites, sings, or writes down. She composes in both verse and prose, both orally—“dist en chantant cest son nouvel” (122, 153) [she said as she sang this new song]—and in writing: “je veul escripre un lay nouvel.” (167, 251) [I want to write a new lai.]4 She may spontaneously improvise a new lai on the spot—“Chella dist elle . . . en maniere de lay” (104, 121) [She said that in the form of a lai]—or spend painstaking hours laboring over drafts of a narrative: “elle commenche a escripre longement et par loisir jusques bien pres du vespre.” (167, 251) [she begins to write at length, taking her time, until it is nearly evening.] The subplot and its concluding recognition scene paint complex and multidimensional portraits of the creators and performers of narrative. Ysaÿe le Triste first casts Marthe as an amateur author and performer—that is, as an author and performer who, unlike a professional, does not depend on her craft to earn a living. Marthe then travels incognito as a minstrel, in other words as a professional performer. Ysaÿe le Triste thus uses disguise to explore definitions of and connections between authors and performers, amateurs and professionals. Paradoxically, by fusing the identities of composer and performer, of amateur and professional, into a single character, Ysaÿe le Triste magnifies the plurality and diversity of those who create and transmit narrative. It thus explores variations in the purpose of their narrative art—private and public, personal and for-profit—and in the nature of their craft: composition and execution, words and music. In Ysaÿe le Triste, Marthe as an amateur author composes her narratives exclusively in intimate, private spheres, and for personal reasons.5 Her purpose is to

Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 25 (1901): 175–214, 472–89, 641–68. Giacchetti offers a briefer synopsis in his edition (19–25). 3 For a complete listing of works inserted into Ysaÿe le Triste and attributed to the character Marthe, see the Appendix to this article. The terminology used in Ysaÿe le Triste to describe the form of Marthe’s compositions is at times imprecise. Terms include: “lettres” and “brief” [letter]; “lay” [lai] and “lay nouvel” [new lai]; “canchonnette,” “cançonnette,” “canchonnette,” and “sonnet” [little song]; “chant,” “canchon,” “chançon,” and “chanson” [song]; “son nouvel” [new song]; “dis” [dit]; “livre” [book] and “livret” [little book]. For description and analysis of these forms see Giacchetti, “Une nouvelle forme du lai apparue à la fin du XIVe siècle,” Etudes de langue et de littérature du Moyen Age offerts à Félix Lecoy par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis (Paris, Champion, 1973) 147–55; Michelle Szkilnik, “Des femmes écrivains: Nérones dans le Roman de Perceforest, Marte dans Ysaÿe le Triste,” Romania: recueil trimestriel consacré à l’étude des langues et des littératures romanes 117 (1999): 474–506; and Patricia Victorin, Ysaÿe le Triste: Une esthétique de la confluence. Tours, tombeaux, vergers et fontaines (Paris, Champion, 2002). 4 Citations from Ysaÿe le Triste, ed. Giacchetti—page number followed by paragraph number. Occasionally, in the case of verse insertions, a third set of numbers indicates verses. Translations are mine. 5 Throughout this article terms such as “the author,” “the composer,” “the minstrel,” and “the

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console herself and to express her overwhelming emotions. When, abandoned by Ysaÿe after the initial consummation of their love, she contemplates suicide—“je m’ochiroye. . . . mieulx veul morir que je ne le voye” (166, 251) [I would kill myself. . . . I would rather die than not see him]—she vents her torment verbally by writing a lai: “Or tost, fait Marte, bailliés moy l’escriptoire: je veul escripre un lay nouvel.” (167, 251) [Now quickly, says Marthe, give me my writing case: I want to write a new lai.] She writes for a long time and then reads her composition to herself: “Et quant elle ot tout fait, sy commencha a lire” (167, 251) [And when she finished, she began to read]. The death of the author-heroine is thus averted through this act of writing and reading a narrative. Rather than commit suicide, Marthe declares in a lai her decision to don minstrel disguise and seek her lover: “Je veul faire un joly lay, / Et s’iray sans nul delay / Lui querant qu’il est a my.” (167, 252) [I want to make a pretty lai, and will go, without delay, seeking he who is mine.] Intimately and inextricably tied to Marthe’s life experience, the narratives she composes are all self-referential works that express her own thoughts, feelings, and desires. The heroine’s interpolated narratives and their performance within Ysaÿe le Triste are essential to the definition and development of her character. Indeed, in her typology of inserted songs, Maureen Barry McCann Boulton logically categorizes Marthe’s narratives as monologues and argues convincingly that the heroine’s autobiographical songs are her sole means of emotional expression in Ysaÿe le Triste.6 Whereas in Ysaÿe le Triste the amateur author analyses and expresses her emotions by composing oral and written narratives, the professional performer is never presented as an author of narrative. As a minstrel, Marthe never reads or writes, nor displays any proof of literacy, nor even composes orally. The minstrel Marthe thus presents herself as a professional who, without recourse to writing, publicly performs works composed by others. Even though Marthe as a minstrel performs narratives that she as an author has in fact composed, she invariably claims that these are the creations of another, consistently keeping the identity of the narrative’s amateur author separate from that of the songs’ performer. Speaking of herself in the third person and referring to her royal identity as the niece of King Yrion, Marthe repeatedly attributes the composition of the narratives she as a minstrel performs to “le nieche le roy Yrion” (175, 269). This disjunction is particularly notable in the narratives Marthe sings while disguised as a male minstrel. The “male” minstrel’s use of the author Marthe’s feminine “je” [I] and his repetition of a series of feminine adjectives in refrains underscore that the narrative the minstrel performs is not “his” own composition: “Lasse, dolente, quetive, que feray ge?” (175, 268) [Wretched, mournful, miserable, what will I do?]. Ysaÿe le Triste further emphasizes a distinction between the amateur performer” all refer specifically to the character Marthe in Ysaÿe le Triste. It is not my purpose here to generalize, but simply to examine this one particular, complex case. 6 Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 1993) chapter two, especially 72–9.

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author and the professional performer of narrative when the minstrel Marthe feigns uncertainty as to the origins of her songs: “je pense que Marte, le nieche le roy Yrion, le fist” (186, 285) [I think that Marthe, the niece of King Yrion, composed it]. This “je pense” [I think] implies that the minstrel has not had direct contact with the author of the narrative performed, but rather learned the composition from some intermediary source. Ysaÿe le Triste draws attention to the distance between the performer and creator of narrative by having the minstrel attribute her knowledge of the composer’s inspiration to hearsay. The minstrel supposedly relies on others’ testimony to describe the author’s beloved addressee: “pour ung chevalier qu’elle aime que on appelle Ysaÿe le Triste et porte, sy comme on dist, ung escu d’argent a une espee vermelle.” (186, 285) [for a knight, whom she loves, called Ysaÿe le Triste and who carries, they say, a shield blazoned argent, a sword gules.] As a performer of others’ works, the minstrel Marthe only once boasts of knowing how to sing new songs: “canter lais et canchons nouvelles” (185, 283). Despite this claim, however, her patron does not assume she is a composer: “Se Dieus vous gart, dist ly rois, qui fist le canchonnette?” (186, 285) [May God be with you, says the king, who composed the little song?]. Therefore by “lais and new songs” the minstrel apparently means she performs works newly composed by others. Although the minstrel in Ysaÿe le Triste is never represented as an author, the amateur author is depicted as a performer as well as a creator of narratives. Marthe as an amateur author composes narratives in private and for personal reasons; likewise she performs (or may have other characters perform) her narratives in private spaces, and alone or in small, intimate groups of only two or three people.7 As an amateur author, Marthe performs her narratives neither publicly to entertain, nor for remuneration. In contrast, as a minstrel she may perform narratives before a single person or a large court, in private or in public realms, necessarily adapting to the wishes of whatever audience he or she faces in order to earn a living. The primary purpose of the minstrel’s performance of narratives in Ysaÿe le Triste is to bring joy and diversion. When Marthe performs as a minstrel, her audience “prendoit tant d’esbat a che que Marte savoit faire et dire que goutte ne lui anoyot.” (179, 277) [was so entertained by what Marthe could do and say that they did not weary of her.] Count Hergo requests that the unnamed “male” minstrel, entertain his court while they dine: “se nous esbatera ung poy.” (174, 267) [he will entertain us a bit.] When Marthe runs into a knight in the woods, he tells her: “Mais vous venrés en me tente o moy et demourés tant qu’il vous plaira, et la esbaterés mon corps et le corps d’une dame qui y est.” (178, 275) [Now you will come in my tent with me and stay as long as you like, and there you will entertain me and a lady who is there.] He leads the minstrel to his lady and explains: “Je vous amaine ung jongleour pour vous esbatre.” (178, 275) [I bring you a minstrel to entertain you.] The lady asks Marthe to stay with her “par quoy je puisse prendre esbat o vous.” (178, 277) [in order that I might be entertained by you.]

7

See 94, 95 and 225, 359–60.

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Yvoire, imprisoned in a tower, rejoices when her father, Estrahier, sends her the minstrel Marthe “pour lui esbatre” (186, 285) [to entertain her], because it will relieve her of one hell: “je ne fuisse aussy aise pour mile florins d’or, et ly roys mes peres fait qu’i ne veult que j’aye deux Infers: prisons et tritresse” (187, 286) [I would not have been more pleased with a thousand florins of gold, and the king, my father, does this for he does not want me to suffer two hells: prison and sadness]. The worth of a minstrel—here valued at over one thousand florins of gold—lies in the ability to chase boredom and sadness. The minstrel, however, lacks the freedom, which the amateur author and performer enjoys, to use performance of narrative for purely personal, selfserving ends. The livelihood of the professional performer depends on patrons’ largess; the minstrel must thus appeal first and foremost to audiences’ wishes. In order for the minstrel to be hired, the discerning patron may first test the minstrel’s merit. Before giving the unknown performer a place in his court, King Estrahier has Marthe audition for him: “je iray tantost a table, sy y verrés, s’il vous plaist, et la saray que vous savés faire.” (185, 283) [I will go straight away to table, as you will see, if you please, and there I will learn what you can do.] Similarly, a future patroness makes Marthe first sing a short song—“chanter une briefve canchonnette” (178, 275)—before she employs the minstrel for a three-week period: “demourer o moy .iii. sepmaines, par quoy je puisse prendre esbat o vous.” (178, 277) [stay with me three weeks, so that I can be entertained by you.] Once hired, the minstrel is at the whim of the patron, who may unpredictably alter the performer’s terms of employment. Although the patroness asks Marthe to stay with her three weeks, after a fortnight the lady no longer desires the minstrel’s musical services (once “he” has rebuffed her amorous advances!) and gives Marthe leave to go. In addition to representing divergent purposes and conditions of performance of narrative for the amateur and the professional, the subplot also delineates differences in their craft: whereas Ysaÿe le Triste represents the minstrel’s performance of narrative as centered on musical instrumentation, it portrays the composer’s narrative art as founded on words. In Ysaÿe le Triste, the composer crafts the words of the narrative, whereas the minstrel performs the music that may accompany the narrative. In the written lai where Marthe first announces her plan to travel as a minstrel, she describes the minstrel’s art in purely musical terms. Marthe specifically states that she will entertain as a professional harpist: “Mais j’emportray / Dont harperay, / Et m’esbatray, / Et gaigneray / Dont me vivray.” (167–8, 253) [Now I will carry that with which I will harp, and will entertain myself, and will earn my living.] As a minstrel she will sing and harp as she travels: “Adont cantant / Yray errant, / Et hault harpant” (169, 255). She may also play the vielle: “Vauray harper / Ou viëler, / Ou . . . canter” (170, 257) [I will want to harp or play the vielle, or sing]. When Marthe prepares to set out as a minstrel, her first step is to pack a psaltery, an instrument similar to the dulcimer, but whose strings are plucked rather than struck: “Lors qu’elle senty sez pucelles couchies, si vient a ung sien escring et y prent ung sartarion” (171, 260) [When she felt sure that her maids were in bed, she then came to a chest of hers and took from it a psaltery]. Even though this passage represents Marthe as already owning and 93

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knowing how to play at least one instrument, Ysaÿe le Triste does not establish instrumental performance as central to Marthe’s identity as an amateur author of narrative.8 Yet as a minstrel, Marthe simultaneously sings narratives and plays instruments.9 Moreover, Ysaÿe le Triste further emphasizes the musical performance of narrative as an essential element of the minstrel’s art by subtly multiplying the instruments she plays. Although Marthe only takes a single instrument with her when she begins her travels, Ysaÿe le Triste makes her musical abilities appear ample by changing—and adding—instruments. When Marthe announces her plan to set out as a minstrel, she declares she will “harper / Ou viëler” (170, 257) [harp or play the vielle], yet the instrument she brings is a psaltery. When the minstrel visits her first court, its lord requests: “sacquiés vostre instrument, sy nous esbatés.” (174, 267) [pull out your instrument and entertain us.] Although Marthe has packed a psaltery, she now pulls out a harp: “Lors sacque le harpe et l’atempre, et puis commenche a harpper” (174, 267) [She pulls out the harp, tunes it, and then begins to harp]. Rather than distinguish precisely the minstrel’s instrumental performance, Ysaÿe le Triste creates an impression of the minstrel as a performer of multiple musical instruments. In contrast, the author-figure’s performances of narrative are never accompanied by instrumentation. Only when Marthe performs narratives as a minstrel does Ysaÿe le Triste depict her with a musical instrument. The minstrel’s musical performance is represented as independent of the verbal art of the author. When Marthe first sings to her patron Estrahier a song, accompanied by her harping, the king requests she repeat the song—but this time without music: “Quant ly roys Estrahiers ot oÿ le canchon, sy pria qu’elle deist une fois le dis sans canter, et sy fist elle.” (186, 285) [When King Estrahier had heard the song, he asked her to say the dit once without singing, and she did.] The minstrel obeys her patron and performs the “canchon” as a “dis,” a recited

8 Marthe is represented as already owning an instrument and needs no period of apprenticeship to master it. In contrast, Nicolette in Aucassin et Nicolette must acquire an instrument and spend an indefinite period of time studying to play it before she assumes her minstrel mask: “ele quist une viele, s’aprist a vieler” [she sought a vielle and taught herself to play it] (Aucassin et Nicolette: chantefable du XIIIe siècle, ed. Mario Roques, 2nd ed., Les classiques français du Moyen Age 41 [Paris, Champion, 1982] 36, xxxviii, 12). In addition, when Renart the Fox masquerades as a minstrel, he has Isengrin steal a vielle for him and then takes two weeks to learn it: “Tant fist Renart qu’en quinze dis / Fu si de la viele apris” (Le roman de Renart, ed. Ernest Martin, 3 vols. (Strasbourg, K. J. Trübner, 1882–87) I, 77, 2751–2). On Renart’s disguise as jongleur, see Marilyn Lawrence, “Parole, pouvoir, plaisir et déguisement du goupil dans Renart jongleur,” Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society 14: (2001) 173–88, and the bibliography cited therein. 9 The single exception in the entire subplot occurs when a future patron meets the minstrel Marthe traveling on horseback and requests that she dismount and immediately sing a short song: “fait dessendre Marte et chanter une briefve canchonnette” (178, 275). However, Marthe’s subsequent performances as a minstrel for this patron always bring joy through both singing and harping: “cantoit et harpoit tous jours renvoisiement” (179, 277). In the scene, directly preceding her encounter with this patron, Marthe rides through the forest singing without instrumental accompaniment; yet Marthe is at that moment alone, singing for herself, as she does when she is an author, rather than when she is performing as a minstrel for an audience.

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narrative poem. It is hearing the words of the narrative performed without music that incites Estrahier to inquire as to the author of the composition: “qui fist le canchonnette?” (186, 285). Representing relations between words and music, and between author and performer of narrative, Ysaÿe le Triste employs multiple modes of oral performance of narrative to drive the central action of the subplot. Ysaÿe le Triste displays a rich variety of performances of narrative; resisting categorical value judgments, it deems no one kind of performance of narrative better or worse than any other. Yet Ysaÿe le Triste does present one specific mode as essential for conclusion of this subplot: oral performance of written narrative by a performer who is not its author—that is the reading aloud by Ysaÿe’s attendant, Tronc, of the allegorical romance written by Marthe. This permutation presents the most complex relations between the creation and transmission of narrative, and between its author and performer. Marthe’s written romance is clearly a physical object, but it is nonetheless meant for oral performance—in this case by a performer who is definitely not the author. Marthe’s written narrative is a “livre” (225, 359–60) [book], or “livret” (225, 359) [little book], enclosed in “ung sien escring” (224, 359) [a chest of hers]. Due to its material nature, Marthe’s romance is passed from writer to audience differently than narratives that are composed and transmitted orally without any recourse to writing. Purely oral narratives initially are passed from a composerperformer to another performer; when performing a lai as a minstrel, Marthe claims she has learned the composition directly from its author: “le nieche le Roy Yrion le m’aprins.” (183, 281) [the niece of King Yrion taught it to me.] Subsequent diffusion of oral narratives depends exclusively on performers. Written narratives, however, may also be distributed by people who do not perform. In the case of Marthe’s romance, a messenger carries her written narrative from its author to its performer. Another term used to indicate Marthe’s romance—“brief” (225, 359) [letter]—may in fact allude to its mode of transmission: the written narrative is delivered as a letter. Ultimately an audience’s aural reception of a written narrative depends on a literate performer. Marthe sends her romance with the messenger along with a command to find a performer who can read the narrative: “Mes enffes, fay tant pour moy que tu portes cest livret au fol [Ysaÿe] que de chy se part, et ly dy que l’une dez dames de ceste tour lui envoye et qu’il fache garder qu’il y a dedens.” (225, 359) [My boy, do this for me: carry this little book to the fool (Ysaÿe) who is departing, and tell him that one of the ladies of this tower sends it to him and that he have someone look at what there is in it.] Marthe intends her written narrative to be performed orally. Heeding Marthe’s message, Ysaÿe orders Tronc to read the romance aloud: “Tronc, fait Ysaïe, une dame m’a envoyet ung livre. Je vous prie que le lisiés. —Volentiers’ fait il.” (225, 360) [“Tronc,” says Ysaÿe, “a lady has sent me a book. I ask you to read it.” “Gladly,” he replies.] Although Ysaÿe is literate and thus could read the narrative himself, he does not. Rather, he receives the written romance aurally: “Ysaÿe ot oÿ le livre” (245, 362) [Ysaÿe had heard the book]. Interestingly, Marthe addresses Ysaÿe at the end of her narrative, “Amis, se avés lut men livre” (244, 95

MARILYN LAWRENCE

361, 992) [Friend, if you have read my book], even though she had requested that Ysaÿe have the romance read to him by someone else. This ambiguous use of the active voice in the final verses of the narrative suggests that in Ysaÿe le Triste—and perhaps in other works as well—the verb “lire” [to read] can connote oral performance and may be interpreted as “to have read aloud.”10 The text of Marthe’s narrative itself has embedded within it numerous references to oral performance and alludes to the art of narrative fiction. Her allegorical romance repeatedly refers to speech—featuring such figures as Beaux Parlers (227, 361, 64) [Fine Talk]—and is populated by performing personifications. Venus struts in laughing and singing: “Elle entra ens, empavenee / Ryant, cantant” (230, 361, 246–7). Resconfort [Comfort] arrives on horseback, singing—“tout notant.” (237, 361, 610) Faulx-Samblant [Pretence] knows songs: “Faulx Samblant set tel notte” (238, 361, 650). Doulx Espoirs [Sweet Hope] and Resconfort encourage Marthe to sing often: “Sy estoie souvent cantans / Car Doulx Espoirs le me looit / Et Resconfors sy le volloit.” (241, 361, 789–91) Resconfort is constantly helping Marthe make (compose? perform?) songs and sweet dits: “Et Resconfort m’edoit toudis / A faire canchons et doux dis.” (244, 361, 990–1) In addition, Marthe remarks in her romance that her written compositions are beautiful to hear performed: “Et s’ay escript en parchemin / Pluiseurs choses et par quemin / Sy que canchonnettes et lais / Beaux a oïr” (232, 361, 350–3) [And I wrote on parchment many things along the way, such as little songs and lais, beautiful to hear]. Marthe’s romance refers as well to the reading aloud of written narrative. Marthe tells of how Tristresse [Sadness] reads to her the story of Ysaÿe’s father, Tristan, and of his companion, Rage: “O moy vint, et toudis me lut / De le vie Tristran vo pere, / Et de dampt Rage sen compere.” (234, 361, 445–7) The text of Marthe’s romance reveals that she has written her narrative with its oral performance in mind. In her romance she frequently addresses her audience, Ysaÿe: “Amis! pour ty allay cantant” (232, 361, 364) [Friend! For you I went singing]. She requests in her narrative that her audience listen—“Ascoutés” (227, 361, 74), “Escoutés” (228, 361, 141)—and insists that she “speaks” clearly and candidly: “sy vous dy pour droit” (226, 361, 34) [thus I tell you truly]; “Faittes me tuer, si jour noyr / Y trouvés, ne parler oscur” (227, 361, 111–12) [Have me killed if you find here obscurity or obscure speech]. Marthe uses the verb “dire” [to speak] to describe her storytelling and requests that Ysaÿe listen but not refute her: “Amis, en ce tamps que je dy / —Ascoute voir, ne me desdy” (226, 361, 15–16). Marthe thus tells her story through the intermediary voice of a performer who fosters the illusion of immediate contact between the absent writer and the audience of the narrative—as if Ysaÿe could speak up and contradict Marthe directly! As a performer, Tronc brings to life from the written page not only the story, but also the storyteller and her voice. The individual roles of the author and the performer of this written narrative 10 Such ambiguity is apparent today when people who have listened to an audiobook on tape or compact disk say that they have “read” the book. See Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999) 125–6.

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are further segregated through the use of gender.11 In the final scenes of this subplot, the woman writer, Marthe, is locked in a gynaeceum, a prison tower restricted to women, and is thus divorced from the world of her male audience and the male performer of her narrative. It is the written narrative that bridges the gap between female and male, that links writer, audience, and performer: Marthe hands her romance out a tower window to a male messenger who delivers the book to Ysaÿe. Ysaÿe le Triste, however, is highly complex. While it clearly represents here a distinct separation between the writer and performer of Marthe’s romance, it simultaneously multiplies the possibilities for performers of narrative: first through use of disguise, and second through Tronc’s status as a performer. At the court of King Estrahier, Marthe performs as a minstrel, that is as a professional who performs to earn her keep. Yet she writes her romance for personal reasons and as Ysaÿe’s lover, that is as the Princess Marthe, an amateur author and performer. Tronc performs Marthe’s romance at the request of his patron, though he is not a full-time performer who depends on performance of narrative to earn a living. He is a minstrel only in the most fundamental sense of the medieval Latin term “ministeralis,” which originally signified a court functionary or servant, and only later, in the last third of the twelfth century, narrowed in meaning to indicate specifically a professional performer in service of a particular patron.12 In this subplot, Marthe is an amateur author and performer who serves as a professional performer, but who has her narrative performed by a servant who, though not a full-time performer, nonetheless performs at his patron’s command. In sum, Ysaÿe le Triste multiplies the possible performers of written narrative to include amateurs and professionals, full-time and occasional performers. Marthe’s allegorical romance, sent as a book and aurally received, rewrites her part of the story of Ysaÿe le Triste. It thus conceivably reflects how Ysaÿe le Triste itself might have been created, transmitted, and received by its audience. It suggests that even literate audiences received Ysaÿe le Triste through oral performance. Even if Ysaÿe le Triste were originally performed by its own creator, it was a romance that, in order to achieve the popularity it did, inevitably would have been performed—at least eventually—by persons other than its author. This remarkable subplot and its dénouement draw attention to the creation and performance of narrative in a late-medieval literary milieu characterized by the coexistence of orality, aurality, and literacy.13 Ysaÿe le Triste does not propose 11 See my companion piece to this article, Marilyn Lawrence, “Yseut’s Legacy: Women Writers and Performers in the Medieval French Romance Ysaÿe le Triste,” Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Acts and Texts, ed. Laurie Postlewate, Ludus: Medieval and Early Theatre and Drama (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005). 12 See Edmond Faral, Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Age, Bibliothèque de L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes 187 (1964; Geneva, Slatkine Reprints, 1987) 103–6 and L. M. Wright, “More on the Meanings and Uses of Jongleur and Menestrel,” Romance Studies 17 (1990): 7–19. 13 See Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 26 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly chapter one.

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any categorical hierarchy of types of performance of narrative, nor privilege one type of transmission of narrative over any other. Hung on a plot-line of recognition, the subplot encourages its readers and listeners to recognize and explore the many dimensions of the production, transmission, and reception of narrative. While Ysaÿe le Triste brings to a close the subplot centered on Marthe, it leaves open an intriguing array of possibilities for the performance of medieval narrative.

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Appendix A showcase of performances: Compositions attributed to the character Marthe and inserted into Ysaÿe le Triste

Ysaÿe le Triste is filled both with references to compositions and performances, and with actual inserted texts of songs and stories that are represented as performed. In the following table this Appendix exclusively catalogues works (1) that are represented as composed by the character Marthe, and (2) whose words are inserted into Ysaÿe le Triste. Ysaÿe le Triste also contains numerous references to Marthe’s composing and performing pieces that are not accompanied by inserted texts; I have not included such references in this Appendix, but I have noted those of her inserted compositions that allude to the arts of composition and performance. Marthe’s compositions—all of which are in the first person—represent a range of levels of storytelling. They run the gamut from non-narrative lyrical moments, which are too brief to communicate a clear story, to narrative songs and lais that either recount past events or anticipate what will unfold in the story of Ysaÿe le Triste. Her writings range from works (such as her initial letter to Ysaÿe) that describe past occurrences, but which do not neatly fit a strict definition of narrative, to elaborately constructed narratives, such as her thousand-line allegorical romance with which the subplot ends.

99

100

female, amateur author and performer

123, 154 Marthe

Marthe

Yrion (Marthe’s uncle)

none— Marthe is alone

Tronc

none— Marthe and Yrion are alone

none— Marthe is alone

Marthe’s chamber

Marthe’s chamber

Marthe’s chamber

unspecified private space

during journey, stopped outside a city oral

written

cançonnette —verse

son nouvel, cançonnette — verse oral

oral

none

none

sung

sung

none

none

read (aloud?) none

recited

read aloud

performance repeated: Yrion reads song two or three times

letter refers to composition and performance

Composition Performance Instrumental Notes mode mode accompaniment

canchonnette, written canchon— verse

lay—verse

lettres— prose

Performance Terms to space describe form2

1 References to Ysaÿe le Triste: roman arthurien du Moyen Age tardif, ed. André Giacchetti, Publications de l’Université de Rouen 142 (Rouen, Université de Rouen, 1989)—page number followed by paragraph number. 2 See page 90 n3 in my article for translations of terms describing the forms of Marthe’s pieces, and for relevant bibliography.

female, amateur author and performer

female, amateur author

105, 122

122, 153

female, amateur author and performer

104, 121

Marthe

Tronc

female, amateur author

94, 96

Ysaÿe, his foster brother, and a messenger

Performer Audience

Reference1 Marthe’s identity

MARILYN LAWRENCE

male minstrel

174, 268

101

court at mealtime

canchonnette, oral chançon— verse

oral

oral

oral

sung

sung

sung

sung

none4

none

harps (and sings simultaneously)

harps (and sings simultaneously)

Marthe performs song twice

song refers to performance

lai refers to composition and performance; lai announces plan to travel as a minstrel

3 Here Marthe is still disguised as a male minstrel, but at this moment she is traveling alone, composing and performing for herself as an amateur author and performer. 4 Having just dismounted from her horse, Marthe does not take the time to unpack an instrument before performing for a lady who is judging on the spot whether or not to hire her. Marthe does not play instruments when on horseback (see 177–8, 274).

Marthe

a lady—and in lady’s tent perhaps her knight

male minstrel

178, 276

sonnet— verse

chanson, canchon— verse

read (aloud?) none

written

lay nouvel— verse

Marthe’s chamber

sailors and on a boat their captain

Count Hergo and his court

none— except perhaps Marthe’s two-yearold son and her female attendants

Composition Performance Instrumental Notes mode mode accompaniment

Performance Terms to space describe form

none riding alone chant, intended— on horseback canchon— but a knight through forest verse overhears her song

Marthe

Marthe

Marthe

Performer Audience

177–8, 274 female, Marthe amateur author and performer3

male minstrel

female, amateur author and performer

167–70, 252–9

176, 270

Marthe’s identity

Reference

ORAL PERFORMANCE IN YSAŸE LE TRISTE

102 Ysaÿe, Yreux (Ysaÿe’s friend), and Tronc

a dozen women, including king’s daughter in Yreux’s bedroom in a bourgeois lodging

tower

livret, livre, brief—verse romance

written

canchonnette oral —verse

canchon, dis, oral canchonnette —verse

read aloud

sung

first sung, then recited

sung

none

none

harp (for sung performance only?)

harp

romance refers to composition and performance

song refers to performance

song/dit refers to performance; performed twice: sung, then recited

lai refers to performance

Composition Performance Instrumental Notes mode mode accompaniment

Ysaÿe’s room lay, chanson, oral in a castle canchon— verse

King court at Estrahier mealtime and probably his court

Ysaÿe and Tronc

Performance Terms to space describe form

5 Within her romance, Marthe represents herself as an amateur author and performer who travels as a professional performer. Marthe is still serving as a female minstrel at King Estrahier’s court when she has her romance delivered to and performed for Ysaÿe.

female amateur author5 Tronc

Marthe

187, 286

225–45, 361

Marthe

185–6, 248 female minstrel

female minstrel

Marthe

female minstrel

180–3, 279–80

Performer Audience

Marthe’s identity

Reference

MARILYN LAWRENCE

Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le roman du Hem (1278)1 Nancy Freeman Regalado

Although Arthurian romances were popular in the Middle Ages, few records depict actual circumstances of their performance. Le roman du Hem,2 which presents itself as an eyewitness account of a tournament at Le Hem in 1278, is therefore an invaluable document, for it describes five interludes based on characters and motifs of Arthurian romance. These interludes are entertainments presented during the festive banquet and at intervals between the jousts. In them, storytelling shifts towards dramatic enactments where those attending the tournament play scenes derived from Arthurian romance. There are allusions to Arthurian themes in tournaments beginning in the early thirteenth century.3 Le roman du Hem, however, provides that which we lack for much of medieval performance of narrative: a richly detailed description of circumstances and contents of performance and the responses of participants and spectators. Le roman du Hem is a romance-length poem of some 4600 verses composed in 1278 by a poet named Sarrasin. Sarrasin says his book was commissioned by “la roïne Genievre” (line 373) [Queen Guinevere],4 referring to the sister of Aubert de Longueval, the lord whose domains lay near Le Hem and who organized the tournament with his neighbor Huart de Bazentin. It is one of the first known 1 It is a pleasure to thank Laurie Postlewate for the invitation to present this material at “Public Performance/Public Ritual,” The Seventeenth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, 12 February 2000, and Karen Fresco and C. Stephen Jaeger for inviting me to discuss it at a seminar of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, University of Illinois, 20 February 2003. 2 Sarrasin, Le roman du Hem, ed. Albert Henry, Travaux de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Bruxelles 9 (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1939). 3 See Roger Sherman Loomis, “Chivalric and Dramatic Imitations of Arthurian Romance,” Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, ed. Wilhelm R. W. Koehler (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1939) 79–97 and his “Arthurian Influence on Sport and Spectacle,” Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford, Clarendon, 1959) 553–9. In his lyrico-narrative poem Frauendienst (c.1255), the Styrian diplomat and knight Ulrich von Liechtenstein records a jousting tour of 1240 where he assumed on occasion the identity of King Arthur and attributed names of Arthurian characters such as Lancelot and Gawain to knights in his entourage or those who jousted with him. I thank Carola Dwyer for summarizing, translating, and commenting on passages from the Arthurian portion of Ulrich’s Frauendienst (ed. Franz Viktor Spechtler, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 485 [Göppingen, Kümmerle, 1987] stanzas 1402–1604). 4 Translations throughout are mine.

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examples of the French festival books written to commemorate courtly celebrations in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.5 It is also (with Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency of 12856) one of the earliest extended accounts of a historical chivalric festivity in France, although descriptions of tournaments are common features of romances.7 Le roman du Hem narrates the events of a tournament which included jousting (running courses to break lances) but not the kind of open-field mêlée encounter between two sword-wielding teams8 that was prohibited at that time by the French king. It was held on the feast of Saint Denis, 8–10 October, 1278 at Le Hem in Picardy, a tiny village on the Somme River, which was the scene of fierce fighting in the First World War. Now fishermen sit quietly along a bend in the river next to fields which must have been filled with the tents, horses, wagons, and households of the hundreds of persons who rode across northeastern France and Flanders to participate in three days of jousting and feasting. Juliet Vale’s historical study of the tournament at Le Hem includes a map of the geographical distribution of participants which gives some sense of the distances knights and ladies traveled to attend this grand party, whose guests of honor included the Duke of Lorraine and two members of the royal family of France, Robert, Count of Clermont, sixth son of Louis IX, and Robert II, Count of Artois, cousin to King Philip III.9 In his tournament book, Sarrasin describes two kinds of performances: “les joustes qu’il vit molt dures” (line 4601) [the mighty jousts he saw] and “aventures” (line 4602) [adventures], that is, the interludes in which Arthurian fictions were performed and which provided important roles for ladies as well as knights and professional entertainers (such as dwarves) in their households. The full program of jousts and interludes at the Le Hem tournament is summarized in the accompanying Table.

5 On the production of Sarrasin’s book, see my companion piece to this article, “A Contract for an Early Festival Book: Sarrasin’s Le roman du Hem (1278),” Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Acts and Texts, ed. Laurie Postlewate, Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theater and Drama (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005). 6 Jacques Bretel, Le tournoi de Chauvency, ed. Maurice Delbouille, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège 49 (Liège, Vaillant-Carmanne,1932). See Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry in Jacques Bretel’s Tournoi de Chauvency (Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 308),” Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Studies for Jonathan J. G. Alexander, eds. Susan L’Engle, Gerald B. Guest, and Erik Inglis (London, Harvey MillerBrepols, forthcoming). 7 See the examples cited by: Albert Henry (Sarrasin xii–xiii); Larry D. Benson, “The Tournament in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes and L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal,” Chivalric Literature: Essays on the Relation between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, eds. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1980) 1–24; and John W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) passim. 8 On mêlée tournaments in history and romance, see Baldwin 69–79. 9 Juliet Vale, “The Late Thirteenth-Century Precedent: Chauvency, Le Hem, and Edward I,” Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context 1270–1350 (Woodbury, Suffolk, Boydell, 1982) 4–24 and Appendices 1–9.

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Table Program of jousts and Arthurian interludes (in bold) at Le Hem (1278) Day 1 October 8 Queen Guinevere arrives with her court at Le Hem and presides at the banquet. Interlude 1 (banquet hall): Soredamors enters on horseback, led by a dwarf. She asks the Queen for a champion to free her lover, imprisoned by Alise. Sir Kay mocks Soredamors. Day 2 October 9 Feast of Saint Denis. 48 pairs of jousters named. Queen Guinevere presides over the jousts in the grandstand. The Tale of the Knight of the Lion: Robert d’Artois, disguised as the Knight of the Lion, rescues four damsels held prisoner by the Lord of the Castel du Bois. Interlude 2 (banquet hall): The Lord of the Castel du Bois and his six knights enter the banquet hall on horseback, preceded by a lion. They yield to the Queen in the name of the Knight of the Lion. Sir Kay mocks them. 38 jousts including Aubert de Longueval vs. Baudouin, Châtelain d’Arras; Sir Kay vs. Jehan des Jestes (comic interlude?); Robert, Count of Clermont vs. Huart de Basentin. Interlude 3 (jousting lists): Entry of the Knight of the Lion preceded by the lion, the four rescued maidens singing on horseback, and musicians. Comic byplay before the Queen between Sir Kay and Mademoiselle Sueffre-Paine. Fortrece, the Queen’s lady in waiting, admires Robert d’Artois who jousts with Aubert de Longueval, then joins Queen in stand. Interlude 4 (jousting lists): Entry of the Duke of Lorraine, borne in the air in a capele, from which four maidens deliver him. The Duke jousts with Gautier de Fouilloy. 3 jousts. Interlude 5 (jousting lists): A damsel, whipped and insulted by a dwarf, enters bareback on a thin white nag. She is thus punished by her lover Robillart de Coupigny for declaring that the knights of Queen Guinevere’s court are the best in the world. Her lover is defeated by her champion, Wautier de Hardecourt. Sir Kay mocks the vindicated maiden who chooses to leave with her lover. 4 jousts. Day 3 October 10 57 pairs of jousters named. Queen Guinevere presides over the jousts in the grandstand. 56 jousts including Aubert de Longueval vs. Wautier d’Antoing; Robert d’Artois vs. Pierre de Baffremont; Huart de Basentin vs. Landegrave [a German prince]; the Count of Clermont vs. Erart de Brienne. 18 jousts are conducted by torchlight as night begins to fall. The Count of Clermont and Robert d’Artois conduct Queen Guinevere back to her court. 20 more jousts by torchlight; Sarrasin can name only 1 pair of jousters.

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Performance of narrative is complex in Le roman du Hem, where Arthurian stories are enacted at three levels: first, in the form Sarrasin adopts for his poem; second, in the overall setting of the tournament itself, as well as in the content of the five interludes; and third, in a lengthy narrative interpolation, the tale of the Knight of the Lion, which Sarrasin sets within his chronicle of the tournament. Scenes playing out the end of this interpolated narrative, moreover, are performed in Interludes 2 and 3. Romance motifs provide an encompassing Arthurian frame for Sarrasin’s poem and all the events he reports.10 Indeed, Sarrasin specifically takes as his model Chrétien de Troyes, citing “[le] remant que Crestiiens / Trova si bel de Perceval” (lines 478–9) [the fine romance that Chrétien made about Perceval] as well as Le roman de Troie, the adventures of the Grail, and stories of the Knights of the Round Table (lines 472–87). Stating that the Le Hem enterprise surpasses the Grail quest in Chrétien’s Perceval (lines 476–93), Sarrasin maintains an Arthurian setting throughout his report of the chivalric festivities. He represents the tournament planning session as a conversation between the Lords of Longueval and Bazentin and an allegorical figure, “Dame Courtoisie” (line 274) [Lady Courtesy]. It is she who urges them to announce the tournament in England, “De coi li Graaus nous ensegne / Que li rois Artus en fu sires” (lines 324–5) [for the Grail tells us King Arthur ruled there]. It is she who mingles praise of Edward I11 with a cascade of motifs from Arthurian narrative—the marvels of Merlin, the noble deeds of Lancelot, Gawain, and the Knights of the Round Table (lines 326–37). And finally, it is she who announces that Queen Guinevere will preside over every event. Performers in the five interludes enact characters, dialogue, and stories of Arthurian fictions that would have been familiar to those present in Le Hem, for they are drawn from well-known romances by Chrétien and from the Prose Lancelot. Queen Guinevere is accompanied at every moment by her seneschal, who plays the role of the Arthurian character Keu (Sir Kay), and who supervises the laying out of barriers in the jousting lists and the setting up of banquet tables. Sir Kay adds comedy to every scene in which he appears in Le roman du Hem, where he insults all comers and is constantly reproved by the Queen. He jousts on Day 2, shouting the famous line that welcomes Lancelot to the tournament at Noauz in Chrétien’s Chevalier de la charrette: “Or est venus qui aunera” (line 1906) [Now is come one who will take the measure of others]12 —loudly enough 10 By giving his tournament book an Arthurian setting, Sarrasin inverts the practice found in three earlier romances that famously incorporate real names of contemporary persons into their depictions of fictional tournaments: Jean Renart, Le roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques français du Moyen Age 91 (Paris, Champion, 1962); Gerbert de Montreuil, Le roman de la violette ou de Gerard de Nevers, ed. Douglas L. Buffum, Société des anciens textes français (Paris, Didot, 1928), and his Continuation de Perceval, eds. Mary Williams and Marguerite Oswald, Classiques français du Moyen Age 28, 50, 101, 3 vols. (Paris, Champion, 1922–75). On the relation between history and literature in depictions of tournaments, see Benson and Baldwin 14, 31–48, 61–86, 260–7, and 345n36. 11 On the “Arthurian-based activities” of Edward I, see Juliet Vale 19–22. 12 See Sarrasin 137.

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to be heard by his partner and by the ladies in the grandstand, who enrage Sir Kay by their teasing. The repeated term la roïne and the ongoing antics of Sir Kay constantly remind the reader of Le roman du Hem of the reigning Arthurian fiction. Would the imposing crowned figure of Queen Guinevere—seated with Sir Kay at the high table at the banquet and in the grandstand erected at the lists—have had the same effect on participants at the tournament? Would the knights and ladies have experienced themselves as more than spectators—as actors within the Arthurian frame or even as characters in the interludes? All salute the Queen with reverence, as does the Count of Clermont:

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Et li quens, l’escu en cantel, S’em passe devant la roïne, Si le salue et si l’encline Et ele li rent son salu.

[And the count (of Clermont), shield raised, / passes before the Queen. / He salutes her and bows to her / and she returns his greeting.]

Although Sarrasin mentions the “vaillant roi Artu” (line 486) [brave King Arthur], it is the Queen and other female figures who initiate and maintain the overall Arthurian fiction and who play leading roles in the five interludes, which are clustered at the banquet on Day 1 and towards the end of the jousting on Day 2 (see the Table). The Queen is said to enter with a train of seven hundred knights, ladies, and maidens (lines 520–2); she presides at the banquet and in the grandstand at the jousting lists; she plays a role in four of the five interludes. Queen Guinevere’s presence transforms the whole feast into a performance of romance, casting participants as members of her court. The interludes bring the reigning Arthurian fiction into dramatic prominence. In Interlude 1, a damsel named Soredamours enters the banquet hall on a horse led by a dwarf. She is brought before the Queen, who is seated under a canopy at the high table. Sir Kay greets the damsel rudely—“On devroit le chevalier tondre / Qui pour vous en peril se met” (lines 614–15) [Any knight who risks danger for you should have his head shaved]—and the Queen reproves Sir Kay publicly. The ensuing dialogue between Soredamors and the Queen has a double function: Soredamors’ speech carries her story forward: she requests a champion to rescue her lover from Lady Alise, who has imprisoned him. The Queen’s thoughtful pause and her ringing response engage participation by spectators in the performance of Soredamor’s story: 640

656

“S’il a en vostre court vassal Qui viegne, armés sur son ceval, O moi, pour mon ami rescourre.” / . . . / Madame Genievre se taist; Quant pensé ot, si respondi Que toute la cours l’entendi: “Damoisele Soredamours, A moi arés vous bon secours Et as chevaliers de ma court.” 107

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660

A ces paroles en acourt Devant la roïne tes cent, Qui tout se metent en present De cele besoingne furnir.

[“Is there a knight in your court / who would come armed and mounted / with me to rescue my lover?” / . . . / Lady Guinevere is silent; / when she had thought a while, she responded / so that all the court heard her: / “Damsel Soredamours, / you will receive good succor from me / and the knights in my court.” / At these words some one hundred knights / rush forward before the Queen. / All of them offer / to undertake this challenge.]

The role of those present in the hall has been redefined: one hundred of the knights at the banquet do not remain outside the performance, but rise as one to play their part in the interlude. Why do spectators rise to act out a role in this performance? First, its fictional motifs are deeply familiar to the audience. They are a textual community,13 in the sense that all are readers or hearers of Arthurian romance.14 The Queen’s loud appeal on the maiden’s behalf is the cue for knights to enter the performance: the audience knows it is a cue, because they have read romances. How do the knights at the banquet know it is their cue? Is their participation prearranged, or do they experience themselves as characters within the Arthurian frame of the tournament? Does the Queen pause for dramatic effect or to signal the knights to prepare their entrance? Sarrasin casts a spell of fiction over his representation of this scene, blurring the boundary between entertainment and belief for his reader.15 In what sense does this interlude constitute a performance of narrative? Although it does not enact a preexisting scene from any one particular romance, it is clearly modeled on themes common to many. The proper names, character types, and motifs in Soredamors’ story are a medley of borrowings from several Arthurian romances.16 Soredamours is a maiden in Chrétien’s Cligès; Arthurian romances abound in damsels in distress and ladies who imprison knights. In Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion, Lunette goes to Arthur’s court to seek a champion; in the Prose Lancelot, the Lady of Malehaut falls in love with Lancelot who is her prisoner. These names and motifs—known to all—are enough to sustain the narrative thrust of the performances which Sarrasin describes in such extraordinary detail. The story is enacted rather than told, however, first through a processional 13 Brian Stock, “Textual Communities,” The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983) 88–240. 14 Elspeth Kennedy, “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance,” Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend. Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, eds. Martin B. Schichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, State University of New York Press) 70–90. 15 On the relation between participants and onlookers in court festivities, see Susan Crane, “Wild Doubles in Charivari and Interlude,” The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) 142. 16 See the examples cited in Sarrasin liii–lvi.

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movement as Soredamours is led up to the Queen’s table, then through carefully wrought speeches delivered by persons performing three character roles: Sir Kay (27 lines), Soredamours (24 lines), and Queen Guinevere (19 lines). Finally, the action of one hundred knights rushing forward completes the staging of this romance episode. Moreover, the narrative performed in this interlude is linked to the next day’s jousts by an additional scene at the banquet’s end in which a horn sounds outside the hall from the castle bridge, a dwarf announces that the knight whom Lady Alise imprisoned has arrived, and Sir Kay demands that the Queen grant him the honor of the first joust on behalf of Soredamors (lines 668–701). Just as the shared knowledge of Arthurian romance invited spectators to cross the boundary between reality and performance of narrative, so too the physical world of Le Hem lay very close to the fictional realm of Arthur. Everyday material elements served as sets, costumes, and props in the interludes. The sets—the banquet hall and high table well lit by torches (line 1437)—were already in place. Props and costumes were simple and ready at hand: a horse, a canopy, a crown. It is likely that trained performers were on hand, such as the dwarf whom the victorious knight in Interlude 5 claims as his prize, for such entertainers were valued members of noble households such as that of Robert d’Artois.17 In his poem, Sarrasin does not draw a clear line of demarcation between the past world of Arthur and the present of Le Hem in 1278. Nor does he present any of the interludes as fictions: they begin without explanation or transition. Indeed the dramatic action of Interlude 5 on Day 2, that of the damsel whipped by a dwarf, continues during the joust which it appears to provoke (lines 3018–239). In this interlude, played in the jousting lists, Sarrasin does not confer Arthurian names on the actors, but similarities in plot and props between Interludes 1 and 5 recall romance motifs.18 A maiden enters, mounted bareback on a thin white horse and bearing a lance and a sword hanging from her neck. She is whipped and insulted repeatedly by a dwarf riding a piebald nag and wielding a knotted scourge. Her lover, a proud knight named Robillart de Coupigny, rides behind her. He has ordered this cruel punishment because the maiden has asserted that the best knights in the world are to be found in Queen Guinevere’s court. The maiden’s lover has sworn she will be whipped until he is defeated by one of the Queen’s knights. Wautier de Hardecourt, one of the knights present among the spectators (that is, in “Queen Guinevere’s court”) accepts the challenge and thus enters the performance. As the knights clash, the dwarf continues to beat and insult the damsel: 3120

Et se donnent mout tres grans cols: Sour les escus qu’il ont as cols Convint les lances peçoiier.

17 Carol Lynne Symes, “The Makings of a Medieval Stage: Theatre and the Culture of Performance in Thirteenth-Century Arras,” diss. Harvard University, 1999, 357 and 363. On the role of aristocratic households in festive interludes, see Crane 140ff. 18 There are reminiscences, in this scene, of the damsel whipped by a dwarf in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide (lines 138–271) as well as the episode of Le chevalier au lion cited by Albert Henry (Sarrasin liv).

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3124

3144

3148

3152

Et tous jours convint convoiier La damoisele son ami, Et li nains tous jours aprés li, Ferant, frapant a cascun pas: “Loudiere, ensi n’ira il pas Com vous quidiés, mais autrement.” / . . . / Et li autres chevaliers faut. Et dont dist la pucele en haut, Si que ses amis l’oï bien: “Encor n’ai ge menti de rien,” Dont sot il bien qu’ele vaut dire. De courous et de duel et d’ire Art li chevaliers et esprent. La lance meïsmes reprent Dont il avait devant fali, Et dist, se il n’abat celui, Qu’il pardonra son maltalent S’amie et de l’amendement Ert en madame la roïne.

[(The knights) give each other great blows: / their lances strike against / the shields that hang from their necks. / And still the damsel / stays close to her lover, / and still the dwarf follows her / beating and hitting her at every step: / “You filthy whore, you’re not going to get / what you’re hoping for, but something else!” / . . . / The other knight (the damsel’s lover) fails. / Whereupon the maiden says loudly, / so that her lover will hear her well: / “I haven’t yet told any lie.” / And he knew well what she meant. / The knight flames up and burns / with rage and sorrow and chagrin. / He picks up the very lance / with which he had failed / and says that if he cannot defeat his adversary / he will forgive his girlfriend’s offense / and make amends / to the lady Queen.]

Sarrasin notes in Interlude 5 how the damsel projects her voice in performance, loud enough to be heard by her lover (and by the spectators in the Queen’s grandstand). The maiden’s words inspire the proud knight to redouble his efforts—that is, his joust is motivated by the narrative action of the interlude. Wautier triumphs in the next joust, delivering the damsel who gives him the sword hung round her neck. He claims the dwarf as his prize, but courteously lets the maiden choose to remain with her lover; the damsel, the dwarf, and the two knights ride off ceremoniously together as Sir Kay jeers from the window of the grandstand—“Que plus ferés femes de max / . . . / Plus ara a vous d’amitiés” (lines 3228, 3231) [The more you mistreat women, . . . the more they’ll love you]—until the Queen shoos him off to set up the banquet tables. These Arthurian interludes are more than mere entertainment; they serve at times to motivate jousts and also to spotlight guests of honor. Thus, in Interlude 4 on Day 2, the Duke of Lorraine makes his grand entry into the lists (lines 2906–24). Sarrasin describes a scene in which a mysterious and beautiful “capele” [mantle] moves forward “en air vers les tentes” (line 2909) [through the air towards the tents]. It is perhaps a canopy drawn on a float or borne by a horse; 110

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it represents a prison from which the Duke is delivered by four maidens; he then goes on to break lances with Gautier de Fouilloy. The knight imprisoned by enchantment is a familiar theme in Arthurian romance, but Sarrasin does not further develop this interlude with proper names or dialogue. Instead—crossing the line between performance of romance and financing of tournaments—he goes on to report the Duke’s failure to contribute to the feast, in contrast with the liberality of the Counts of Clermont and Artois (lines 2970–9). The most complex set of Arthurian performances recorded in the Roman du Hem features Robert d’Artois in a starring role as the Knight of the Lion. It includes an extensive narrative interpolation of more than 800 verses (lines 716–1517) and Interludes 2 and 3 (see the Table). The narrative tells how the Knight of the Lion delivered four handmaidens of the Queen who were imprisoned by the Lord of the Castel du Bois when they went to deliver tournament invitations. Has Sarrasin added this tale to fatten his book or was it addressed to the participants at Le Hem as Juliet Vale believes?19 It could well have been recited from memory or read aloud before the related scene in Interlude 2 was played out at the banquet.20 It is hard to place the performance of this narrative within the feast, however, because the sequence in Sarrasin’s poem is confused. In her speech stating the overall program of the tournament, Lady Courtesy announces that the scene in which the Lord of the Castel du Bois and his six knights yield to Queen Guinevere (Interlude 2), will be the first aventure performed at the banquet on Day 1 (lines 420–428). But the tale of the Knight of the Lion, which ends with this scene, is awkwardly cobbled into the Roman at the beginning of Day 2. Just as Queen Guinevere is waiting to see Sir Kay begin the jousting, Sarrasin breaks off his account and begins the tale with a common storyteller’s phrase: 712

716

La roïne et toutes ses jens S’en va as loges assëoir, Qu’ele veut la jouste vëoir Du senescal mesire Keu. Mais s’il vous plaist entendre un peu, Je vous dirai d’une aventure.

[The Queen and all her attendants / go to their seats in the tribune, / for she wants to see the joust / of her seneschal, Sir Kay. / But if it please you to listen a while / I will tell you about an adventure.]

The tale is a fine piece for an audience that enjoys listening to romance. It is enlivened by picturesque praise of the Knight of the Lion whose chivalrous thoughts are reported in interior monologue. There is a pretty tableau of the four maidens, 19

Juliet Vale 13–14. It took me about a half-hour to read the narrative of the Knight of the Lion out loud to myself. At 802 verses, the story is somewhat longer than what Carol Symes calls the typical “attention unit” of 300–500 verses (Symes 76n86, citing Michel Rousse, “Le Jeu de saint Nicolas. Tradition et innovation,” Arras au moyen âge: Histoire et littérature, eds. Marie-Madeleine Castellani and JeanPierre Martin [Arras, Artois Presses Université, 1994] 153–62). 20

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hair streaming down over their white chemises as they ride along carelessly on a fair morning carrying their invitations. There are scenes of elegant etiquette, much appreciated by thirteenth-century courtly audiences. The drama of the maidens’ rescue is increased by the description of a squire who dashes back and forth between the Knight of the Lion and the four damsels who watch the combat from the battlements. Listeners might have admired the Knight of the Lion’s noble refusal to accept the magic shield that the maidens offer him and which would protect him from harm. They would have reveled in the thunderous blows of his combat with the Lord of the Castel du Bois that make the earth quake and the castle shake so hard that tiles fall off the roof, and the way the Knight of the Lion kneels before the weeping maidens, his armor still dripping blood and sweat, to beg forgiveness for having delayed so long in coming to their rescue. Perhaps most entertaining for the audience at Le Hem, as for readers of Sarrasin’s Roman, is the way the tale plays with the framing fiction, which pretends to conceal the true identity of the Knight of the Lion while gradually revealing Robert d’Artois. The story tells how the maidens beg to learn their rescuer’s name: 1236 1268

Cardoneuse escrie trest poins: “Sire, que nous diiés vo non!” Et il li escrie: “Je non.” / . . . / “Ce poroit bien estre li quens D’Artois, qui chi nous vient requerre.”

[Cardoneuse calls out, “Isn’t it time / Sir, for you to tell us your name?” / And he replies, “Not I!” / . . . / (Aiglentine says,) “That must be the Count / of Artois, come to rescue us.”]

His true identity is not disclosed, however, until the climactic moment in the combat when a lance blow knocks off his helmet, exposing his face. The squire courteously pretends not to recognize him, but runs to tell his lord, while Robert hastily attempts to hide his face: 1312 1320

1324

1332

Si li dist: “Sire, vous avés Jousté, et si ne le savés Au conte d’Artois vraiëment.” / . . . / Li sires du castel s’en rit Et vient au chevalier tout droit. Se main devant son vis tenoit, Pour Diu prie c’on li aport Son hiaume, sans plus de deport. / . . . / “Volentiers vostre non saroie, Se demander le vous osoie.” Et li quens li dist en apert: “Mon parin ot a non Robert.” Et li chevaliers, com courtois, Li dist: “Vous estes quens d’Artois.”

[(The squire) says, “Sire, you have / jousted, without realizing it, / with the Count of Artois himself. / . . . / The Lord of the Castle laughs / and goes 112

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straight to the knight. / (The knight) held his hand before his face / and calls in God’s name for someone to bring / his helmet, without more delay. / . . . / “Willingly would I learn your name / if I dared ask it.” / And the Count says to him openly: / “My godfather was named Robert.” / And the knight says courteously, / “You are the Count of Artois.”]

This teasing story celebrates Robert d’Artois, who retains all the prestige of his historical princely self, and, at the same time, gleams with the glory of an Arthurian hero as he rides out of the narrative and into the tournament. Although Sarrasin does not mark any shift from narrative to performance mode, the plot of the interpolated tale of the Knight of the Lion leads directly to the description of Interlude 2, where the seven knights yield to the Queen at the banquet. Sarrasin’s account is packed with information about how the interlude itself was actually performed:

1440

1444

1448

1452

Maint tortin i avoit ardant. Durement les va regardant Tuit li chevalier de la court; Et li lyons devant eus court, Tous jours as piés de lor chevaus. Mesire Ques li senescax Se pourvoit de çou qu’il doit dire. Cil qui des compaignons fu sire Vint devant la roïne, as dois, Et li lyons, qui fu courtois, Devant la roïne s’estut Tous cois c’onques ne se remut, sour le table mist son musel. Et li chevaliers du castel Salue la roïne et dist: “Madame, sans nul contredit, Nous venons metre en vo prison De par le Vassal au Lyon.”

[Many torches were blazing. / All the knights of the court / are looking at them intently, / and the lion runs before them / always at the feet of their horses. / Sir Kay the seneschal / prepares his lines. / The lord of the company of knights / came before the Queen, at the canopied table, / and the lion, who was courtly, / remained before the Queen / quite still, and never moving, / putting his muzzle on the table. / And the Knight of the Castle / salutes the Queen and says: / “My lady, without resistance / we have come to yield to you / in the name of the Knight of the Lion.”]

Sarrasin depicts a scene lit by torches where spectators eagerly gaze at the seven knights who ride forward on horseback, all costumed in identical armor. He spotlights Sir Kay for a moment as the seneschal reviews his lines. Indeed, Sir Kay has a big speaking role in four interludes, providing comic relief throughout. After the knights yield to the Queen, Sir Kay addresses them in thirty-eight lines of “cox” [blows], insults mocking the virility and strength of each: 113

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[1479] “Venés vous femes demander? / . . . / Et cis rous la, qui est si grans, Aroit tost fait un home cous. 1484 Et cil la aroit tost rescous Plain hanap de vin, au besoing, / . . . / 1488 Et cil la est mout enfonsés De car, je croi qu’il soit mout mous.” Et si dist sour cascun ses cox Mesire Quex, dont il fet mal. [“Have you come to get dames? / . . . / Watch out that Big Red there / doesn’t cuckold you. / And that other fellow can rescue / a beaker full of wine, if need be. / . . . / And Fatso over there / is a real softy.” / Thus Sir Kay heckles each of them / which is very rude of him.]

The lion, of course, is the pièce de résistance of this processional performance. Although the lion plays no role in the interpolated narrative of the Knight of the Lion,21 he gives a notable performance in Interludes 2 and 3 where he parades through crowds with courtly courtesy, poses without moving during speeches, and growls with alarm during the joust when Aubert de Longueval’s lance crashes against the shield of Robert d’Artois (lines 2842–3). Rather than a real beast from a menagerie or a mechanical wonder like those in the later Burgundian court feasts,22 it is likely that the lion was played by an actor wearing a lion’s mask and hairy costume similar to those depicted in the Fauvel charivari of Paris in BnF MS Fr. 146 (1317).23 Robert d’Artois had taken the lion as one of his emblems well before the tournament at Le Hem, adopting a lion’s head for his seal in 1274 in place of the Artois coat of arms.24 Did Robert d’Artois and the minstrels in his household organize and perform the whole episode of the Knight of the Lion—tale and interludes—as his contribution to the feast? He is warmly praised by Sarrasin for his courtesy, his generosity, and for his joy in tournaments (lines 3926–46). Interlude 3, the entry of the Knight of the Lion, occurs later on Day 2, concluding the narrative action of the tale interpolated earlier. It is the most fully developed of all the interludes in Le roman du Hem and is a primary document of rare interest for historians of medieval performance (see the full text in the 21 In the tale, the Knight orders the lion to accompany the seven knights to Le Hem (lines 1420–1) and there are two references to “cil qui li lyons maine” (lines 733, 1293) [he who leads the lion]. 22 I thank Jesse Hurlbut, for sending me the results of his survey of chronicle mentions of real and mechanical lions in late-medieval Burgundian festivities (presented in his paper “Bringing the Burgundian Court to Life: Animals, Pageantry, and Automatons,” Thirty-ninth International Congress on Medieval Studies, 9 May 2004, Western Michigan University); they include a carefully chained live lion protecting a statue at the Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 and a roaring mechanical lion at a fête at Ghent in honor of Philippe-le-Bon and Isabelle of Portugal in 1457. 23 See Nancy Freeman Regalado, “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,” Masques et déguisements au moyen âge, ed. Marie-Louise Ollier (Montréal, Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1988) 111–26, figs. 1, 2, 4. 24 I thank Brigitte Bedos-Resak for giving me information about Robert’s seals (see her article, “The Arthurian Legend in the Arts: The Knight and Lion Motif on Some Medieval Seals,” Avalon to Camelot 2 [1987]: 30–4).

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Appendix). In addition to the lion, there are eleven characters including seven speaking roles (two are comic figures) as well as four maidens singing, and musicians playing trumpets and tabors. The performance space extends from the gate of the lists to the Queen’s grandstand.25 The Knight of the Lion enters on horseback, preceded by the lion, the musicians, and the four damsels he has rescued, who are mounted on palfreys and dressed alike in finely pleated white chemises with large brooches. The Knight pauses at the gate while his written request for permission to join her court is brought to the Queen in the grandstand. His letter, sealed with a mirror, is carried by a loathly damsel, Mademoiselle Sueffre-Paine [Miss Long-Suffering], a giant figure dressed in a yellow and black cape and kerchief, who is jollied along by Sir Kay, as she passes: “Welcome, fair maiden! Are you she for whom so many knights have died?” (lines 2717–19). The processional movement of the entry is articulated first by this pause, next by the formal reading of the letter by the Queen’s chaplain in the grandstand, and then by a twenty-line speech in which Sueffre-Paine relates her exchange with the Queen to the Knight (and to spectators stationed far from the grandstand). Finally the procession advances into the lists to the music of drums, trumpets, and the maidens’ singing. There is further byplay among the spectators about the identity of the Knight, who is admired by the ladies in the stand. Fortrece, the Queen’s handmaiden, exclaims: “What a warrior! I never saw anyone who looked more like Robert d’Artois!” (lines 2807–9). The interlude ends with a joust between the Knight of the Lion and his host, Aubert de Longueval, which earns him the right to enter the service of Queen Guinevere and join her in the stand, that is, to remain in the Arthurian fiction. Performance of romance in this interlude thus serves to affirm the noble, courtly identity of Robert d’Artois. In his transparent disguise as the Knight of the Lion, Robert shifts between real and fictional roles, but he is glorious in each.26 Similarly, Sarrasin highlights the title or real name of male performers in the other interludes—Wautier de Hardecourt, Robillart de Coupigny, and the Duke of Lorraine—as carefully as he records the names of each of the 189 knights in the jousts.27 Other than the dwarfs, the only male performer never identified by his real name is Sir Kay, who seems to be a knight serving in the Longueval household. The jousts and interludes use different means to emphasize ideal chivalric performance. In his account of the jousts, Sarrasin is instructed to show each knight successfully breaking his lances. The Queen’s handmaiden Fortrece tells him: “Di le bien et si lai le mal” (line 3953) [Say the good and leave out the bad]. In contrast, four out of the five interludes depict negative examples of chivalric comportment corrected by the Queen’s knights. Knights such as Robillart de 25

On the use of scaffolds in this interlude, see Juliet Vale 14. Similarly in his Frauendienst, Ulrich von Liechtenstein dubs his companions with Arthurian names but emphasizes their real identity: “von spiegelberc her Lanzilet, / her Heinrich war sin reher nam” (stanza 1430, lines 3–4) [Lord Lancelot von Spiegelberg, / his true name was Lord Heinrich (trans. Carola Dwyer)]. 27 On the Roman du Hem as a roll of arms, see Juliet Vale 22–3 and Regalado, “A Contract.” 26

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Coupigny seeking honor in the tournament could evidently accept to play “bad guys” in the interludes, for these performances of Arthurian narrative test and confirm the values of chivalry at Le Hem. Although Le roman du Hem celebrates the historical identity of the knights present at Le Hem, Sarrasin does not reveal the real names of the ladies attending the tournament or playing roles in the interludes, or even that of Queen Guinevere.28 Women are central, however, in each of the five performances of narrative: the Queen, Soredamors, Sueffre-Paine, Fortrece, and all the many maidens. Moreover, women are an indispensable presence in the order of the tournament itself: Lady Courtesy emphasizes that each knight must bring a lady or damsel to honor the queen.29 Omission of the real names of women in Le roman du Hem thus seems both deliberate and puzzling. In contrast, the historical identity of ladies is carefully marked throughout the analogous festival book, Le tournoi de Chauvency, where they are named and shown conversing, singing, dancing, and miming in the 1285 tournament.30 Does Sarrasin draw a veil over the real names out of some notion of respectful courtesy? Or does he do so in order to focus attention entirely on the women’s role in the performances of narrative? The historical identity of the ladies (unlike that of the knights) is entirely absorbed by their performance in the romance fictions that reign in Sarrasin’s poem. The issue of identities points to the meaning of the performances of narrative in Sarrasin’s book. The interludes open a window into a world where knights and ladies add luster to their historical identity by playing romance roles. The imagination of the participants at Le Hem is filled with the stuff of romance. Participants take Arthurian romance as the inspiration for the best that men and women can do, in the belief that what is done in the imagination and in the heart is as important as what “really” happens. Le roman du Hem thus reveals broad dimensions of the performance of narrative in the Middle Ages; it points to ongoing performances in the imagination of a textual community of readers of romance which could, upon occasion, be manifested in the etiquette of courtly festivities, in Arthurian interludes, in the conduct of a tournament, and in the written chronicle of such an event. The knights and ladies perform in their own armor, their own white chemises, and in the familiar spaces of banquet hall and jousting field. Yet, because their exploits are performed as romance, these festivities glorify their every gesture—their beauty, prowess, courtesy, and generous courage.

28 One real woman’s name is announced by Lady Courtesy, “la dame de Caieus” (line 451), who is to accompany the Queen. She is probably Marguerite de Longueval, related to one of the tournament sponsors (Sarrasin lxxvii). 29 “Que, pour le roïne honerer, / Amaint cascuns sans demourer, / Dame u pucele amaint o lui” (lines 383–5) [In order to honor the queen / let each bring without delay / a lady or a maiden with him]; see Juliet Vale 13. On women in real and romance tournaments from the twelfth and first part of the thirteenth centuries, see Baldwin 83–6. The importance of female attendance in the later thirteenth century and after is confirmed by archival records showing that wagonloads of maidens were transported to tournaments (Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 [Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001] 198–9). 30 Regalado, “Picturing the Story of Chivalry.”

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Appendix Interlude 3: The Entry of the Knight of the Lion

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Ensi que la roïne estoit Es eskafaus et regardoit Les bon joustëours et les fors Si voit venir par de defors Quatre puceles d’un sanlant Lour palefroi furent amblant, Et sont si bien faites de taille Je ne quic mie que j’en faille Qu’ainc plus beles veïst nus hom. D’un sanlant et d’une façon Sont vestues au fuer d’esté; Blans cainses, bien menu ridé, Ont vestu, qui bien lour avienent. Devant le chevalier s’en vienent, Qui du castel les delivra Et toutes quatre lour livra Gros fremaus et grosses afiques. Arrestés est dehors les liches Li chevaliers qui les amaine Madamoiselle Sueffre-Paine A apielee et ele i vient, Et ot vestu, bien m’en souvient, Une cape; d’un couvrechief Gros ot envolepé son cief; Gaune ert et noire et de grant taille. Mesire une lettre li baille, Seelees d’un mirëour, Et dist: “Vous irés sans demour A la roïne, qui la haut Est assise en cel eskafaut; Bien la connisterés seur toutes Ains que soiiés outre les routes. Se mesire Kex vous perçoit, A la roïne trestout droit Vous merra pour vous escarnir; Mais de tant vous voel jou garnir Que ne respondés tant ne quant.” Sueffre-Paine s’en part a tant Et vient a la roïne droit. Et mesire Kex orendroit Estoit venus au chevalier, C’on desarmoit sur son destrier, Si avoit il grant cop reçut. Cil qui premerains se perçut De Sueffre-Paine, ce fu Qués. Encontre li s’en est alés Et dist: “Bien veigniés vous, pucele. Or me dites, estes vous cele

While the Queen was in the grandstand and watching the good, strong jousters, she saw coming from outside four maidens all alike. Their palfreys were trotting and they were so shapely I dare say that no man ever saw prettier. They were all dressed identically in summer clothing. They wore white chemises, finely pleated which suited them well. They preceded the knight who delivered them from the castle, and he gave each of four great brooches and large clasps. The knight who brings them pauses outside the lists. He calls Miss Long-Suffering and she comes forward wearing (if I remember aright) a cape; her head was wrapped in a huge kerchief; She wore yellow and black and was very tall My Lord gives her a letter sealed with a mirror, saying: “You are to go without delay to the Queen, who is seated up there in the grandstand; You’ll recognize her among her maidens As soon as you get through the crowd. If Sir Kay catches sight of you, he’ll escort you to the queen in order to make fun of you; but I warn you not to answer him back.” Long-Suffering sets off and comes straight to the Queen. And meanwhile, Sir Kay came up to the knight seated on his warhorse as he disarmed (for he had sustained great blows). Kay was the first to spot Long-Suffering. He went to meet her, saying: “Welcome, maiden. Now tell me, are you she

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Pour qui tant chevalier sont mort? Par ceste teste que je port, Vous n’en rirés pas sans ami, Se vous volés entendre a mi. Que vos grans biauté me deçoit.” La damoisele s’aperçoit Que Kex le moke, si se taist. Pres de la roïne se traist, Si l’a hautement saluee. Et la roïne s’est levee, Qui mout est bonne et honerable. “Dame, ves ci le bonne Orable1 Qui une lettre vous aporte. Puis qu’ele entra dedens le porte, Le m’a on hapee trois fois Pour sa biauté.” —“Taisiés vous cois Mesire Ques,” dist la roïne, “Tant estes de male doctrine Que tous li mondes vous ressoingne. Mais il est drois qu’epine poingne Et que male langue parole. Il n’est nus qui ja mais vous tole Vostre usage, que si est vieus: De castiier cat qui est vieus Ne puet nus hom venir a cief.” La damoisele de rechief Commence son message a dire, Et dist: “Roïne, faites lire Ceste lettre que je vous baille, Que il convient que tost m’en aille.” La roïne prent en sa main La lettre et huce un capelain, Qui li devise mot a mot Et lués que la roïne l’ot Que li Chevaliers au Lyon Li proie qu’en tout guerredon Le retiegne de sa maisnie, S’en est la roïne si lie Qu’ele ne set que devenir. “Damoisele, faites venir Vostre seigneur, que Dix honnourt!” —“Dame, saus les drois de no court ‘Est mesire a vous demourés.” —“Damedix en soit aourés,” Dist la roïne, “qu’il le gart!” A tant la pucele s’en part, A son signeur vient, si li conte: “Sire, la sont et duc et conte, La u vous m’avés envoiie; D’un chevalier fui convoiie Dusk’a madame la roïne Ne sai se ce fu par haïne,

for whom so many knights have died? I swear that you’ll not leave here without a lover, if you’ll just listen to me, for your great beauty takes me by surprise.” The damsel sees that Kay is mocking her, and says nothing. She goes to the Queen and greets her courteously. The Queen arises, for she is good and full of honor. [Kay:] “Lady, here is the good Orable come to bring you a letter. Since she came to the gate, thrice someone has snatched her from me because of her beauty.” —“Be quiet, Sir Kay,” said the Queen, “Everyone is concerned because you’re so ill-mannered. But thorns must prick and sharp tongues speak. No one can change your ways which are so long-standing. No one can teach an old dog new tricks.” The damsel immediately begins to deliver her message, saying: “Queen, have this letter read out, which I bring, for I must leave soon.” The Queen takes the letter in her hand and calls a chaplain, who reads out every word for her. And as soon as the Queen hears that the Knight of the Lion begs as his reward to join her court, the Queen is so happy she is beside herself. “Damsel, have your lord, whom God honors, come forward!” —“Lady, it is right that my lord remain in your court.” —“God be praised,” said the Queen, “and may He keep him.” At this point, the maiden leaves, comes to her lord, and tells him all. “Sire, there are dukes and counts over there where you sent me; I was escorted by a knight to my lady, the Queen; I don’t know if he spoke out of hate,

Saracen name of Guibourc, wife of Guillaume d’Orange in the epic La prise d’Orange.

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Mais il me requist de m’amour. La roïne, pour soie honnour, Se dreça lués qu’ele me vit. Quant ele ot entendu l’escrit, Sire, que je li aportai, De la joie me confortai Qu’ele fist de vostre venue. Vous et vo gent est retenue, Se vous estiés quatre milliers. Joustes quatre de chevaliers, Mout felenesses et mout fort, Cevax et espaulés et mors I vi parmi ces rens jesir. La roïne n’a nul desir Si grant comme de vous vëoir.” Son lyon commande a mouvoir Li chevaliers, et ses puceles Deus et deus s’en vont, comme celes Qui plus bel cantent que seraine; Aprés le lyon qui les maine Viennent les puceles a court. Tous li mondes encontre court, Il i a trompes et taburs; Es lices entrent parmi l’uis, Si ordené que riens n’i faut. Les dames deseur l’escafaut Voient le Vassal au Lion: El ne regardent se lui non Et son lyon et ses puceles; Et de teles armes comme eles Fu li chevaliers adoubés. Devens les lices est entrés Prest de jouster, ne li faut riens. “Par le cief Saint Jehan d’Amiens,” Dist Fortrece, “cis est vassaus. Et si puisse jou estre saus, Je ne vi onques de mes iex Nul homme qui resanlast mix Monseigneur le conte d’Artois.”

but he begged me for my love. The Queen, in all honor, stood up as soon as she saw me. When she had heard the letter, Sire, which I brought to her, I was gratified to see how she rejoiced over your arrival. You and your company are to join her court, even if you were four thousand strong. I saw knights in four jousts, fierce and mighty, horses, and broken shoulders, and gear lying about within the lists. The Queen has no desire greater than to see you.” The knight orders his lion to move forward, and his maidens. go two by two, singing more beautifully than sirens. After the lion, who leads them, the maidens come to the court. Everyone rushes forward to greet them; there are trumpets and tabors; They pass through the entry of the lists in such fine order that nothing is lacking. The ladies in the grandstand see the Vassal with the Lion. They look only at him and at his lion and his maidens; the knight was armed with armor like wings. He enters the lists ready to joust; he lacks nothing. “By the head of Saint John of Amiens,” says Fortrece, “what a warrior! And, God save me, I never saw with my own eyes any man who looked more like my lord, the Count of Artois.”

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Part III PERFORMABILITY AND MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE GENRES

Performing Fabliaux † Brian J. Levy

In setting out on a search for performances of the Old French comic fabliaux, this essay begins neither in the town marketplace, nor in the higher social surroundings of manor house or castle hall, but in the pulpit. Paradoxically, and with an irony that would not have been lost on the professional conteors themselves (so often ready to close their stories with a mock-homily), some of the most direct evidence that we possess of the fabliaux’s performance potential comes from the artes prædicandi [arts of preaching]. Throughout the various collections of exempla, which bear full witness to the practical eclecticism of the medieval sermon, are to be found a number of recognisable fabliaux or fabliaux analogues. The case of Jacques de Vitry (whose sermons are datable to c.1228–40) is a particularly informative (and formative) one, since he takes great care to tailor his material to his audience. In contrast to his Sermones feriales et communes [Sermons for Feasts and Ordinary Days] (aimed at fellow-clergy at a time when Cathar heresy had to be countered by orthodoxy and spirituality), his Sermones vulgares [Sermons to the Laity] are directed at the wider lay public and its human failings. The anecdotes of this latter group are just as cunningly chosen, but from a far more popular domain. It is surely no coincidence that the period of a hundred years, from Jacques de Vitry to the Anglo-Norman minorite Nicolas Bozon who enthusiastically reworked exemplary anecdotes into vernacular narrative form,1 is also that of the heyday of the fabliaux. The cardinal-bishop of Tusculum and the preaching friars would be disseminating the same stories at the same time as the jongleurs, and effectively to the same wide audience, who would recognise them and pay attention. Surroundings and intent may have been different, but the telling of the tales 1 Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, frère mineur, eds. Lucy Toulmin Smith and Paul Meyer (Paris, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1889). It should perhaps be noted that Bozon’s own sermons would probably have been given for the most part in English, his Anglo-Norman French being by this time (c.1320) a cultural vernacular which tended to be reserved for such “literary” productions as his devotional poetry and prose works (or, elsewhere, for the more technical fields of records or documentation). Such, however, is the pungency and sheer direct appeal of some of Bozon’s anecdotes (he calls them Metaphorae [Metaphors], rather than the “Moralising Tales” coined by the editors) that we should not rule out the possibility of a “performance” in AngloNorman to an urban middle-class audience still as sufficiently at home with this alternative tongue as is the preacher himself.

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themselves would have called upon common performing skills. In Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones vulgares may be found anecdotes based on, inter alia, the following comic texts: Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus [The Covetous Man and the Envious Man], La Housse partie [The Divided Horse Blanket], Le Pré tondu [The Mown Meadow], Le Prestre qui menga mores [The Priest Who Ate the Blackberries], Le Preudome qui recolt son compere de noier [The Worthy Man Who Saved his Companion from Drowning], Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’anel [The Three Ladies who Found a Ring], La Veuve [The Widow], Le Vilain asnier [The Peasant and his Asses], and Le Vilain mire [The Peasant who Pretended to be a Doctor]. The Dominican Étienne de Bourbon (d.1261) retells the tales of Brunain [Brownie the Cow], Le Prestre et le Leu [The Priest and the Wolf], and Le Prestre mis au lardier [The Priest in the Pantry]. Among English Franciscan compilations, the Liber exemplorum [Book of Exemplary Stories] (c.1275–79) lists La Housse partie, while Les Perdriz [The Brace of Partridges] is found in the Speculum laicorum [Mirror for the Laity] of c.1277–92. Into the 1320s Nicolas Bozon offers vigorous redactions of Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus, Jouglet [The Great Jugglo], and Le Vilain mire.2 This is not the place to analyse the form or function of all thes fabliaux in their new didactic, moralising context,3 although the repeated presence of La Housse partie and of Jean Bodel’s Le Couvoiteus et l’Envieus does at least emphasise the ambivalent, and truly cautionary, nature of these two texts.4 What interests us here is that they are clearly part of a live performance, or rather echoes of one, and that the selected stories—including some far less overtly-moralising ones—are particularly well-suited to being performed. All are sharply dramatic, with one episode following swiftly upon another (the récit lending itself to compression as, in other circumstances, it would to amplification).5 Many contain telling, one-line 2 The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, ed. T. F. Crane (1890; New York, Franklin, 1971) exempla numbers (the order corresponds to the list of the fabliaux cited in the text) 196, 288, 221 and 222, 51, 160, 231 and 248, 232, 191, 237 and 254, 236, 197. Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, Renouard, 1877) exempla143, 468, 470. Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium, ed. A. G. Little (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1908) number 105. Le Speculum laicorum, ed. J.-Th. Welter (Paris, Picard, 1914) chapter X, paragraph 63. Bozon, Contes moralises, numbers 112, 144, 44. 3 Mary Jane Schenck and I have each independently written on the subject: Mary Jane Stearns Schenck, “Narrative Structure in the Exemplum, Fabliau and the Nouvelle,” Romanic Review 72 (1981): 367–82 (a Proppian analysis showing mouvance through the three genres); and Brian J. Levy, “Le fabliau et l’exemple. Étude sur les recueils moralisants anglo-normands” (concentrating on popular Fraternal preaching, with particular reference to the Franciscans of the English Province in the later thirteeth and early fourteenth centuries), Épopée animale, Fable, Fabliau. Actes du IVe Colloque de la Société Internationale Renardienne, Évreux, 7–11 septembre 1981, eds. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1983) 311–21. 4 On the subject of the ambiguous or “serious” fabliau, see Jacques Ribard, “Et si les fabliaux n’étaient pas des ‘contes à rire’?” Reinardus 2 (1989): 134–43; a reworked version of this article appears in Le Rire au moyen âge dans la littérature et dans les arts, eds. Thérèse Bouché and Hélène Charpentier (Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990) 309–22. 5 Even when they are reduced to their bare bones, as in Vitry’s thumbnail version of the already short fabliau of the Vilain asnier, the impact is still an immediate and dramatic one, triggering the audience’s recognition and appreciation of the “full” story.

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pieces of dialogue, and all have potential for “business” with gestures and imaginary props. That they are taken out of their original purely comic context does not in the slightest affect the vigour of the performance factor. The Speculum laicorum’s version of Les Perdriz may end, not with the greedy wife’s triumphant avoidance of a threatened beating at the hands of her husband, but with the beating itself; however, the preacher still has all the material he needs to dramatise his point. There is the wife’s hungry and shrill dialogue: “Give me a wing!” There is her action in seizing the bird (the exemplum features a single plump capon, instead of two partridges), ripping it apart and gobbling as much down as possible before her husband’s very eyes, and finally there is some crucial business with the spit (which in the original fabliau narrative is in fact only a very ancillary prop, linked to the household realia of the tale). This business involves both verbal and physical performance. The husband declares, “You’ve eaten everything! But why have you left the spit? You ought to have a taste of that too!” and then proceeds to act out the pun by picking up the spit and using it as an ironically appropriate club with which to belabour his wife.6 A generation of friars later, Nicolas Bozon concludes a model sermon on the uselessness of hoarding material goods with a re-telling of Jouglet (which represents a pinnacle of homiletic performance art). Firstly, a deft and daring mise en abyme: here is a skilled preacher-narrator telling a story about another archprofessional performer, a minstrel juggler (the congregation would well appreciate the diverting irony of hearing from the very pulpit itself details of a parallel performing art, but one expressly condemned by the Church as particularly lewd and wanton). Secondly, localisation, catering directly to an East Midlands audience, it is in Leicestershire (“en la counté de Leycestre”) that the jongleur arrives to entertain “graunt assemblé des bonz gentz” [a great gathering of worthy folk] at a local manor house. Thirdly, the “running” visual prop (imagined, or perhaps an actual purse held up by the preacher) of the “sachel,” the juggler’s bag of tricks. Finally, the blend of dramatic direct speech and a narrative lends itself throughout to mime and business of all kinds. Here is the entertainer carefully hiding his satchel; here are the “deus mauveis garceouns” [two good-for-nothing layabouts] finding it, and shitting in it; here is the jongleur in performance, playing his first tricks of sleight-of-hand, and here he is promising his audience more: “Mes uncore y ad un gyle en ma bourse,” and delving into his satchel for further props (“pur prendre ses deceitez”), only to find his hand all covered in excrement. Here he is at the end, running offstage in distress, to the accompaniment of much laughter and heckling: “Veyre, veyre, tregettour, bien parlastez: autre deceit fust en vostre bours qe vous cuidastez!” [You were right there, juggler: there were more tricks in your bag than you reckoned for!]7 In this single excerpted example of the preacher’s art, tuned to attract, entertain, and instruct his secular congregation in the most direct manner, Bozon offers many practical possibilities which 6 “ ‘Totum sola comedisti, non restat nisi veru i.e. spite, justum est ut gustes ex eo,’ et ‘verberavit eam egregie ipso veru spice,’ ” Speculum laicorum 15. 7 Contes moralisés numbers 144 (179–82), 180. All English translations here and elsewhere are my own.

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may be tested on the original fabliaux so as to investigate their own performability and their jongleurs’ own “communication techniques.” Certain narratological elements are of particular relevance to the communication of the comic text to its listening public. In the fabliaux, as elsewhere, the element of verbal address is conveyed by means of a number of devices: choice of second person and of verbs such as oïr/veoir; rhetorical questions and similar phrases linking “je” and “vous”; warnings and assurances having the effect of confidential asides, for example. For our purposes, all these formulae are more than just observable stylistic features; in actual performance they become, as it were, attention-catching props in the juggler’s (or jongleur’s) satchel. As far as practical performance is concerned, at least three basic patterns may be observed: having read the text for himself, the reciter may commit it to memory, or (as in the case of some of the preachers’ handbooks) he may have his memory jogged by a few written lines, going on to expand the narrative orally, or he may consult an actual manuscript, reading his story directly from it. Our fabliaux are short texts (most of them no more than one hundred to five hundred lines long) and easy for a professional jongleur to memorise. On the other hand, their very shortness (as well as their comic intent) implies that more than one might be told at a given session, and therefore recourse to the written word should not be ruled out, particularly if the “script” becomes part of the act itelf. A few (the longer episodic stories of over one thousand lines) might extend over more than one sitting, depending on circumstances; the exceptional case of Trubert (at nearly 3000 lines) certainly presents the jongleur with an extended multiple gag, a “fabliau à sketches” breakable at the end of any one of its brutally funny episodes. Given the sheer amount of modern scholarly interest in the fabliaux, it is remarkable how comparatively little attention has been paid to actual details of performance. Two notable exceptions have been Willem Noomen and Norris J. Lacy. With his usual percipient eye, Lacy has noted the presence of the “observer” in the fabliaux: either through a direct Ez vos [Now see] appeal to the audience itself, or through the activity in the text of a character whose role it is to witness the comic actions of others (who thus become doubly objects of fun).8 For his part, Noomen has contributed two important articles on fabliau texts as indicators of performance.9 These have been invaluable in providing clear examples and in laying down markers for future study; the rest of this essay duly acknowledges both Noomen’s pioneering and Lacy’s recent work, adding material, widening the field, and drawing some further conclusions. We shall first look for any possible evidence of performance in the fabliaux manuscripts, and study the implications of citing other comic titles in a given tale, then consider the

8 Norris J. Lacy, “Subject to Object: Performance and Observation in the Fabliaux,” Symposium 56 (2002): 17–24. 9 Willem Noomen, “Performance et mouvance: à propos de l’oralité des fabliaux,” Reinardus 3 (1990): 127–42; and “Auteur, narrateur, récitant des fabliaux: le témoignage des prologues et des épilogues,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 35 (1992): 313–50. Albeit of more general application, Evelyn Birge Vitz’s comments (Orality and Performance in Early French Romance [Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999] 164–227) are of equal importance to our study of the comic text.

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recital-function of fabliau prologues and conclusions, as well as other elements indicating an address to a “live” audience. Finally we shall seek to uncover the full oral performability of the fabliaux, with close reference to a number of representative texts. Recent studies of the well-known fabliaux manuscripts cast light on the concept of “repertoire” in the later thirteenth century.10 These are very deliberate compilations containing more than fabliaux, each the work of a single copyist (or of a small number of scribes working in close collaboration), and each containing strong evidence of thematic grouping. Two patterns in particular seem to emerge. Firstly, blocks of fabliaux tend to alternate with far more serious moral or “courtly” texts, yet another indication of the medieval catholicity of taste, and also of a strong counterpointing role played by the fabliaux as possible “negative exempla.” From the point of view of performance, this implies that the jongleur might deliberately alternate genres, and that his audience would not merely expect to be entertained with serious pieces as well as comic, but would actually appreciate a witty conjunction of the two, seeing in the one a mockery of the other (or a more cultured or seemly antidote to it). This interweaving of genres, highlighting the increasing popularity of the comic text, brings us back to our opening mirror-image of the fabliau “performed” from the pulpit; in each case both performer and public are fully aware of the parallel track of instruction and entertainment. The second pattern observable in the fabliau manuscripts is that in at least two cases (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 354, and Paris, BNF, fr. 837) there is a concentration—too evident to be coincidental—of poems about, or references to, various trades and occupations. This does not merely reflect the personal interests of the manuscript’s owner, who may well have moved in such artisanal or mercantile circles. It also suggests that, if the owner were a jongleur, these are some of the audiences before which he would perform, drawing on material which he knew would be highly acceptable at functions organised by the urban trades guilds. The case for proposing these utilitarian, text-packed, and unadorned manuscripts as possible “jongleur-books” is a tempting one. The master conteor would provide texts for the scribe to copy, and the resulting impressive anthology would certainly give him an “edge” over the opposition, in this golden (and increasingly

10 Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, “Les jongleurs et leur public,” Autour de 1300. Études de philologie et de littérature médiévales, eds. Sorin Alexandrescu, Fernand Drijkoningen, and Willem Noomen (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1985) 59–70 (an article originally appearing in Dutch in 1982, and translated into French for this memorial collection); Keith Busby, “Fabliaux and the New Codicology,” The World and its Rival. Essays on Literary Imagination in Honor of Per Nykrog, eds. Kathryn Karczewska and Tom Conley (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1999) 137–60; and Barbara Nolan, “Turning over the Leaves of Medieval Fabliau-Anthologies: The Case of Bibliothèque Nationale MS. Français 2173,” Medieval Perspectives 8 (1998): 1–31, and “Anthologizing Ribaldry: Five Anglo-Norman Fabliaux,” Studies in the Harley Manuscript. The Scribes, Contents and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, Michigan, Medieval Institute Publications, 2000) 289–327. Although neither article addresses the precise question of performance, some of the authors’ shared or independent conclusions lead us, as it were, into the wings of the stage.

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competitive) age of the jongleur.11 Nico van den Boogaard suggests that the fabliau manuscripts might have been used as master textbooks for apprentice jongleurs; although there is no proof that this was ever the case,12 his theory does force us to think clearly about the relationship between the written text and its performance. Once set down in ink, the fabliaux would be available to the jongleur for personal reading, assimilation, useful practice, and final professional delivery to a paying public.13 Here, one can distinguish two techniques, each equally valid (and indeed combinable): the jongleur reads, and commits whole tracts to memory, or he consults his book as part of his performance, as a formal recitation. This latter is an important point, to which we shall return. Before moving on from indications of repertoire to look more closely at those of actual performance, we may note other intertextual hints in some of our texts,14 in particular, those by named authors. In Les Deus Chevaus [The Two Horses], Jean Bodel (our earliest known fableor, and creator, if not of the genre, then most probably of its swift popularity), opens with a meticulous list of the titles of all his other eight fabliaux.15 This is proud publicity, as effective when recited by the jongleur to gain the medieval listeners’ ears and approval as would have been the invitation, cried out by the local innkeeper, to come taste his fine wines. Similarly, when Gautier le Leu’s filthy fabliau of Connebert [Cuntbert] starts both by naming the author and by citing the title of another of his scabrously comic pieces,16 and when exactly the same thing happens, but twice over, in the opening 11

Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France au moyen âge, 2nd ed. (Paris, Champion, 1964). “Les jongleurs et le public” 67. Lack of proof does not mean that we should rule this hypothesis out of court: it is certainly tempting to see in our fabliau manuscript the comic-text equivalent of Villard de Honnecourt’s art and architecture portfolio, with apprentice reciters learning to extract laughter from scatological vocabulary in much the same way, and at exactly the same time, as the design students in the Picard master’s atelier were learning how to draw a dog or cat licking its own backside. 13 A rare, but informative example of an amateur, “ad hoc” performance is found in the fabliau of Le Povre Clerc [The Poor Student], whose eponymous impoverished student, offered hospitality in a well-to-do vilain’s house, is asked to entertain the family while the meal is being prepared. While confessing that he knows no fabliaux, the acutely-observant clerk proceeds to tell a tale which effectively reveals the peasant wife’s miserliness, and even her adultery with the priest. At the end, he receives the guilty priest’s clothing as recompense. In this little “fabliau within a fabliau” we have some key elements of the circumstances of performance: place, occasion, audience, tale, and jongleur’s traditional reward. 14 All references are to the Nouveau Recueil complet des fabliaux [NRCF], eds. Nico van den Boogaard and Willem Noomen, 10 vols. (Assen, Van Gorcum, 1983–98); in references, the Roman numeral refers to the volume, the Arabic numeral to the fabliau number. 15 Les Deus Chevaus (NRCF V/50): “Cil qui trova del morteruel / Et del mort vilain de Bailluel / . . . Et de Gombert et des deus clers /. . . Et de Brunain, la vache au prestre / . . . Et trova le songe des vis / . . . Et du leu que l’oue deçut / Et des deus envieus cuivers / Et de Barat et de Travers / et de lor compaignon Haimet” (lines 1–13) [The same author who told you all about the bowl of hot broth, and about the dead peasant of Bailleul . . . And about Gombert and the two students . . . And about the priest’s cow Brownie . . . And who told you the one about the vision of the pricks . . . and about the goose who deceived the wolf, and about the two jealous sods, and about Barat and Travers and their mate Haimet]. 16 “Gautiers, qui fist del preste taint” (NRCF VII/77, line 1) [Gautier, the author of The Painted Priest]. Gautier’s Prestre taint is NRCF VII/81. 12

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lines of his Des Deus Vilains [The Two Peasants],17 the desired effect on the listening audience is surely one of wider recognition, and of extra lascivious anticipation. With these examples, we are in a position to study more closely (in the company of Willem Noomen and his 1992 article) the prologues and epilogues of such “named” fabliaux. Certainly, as the above examples show, the citing of the (let us assume reputed) author’s name would ensure the whetting of any audience’s appetite; however, the semantic structure of these prolegomena and conclusions—not to mention significant variants in extant manuscripts—is often nicely ambiguous, casting a no-less ambiguous light upon the precise circumstances of performance. The sense of the formulaic opening lines of Connebert and Des Deus Vilains (“Gautiers, qui fist . . .”) may indicate that the author is reciting his own work, and thus addressing his own public; or a distinction may be implied between the author referred to and the present teller of the tale (which may or may not actually belong to that author’s oeuvre: the jongleur may simply be seeking this extra cachet before embarking upon his recitation).18 In some cases, a name is introduced in so imprecise a way as to raise the possibility that it may just as well refer to the reciter-jongleur himself as to an author. If there is a pattern, taking the variants into account, and accepting the fact (since we possess no holographic evidence) that an extant manuscript version will represent a later generation of the fableor’s original composition, it is a not unexpected one: in their presentation and form of address, many of our fabliaux seem to be moving away from the fableor and towards the jongleur, towards the reciter. In this sense, in the form in which they are preserved in manuscript, they bear the mark of the hybrid; they are at one and the same time composed reading texts and “performance scripts.”19 17 “Gautiers, qui fist de Conebert / Et del sot chevalier Robiert” (NRCF IX/107, lines 1–2) [Gautier, the author of the tales of Connebert and of Robert the idiot knight]. Le sot Chevalier is NRCF V/53. The “Conebert” referred to is perhaps more likely to be one of Gautier’s companion-pieces, the fabliau analogues Du Con and Des Cons [The Tale of the Cunt; A Tale of Cunts], than the fabliau which has been given this name, probably in error, by the rubricator of the Bern manuscript (the more logical title is the Prestre ki perdi les co[i]lles [The Priest who Lost his Balls] of the second manuscript, Nottingham, Univ. Library, Middleton L.M. 6). In the context of this essay, this is no laboured point: I believe that the mistaken rubric may well be due to the fact that the name “Connebert” (an obscene pun on female genitalia, hinting also at an impious mockery of the name of Saint Cunebert) occurs in the text of this fabliau, and then again and again in three more of Gautier’s poems (Du Con, Des Cons, and Les Deus Vilains). We are surely in the presence of a comic catch phrase, and the performer (Gautier himself, or a fellow-jongleur) would only have to pronounce these three syllables for them to have an immediate and autonomous effect on his audience. 18 An example of the first case is in all probability the piece by Jean Bodel already cited; the lines have a distinctly proprietorial air about them. So does Watriquet de Couvin’s Les Trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne [The Three Canonesses of Cologne] (NRCF X/121): not merely does this author refer directly to himself and to his work, but he actually appears in it in person and in dialogue with his chararacters—a witty conceit, lending itself to a particularly vigorous piece of performance. 19 The waters may be muddied still more by the common medieval literary device of a reference to a validating auctoritas. Le Vallet aus douze fames [The Young Man with Twelve Wives] (NRCF IV/29) opens with: “Ce dist cil a qui je l’apris” (line 3) [that’s according to the person from whom I learnt this story]; the “je” here might be the author himself (entering his own text with a conventional

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Whichever creative party may be “speaking,” the presence of first-person address certainly sets up recognisable conditions of direct contact, and even of mutuality. Le Pescheor de Pont seur Seine [The Fisherman of Pont-sur-Seine] opens with a “Here’s one I heard last week” gambit: “J’oï conter l’autre semeine,” and ends on a note of shared involvement: “Cil fablel nos raconte et dit” [As this fabliau story tells us].20 The opening lines of Gautier le Leu’s Des Deus Vilains seem to be those of the jongleur, mentioning the author by name, and associating himself with his audience as mutual recipients of the written text (“Gautiers . . . / Nos aconte d’une aventure / Qu’il a fait metre en escriture” [lines 1, 3–4] [Gautier has a tale to tell us, which he’s had set down in writing]), and in its present state, the conclusion is equally the jongleur’s, with a reference to Gautier’s having first heard a version from another storyteller, “Le Goulu” [Greedy-guts], and subsequently setting it down in narrative verse as a “fablel en rime” (line 176).21 From personal names to introductory place-names. The “urban geography” revealed by a good third of the fabliaux, with the resultant linkage between text and social milieu, has inevitably been closely studied.22 However, the actual names of towns (which set the scene in many of our comic stories) deserve further comment as possible performance factors, over and beyond the general associative element of regional local colour which they impart. Even where they consist of a perfunctory one-line reference, it is at least possible that the name slotted in (and subsequently “frozen” into permanency by the manuscript tradition) is that of one of the towns in or near which a recitation has been held. A more descriptive or elaborate reference might suggest even more forcefully that the tale is being tailored to the venue and circumstances of its performance (or one of its performances). Orléans offers a particularly effective “opening gambit” for the performance of at least one text. Gautier le Leu’s Le Prestre teint does not merely inform us that the action is taking place in Orléans, and, to be even more precise, between May Day and the Feast of Saint John the Baptist (24 June; lines 4, 31); the author opens with a flattering reference to the fair city, “Orliens la bone cité” (line 5), and goes on to assure his listeners that he knows the town well, that he has often stayed there, and that it was here, on the very last occasion (in between acknowledgement), or a later jongleur in recital. Nor should we forget that the fableor would himself be a jongleur, and perform his own work. 20 Le Pescheor de Pont seur Seine (NRCF IV/28, lines 1, 197). 21 For further details of this particular multi-layered piece of composition-cum-performance, see Noomen, “Auteur, narrateur, récitant” 329–30. In Le Prestre et Alison (NRCF VIII/91) [The Priest and Alison], the reciter first refers to his own minstrel status as one of the menestreus (line 1), before instantly switching to acknowledging the story’s author, “Guillaume,” whom he subsequently mentions twice more: halfway through the story (lines 188–9), in an aside drawing specific attention to Guillaume’s written composition “en parchemin et en romanz” [set down on parchment and in French]; and in his conclusion (as “Guillaumes li Normanz” [line 439] [William the Norman], just before he himself steps down with a final word to his audience, “Il n’i a plus de cest fablel” (line 452) [That’s all, folks!]). 22 Notably, by Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, Façons de sentir et de penser: les fabliaux français (Paris, Champion, 1979), and by Gabriel Bianciotto, “Le fabliau et la ville,” Third International Beast Epic, Fable, and Fabliau Colloquium, Münster 1979. Proceedings, eds. Jan Goossens and Timothy Sodmann (Cologne, Böhlau, 1981) 43–65.

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pawning the shirt off his back to settle his exorbitant tavern bill and the present), that he actually composed “la rime fresche et novele” [the spanking new lines] of this fabliau.23 All this imparts to the prologue an element of boisterous and fraternal dialogue between the author and his public. There is perhaps an equal element of legerdemain here; such effortlessly convincing autobiographical details may be no more than Gautier’s indulgence (like his probable contemporary Rutebeuf) in the topos of the Poor Poet. Seen from the viewpoint of the audience, in fact, the truth or otherwise of these lines (or whether they are even Gautier’s original words, or another reciter’s interpolation) is quite immaterial. They are just as much part of the enjoyable performance as is the telling of the tale itself; like the stand-up comedian’s ingratiating pleasantries or fake confessions of woes and inadequacies, before his act gets fully under way. So to the act itself. Willem Noomen’s 1990 Reinardus article admirably sketches out some of the key points of fabliau performability. In studying “Performance et mouvance,” he inevitably pays tribute to Zumthor’s work on the shifting sands of orality and on the nature and status of the text as retaining or suggesting elements of extratextual circumstances: “Le texte verbalise une situation particulière.”24 Noomen makes the point that these elements, all of which combine to make up the “theatricalisation” of the comic tale, turn essentially on the binary interaction between voice and gesture.25 A professional user of the voice to maximum effect, the jongleur may slow down his delivery, in order to build up tension or to underscore a necessary detail, and then speed it up to convey rapid or vigorous activity. In dialogues, which are so much part and parcel of the comic récit, he will be able to modulate his voice in order to mimic his characters and bring them directly to life, both male and female (just as it is a mistake to seek to restrict the fabliau audience to one particular social class, so one ought not think of it as exclusively masculine—there are, as we shall see, a number of ways in which the reciter can address the presence of women in his audience). Other inflections would enable him to imply the very opposite of the literal word: thus, a bland invitation to hear “une aventure asés courtoise” [a very courtly tale], or “un fablel merveilleus et cointe” [an excellent and seemly little story],26 when delivered with a suggestive verbal leer, tips everything over into comic innuendo, mocking both strict semantics and anyone 23 “Si com je la fis l’autre jour / A Orliens, ou fui a sejour / Tant i sejornai et tant fui / Que mon mantel menjai et bui / Et une cote et un sercot / Mout i paié bien mon escot / . . . Tel ostel a maufez commant / Que ja mes jor n’i enterrai” (lines 9–14, 27–8) [Just as I composed it the other day in Orléans, where I was staying. My stay there lasted so long that I ate and drank away my cloak, together with a coat and surcoat. I certainly paid my bill to the penny—Devil take that hostelry, I’ll never set foot in there again!]. Orléans must have been a popular locus: it is also the setting for Les Braies au Cordelier [The Cobbler’s Underpants] (NRCF III/17), and above all for La Borgoise d’Orliens [The Orléans Merchant’s Wife] (NRCF III/19). 24 Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris, Seuil, 1983) 69. 25 Noomen points out how the rhetoric of fabliau recitation seems to follow many of the principles laid down in the medieval Artes poetriae (“Performance et mouvance” 130). It thus forms part of a serious tradition. 26 La Borgoise d’Orliens (line 2); Les Quatre Sohais saint Martin [Saint Martin’s Four Wishes] (NRCF IV/31, line 3).

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in the audience too naïve to get the drift. Similarly, fabliau puns can be milked for all they are worth, in a “Get it?” tone of voice,27 while the concluding “moral” may lend itself to deadpan delivery, or to heavy irony, or to overdone outrage, or again to giggling mock-solemnity. Gesturing is just as essential to the performance as is the actual recitation of the text. Noomen notes the particular importance of brief moments of silence, of “pauses for effect” punctuated by a whole range of facial expressions and head movements which become vital elements of non-verbal communication with an attentive audience. To these winks, pursed lips, grimaces, raised eyebrows, and shoulder-shrugging28 should be added the inevitable hand gestures employed by the jongleur to reinforce his story or to mime a given comic reaction. Gesturelanguage was a strong a cultural feature in the thirteenth century (above all, in Latin countries) extendeding into the whole iconographical tradition of the narrative image, in manuscript illustration as in church sculpture and stained glass. The performer could convey by standardised signing all manner of emotions or intentions expressed or implied in his text: acceptance or opposition, confident assertion or doubt, delight or horror, presentation or refusal.29 By striking a statuesque pose at a given moment the jongleur would be assured of an understanding laugh, even more so when these gestures accompanied pieces of dialogue, which he would act out by adopting in turn the persona of each character involved: husband and wife, priest and clerk. In a similar vein, he could physically mimic a brawny artisan (Le Meunier et les deus clers [The Miller and the Two Students]), or a hunchback (Les Trois Boçus [The Three Hunchbacks]), or an old hag (La Vieille Truande [The Rascally Old Woman]).30 His hands could also make use of imaginary (sometimes, perhaps, even real) props, actualising items in the text: clubs, 27 In Les Quatre Sohais saint Martin, for instance, the peasant’s magic wish which covers his wife’s body with female genitalia is accompanied by a narrative aside: “Lors fu la fame bien connue” (line 147) [So the wife was well and truly a-cunt-ed for], and the same obscene pun is subsequently turned into direct speech, and put into the husband’s mouth: “Que ja mais n’anteroiz en rue / Que ne soiez bien coneue!” (lines 173–4) [Every time you go outside you’ll be called to a-cunt!] We can imagine the jongleur’s technique: first lingering over the syllables (and so making sure that his audience gets the dirty joke), and then, in the follow-up, delivering the word quickly (but in a suitably comic peasant accent), to the accompaniment of a second, knowing burst of laughter. 28 “Performance et mouvance” 136. In raising the point of the “attente du public,” Noomen suggests in passing that an audience might expect something of the kind from a known popular fabliau-performer. One should not push conjecture too far, but the “signatures” of classic vaudeville performers go back to a very long tradition of foolery indeed; and, given the pictorial evidence (notably on misericords) of the medieval fool with his cap and bauble, it is tempting to see the comic jongleur wearing a distinctive item of clothing, well-recognised by his public (like the ultimate comic icon of Chaplin, with his bowler-hat, cane and boots). 29 Full details of medieval gesture iconography may be found in François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au moyen âge, 2 vols. (Paris, Le Léopard d’Or, 1982–89). For a modern sociolinguistic study, see Desmond Morris, Bodytalk: A Worldwide Guide to Gestures (London, Cape, 1994). 30 In each of these cases the fabliau text itself provides the jongleur with an excellent excuse for some comic-grotesque miming. Here is the miller hurrying to his mill and lugging the stolen sack of corn over the back of his nag: “Si vient au molin auramant / Lo sac lieve sor la jumant” (Le Meunier et les deus Clers, NRCF VII/80, lines 93–4); there the physically repulsive husband with his large and ugly head set squat on hunched shoulders: “Trop estoit de laide faiture / Grant teste avoit et laide hure / Cort col et les espaules lees / Et les avoit haut encroees” (Les Trois Boçus, NRCF V/47, lines

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pitchforks, boathooks, carving-knives, feathers, coins, bags, sacks, buckets, boxes, needles, and thimbles. Using whole body-language, he could pretend to arrive home, open doors or cupboards, eat and drink at table, jump into a bed or a bath-tub, run away, beat someone over the head, or himself be beaten and collapse in a heap. There is considerable performance potential in the sheer amount of everyday objects (great and small) referred to or focused upon throughout the corpus; of all thirteenth-century narrative genres, the fabliaux are arguably the most remarkable textual repositories of medieval realia.31 So it is by word and gesture combined that the performance builds to its comic climax and denouement (just as it has in the preacher’s fabliaux-based exempla, albeit for very different ends). The essential rapport between poet/jongleur and public is also maintained by means of various forms of the rhetoric of direct address, which is of course by no means exclusive in medieval narrative to the fabliaux, but which is ideally suited to the specific context of comic storytelling. The narrative may be punctuated by sharp little extratextual asides, destined for the ears of the reader/listener, and aimed at bringing further smiles to his/her lips. In La Borgoise d’Orliens, at the very moment when the disguised husband seems on the point of gaining proof positive of his wife’s adultery, we are told: “Dieus, com cil savoit or petit / Ce que sa fame li porpose!” (lines 136–8) [“Lord, little did he know what his wife was cooking up for him.”] In Le Segretain moine [The Abbey Sacristan], the death of the lecherous monk is greeted by a wholehearted “good-riddance”: “Ainsi va fous sa mort querant” [So a fool seeks his own end]. Then, as the couple Guillaume and Ydoine wrack their brains to find a way of disposing of the unwanted corpse (the result of the husband’s rashly savage attack), a second mocking aside is delivered, this time glossing Guillaume’s own stupidity: “Molt remaint de ce que fous pense!” [A fool’s thought amounts to naught].32 Towards the end of the second version of Les Tresces [The Tresses], after the adulterous wife has persuaded her utterly deluded husband that he is possessed by a demon, a gratuitous comment heads unerringly in our direction: “Et si est il, n’en doutez mie!” the effect of which is quite as funny as the poor dupe’s predicament.33 The opening or closing personal-address gambits which we have already noted in their basic forms (as suggesting the often complex triple relationship between fableor, jongleur, and reader/listener) may be extended into a minor performance in their own right. Auberee’s little prologue (lines 1–6, present in all its six manuscripts) is in effect a call to the public to roll up and hear a good tale, a full account 33–6); and there the ghastly hag ludicrously plastering herself with makeup: “Mais ce n’estoit mie bele Aude / Ains estoit laide et contrefaite! / Mais encor s’adoube et afaite” (La vieille Truande, NRCF IV/37, lines 54–6) [No ravishing young heroine she—she was ugly and deformed. But she still painted her face, and primped herself]. 31 This “mundane” aspect of the fabliau’s ability to reflect reality is analysed and fully illustrated by Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Marie-Thérèse Lorcin in Le Quotidien au temps des fabliaux. Textes, images, objets (Paris, Picard, 2003). 32 Le Sacristain II (Le Segretain moine, NRCF II/74b, lines 348 and 370). Most, if not all, of the comic genre’s many proverbial sayings may serve as similar quips directed at the audience. 33 Les Tresces II (NRCF VI/69, line 397) [And to be sure he is, isn’t he?—by a she-devil!].

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of something that happened in Compiègne. The similarly tub-thumping introduction to Gautier le Leu’s Connebert (lines 1–11)34 amounts to a preview of the plot (in more modern media terms, a “trailer”), before the reciter embarks upon his full story, in front of his full audience. Other fabliaux interact with the listeners at the end, using an “Over to you, now, folks . . .” technique. Le Bouchier d’Abeville [The Butcher of Abbeville] (which began with a general appeal for attention35) concludes with a final decision deferred (who should get the prize sheepskin: the shepherd, the priest’s mistress, or the maidservant?), and with an invitation by Eustache d’Amiens to his audience to make the judgement for him (lines 538–44). Each listener (“Chascun”) is involved, urged to participate in the performance and to pronounce on the preferred ending. The audience is similarly approached at the end of Le Jugement des Cons [The Cunts’ Judgment], and asked to supply a better conclusion if they are not satisfied.36 The twin versions of Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’anel [The Three Ladies who Found a Ring] offer variations on this type of audience participation. After having told the story of the three women and of the deplorably ingenious trick each plays on her respective husband, the anonymous text turns to the audience as to a jury, summing up the facts of the case (with quick résumés of the three little plots), and calling for a judgement. Haisiau’s shorter redaction of the same fabliau goes one stage further in this process of direct interaction between author/reciter and public: after having invited the choice, Haisiau jumps into the debate, and plumps for the winner himself.37 Les Trois Meschines [The Three Girls] actually starts by extending a “listenand-judge” invitation to the audience, which is duly followed up in the epilogue, in quite a significant way: “Seignors et dames qui savez / De droit, jugiez sanz delaier / Qui doit ceste poudre paier.”38 The text is addressing women as well as men, and therefore seems to mirror the circumstances of its public performance. There are, besides, two interesting features about the narrative of this particular fabliau. Firstly, all the characters are female, and the basic mise en scène is one which would evidently appeal to women: three young girls, Sueree, Brunatin, and Agace, wishing to look their very best at a forthcoming tournament, decide to buy some expensive makeup in Rouen, but between them they spill all the precious face-powder, quarrel over who is to blame for the lost rouge and who should

34 This is another piece of ambiguous address: are these words Gautier’s own, or are we hearing another jongleur telling the tale, with acknowledgement to the outrageous master? 35 “Or escoutez une merveille / –Onques n’oïtes sa pareille– / Que je vos veil dire et conter. / Or metez peine a l’escouter” (NRCF III/18, lines 1–4) [Now listen to this fantastic story I want to tell you—you’ve never heard anything like it—come on, pay attention!]. 36 “Or vois querant par la contree / Se li jugemenz est bien fez. / Que Dieus vous pardoinst voz mesfez, / Se vous i savez qu’amender: / Je le vieng a vous demander.” (Le Jugement des Cons, NRCF IV/23, lines 162–6) [I’ve been going round these parts, just checking if folk agree with this ending. May God pardon your sins, if you can come up with a better one, then—here I am—tell it to me!] 37 Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’anel I (NRCF II/11a, lines 266–7, 276–8); Les Trois Dames qui troverent l’anel II (NRCF II/11b, lines 163–4, 171–2, 177–8). 38 Les Trois Meschines (NRCF IV/32, lines 1–2, 124–6) [Ladies and Gentlemen, you know the facts, now you judge: who pays for the face-powder?].

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reimburse whom. Secondly, and contrastingly, this is a most foul-mouthed and scatological fabliau: it is full of piss and farts, cunts and arses, with the taboo words even occurring in passages of direct speech between the girls. The implications are clear: this story may well cater for the tastes of female listeners, but the ladies in the audience would also certainly greet the mentions of “cul” and “con,” and the jongleur’s unrestrained body-language,39 with as much frank hilarity as would any man. Other fabliaux clearly indicate that our author/jongleur is addressing a mixed audience (but, as with Les Trois Meschines, is by no means thinking to “tone down” his material in any noticeable way). La Damoisele qui sonjoit [The Lady who had a Dream] concludes with a wish that the ladies present should enjoy as vigorously sexy a dream as that experienced by the character in the story.40 One should note that this fabliau, which consists of repeated copulation, would appear to be addressing a distinctly high-born audience (since much of the joke depends upon the description of the sex act as a formal tournament), and that the last image we have is that of the insatiable woman pushing her exhausted lover onto his back and mounting him: “Car je revoil aler desus: / Ce n’est pas, ce m’est avis, honte, / Qant home faut, se fame monte!” (lines 66–8) [It’s my turn now to go on top: as far as I’m concerned, there’s no shame in a woman riding a man when he’s not up to it!]—quite a daring assertion of female sexuality, and one which would meet with surprised and delighted laughter from the attendant ladies. A similar double assumption of woman’s highly-sexed nature and of the presence of women in the audience (here possibly of a more general class) is made in Le Pescheor de Pont seur Seine, as the author-cum-reciter comments that a wife prizes her husband’s wedding-tackle more than anything else about him, and then instantly offers a mock-apology to the ladies: “Se dames dient que je ment, / Soufrir m’estuet por avoir pes” (lines 212–13) [Any of you ladies accuse me of telling fibs? Well, fair enough, I don’t want to argue, OK?]. The first-person narrative of Watriquet de Couvin’s Les Trois Chanoinesses de 39 The rouge has to be watered to a paste; so one of the girls bends over to urinate on it, while another holds the cosmetic jar up to her backside. Unfortunately, she passes wind, and blows away all the powder . . . The potential for comic gesture would assuredly not have been lost on the performer, both here and in other even more scatological fabliaux, such as Jouglet (we have already seen Friar Nicolas Bozon’s exemplum-version of this story, with its defecation in the minstrel’s pouch, and filth spread all over the hapless victim (NRCF II/10) or La Crote [The Turd] much groping at crotch and anus, and chewing at a ball of faeces (NRCF VI/57). 40 “Et a cez dames qui ci sont, / Lo premier que il songeront / Soit autresi comme cel fu: / Mout lor seroit bien avenu!” (La Damoisele qui sonjoit, NRCF IV/25, lines 71–4) [And may all the ladies in the audience, next time they’re asleep, have exactly the same kind of dream: it’ll do them a lot of good!] For details of this text’s use of technical jousting vocabulary, see 48–9. Even when there is no direct concluding address, some fabliaux would probably have had a strong appeal to women listeners. A case in point might be Garin’s Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons (NRCF III/15) [The Knight who Made Cunts Speak], with its mock courtly opening (knight and squire, magic fountain, beautifully-clothed fairies), leading to a realistic court atmosphere, dominated by the fair countess and her retinue of ladies (the I-text contains a long interpolated episode heightening still more this ambience of female attraction). The subsequent explicitly rude subversion of these politesses would not of course make this fabliau any less acceptable to its female public.

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Couloigne is even more specific about ladies’ pleasures. Invited to dine with the three attractive canonesses, the jongleur observes them in and out of their hot tub, eats and drinks copiously with them, and then recites for his supper. His initial courtly-love story is, however, not to their liking; they insist on much stronger and funnier entertainment, and he resorts to telling them dirty fabliaux (which they greatly appreciate), before the drinking session continues.41 Finally, a neat example of quite a different female reaction is provided by the eponymous Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre [The Young Lady who Could Not Bear to Hear Talk of Fucking]: a tender young lady of the house, who, when vulgar fabliaux are recited as after-dinner entertainment in mixed company, swoons at the first mention of screwing.42 Since this particular text is specifically addressed to men (“Seignor, oiez un noviau conte” [line 1] [Gentlemen, listen to a new story]), the audience for this highly indecent fabliau (as opposed to its mise en abyme) may not have been mixed. The stories discussed above enable us to move to a further stage in our study of performance. It must now be apparent that an appreciation of the reciter’s use of voice, pause, body language, and business (with or without props) is nowhere more essential than when we come to those thirty or forty obscene or pornographic fabliaux that have in the past given the genre its notoriety, its “mauvaise reputation.” I should like to suggest the different techniques which the jongleur might call upon in his re-enactment of these bawdy pieces. There seems to be a clear sliding scale of increasing “bad taste”; in this, our texts have much in common with the far more modern examples drawn from stand-up, music hall, or vaudeville tradition and from “alternative” or “club” comedy routines. Whether or not the jongleur was capable of memorising entire stories, there are, as Willem Noomen has pointed out, sufficient direct references in our fabliaux to the written text at least to suggest that the actual manuscript might be to hand, for the purposes of recitation or consultation.43 This “script” (similar to the medieval actor’s rolet or agenda) could also form an integral part of the comic performance, picked up from a table or lying open on a lectern (the idea of a jongleur aping the preacher’s Gospel reading is a tempting one, given this essay’s opening examples of the reverse procedure).44 In this way, coarse language could be “authorised” by a mock consultation of the written word, or the manuscript pointed to, as if to disclaim personal responsibility for a vulgar episode.45 41 Les Trois Chanoinesses de Couloigne (NRCF X/121, lines 109–53). As one of the canonesses points out, such vulgar entertainment is perfectly acceptable for ladies in a private session: “Nous n’en poons estre accusees / Car nous sommes en lieu secré” (lines 162–3). 42 La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre I (NRCF IV/26a, lines 19–24). 43 Noomen, “Performance et mouvance” 141. A few illustrative examples: “Ce nous raconte li escris, / Seignor” (La Housse partie I, NRCF III/16a, lines 103–4) [Gentlemen, this is what our text tells us]; “Nos trovomes en escriture / Une mervellose aventure” (Le Vilain qui conquist paradis par plait, NRCF V/39, lines 1–2) [I’ve found a wonderful story written down]; “Ainsi le tesmoingne li livres” (Estormi, NRCF I/1, line 28) [That’s what the book states]. 44 Given also the ambivalent parallelism of those medieval images (in manuscript margins, or carved on choir stalls) of actual apes in the pulpit, and of Reynard the Fox preaching. 45 The notorious British music hall comedian of the 1940s and 1950s, Max Miller, offers an

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The comic effect of such euphemistic asides as the “Si se joent ensemble et font / Le gieu por quoi assemblé sont” (lines 407–8) [So here they are playing together, playing the game they came to play] of Auberee or of the barelyeuphemistic bestiary of animals representing male and female genitalia (piglets, stallions, mice, cranes, bunny-rabbits, and squirrels, inter alia)46 would be heightened by being delivered absolutely dead-pan, with perhaps a knowing wink or a raised eyebrow. When dispensing with all euphemisms, a cough just before a taboo word is pronounced, or a hand raised to the mouth just afterwards, would elicit similar laughter, particularly if the jongleur’s face retained a Buster Keaton impassivity or a Marie Lloyd expression of innocence. As the air becomes blue, the jongleur would have recourse to more exaggerated gestures of horror, sometimes expressing his own assumed distaste at what he has just had to say, at others “hamming” the part of one of the characters in his story. Thus, in Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari [The Widow Fucked on her Husband’s Grave], when the squire bets his master that he can show up the hypocrisy of the grief-stricken young widow, the words “La foutrai” [I’m going to fuck her] would register first on the jongleur’s “own” face (grimacing at his audience), and then again immediately afterwards, as the performer moves on to mimic the knight’s outraged reaction (“Q’as tu dit, esconmeniez?” [NRCF III/20, line 57] [What did you say, damn you?]). The telling of a dirty story positively invites obscene gestures and sexual mimicry. When describing in words the hugely erect male member, whether prior to intercourse or to castration,47 the jongleur has the added choice of the imaginary fisherman’s yardstick, the “bras d’honneur” of the suggestively bent arm, or even an actual phallus-shaped piece of wood as a (theatrical) prop. The sex act itself would doubtless be just as vigorously and as brazenly mimed. The most memorable fabliaux are memorable as much for their sheer recitability and performability as for the carefully-plotted comic patterns of their textual structure. One single commented example must here stand for all, but it

analogous twentieth-century example of the mocking use of a text during a stand-up act. Miller would ask his audience whether they would prefer a story from his “White Book,” or from his “Blue Book.” Stories from the white book would be only mildly salacious; when he turned to his blue book, Miller’s adoring public (always mixed: he would invariably address and wink at the ladies in the house) knew exactly what to expect. 46 For further details, see Brian J. Levy, The Comic Text. Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000) 31–77. 47 La Dame qui sonjoit (intercourse): “Gros avoit et carré lo vit” (line 10) [He had a big thick cock]; La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr de foutre I (intercourse): “Si a trové un vit si fier / Que cil avoit entre deus aines, / Mout bien fresté a treize veines, / Comme baston a champion” (lines 54–7) [She found the fine, proud cock that he had between his thighs, all bulging with veins, just like a FieldMarshal’s baton]; Le Pescheor de Pont seur Seine (intercourse): “Au bachelier tendi le vit, / Qu’il avoit et lonc et gros” (lines 24–5) [the husband’s long thick prick got a hard on]; (castration) “Le vit res a res du panil / Li a a un coutel trenchié” (lines 100–1) [He took a knife and cut off the cock level with the groin]; Le Prestre crucefié [The Crucified Priest] (castration): “Et ge vous di tretout por voir / Que vit et coilles li trencha” (lines 70–1) [And I tell this, it’s the truth, he cut off his cock and his balls]. In BNF, MS. f.fr. 837, these four fabliaux occupy a noticeable block, fols 178b-85b: an indication of a jongleur-owner grouping together some of his “Blue Book” specialities?

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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.

Luttrell Psalter. London, British Library, Additional ms. 42130, fol. 176 (by permission of The British Library). This marginal figure of a dancing kettledrummer conveys (in its own musical medium) much of the comic performance potential of the narrative fabliau. There is the same energetic body language, and above all the same sexual allusions: the twin drums look like huge testicles, often called “nakers” [drums], while, in the fabliaux, the verb “to beat” often refers to sexual intercourse; the cord hanging down between them from the knotted belt is itself suitably priapic.

contains all the material necessary to indicate the full potential of the jongleur’s art. Les Perdriz (which we have already noted in its sermonised adaptation) may be broken down into a succession of intensely visual mini-episodes, backed by equally heightened communicative dialogue. A resulting “performing script” (every detail of which is supported by a mention or broad hint in the text) would be as follows: Reciter assures audience of the “truth” of his story, lines 1–3 [knowing smile or wink]; peasant catches pheasants and hands them to wife, lines 4–7 [business with imaginary brace]; wife lights fire, skewers birds on spit, lines 8–9 [gestures]; husband leaves to invite priest, lines 10–11 [striding “offstage”]; birds cooked, wife nibbles a bit of crisp roast skin, lines 13–15 [spit taken down, fingers picking, meat conveyed to mouth]; comment on woman’s gluttony and on her desire for instant gratification, lines 16–19 [jongleur addresses audience: solemn-faced mock sermon]; wife attacks one bird, eats both wings, lines 20–1 [speed, gobbling]; wife pops outside to check husband’s absence, lines 22–5 [quick little paces, head turning l/r, hand up to eyes in peering gesture]; whole 138

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bird consumed, lines 26–7 [more gobbling]; wife’s escape plan, to pretend that two cats have stolen the partridges, lines 28–36 [jongleur adopts “thought” gesture, then turns half-aside to audience, with back of hand to mouth “reporting” gesture, ending with wink]; wife goes back outside to check again, lines 37–9 [reprise of gestures]; wife’s desire for second partridge, lines 40–3 [tongue out, licking lips, desperation]; neck eaten, lines 44–6 [with great comic delicacy, careful licking of fingers]; wife’s words of panic, followed by her determination, lines 47–52 [comic emotions: fear, greed]; everything eaten, lines 53–4 [mouth wiped, stomach patted]; husband returns, lame excuse given, lines 55–9 [return-stride, loud question / hesitant answer]; husband about to beat wife; she assures him that the partridges have been covered over to keep warm; he responds grumbling and calling for drink, lines 60–71 [violent / cowering gestures; contrasting dialogue-tones]; wife tells (lines 70–1 [husband to sharpen carving-knife on whetstone in courtyard; he leaves, knife in hand, lines 72–7 [business with knife (real prop or imaginary)]; priest arrives, embraces wife, lines 78–81 [entry-movement, caressing gestures suggesting intimacy; jongleur’s knowing leer to audience]; wife urges priest to flee, telling him husband is sharpening knife to cut his balls off, lines 82–9 [voice-tone; stress on taboo-word, possible gesture of castration]; priest dumbfounded, wife insistent, priest convinced, lines 90–101 [sharp alternating dialogue, with supporting comic gestures: sheer disbelief—wife’s hand sweeping round to indicate absence of any birds, then pointing as to husband and knife—priest’s panic business]; priest hastily departs, lines 102–3 [running-on-spot gag]; wife summons husband, tells him priest has stolen the partridges, lines 104–11 [alternating dialogue; high-register screeches]; husband chases priest, knife in hand, lines 112–14 [running-on-spot gag, business with prop]; husband shouts after him, threatening to part him from the brace of birds, lines 115–21 [jongleur’s voice and bawdy gestures complete comic double-entendre association with the priest’s two testicles48]; priest looks back at pursuer, desperately puts on speed, just gets home in time, lines 122–30 [chase gag: running, head turning, knife waving; safety gag: mime of opening, slamming and bolting door, then priest panting, hand on heart—if not on codpiece]; husband returns home, line 131 [slower, trudging pace]; wife tells him pack of lies about the priest’s theft of the partridges, lines 135–45 [“As-God-is-my-witness,” butterwouldn’t-melt-in-mouth tone of voice]; so both priest and husband have been tricked, lines 148–9 [reciter addresses listeners, underlining the jest]; conclusion, lines 150–6 [jongleur’s final words to his audience: (a) mock-solemn homily (fabliau as exemplum), with an anti-feminist tag (“women are archdeceivers”) delivered with finger upraised, in teaching mode; (b) signing-off acknowledgement to the fabliau’s original composer (“our author has not given us any more details”), with an applause-awaiting bow (“that’s the end of the Partridges story!”)].

The performance potential of Les Perdriz is a complex one, ranging from micro-gestures to expansive acting-out of the text. Other fabliaux, and other jongleurs, may require less “business” in the telling, but time and again the comic 48 “Ainsi nes en porterez mie!” (line 116) [You won’t be carrying those away with you any more!]; “Bien les en portez eschaufees / Ça les lerez se vous ataing!” (lines 118–19) [You’ve got them all hot, haven’t you? Well, you’ll leave ’em behind if I catch you!]

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story offers its reciter some ripe (sometimes over-ripe) opportunities. In those fabliaux dealing with the “Transported Corpse” (Estormi, Les Trois Boçus, Les quatre Prestres [The Four Priests], Le Prestre comporté [The Priest Who Was Carted Around], Le Sacristain), the way is clear for the jongleur to mime the repeated dumping of a dead body in a marl-pit, or the lugging of the unwanted cadaver from place to place, in blackly-comic and increasingly farcical circumstances: the corpse left on a seat in the abbey latrines, then propped up against a front door in town, then stuffed in a sack in a farm midden, then (mistaken for a flitch of bacon) carried into a tavern, then hung up in a barn back at the farm, and finally, slumped in the saddle, “riding” home into the abbey.49 Our search for evidence of the performance of Old French fabliaux began in the medieval pulpit; were it not for this volume’s properly strict terms of reference, it might have concluded on the medieval stage. However, despite the intriguing links between fabliau and farce, our comic narratives are not plays, nor is the jongleur (for all his undoubted performing ability) an actor in a play.50 This essay has therefore concentrated on the twin poles of orality and textuality. The jongleur and his authorised recitation follow in the heels of the fableor and his authored narrative; the one may well be the other, just as the written text may contain “oral implants.” In the end, the comic text stands in its own right, to be read and appreciated in all its evocative detail. The title of this essay, “Performing Fabliaux,” is a tribute to the auctoritas of Norris Lacy, whose indispensable Reading Fabliaux has opened so many eyes to so many of our fableors’ deft touches.51 It is also a little play on words, evoking a double imperative: our fabliaux are duly there in repertoire, performed in public by the jongleur, but they are also “performing fabliaux” in their own right, such is their narrative power to describe objects, to recount activity, to convey emotions, to imply attitudes, to hint at irony, to parody other genres—and thereby to create inextinguishable laughter.

49 Le Segretain moine (Sacristain II). At over 800 lines, this particular extended fabliau could have been told at one sitting, or recited one or more episodes at a time. 50 An ingenious suggestion has recently been made by Michel Rousse, who is tempted to see in the dialogue and gesturing of Estormi an echo of a dramatised piece, possibly a very early puppet-show (the “corpses” thus being comic marionettes). The theory is interesting, if lacking in substantive detail. See M. Rousse, “Estormi ou l’empreinte du castelet,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia. Mélanges offerts à Philippe Ménard, eds. J. Claude Faucon et al., 2 vols. (Paris, Champion, 1998) II, 1139–47. I have offered a further study of the problematic relationship between the fabliau and the later medieval farce, in “Du fabliau à la farce: encore la question performancielle?” Reinardus 15 (2002): 87–100. 51 Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York, Garland, 1993).

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Preaching, Storytelling, and the Performance of Short Pious Narratives Adrian P. Tudor

Short pious narratives present interesting performance issues as they occupy a middle ground in vernacular medieval literature. These stories have a message to communicate—and indeed often include short sermons—but they also aim to entertain.1 Their message may have written sources (e.g., commentaries, patristic texts), but their delivery is oral. We can surmise that many of them were intended to be read to mixed audiences (male and female, young and old, lay and clerical) which implies divergent styles of performance. Part fabliau, part exemplum, part sermon, part Saints’ Life, these texts do not at face value represent a cohesive genre; they therefore reflect many kinds of possible performance practice. Nonetheless, the many similarities in composition and function make this a fascinating corpus for the study of preaching, storytelling and performance. As we will see, the text—the first port of call for a study of this kind—provides many hints as to not only the performability of these texts but also of their need to be performed in some way. This essay will consider briefly a number of fabliaux, pious tales from the anonymous Vie des Pères [Lives of the Fathers] and from Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame [The Miracles of the Virgin] and three outstanding stand-alone moralising pieces: L’Ermite et le jongleur [The Hermit and the Minstrel], Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame [Our Lady’s Tumbler] and Le Chevalier au barisel [The Knight with the Barrel]. It will conclude that, although the various modes of reading in the Middle Ages remain something of a mystery to us, it can confidently be posited that these texts were crying out to be performed. Two authors, Jean Bodel (1165?–1210) and Rutebeuf (c.1285), broadly represent the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of this essay. Both are known to have composed a variety of texts—including fabliaux and theatrical pieces (Le Jeu de saint Nicolas [The Saint Nicolas Play] and Le Miracle de Théophile [The Miracle of Theéophilius])—many of which still survive. Despite the originality of Jean Bodel’s Congés and the skill of Rutebeuf’s Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne [Saint Mary the Egyptian], neither author is known principally as lyricist or hagiographer; that is to say, Jean Bodel and Rutebeuf are medieval 1 For present purposes sermons can be defined as a public discourse based on divine revelation and in an organised context. By the time of the texts discussed in this essay, “popular preaching” had developed to address the masses.

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authors whom even modern theorists, eager to categorise and classify, are unable to label as anything less general than “medieval authors.” This is important, given the multiple crossovers of tradition and genre. For example, Jean Bodel quite plausibly composed his Saint Nicolas—certainly intended to be played—around the same time that he set down his (at least nine) comic fabliaux, some of which are quite obscene, but are also amongst the very best of the genre. Another example: Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile—the first Miracle par personages [dramatized Miracles]—counts amongst its sources the miracles of earlier hagiographers such as Adgar and, more certainly, Gautier de Coinci (1177/78–1236).2 Rutebeuf equally composed at least one Saint’s Life—that of Mary of Egypt—which was not explicitly par personnages. There is but a short distance from one type of text to another—hagiography (which itself is rooted in “the physical act of prayer”3) to drama—especially when composed by the same author. In this respect, the notion of performability covers a wide range of possibilities and degrees, from varied speech to dramatic representation. Fabliaux such as Le Vilain de Bailluel [The Churl of Bailluel] and Gombert et les deus clers [Gombert and the Two Clerks] are obviously performable; they would be so much less hilarious if told in a monotone by a static jongleur.4 It might be argued, therefore, that in his Saint Nicolas Jean Bodel was formalising to some degree an element of performance that was intrinsically present in other compositions. It is difficult to believe that Jean Bodel and Rutebeuf composed their fabliaux or other texts in a void, completely divorced from their dramatic compositions. Both authors work in a variety of genres and all these texts are eminently performable in some way. The performability plot thickens with two of Bodel’s fabliaux, Les Deus chevaus [The Two Horses] (NRCF 5/50) and Le Couvoiteus et l’envieus [The Greedy Man and the Jealous Man] (NRCF 6/71). The first tells of a vilain who wins a bet with a monk over whose clapped-out old nag is the best, but is then sent packing without his prize. At the end of the fabliau the jongleur directly asks the audience, in their opinion, what should be done. We laugh at the story’s slapstick, but there is a moral point for discussion. Le Couvoiteus et l’envieus, commonly held to be a milder version of the infamous (and brilliant) Quatre Sohais saint Martin [Saint Martin’s Four Wishes] (NRCF 4/31), is at once a fabliau and a miracle tale.5 Both stories are a good way from the belly-laugh-inducing scatology 2 Adgar, Le Gracial, ed. Pierre Kunstmann (Ottawa, Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1992); Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. V. F. Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva, Droz, 1955–70). 3 Evelyn Birge Vitz, “Vie, légende, littérature. Traditions orales et écrites dans les histoires des saints,” Poétique 18 (1987): 389. All translations are my own. 4 Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux, eds. W. Noomen and N. Van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen, Van Gorcum, 1983–98) 5/49, 4/35. Henceforth NRCF. 5 Indeed, the story has recently been described by Keith Busby as “as much a miracle tale as a fabliau” (“Fabliaux and the New Codicology,” The World and its Rival: Essays on Literary Imagination in Honor of Per Nykrog, eds. K. Karczewska and T. Conley, Faux Titre 172 [Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1999] 144). The story tells of a jealous man and a greedy man given a wish by Saint Martin. He who makes the wish will receive what he asks, and the other will receive double. Eventually, the jealous man wishes to lose one eye . . .

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and sexual intrigue of other, supposedly more typical fabliaux.6 The point here is that an author of a miracle play (Jean Bodel) also wrote fabliaux, some of which invite bawdy performance, whilst others call for a more pious handling in reading or performance. Rutebeuf also wrote a miracle play, composed fabliaux and is the author of a vernacular hagiographic text. Gautier de Coinci (1177/8–1236) composed a conventional Life of Saint Christine,7 but is especially (and deservedly) known for his Miracles de Nostre Dame, short narratives which were intended to be read aloud and inspire piety. Gautier was anything but a jongleur, born into a high-ranking family and becoming Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne in 1214, then of Saint-Médard de Soissons in 1233. The purpose of his work was to bring his charges to even greater faith, and this context suggests a restrained but moving performance of his work. The text is replete with direct addresses to the audience and dramatic speeches; there are prayers and invocations requiring participation; the success of the stories depends upon the subsequent actions of the listener; and extant illustrated manuscript witnesses indicate an extended performance, on the page. Gautier is also a consummate musician. His songs contain refrains, his verse intermingles narrative and prayer, and manuscripts of the Miracles depict words, music and images: the evidence of both performance and participation is striking. One collection which brings together the various modes of performance suggested here is the first Vie des Pères. This text, dating from the first third of the thirteenth century, links all three authors discussed above: Jean Bodel, Rutebeuf and Gautier de Coinci. Many of its pious tales occupy the same grey area as fabliaux such as Le Couvoiteus et l’envieus and La Housse partie [The Divided Horsecover]. Alongside the contes pieux [pious tales] are a Life of Saint Thaïs—a reformed desert harlot much like Mary of Egypt—and some Miracles of the Virgin. The Vie des Pères sits firmly in the category of what Evelyn Birge Vitz calls “hagiography in its story-telling mode,” in which “entertainment and charm and the ability to appeal to the emotions rank high.”8 The key was both to entertain and edify, plaire et édifier. In this way, pious tales could offer an attractive and uplifting alternative to comic fabliaux. Everything points towards their being performed in some way. This is a collective text, a supercomposition of forty-one short tales ranging from a few hundred to around a thousand lines. Each narrative is composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets and is framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Consequently, individual narratives can stand alone and are eminently portable.9 6 I use the word “typical” to be provocative, since the genre has yet to be clearly defined to the general satisfaction of scholars. For example, the NRCF lists 127 narratives, whereas in Les Fabliaux: étude d’histoire littéraire et de stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 1957), Per Nykrog named 159 texts as fabliaux. 7 Gautier de Coinci, La Vie de sainte Cristine, ed. Olivier Collet, Textes Littéraires Français 510 (Geneva, Droz, 1999). 8 Evelyn Birge Vitz, “From the Oral to the Written in Medieval and Renaissance Saints’ Lives,” Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, eds. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T. Szell (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991) 98. 9 La Vie des Pères, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris, Société des Anciens Textes Français,

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The crossover of techniques between Saints’ Lives and all types of secular literature continued both ways throughout the Middle Ages. The Vie des Pères represents a striking example of this coming together of techniques, sources and subject matter, of audience(s) and of oral and written texts. My corpus for the present essay is aimed at a semi-literate, semi-scholarly audience and tallies neatly with Duncan Robertson’s description of hagiographic authorship, namely translating doctrine back into events and scenes.10 Doctrine is difficult to convey in an accessible way, but events and scenes can be performed. The very nature of medieval short pious narratives moulds their form and promotes action rather than description. There is equally a strong performative element to my corpus, one which cannot be disregarded: the language of short pious narratives does something in the saying, be it conversion, absolution, prayer or excommunication. The context is an improving one, whether the texts are told by jongleurs or religious. The distance between these texts and contemporary secular texts is unquantifiable, as is the way, place and time in which they were told or performed. Most were probably read in a context somewhere in-between the cloistered (and hushed?) surroundings of Gautier de Coinci and the clamour of the court so vividly evoked in the Old Provençal Roman de Flamenca [Romance of Flamenca]: “The sound of vielle players and the noise of so many storytellers made the whole room buzz.”11 Preaching: performance of the texts Sermons are key to our explorations here: pious narratives necessarily preach to the listener, while sermons need to be performed. The first half of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the preaching orders and the promotion of effective preaching. The prevailing atmosphere was therefore one of performance with a view to inspiring action. The thirteenth century also saw the growth of vernacular drama. The theatricality of medieval sermons has long been established; Alan Hindley has outlined some of the evidence for the influence of sermons in later French Moralités—“homiletic material . . . presented par personnaiges”—noting that dramatists made use of the audience’s experience of preaching and its methods.12 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the spread of heresy was extensive, largely because of the immediacy and accessibility of the sermons given by its proponents. Joachim de Fiore may be typical of the successful preacher: we know, for example, that his verbal performance included dramatic changes in the

1987–99). For a brief commented bibliography of Vie des Pères scholarship, see my article “The One that Got Away: The Case of the Vie des Pères,” French Studies Bulletin 55 (1995): 11–15. 10 Duncan Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives. Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature (Lexington, French Forum Publishers, 1995) 14. 11 “Per la rumor dels viuladors / E per brug d’aitans comtadors / Hac gran murmuri per la sala,” Les Troubadours: Jaufré, Flamenca, Barlaam et Josephat, eds. and trans. R. Lavaud and R. Nelli (Bruges, Desclee de Brouwer, 1960) lines 707–9. 12 Alan Hindley, “The Sermon and the Medieval French Moralités,” Le Moyen Français 42 (1998): 73.

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tone and volume of his voice.13 In a letter to Bishop Geoffrey of Saint David’s (1213/14), the power of Bernard of Clairvaux’s performance even when speaking in a language not understood by his congregation is highlighted: Abbot Bernard . . . preached to German laymen and moved them to tears and weeping, though they did not understand him. An excellent interpreter, a monk, translated his sermon after him, and after he spoke they were not moved. From this it is clear that a man who does not burn cannot kindle.14

However, just as “it seems obvious that preachers [of popular sermons] spoke to their congregations in the language they best understood,” so too does it seem self-evident that the degree of performance of a sermon would change to suit individual audiences.15 The Church taught perfection through parable and example, and its success depended heavily on the artistic talent of sermonisers: they were performers and poets as well as preachers.16 This is certainly the case of the authors of texts such as the Chevalier au barisel, Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame and the first Vie des Pères, all of whom are competent preachers but consummate storytellers and whose works invite highly dramatic performance.17 Gloria Cigman has commented on the multiple voices used by medieval preachers, ranging from je and tu to nous and vous. Each voice represents a new or separate role for the speaker, and the linguistic notion of voice it highlights can easily be imagined to slide gently into the more dramatic notion of voices. Obviously, dialogue cannot be reported in a monotone.18 The Lollard preacher, author of the sermons central to Cigman’s study, simulates dialogue and gives many highly dramatised descriptions. Both preacher and dramaturge exploited the same reservoir of thematic and exegetical material, and this inevitably leads to similarities in methods. 13 Luke of Cosenza, Vita Joachimi, ed. Herbert Grundmann, in Grundmann, Ausgewählte Anfsätze, vol. 2, Joachim von Fiore, MGH Schriften 25 (Stuttgart, Hiersemann, 1977) 354. 14 Cited in Giles Constable, “The Language of Preaching in the Twelfth Century,” Viator 25 (1994) 150. 15 Phyllis Roberts, Stephanus de Lingua: Toronto Studies in the Sermons of Stephen Langton, Studies and Texts 16 (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968): 54. 16 Siegfried Wenzel speaks of thirteenth-century sermons as “prose work[s] endowed with a variety of consciously sought artistic features.” (Preachers, Poets and the Early English Lyric [Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986] 62). Indeed, Michel Zink points out that “les sermons en langue vulgaire font partie de la littérature romane. (La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 [Paris, Champion, 1976] 365). [Sermons in the vernacular are part of romance literature.] 17 Let us not forget that a number of our texts were in turn adapted into Miracles par personnages. The legend of the Sacristine, for example, is Miracle 48 in Adgar’s Gracial, the thirteenth tale of the first Vie des Pères and I Mir. 43 in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame; in the fifteenth century, the legend became a miracle for sixteen personnages. See Robert Guiette, ed., La Légende de la Sacristine (Paris, Champion, 1927). For the later play, see Nigel Wilkins, ed., Two Miracles: La nonne qui laissa son abbaie [and] Saint Valentin, edited from the MS, Paris, B.N., fr. 819–820 (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1972). 18 Gloria Cigman, “Le Dramaturge malgré lui: les voix nombreuses du prédicateur lollard,” La Littérature d’inspiration religieuse: théâtre et vie de saints, ed. D. Buschinger (Göppingen, Kümmerle, 1988) 49–60.

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Now, our short pious narratives reflect the centrality in sermons of the Word. Preachers would use prayers, saws and proverbs—“the moral conscience, the voice of nature and therefore voice of Grace”19 —to hold the attention of and include their audience. This practice is widespread throughout my corpus; as Marie-Paule Champetier has asserted, “the preacher says what is written.”20 But preachers’ techniques also included the use of gesture, and this too can be discerned in our stories. Albert Lecoy de la Marche believed that, with the exception of counting on their left hand—their right hand being used to hold a book—preachers would have remained calm and sober.21 However, in her study of the gestuelle of medieval preaching, Champetier shows that a degree of drama was indeed permitted in the pulpit, perhaps since, in the thirteenth century, “the mental model of Christ the Preacher is strongly established.”22 In Bibles moralisées [moralized Bibles] the preacher is frequently depicted as a very active intermediary between God and the people, taking up all kinds of symbolic stances which must have been imitated by—or the imitation of—real sermonisers. Sermons, especially those filled with exempla, depended greatly for their efficacy on the element of performance brought into play by the preacher. This is equally true for our thirteenth-century short pious narratives, all of which contain sermons or a degree of sermonising: the words sermon and prechier abound. For a sermon to be effective it had to be illustrated, and it was the exemplum that gave it this necessary dramatic dimension. Here is another crossover: exempla, which could be approbatory or cautionary, at times differ very little from fabliaux. Brian J. Levy has suggested that the essential difference between the two traditions lies in the role of the characters, characters in the fabliaux being comic, and those in sermons acting as solemn warnings against vice and sin.23 Levy adds that Jacques de Vitry borrowed heavily from the fabliaux, giving them a Christian flavour and moral in order to turn them into exempla. But, in particular, fabliaux provided source material for mendicant preachers because of their social satire. E. J. Lawless has applied this notion to a contemporary setting and demonstrates how a modern pastor uses ancient rhetorical and dramatic techniques in his preaching.24 One of these techniques is clearly visible in the prologue to Renieur [The Renier] (Vie des Pères, lines 1195–708) which contains a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for Man and of Man’s duty to Christ. It sets in contrast the King of Heaven with the king of myth/the world and calls for the faithful to withdraw from the world, 19

“la conscience morale, voix de la nature et donc voix de la Grâce.” (Zink 186) “le prédicateur dit l’Écrit.” (Marie-Paule Champetier, “Faits et gestes du prédicateur dans l’iconographie du XIIIe au début du XIVe siècle,” Médiévales 17 [1989]: 147). 21 Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au Moyen Âge, spécialement au XIIIe siècle (Paris, H. Laurens, 1886). 22 “le modèle mental du Christ prédicateur est fortement affirmé.” (Champetier 199) 23 Brian J. Levy, “Le Fabliau et l’exemple: étude sur les recueils moralisants anglo-normands,” Epopée animale, fable, fabliau: Actes du IVe colloque de la Société Internationale Renardienne, Evreux, 7–11 septembre 1981, eds. G. Bianciotto and M. Salvat (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1984) 311–21. 24 E. J. Lawless, “Narrative in the Pulpit: Persistent Use of Exempla in Vernacular Religious Contexts,” Journal of the Midwest Language Association 21 (1988): 48–64. 20

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to forget riches and to serve God. It begins with a swipe at fashionable profane literature: he who refuses to hear what is good is knowingly foolish and can wait with the Britons for Arthur, who will never come.25 Is this mention of Arthur a clever but simple (and commonplace) method of attracting the attention of the audience?26 Roger Dubuis has stressed the need to keep the public awake and intrigued, even when being told bawdy, ribald, romantic or adventurous stories, and in performance terms there are a number of ways of doing this.27 For example, the voice can do so much that the written word cannot: variations of pitch, rhythm, speed, volume and register are just a number of possibilities. The texts of my corpus all contain, to some degree, sermons or sermonising tracts and share their performabilty. In such overtly moralising texts as Gautier’s Miracles they are abundant;28 in the Vie des Pères authorial sermons are equally commonplace, taking the shape of a prologue, epilogue or in-text commentary. But even more interesting are the dramatic or dramatised in-text sermons of the author’s characters. These are also common; of course, holy men and women are seen to live holy lives, but on many occasions it is by their words as performed, as opposed to their example, that they manage to convert sinners. Perhaps the best illustration of this can be taken from Thaïs, where the hermit builds on the harlot’s own words in his long and successful sermon to her (lines 2311–54). This speech is one of the most satisfying monologues of the first Vie des Pères and is powerful enough to make even the hardened sinner Thaïs repent. Indeed, the author provides proof of the skill of the hermit’s sermon: “Thaïs was so moved by the sermon that she felt it in her heart and she accepted the words of the holy hermit because she knew that he spoke the truth.” (lines 2441–6)29 But sermons were not always lively or well-performed, as can be seen in the author’s words at the end of his prologue to Malaquin: “I want to end this prologue here and come to my story because some people find long sermons more tedious than rainy days” (lines 10714–17).30 There are many examples of mock sermons in the comic fabliaux, possibly delivered deadpan or exaggerating commonly experienced tones and gestures.31 However, some of those tales lying in the grey area between fabliau 25 “De fol avoir a grant talent / cil ki s’afole a escïent; / et ki son preu ne veult entendre, / avec les Bretons puet atendre / Artur, qui ja mes ne vendra.” (lines 1195–9) 26 Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of one such occasion in Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. J. Strange, 4 vols. (Cologne, Hebeele, 1851) Capitulum 36, “De domino Gevardo Abbate, qui monachos in sermone dormitantes per fabulam Arcturi excitavit” 205. 27 Roger Dubuis, “Jeu narratif et jeu dramatique dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge,” Michigan Romance Studies: Contemporary Readings of Medieval Literature 8 (1989): 218. 28 For example: “Sachiez de voir, vos damoyseles, / Vos cloistrieres, vos jovenceles, / Se par prïeres ne tensez / Temptatïons et folz pensez, / Li dyables, qui seit maint tour, / Tant vos ira sovent entour / Qu’un malvais plait vos bastira: / De vostre espouz vos partira / Se vos de lui ne vos waitiez.” (Des Nonains de Nostre Dame de Soissons [The Nuns of Notre-Dame de Soissons] II Chast. 10, lines 439–47). 29 “Mout fu Taÿs bien sermonee. / Par le sermon fu tant menee / que jusques el cuer s’en senti / et tant ke ele s’asenti / as paroles del saint hermite / par le reson k’il li ot dite.” 30 “Cest prologue vueil ci fenir / et a matiere venir, / qu’a plusors genz est anuieus / lons sermons plus que tens pluieus.” 31 See Brian J. Levy’s essay in the present volume.

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and conte pieux offer short authorial sermons which, despite the comic context, it is hard not to consider serious.32 The short narratives which may be enclosed by sermons or punctuate sermons are consequently set in a context which is inherently dramatic and performable. This sententious and dogmatic aspect is perhaps the most obviously performable element of short pious narratives: they are texts serving the same function, and operating on the same level (either in whole or in part), as a sermon. Gautier de Coinci aimed to inspire an active response in the form of religious vocation; the first Vie des Pères, composed at a time shortly after Lateran IV when the Church sought to promote the sacrament of confession, looked to teach Christian dogma and persuade of its truth, and to promote obedience to Church authority. Its dual role, to entertain and to edify, is evident in the variety of tones adopted by authors. These range from the apparently erudite expositio of the prologues, epilogues and sermons (given by both narrator and characters) to the fabliau-like action scenes of drinking, violence and sex. Authors seek active participation which is intellectual, empathetic and discursive. A response is elicited from the listeners who, in turn, are meant to act upon what they hear. The audience is not dispassionate—it will be shocked by sin and will take the side of the saints. It might well have responded to direct or rhetorical questions in the sermons, or to the acts of a good or evil character, by booing or cheering or making the sign of the cross. The members of the audience are thereby expected, on a number of different levels, to play a part in the performance of the text by themselves performing. The oral delivery of these short pious narratives is no longer truly in question, and the performance potential of such texts is obvious. Other elements characterising lively, oral performance include metre, formulae, repetition, music, participation, vocabulary, direct address, gesture and discourse markers. And almost always composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, rooted, as Vitz would have it, in oral culture.33 Peter F. Dembowski agrees that verse was “por oïr dire” [to be heard or spoken], whereas prose became the form to be read and of truth.34 Each text of my corpus contains certain oral formulae and, being short, is memorisable. Koenig insists especially that repetition in Gautier’s Miracles is an aural discourse marker, and there is plenty of evidence to support this well-studied view. More compelling, though, is the evidence that Gautier is writing for memory, to keep a text, rather than for its performance.35 There may be references made to musical accompaniment,36 and there are always participatory elements

32

See for example La Housse partie, NRCF I, 3/16, lines 408–16. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999) chapter 1, and her “Rethinking Old French Literature: The Orality of the Octosyllabic Couplet,” Romanic Review 77 (1986): 307–21. 34 Peter F. Dembowski, “Literary Problems of Hagiography in Old French,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 117–30. In particular, Dembowski cites the prologue of Nicolas de Senlis’ translation into Old French of Pseudo-Turpin’s Chronicle (1202). 35 See for example D’Un Moigne [On a Monk], I Mir. 40, lines 1–14. 36 As we have seen, Gautier de Coinci is a consummate musician. He praises singing throughout I Mir. 14 and in I Pr. 2: “Que que vous chant chançons polies / De risees et de folies, / Je ne veil pas 33

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such as the use of the word “Amen” and the reciting of prayers.37 Audience participation of one form or another is explicitly elicited; Gautier says: “Dites amen, tu autem di” (I Mir. 44, line 82) and calls for us to pray with him (I Mir. 29, lines 267–72). In I Mir. 33, he says: “Let us praise her with all our heart and soul, kneeling before her image” (lines 148–50).38 It is altogether likely that his audience joined in with his hymns, prayers and gestures of devotion. The vocabulary used by the authors and narrators with reference to the telling of their tales is fairly standard (conter, dire, oïr), necessarily implying an audience. There are frequent direct addresses (vos, nos, je); the medieval poet, just like the medieval preacher, spoke with more than one voice. Certain logical conclusions can then be drawn as to the use of gesture. For example, in Crapaud [The Toad] (Vie de Pères, lines 7900–8250), a lump of meat magically turns into a toad, leaps up and grabs a man’s cheek with its teeth: it is inconceivable that such action be told in any way which is not dramatic, if not dramatised.39 We need to recognise the expectations of the audience at this time: people expected to hear sounds—why not also to see gestures? Discourse markers abound. For example, after a lengthy aside in the story of the Juitel [The Little Jew], the author of the first Vie de Pères says: “now I’m going to get back to the Jew’s son” (line 463).40 Textual architecture includes all manner of listener aids.41 Sections of direct speech suggest a change of tone and voice. What is more, it is not difficult to imagine the use of simple props, such as musical instruments in L’Ermite et le jongleur; in an act symbolising his decision to leave the profession, the jongleur drops his vielle and arc when he hears the hermit tell of the angel and its prediction.42 The evidence of performance potential is abundant. All that seems undetermined is the extent to which these narratives were performed in the modern sense: to entertain people by dancing, singing, acting or playing music. And even this would inevitably have changed from reading to reading, performance to performance. A number of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame were adapted, perhaps by the compiler of BN. fr. 819–820, into dramatic Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages. This movement—from narrative text to dramatic text—parallels that of comic fabliaux into farce.43 As far as Miracles are concerned, the dramatic potential is clear: the plots are often quite thrilling, and chanter tex chans, / car trop i a pleurs et deschans . . . Or escoutez comment j’en chant” (1 Pr. 2, lines 63–6, 74). These lines are followed by the texts of a number of songs. 37 See Gautier, Miracles: I Ch. 3, line 72; I Ch. 4, lines 9, 45; I Ch. 6, line 60; I Ch. 7, line 65; I Mir. 44, line 8; II Prière 38, line 78; II Prière 39, line 36; II Mir. 22, line 246; II Mir. 11, line 768; etc. 38 “Saluons la devotement / De bon cuer et de bon corage, / A nus genolz, devant s’ymage.” 39 My generalisation can be tested in a simple way: is it possible to describe a spiral without using your hands? 40 “Au fil del juïf m’en revieg.” 41 See for example my essay, “La Légende de l’enfant juif: peinture des personnages, mouvance d’épithètes,” Les Lieux Interdits: Transgression and French Literature, eds. Larry Duffy and Adrian Tudor (Hull, Hull University Press, 1998) 31–62. 42 Brian J. Levy, “L’ironie des métiers, ou le récit chiasmique. A propos du conte pieux de l’Ermite et du jongleur,” Reinardus 5 (1992): 106. 43 In particular Le Pet au vilain (NRCF 5/55) and Le Prestre crucfié (NRCF 4/27), see Brian J. Levy, “Du Fabliau à la farce: encore la question performancielle?” Reinardus 15 (2002): 87–100.

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twenty-four Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages contain a sermon, itself a form needing to be performed. Storytelling: performance in the texts Much of the performability I identify in short pious narratives is driven by the characters rather than the reader. Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame—which have been described as illustrated sermons44—tell of bishops and abbesses, emperors and kings, monks and nuns, priests and laymen. His characters, although remaining representatives of a section of society, are less stereotyped than characters in the comic fabliaux (or, indeed, in many other profane texts). They all have a role to play and a function to perform: their salvation or damnation tends to be performance-related in that their eventual lot is decided by their deeds. Some of the characters of the first Vie des Pères are, as the title of the text suggests, saintly individuals drawn from the mythical past of patristic legend. But those characters who are shown to act in a realistic and recognisable way are human beings drawn straight from thirteenth-century life. There is no reason why the reader could not imitate common gestures or ways of speaking. Many characters speak and act as did the contemporaries of the author; they are shown praying, fasting, swearing oaths, working, fornicating, lying, fighting, giving and listening to sermons, stealing, cheating, eating and drinking. In short, they are depicted doing, and telling of doing in itself requires doing. A brief examination of the dramatic potential of three short pious narratives will highlight the performability both of and in the texts. L’Ermite et le jongleur tells of a hermit who is horrified to learn that his equal on earth is a jongleur and who seeks out the person in question to test this revelation. The tale begins with a dramatic exchange between the hermit and an angel. This dialogue comes across as a spat between two bickering neighbours; the hermit is offended to learn that “a minstrel is your spiritual partner.”45 This is already both entertaining and highly dramatic.46 A single storyteller would have his work cut out to make sense of this story without performing essential passages. Quite apart from the visual and dramatised potential of the scene, there is a deeper sense that the jongleur in the story in fact performs badly as a jongleur. This is what, one assumes, helps him perform so admirably as a penitent: we learn that he has become a minstrel reluctantly. There then follows a second exchange, this time between the hermit and the jongleur. The hermit shows for a second time 44 See David A. Flory, “The Social Uses of Religious Literature: Challenging Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Marian Miracle Tale,” Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 61–9. 45 “Uns jongleurs est tes conpains” (“La Légende de l’Ermite et le jongleur,” ed. L. Karl, Revue des Langues Romanes 63 [1925]: 110–41). 46 Levy has pointed out the irony concerning the jongleur’s poor clothes, irony which would not have been lost on a medieval audience: “Tout jongleur professionel fait friand cas de ses vêtements, dont la qualité (tout comme la quantité) dépend de la largesse de ces nobles et riches patrons divertis par sa performance.” (“L’Ironie” 93) [Every jongleur was fond of his clothes; their quality (and quantity) depended largely on the largesse of those nobles and rich patrons who enjoyed his performance].

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that he suffers from a temper, pride and mood swings. The contrast between his angry shouting and the jongleur’s silence is most dramatic. Then, we actually witness three performances by the jongleur. There are three tale-in-a-tale anecdotes which illustrate and prove the jongleur’s piety: these are performances good enough to convince the initially hostile hermit of his spiritual worth. The jongleur’s ecstatic prayer at the end of the story is, according to Levy, “our jongleur’s last ‘performance’; it is the cleverest and most paradoxical of his career, since it is motionless, silent, interiorised.”47 There follows a communal prayer; together we pray: “que tous nous pregne a bone fin. Amen” (line 702). In this story the jongleur is seen to be a worthy man and prayerful penitent, but is also (and despite his own remarks to the contrary) an able storyteller: “The jongleur ends up the winner, thanks to words and then to his performance; that is, by performing the profession he so despises.” 48 It is inconceivable that the reader or performer deliver this story, dealing with his own profession, in a dispassionate and static way. When Levy notes that “the reader applauds the work of the poet, just as the hermit appreciates the jongleuresque performance,” he could have added that the audience must have put their hands together for the lively performance of a masterful narrative. The Tumbeor Nostre Dame is in many ways a pendant to L’Ermite et le jongleur. This delightful tale is full of action, describing—perhaps performing— the summersaults of a simple man whose way of praising the Virgin is via the only métier that he knows. As opposed to L’Ermite et le jongleur, here we have a performer who excels in his trade: the author tells us that the jongleur knows nothing else but “tumbling, leaping and summersaults.”49 How could these verses be said without vocal and visual performance? What is more, there is a vivid contrast between these lines and the description of the silent hermits who communicate by sign only (lines 34–6). Such juxtapositions abound in a tale which both exposes the decorum and prayerfulness of the monks and offers detailed descriptions of the tumbeor’s tricks: “They serve by singing, and I will serve by tumbling” (lines 135–6); “Then he began to do summersaults, low and high and big and small, first below and then above, then he got down on his knees and bowed before the image of the Virgin” (lines 163–7).50 The audience witnesses the tumbeor’s prowess, as both tumbler and holy man, when his dancing and

47 “la dernière ‘performance’ de notre jongleur: la plus fine et la plus paradoxale de sa carrière, puisqu’elle est immobile, silencieuse, intériorisée.” (Levy, “L’Ironie” 103) 48 “le jongleur sort triomphant, au moyen de la parole, par suite de sa performance: bref, en faisant ce métier qu’il méprise tant.” (Levy, “L’Ironie” 107) 49 “Si ne sot faire nul mestier, / Dont on eüst laiens mestier, / Car n’ot vescu fors de timer / Et d’espringier et de baler. / Treper, saillir, ice savoit / Ne d’autre rien il ne savoit.” (Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame in Vierge et merveille: les miracles de Notre Dame narratifs au Moyen Âge, ed. and trans. Pierre Kunstmann, Bibliothèque Médiévale 1424 [Paris, 10/18-Union Générale d’Éditions, 1981] 142–78, lines 23–8.) There is irony in his metier: Levy notes that “what is especially diabolical is the minstrel’s role as leader of the carole, an overly intimate dance which leads women to evil and damnation” (Levy, “L’Ironie” 88). 50 “Li autre servent de canter / Et jo servirai de tumer . . . Lors li commence a faire saus / Bas et petis et grans et haus, / Primes deseur et puis desos, / Puis se remet sor ses genols / Devers l’ymage et

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tumbles are shown to be punctuated by simple and sincere prayer. After his dance, “he beats his breast, and sighs, and then cries very tenderly” (lines 210–11), and then he does a summersault!51 The tale contains an authorial sermon (lines 293–314); episodes in which a monk and the abbot spy on the tumbler; the Virgin tenderly wipes his brow, neck, torso and face (lines 425–8) and we are given details of his day-long performance. There are comic, visual elements: when he hears that his tumbling is good, he is forced to sit down (line 586)! And then great pathos enters the tale as he falls ill and eventually dies. His inactivity now contrasts sharply with his excessive and energetic activity of earlier in the tale. The pace of the narrative is initially very fast, with dances punctuated by short prayers, but now it slows down dramatically and the author gives his final, solemn message: “Now let’s pray to God that we can serve him so well so as to deserve his love” (lines 682–4).52 Is it not likely that the jongleur telling the tale would wish to show the audience that he is the fictional jongleur’s equal by himself performing summersaults and tricks, and by contrasting these with moments of calm and inactivity? My final example, Le Chevalier au barisel, is a true chef d’oeuvre of thirteenth-century vernacular literature. One Good Friday, an impious and blasphemous lord is persuaded by some of his knights to visit and confess to a hermit. The hermit gives the lord a simple penance: to fill the baril that he gives him with water. The proud lord accepts this simple penance, but water is constantly and miraculously prevented from entering the bucket. He perseveres, and is eventually shown the evil of his former ways. At this point he sheds a tear of true repentance, and that tear miraculously fills the bucket.53 The performance potential of this tale was noted by Jean-Charles Payen in 1971. Indeed, Payen remarked that his students had put together a film scenario based on the tale.54 There is a succession of dialogues, including a negotiation surrounding the nature of the penance to be performed, and the lord stands before the hermit as both a proud, arrogant sinner and as a broken penitent. Much seems as visual as it is textual. Payen concludes that the Chevalier au barisel is an inherently performable text: “This is not an exemplum but a dramatic short story, bursting with meaning. I readily imagine it read in several voices . . . by a single reader or storyteller who was used to switching voices as the speakers changed.”55 Is Payen understating its performance potential? There is constant, circular movement in this text, with the hermitage as the epicentre; there are many lively dialogues, with characters si s’incline.” There are many such passages. See, for example, the description of his sweat (lines 234–6, 401–2) and the constant overlapping of the physical and the spiritual. 51 “Lors bat sa cope, si sospire / Et plore mout tres tenrement.” 52 “Or prions Deu, il n’i a tel, / Qu’il nos doinst lui si bien servir / Que s’amor puisson deservir.” 53 Le Chevalier au barisel, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques Français du Moyen Âge 82 (Paris, Champion, 1955). 54 Jean-Charles Payen, “Structure et sens du Chevalier au barisel,” Le Moyen Âge 77 (1971) 239. 55 “Le Chevalier au barisel n’est pas un exemplum, mais une nouvelle dramatique, chargée de sens, que j’imagine volontiers diffusée par une lecture à plusieurs voix . . . il était sans doute lu ou dit par un lecteur ou par un récitant unique habile à changer de voix lors des changements d’interlocuteurs.” (Payen 262)

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outraged or indignant or weeping; there are monologues and prayers; the piece requires limited dramatis personae (in numbers of actors or voices); the narrator directs and joins up the various scenes as would a metteur en scène; there is the opportunity to show sharp contrasts between luxurious foods, wines and clothes, and the poorer fare of the hermit and penitent; gestures abound (mortification, filling the barisel, seeking forgiveness). The lord, as both splendid, arrogant baddy and ragged, but still arrogant, penitent, is a truly striking anti-hero before his conversion, and this contrast perhaps represents the most dramatic element of the entire piece. All revolves around the barisel, a constant “on-stage” reminder of why the tale is being told. When added to the communality and participation demanded by the tale—the last four lines (lines 1081–4) read: “And so the lord died. Now let us pray to God, who is without end, that he will keep us in his glory”56—these elements, added to those highlighted by Payen, reveal a text brimming with dramatic energy and potential. The texts under consideration here are not dramatic in the modern sense of theatrical. But to a medieval audience, performance must have made them alive, immediate, animated. The combination of preaching, storytelling and performance makes short pious stories, united by the catalyst of eminently performable raw material, an intriguing body of narratives in performance. There is a wide range of possibilities for vocal modulation given that the texts include combinations of themes which are earthly and divine, boorish and inspirational, comic and serious. The potential for using gesture and props is clear, as is the requirement for audience participation. There is no question that the telling of a tale where a lump of meat becomes a toad which attaches itself to a sinners cheek, or of a minstrel who leaps and summersaults around, or the story of a bucket which refuses to be filled no matter how hard the sinner tries, must involve many and varied performance techniques.

56 “Li chevaliers ensi fina, / or prions Dieu, ki sains fin a / tous biens en lui, quë il nous maint / en la glore u il maint.”

153

Reading, Reciting, and Performing the Renart Kenneth Varty

Se or vos volïez taisir, Seignor, ja porïez oïr, S’estïez de bone memoire, Une partie de l’estoire Si con Renart et Ysengrin Guerroierent jusqu’en la fin. Si vos me prestés vos oreilles, Ja vos voldrai dire merveilles De Renart qui est vif maufés. (Dufournet II, 192, lines 1–9) [My lords, if you would be silent now and apply your concentration, you would be able to hear part of the story of how Reynard and Isengrin warred with each other to the bitter end. If you lend me your ears, I should like to tell you some astounding things about that living devil Reynard.] (Owen 178) 1

So begins Branch X, Renart trompe Roënel le chien et Brichemer le cerf: Renart médecin [Renart Tricks Roënel the Dog and Brichemer the Stag: Renart Physician]. Particularly relevant are the next four lines, for they seem to indicate that the storytelling session which the text reflects took place in very impressive surroundings: Toz sui espris et escaufés De Renart dire en tel endroit, Sanz delaiement orendroit, Q’einc n’oïstes en si bon leu De lui e d’Ysengrin le leu. (Dufournet II, 192, lines 10–13) [I am very excited and eager to tell about Reynard here and now in such a place as this, for never have you heard in so splendid a situation about him and Isengrin the wolf.] (Owen 178)

Although several branches of the Roman de Renart begin with prologues that 1 The Old French is from Le Roman de Renart, eds. Jean Dufournet and Andrée Méline (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1985), either volume I or II, as specified. The numbering of the branches follows Dufournet (who follows Martin) unless another editor is indicated. The English translations are from D. D. R. Owen, The Romance of Reynard the Fox (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994) except where indicated. The italics within the quotations, used for emphasis, are mine throughout.

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seem to indicate that the story which follows was to be recited before a live audience, this is the only one which gives a clue about the setting in which that happened. It begins with an injunction for silence, typical of so many other stories and poems meant to be performed. For readers who know Noël du Fail’s Propos Rustiques, it will recall the only extant account outside the Roman de Renart of a performance of some of the earliest Renart material. It is told by that jovial, fictitious character, Robin Chevet, a gentleman farmer who, one evening, tells from memory a number of tales, beginning with elements from Branch III (the part known as Renart et les anguilles [Renart and the Eels], followed by the part called La Pêche à la queue [Fishing with the Tail], and continuing with part of Branch II (Renart et Tiécelin [Renart and Tiécelin]). Robin Chevet, we are told: “après souper, le ventre tendu comme un tabourin, saoul comme Patault, jazoit le dos tourné au feu” [after supper, his belly stretched tight like a drumskin, filled to satiety, chattered away with his back to the fire]. While his wife and other members of the household were “occupés à diverses besongnes . . . le bon homme Robin (après avoir imposé silence) commençoit un beau compte du temps que les bestes parloyent . . . comme le Renart desroboit le poisson aux poissonniers; comme il feit battre le Loup aux lavendières lors quil lapprenoit à pescher . . . de la Corneille qui en chantant perdit son fromage”2 [occupied in doing their different jobs . . . our good man Robin (after having imposed silence) would begin to tell a fine story about the time when animals could talk . . . how Renard would steal fish from the fishermen; how he got the Wolf beaten by washerwomen when he taught him to fish . . . about the Crow which lost its cheese as it sang]. Although he is a fictitious, mid-sixteenth-century character, Robin Chevet reflects a commonplace social custom in his day and continues, surely, a tradition of storytelling performances which go back to the times of the professional (resident or travelling) storyteller and to his amateur (family) counterpart who would bid his audience be quiet as he began his performance. Branch III of the Roman de Renart (from which Robin Chevet recites two parts, apparently from memory) opens with an interesting variant of the performer’s “be quiet and listen” approach. The storyteller’s first word “Seigneurs” implies that traditional command, but we have to wait until the forty-second line before it is made explicit: “Or oiez con il les desvoie!” (Dufournet I, 282, line 42) [Now just hear how he dupes them!] (Owen 73), he exclaims, as he tells how Renart deceives the fishermen who drive home with a waggon-load of eels they have caught; and then, from time to time, he “prods” his audience to recall their attention, e.g.: “Oïr poëz ici biau jeu” (Dufournet, I, 296, line 333) [Now you will hear of a pretty trick] (Owen 77). The beginning of Branch XII, Les Vêpres de Tibert [The Vespers of Tibert] is especially interesting because it contains an unusual reference to the desirability of committing this branch to memory, one of the longest with more than fifteenhundred lines of octosyllabic verse: “Oiiés une nouvele estoire / Qui bien devroit

2 Noël du Fail, Propos rustiques, ed. Jacques Boulenger, Collection Des Chefs-D’Oeuvres Méconnus (Paris, Bossard, 1921) 68–9. Translation mine.

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estre en mimoire.”3 [Listen to a new story which really ought to be committed to memory.] Between this opening and the next command to listen to him, “Oiez comment je la conmanz”4 [Listen to the way I begin it], the author-storyteller makes the stereotyped claim that this story was long lost but has been recently rediscovered by a scholar who has translated it into French. This implies, does it not, that he, the author-storyteller, is either reciting it from memory or reading it aloud from the French. Branch IX (Renart et Liétart), of which a priest from La-Croix-en-Brie says, right at the beginning, he is the author, is another of those narrative poems which claims to have a source and to be “true”: L’estoire temoinne a vraie Uns bons conteres, c’est la vraie, (Celui oï conter le conte) Qui tos les conteors sormonte Qui soient de ci jusq’en Puille. (Dufournet II, 80, lines 7–11) [The truth of the tale is in fact affirmed by an excellent storyteller whom I heard relate it and who surpasses all others from here to Apulia.] (Owen 147)

Even if we dismiss the claim by the priest of La-Croix-en-Brie to have had a source in an excellent storyteller, we note that part of his argument is that he had heard it told by this man; it is not clear, however, if he pretends to have heard it recited from memory, or read aloud from a text. Another “be quiet and listen” beginning which also encapsulates another unique and interesting point is to be found in Branch IV, Renart et Isengrin dans le puits [Renart and Isengrin in the Well]. Using the verb dire in, most probably, its primary sense of to tell with the spoken word (for here it is equated with preaching a sermon, and is balanced by the verb oïr), the author-storyteller starts by saying: Or me convient tel chose dire Dont je vos puisse fere rire; Qar je sai bien, ce est la pure, Que de sarmon n’avés vos cure Ne de cors saint oïr la vie . . . Or gart chascun que il se tese, Que de bien dire sui en voie Et bien garniz. (Dufournet I, 308, lines 1–5, 8–10) [I now have something to tell you that should make you laugh; for the truth is, as I know well, that you have no wish for a sermon or to hear the life of

3 Le Roman de Renart, eds. Armand Strubel, Roger Bellon, Dominique Boutet and Sylvie Lefèvre, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, NRF-Gallimard, 1998) 219, lines 1–2. In this edition the branch is numbered VI. 4 Le Roman de Renart, Branches X, XI, ed. Mario Roques, Classiques Français du Moyen Age 55 (Paris, Champion, 1958) 69, line 11,478.

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some holy saint . . . Now let everyone be sure to keep quiet, for I am about to tell you a good story, and am well prepared.] (Owen 81)

The unique and interesting point is made in line 10: “sui en voie / Et bien garniz” [and am well prepared]. The implication is that the author-storyteller has re-read the text of the tale and/or rehearsed the story thoroughly to ensure a good performance. The story he is about to tell is, he says, about the trickster, Renart, well known to everybody in his audience: “C’est de Renart, bien le savez, / Et bien oï dire l’avez.” (Dufournet I, 308, lines 21–2) [He, as you well know, and have certainly heard.] (Owen 81) He too is another performer who prods his audience (politely) from time to time: “Seigneurs, or escoutez merveilles!” (Dufournet I, 316, line 151) [Now, sirs, listen to an amazing thing!] (Owen 83), and yet again in lines 184, 299, 346 and 369–70. All these prods draw the audience’s attention to a new development in the story, or to a point of some importance. These exhortations to listen occur in only a minority, but a sizeable minority, of the tales which make up the Renart. They occur in the later ones almost as frequently as in the earlier ones (the tales are generally attributed to the period 1175–1250). For example, in Branch XXIV, Les Enfances Renart (Renart’s Early Years), usually dated c.1205–50, we find: “Or oez, si ne vos anuit.”5 [Now listen, if you don’t mind.] Similar uses of verbs meaning to listen or to hear are to be found in many places, for example in Fukumoto I, 6, line 166; I, 7, lines 195–8; II, 379, line 1919; and 384, lines 2079–80. In other branches (other than those quoted so far) we find a few passages or single lines which seem to lend strong support to the view that their authors had performances in mind. For example, at the beginning of Branch XIII, Renart le noir [Renart in Black], we read: Une estoire voel conmencier . . . Et grant bien i porés aprendre, Se vos i plaisoit a entendre. Or m’escoutés sans noise faire. Car nuls contes ne poroit plaire A home qui est trop noiseus. Mais de l’oïr soit convoiteus Cius qui entendre le vorra. Or oés que on vous dira.6 [I want to begin a story . . . and you may learn much good from it if you can hear it. Now listen to me without making a noise. For no story can give pleasure to the one who makes a lot of noise. He who wants to hear it should set his mind on hearing it. Now hear what you are going to be told.]

The prologue to Branch XXII, Comment Renart parfit le con [How Renart Made a Cunt], argues that anybody who hears a good story owes it to others to

5 Le Roman de Renart, eds. N. Fukumoto, N. Harano and S. Suzuki, 2 vols. (Tokyo, France Tosho, 1983 and 1985) I, 1, line 23. 6 Strubel 435, lines 1–10.

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re-tell it, and not to let it slip into oblivion.7 Such a man may give pleasure to people who want to hear his story,8 so he, the author-storyteller of this branch, is going to tell a story on which he has lavished much effort, a story once heard told by a wise, talented old man.9 Used by the storyteller in addressing his (imaginary?) audience, the verbs oïr or escouter, in one form or another (mostly imperative), occur frequently.10 One of the most thorough examinations of the use of the verb oïr in the Renart has been made by Jean R. Scheidegger.11 He suggests that the many uses of oïr are part and parcel of a topos, that they are not to be taken literally, that they do not reflect a performance of the tales in which they occur. It is, he suggests, the text that “speaks” to the reader: “Et si cette profusion indiquait que ces oïr font topos? Et si ce qu’on entend n’était pas la claire voix du récitant, mais l’écrit même qui parle?”12 [And what if this profusion were to indicate that these cases of oïr (hear) are in fact a topos? And if what one hears were not the clear voice of the storyteller, but the text itself which speaks?] He quotes a number of passages from both Renardian and non-Renardian works to support his argument. One of the most persuasive is from the Renart itself. When, in Branch I, Le Jugement [The Judgment (sometimes called The Trial)], Grimbert the Badger delivers into Renart’s hands King Noble’s letter commanding him to appear before him, we read: “Tenez mon, brisiés cest seel / Gardés que la letre vos dit.” (Dufournet I, 92, lines 988–9) [Here, break this seal and have a look at what the letter tells you.] (Owen 19) The text continues: “Renart l’ot, si tramble et fremist.” [On hearing him, Reynard trembled and shook.] And then: A grant peor la cire brise Et voit que la letre devise. Il sospira, au premier mot Bien sot a dire qu’il i ot. (Dufournet I, lines 991–4) [Terrified, he broke the seal. He saw the terms of the letter and sighed: from the first word he knew its gist.] (Owen 19)

Andrée Méline’s translation reads: “Mort de peur, il brise le cachet de cire et découvre le contenu de la lettre. Il soupire car, dès le premier mot, il a bien compris de quoi il retournait.”13 [Dying with fear, he breaks the wax seal and discovers the letter’s contents. He sighs for, from the very first word, he has fully understood what it was about.] Both translators get round the ambiguity in the

7

Strubel 751, lines 4–5. Strubel 751, lines 7–8. 9 Strubel 751, lines 9–12. 10 In addition to all the examples given thus far, others are to be found in Branches 1a, Dufournet I, 154, line 2181; in 1b, Dufournet I, 158, line 2285; in VII, Fukumoto I, 412, lines 73, 433 and 738; in X, Dufournet II, 206, line 282; and in XIV, Fukumoto I, 85, line 1. 11 In his Le Roman de Renart ou Le texte de la dérision (Geneva, Droz, 1989). See in particular pages 149–80. 12 Scheidegger 150. 13 Dufournet I, 93. 8

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Old French qu’il i ot. Does this mean “what there was in it” or “what he heard”? As Scheidegger comments: Prenant connaissance des lettres royaux de Noble, ayant lu l’écrit qui dit, devise, prend la parole, Renart peut bien dire ce qu’il entend, ou ce qu’il y avait. Renart voit la lettre, il la lit silencieusement (“bien sot lire quanque il i ot,” écrit H), il entend alors la mauvaise nouvelle: “Quant Renart entent la novele, / Le cuer li bat soz la mamele.” Ce qu’il y a dans l’écrit, on l’entend donc.14 [Reading Noble’s royal words, having read the writing which tells, relates, speaks, Renart may well tell what he hears, or what there was in it. Renart sees the letter, he reads it silently (“he well knew how to read what he heard [or what there was in it]” writes the scribe of manuscript H), he then hears the bad news: “When Renart hears the news / His heart pounds within his breast.” What is in the written text is therefore heard.]

Even if Scheidegger is right in understanding the text to mean that Renart read the king’s letter silently, that the words “spoke” silently to him through his eyes, the fact remains that the text of the letter follows immediately and is in direct speech. Who speaks? The text? Or Renart? Bien sot a dire qu’il i ot: “Mesire Nobles li lions . . . Mande Renart honte et martire . . . Se demein ne li vient droit fere Enz en sa cort.” (Dufournet I, 92, lines 994–1001) [He knew its gist: “My lord noble the lion . . . condemns Renart to shame and torture . . . should he not come tomorrow to answer him in court.”] (Owen 19)

and it is only then that we read: “Quant Renart entent la novele / Le cuer li bat soz la mamele.” (Dufournet I, lines 1006–7) [At this news, Reynard’s heart races in his breast.] (Owen 19) It therefore seems possible to me that the author means us to understand that Renart read the letter aloud, that he speaks each word as he deciphers it. But in any event, this is a totally different situation from that in which, at the beginning of the tale, and at intervals within it, the authorstoryteller, in the process of composition (either recalling a performance of an earlier version of his tale, or envisaging a subsequent perormance of his own composition), speaks to his audience. The furthest I can go with Scheidegger here is to agree that the author-storyteller (or performer) repeats aloud what a written text “tells” him (when he has it in front of him), or recites from memory what a written text “has told” him some time ago. However, Scheidegger’s arguments are extensive, detailed, well-illustrated and often persuasive. Anybody interested in the oral, aural qualities of the Renart ought to read them and weigh them up carefully. He may well be right when he says: “Les marques d’auralité pouvaient à l’origine remplir leur fonction de maintien du contact entre récitant et auditeurs. 14

Scheidegger 151.

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Mais le texte couché sur parchemin, elles perdent cette fonction pour devenir des procédés stylistiques et rhétoriques.”15 [At first, these signs of aurality may have served to maintain contact between storyteller and listener. But once committed to parchment, they cease to fulfil this role and become stylistic and rhetorical devices]. This argument is followed up with many pertinent examples, and sometimes reinforced by references to some excellent scholarly work in this field.16 But whatever the oral or written states of these texts, the fact remains that most of the branches which begin with an appeal to what may have been a live or an imaginary audience, lend themselves easily to performance, either exactly as they are, or modified a little into a different narrative, or quite a lot into stage drama, or even into sculpted or graphic forms. This is especially true of the earliest branches (II–Va) which begin with a proloque which appeals to its listeners’/readers’ recollections of performances and performers of a whole range of other genres: Seigneurs, oï avez maint conte, Que maint conterre vous raconte Conment Paris ravi Elaine, Le mal qu’il en ot et la paine, De Tristan que la Chievre fist, Qui assez bellement en dist Et fabliaus et chançons de geste. Romanz d’Yvain et de sa beste Maint autre conte par la terre. Mais onques n’oïstes la guerre, Qui tant fu dure de grant fin, Entre Renart et Ysengrin, Qui moult dura et moult fu dure. Des deus barons ce est la pure Qui ainc ne s’entramerent jour. Mainte mellee et maint estour Ot entr’eulz deus, ce est la voire. Des or commencerai l’estoire. Or oïz le conmencement Et de la noise et du content, Par quoi et por quel mesestance Fu entr’eus deus la desfïance. (Dufournet I, 208, lines 1–22) [My lords, you have heard many a tale from many a storyteller; how Paris carried off Helen to his great trouble and woe, La Chèvre’s splendid story of Tristan, various fabliaux and chansons de geste; and many another goes around the country telling the romance of Yvain and his beast. But you have never heard of the great, grim war between Reynard and Isengrin that they waged so long and bitterly. The fact is that there was never any love lost between these two lords; but, to tell the truth, they often engaged in fights and brawls. Now I shall begin my story; so hear how their quarrel and 15

Scheidegger 162. For example, M. J. Scholz, Hören und Lesen. Studien zur primären Rezeption der Literatur im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, Athenaion, 1980). 16

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antagonism began and the reason for their dispute that led to their rivalry.] (Owen 53)

Although there is serious doubt about the wording and the meaning of “que La Chièvre fist” as well as of “Yvain et de sa beste” (neither of these groups of words appears in any of the manuscripts in the form they are usually edited, as here), we do have clear reference to different narrative genres, “contes,” in particular narratives about Paris and Helen of Troy, and of Tristan and Isolda, fabliaux, chansons de geste, and courtly romances, all of which, it seems, have been heard before by the storyteller-performer’s audience (real or imaginary). An indirect appeal to an audience’s experience of the performance of narrative material is made in another of the earliest and most successful branches, Branch Ib, Renart teinturier et jongleur [Renart the Dyer and Travelling Minstrel]. Play is also made in this branch on the comic effects realised by hearing mispronounced and faulty grammar. Disguised by a bright yellow coat (after accidentally falling into a vat of bright yellow dye), Renart, suddenly confronted by his old enemy Isengrin, pretends to be a travelling minstrel from foreign parts. With an assumed foreign accent, he boasts to the wolf about a considerable repertoire of tales which he knows by heart and can tell in French. Saying that he is from “Bretaing,” he colours his French with the odd word of English (his very first word, a greeting, is “Godehelpe”) and faulty grammar, relishing the wrong use of the third person singular of the simple past of the verb “to be,” that is “fut,” which he uses as a first person singular and clearly mispronounces in a way that is typically English even now, rendering the sound represented by the “u” with the sound usually represented by “oo” in English and “ou” in modern French. “Fut” thus becomes, in most manuscripts, “fot” or “fout” showing that Renart pronounced it as if it were a form of the verb “foutre,” “to fuck.” So it is that Renart claims to be able to recite bon rotruel, Et un bel lai et un bel son . . . Ge fot17 savoir bon lai breton Et de Merlin et de Noton, Del roi Artu et de Tristran, Del chevrefoil, de saint Brandan . . . Moi saver bon chançon d’Ogier Et d’Olivant et de Rollier Et de Charlon le char chanu (Dufournet I, 164, lines 2374–5 and 2389–92; 188, lines 2853–5) [good ditty, nice lay and pretty song . . . Me savy18 good Bretony lays about Merlin and Noton, King Arthur and Tristan, the honeysuckle and Saint

17 Although there is only one example of this form of the verb in this particular quotation, the same form, “fot,” occurs frequently in Renart’s conversation with Isengrin. See, for example, lines 2356, 2360, 2370, 2371, 2372, 2374, etc. 18 To keep the flavour of the Old French, I would have translated “Me savvy fuck.”

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Brendan . . . Me savy good song about Ogier, and one about Olivand and Roler and Charlie with the whore’s head] (Owen 40 and 47)

In these last lines, Renart is, of course, playing on the names of the epic heroes Oliver and Roland, and muddling the usual epithet “hoary-headed” for Charlemagne to produce some comic sounds. The range of comic devices deployed in this branch is wide, and they are exceptionally well done in this depiction of a singularly inept travelling minstrel and the way he talks. His meeting with Isengrin and their conversation begs to be heard, to be performed. While Renart the travelling minstrel names only the well-known stories he claims he could tell if he were to have an audience, in other branches he actually tells stories, and quite memorable ones at that, stories within stories. One thinks in particular of his confessions where he relishes telling about the tricks he has played on Isengrin and on other victims.19 Other Renart protagonists tell, in lively direct speech, of the tricks Renart has played on them, such as Brun the bear in Branch Va, lines 589–766. Bernart the ass celebrates, in a speech at the fox’s “funeral,” Renart’s “exemplary” life, and in particular his sexual prowess (Branch XVII, lines 836–915). Hubert the kite, in Branch VII, lines 467–634, unwisely comments in some critical detail, as he stands before Renart, on the fox’s beloved Hersent’s sexual appetite. All these speeches, and many more, would lend themselves to entertaining, dramatic performances. Dialogue characterizes most of the branches, especially the early ones in which, again and again, only two protagonists appear “on stage” at any one time. In these especially, it is easy to imagine a talented storyteller playing the narrator’s role, reciting the prologues and narrative openings, the linking passages, and the conclusions. Between these narrative parts it would be easy for him to adjust his voice as he pretended to be first one of the protagonists, then the other, or have an assistant to take one of the “on-stage” parts. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Roman de Renart is that, in spite of its immense popularity in medieval France, and in spite of the fact that it provided the Alsatian Heinrich der Glichezaere and the Flemish author of the first Dutch-language Beast Epic with the raw material for their literary masterpieces (the Dutch then going on to spawn all the other major European Beast Epics), it failed to survive into the first centuries of the age of the printed book. It seems to have been resurrected only in 1800 by Legrand d’Aussy in his article “Le Renard: poème héroïco-comique, burlesque et facétieux.”20 However, in all that has been written since then about the Renart, I know of no public reading, reciting from memory or performance of any part of it after Robin Chevet’s until the late 19 Some of the best are in Branch I, lines 1028–96; Ia, lines 1650–706; VII, lines 343–466; VIII, lines 17–54 and 113–60; and XVII, lines 360–431. 20 Details of this may be found in my study The “Roman de Renart”: A Guide to Scholarly Work (Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, 1998). See in particular entry 117. The fortunes of the Renart in France are traced in the chapter composed jointly by Jean Dufournet and myself, “The Death and Resurrection of the Roman de Renart,” Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Kenneth Varty (New York, Berghahn Books, 2000) 221–44.

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twentieth century when some parts were recorded in one form or another, notably by Lucien Adès on a 33-rpm record where Philippe Noiret recites the selected scenes.21 Although I have not heard this, the talents of an actor and film star of the calibre of Noiret suggests an impressive performance. The subtitle of the record: texte et adaptation phonographique par Lucien Adès, implies that Noiret may be using a modern adaptation of the Old French text. In his bibliography, Scheidegger22 tells us about another reading, this one by Georges Becker, also on a 33-rpm record where the spoken word is accompanied by music composed by P. Maillard-Verger.23 He also goes on to tell us that Becker also made six cassette tapes of Renart stories between 1980 and 1990 which, in 1995, were transposed to a compact disk, but details of neither the tapes nor the disk are given. Lucien Adès also made six cassette recordings intended for young children. Here the text is adapted from the Roman de Renart and read by Michel Hindernoch. Each of the six cassettes is accompnied by a booklet richly illustrated by Peter Alfaenger.24 They appear under the general title Les Renardises adaptées du “Roman de Renart” [Fox Stories Adapted from “The Roman of the Renart”], and each volume contains about thirty-six unnumbered pages. The illustrations, which occupy about half the booklet, precede the text. The second cassette-booklet, Renart, is an adaptation of Branch IV, Renart et Isengrin dans le puits [Renart and Isengrin in the Well]; the third, Isengrin, of Branch IIIa, Les Anguilles [The Eels]. The fourth, Tibert, combines episodes from three different branches featuring Tibert in a major role (IId, XVa and XIVa), yet keeps surprisingly close to the narrative line of each one. This particular storyteller concludes this particular story with a nice image: “Le conte est terminé; moi, je remonte sur mes deux pieds, et je retourne . . . dans la forêt.” [The story is ended; me, I get up again on my two feet, and I go back . . . into the forest]. Other modern performances of the Renart have taken the form of adaptations for the stage. On the whole, they seem to envisage young audiences. Outstanding is Le Roman de Renart by Christian Grau-Stef and Jean Terensier.25 One gathers that the text presented in this volume was staged in 1975 at the Théâtre de l’Atelier de Paris by a Company called Connaissance des Classiques. Photographs of the actors who played the principal roles (Renart, Tibert, Hersent, Brun, Isengrin and Pinte) show that they were made recognisable by the furry or feathered headgear they wore. The play is divided into a prologue, three acts and an epilogue. The prologue is spoken by a troubadour who is seen to enter a room at the royal court where lords and ladies are dancing. He asks for silence so that he may tell them a story. What he does, like the narrator in some of the branches, is 21 22 23

Le Roman de Renart raconté par Philippe Noiret, LP, Paris, Disques Adès, 1987. Scheidegger 437. Le Roman de Renart, LP, L’Encyclopédie Sonore, Paris, Hachette, Dunetod and Thompson,

1995. 24 Their titles are: 1, Chantecler le Coq; 2, Renart le Goupil; 3, Isengrin le Loup; 4, Tibert le Chat; 5, Brun l’Ours; 6, Roënel le Lévrier [1, Chantecler the Cock; 2, Renart the Fox; 3, Isengrin the Wolf; 4, Tibert the Cat; 5, Brun the Bear; 6, Roënel the Greyhound], audiocassettes, Paris, Vif Argent, 1991. 25 Paris, Bordas, 1977.

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set the scene. The action proper begins in the first act during which the troubadour-narrator remains on stage; he withdraws from the remaining acts. The first act draws on some of the earliest branches and shows Renart tricking Chantecler, Tiécelin and Isengrin; the second depicts Renart treating the king’s illness, then making love to Hersent. This leads to Isengrin’s complaints at court, then to Brun’s, Tibert’s and Grimbert’s missions to bring Renart before the king. The third act stages an aggressive cross-examination of the fox at court, then a duel between wolf and fox, Renart’s escape and the siege of his castle from which he also escapes. The epilogue depicts Renart disguised as a Scottish jongleur who bumps into Isengrin who takes him home to meet his wife saying he is sure they will get on well together. Another attractive dramatization is that by Boudet, Poslaniec and Lenfant.26 Boudet and Poslaniec conclude their introduction with the words “Nous souhaitons que cette présente édition permette aux jeunes lecteurs de découvrir la gouaille, la truculence et la férocité de ce premier chef-d’oeuvre à voix multiples de la littérature française.” [We hope that this edition may make it possible for young readers to discover the cocky humour, the raciness and the ferociousness of this early masterpiece of French literature spoken by many voices.] The thirtyfour octosyllabic-line introduction spoken by “le Récitant” (the Narrator) is closely based on Branch IV, Renart et Isengrin dans le puits, and each of the subsequent scenes, all in decasyllabic blank verse, follows the narrative line of the branch whose traditional title it is given. These are: Renart et les anguilles [Renart and the Eels], introduced in four lines by the Narrator; La tonsure d’Ysengrin [The Tonsuring of Ysengrin]; Renart et Tiécelin [Renart and Tiécelin]; Renart et Ysengrin dans le puits; Renart, Tibert et les andouilles [Renart, Tibert, and the Chitterlings]; Renart et la mésenge [Renart and the Tit]; Renart et Brun l’ours [Renart and Brun the Bear]; Renart jongleur; Le procès de Renart [Renart’s Trial]; and, finally, Renart médecin. The Narrator also closes some of the enacted stories (e.g. Renart et les anguilles), opens others (e.g. La tonsure d’Ysengrin), and occasionally interrupts the action to address the audience (“Ecoutez bien, messires, / Et sachez la cruauté que prépare le goupil” [Listen carefully, gentlemen, and learn what a cruel thing the fox is preparing to do]). In this way he performs the role so often given to the storyteller in the Old French. In their introduction, the authors say: Nous avons choisi de présenter ces textes sous forme théâtrale, de telle façon que les jeunes lecteurs puissent en devenir les acteurs. N’est-ce pas la meilleure façon de se couler dans la peau d’un personnage? Le texte forme donc une fresque où l’on pourra choisir un passage seulement, ou mettre en scène l’ensemble comme une pièce de théâtre à tableaux successifs. [We have decided to present these texts in dramatic form so that young readers may be able to enact them. Is this not the best way to get into a character’s skin? Thus, the text becomes a kind of fresco from which just one section can be 26 Le Roman de Renart adapté pour le théâtre, adapt. Robert Boutet, trans. Christian Poslaniec, scenography Christiane Lenfant, illustr. Frédéric Stehr (Paris, L’Ecole des Loisirs, 1988).

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chosen, or the whole of it can be put on stage like a play made up of successive scenes.]

The Roman de Renart did indeed inspire frescoes and other visual representations which captured and still, centuries later, silently mouth its most dramatic moments; it is indeed populated by men and women who wear the skins of animals whose well-known characteristics they so often display as they speak and act out their parts through the voice of the storyteller, a voice as audible now, in our minds, as it was in the minds of our ancestors who almost certainly had the added advantage of attending, from time to time, a live performance of parts of this great animal epic.27

27 In my Index of Subject matter on the Renart, I list and give details of about fifty studies (mostly mine) about visual representations of Renardian matter (Guide to Scholarly Works 174). My most recent major study, Reynard, Renart, Reinaert and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1999), covers primarily the British Isles but also makes comparisons with relevant matter in continental Europe and manuscripts kept in the United States.

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Turkic Bard and Medieval Entertainer: What a Living Epic Tradition Can Tell Us about Oral Performance of Narrative in the Middle Ages Karl Reichl

In the first part of Gottfried von Straßburg’s courtly epic Tristan (c.1210), there is a striking moment when the young Tristan betrays his noble origin at King Mark’s court in Tintagel by performing two Breton lays with astonishing musical and verbal skills. The second lay treats the unhappy love of Pyramus and Thisbe: rîlîche huob er aber an einen senelîchen leich als ê de la cûrtoise Tispê von der alten Bâbilône. den harphete er sô schône und gie den noten sô rehte mite nâch rehte meisterlîchem site, daz es den harphær wunder nam; und als ez ie ze staten kam, sô lie der tugenderîche suoze unde wunneclîche sîne schanzûne fliegen în. er sanc diu leichnotelîn britûnsche und gâloise, latînsche und franzoise sô suoze mit dem munde, daz nieman wizzen kunde, wederez süezer wære oder baz lobebære, sîn harphen oder sîn singen. (lines 3612–31) [In fine style he struck up a second lay, full of yearning like the first, about Noble Thisbe of Old Babylon. He played it so beautifully and went with his music in so masterly fashion that the harper was amazed. And at the appropriate places, sweetly and rapturously, the accomplished youth would wing his song to meet it. He sang the notes of his lay so beautifully in Breton, Welsh, Latin, and French that you could not tell which was sweeter or deserving of more praise, his harping or his singing.]1 1

Text quoted from Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, ed. Karl Marold (Berlin, W. de Gruyter,

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This passage is introduced by an elaborate description of Tristan’s tuning and playing the harp and of the effect his performance has on the audience: he played so beautifully “that many a man sitting or standing there forgot his very name. Hearts and ears began to play the fool and desert their rightful paths.”2 As Gottfried makes clear, Breton lays were sung rather than spoken and they were sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, typically a harp. It also emerges from this scene that a medieval audience was appreciative of music and musical skill and that a good performance had the power to move the listeners deeply.3 This is not the only time in Gottfried’s Tristan that the hero’s musical skills as a harphære (harper, minstrel) are mentioned, nor is it the only scene in Middle High German literature in which the oral performance of a narrative text is depicted. Passages like this one occur in a great number of medieval texts. In particular when the narrator focusses on a feast, the activity of musicians and storytellers, acrobats and minstrels is described, often in minute detail, as for instance in a famous scene in the Provençal Flamenca.4 From these descriptions a great amount of information about the performance of medieval narrative can be gleaned. Yet many finer points remain unclear, partly on account of the ambiguity of the terms employed, partly because not enough unequivocal information is given. Gottfried is very explicit about the singing of Breton lays and about the role the harp plays, but in many cases we do not know whether the singing was accompanied or unaccompanied. Nor is it clear whether medieval reciters of oral narratives performed only alone or also in company with others. Passages that suggest the simultaneous performance of more than one person are ambiguous and hence open to various readings.5 Gottfried is also emphatic about the melodiousness of the music, both played and sung (“sô suoze” [so sweet]). Once again, however, the evidence (in particular when earlier oral narratives such as the Germanic lay are considered) rarely tells as anything about the music. Were these poems sung or simply recited in heightened speech? If they were sung, what was the melody like? What about gestures or other dramatic elements? These and more questions can be asked about the performance of Old English, Middle English, Middle High German, Old French and other medieval narrative poetry of a popular kind, i.e. of a nature which suggests an oral milieu. What

1969) 55–6; translation quoted from Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan. With the Surviving Fragments of the Tristran of Thomas, trans. A. T. Hatto (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1960) 90. 2 Hatto 90; “daz maneger dâ stuont unde saz, / der sîn selbes namen vergaz. / da begunden herze und ôren / tumben und tôren / und ûz ir rehte wanken.” (Marold 55, lines 3589–93). 3 This passage, as well as the role of music in Gottfried’s Tristan in general, has been much discussed; see Louise Gnaedinger, Musik und Minne im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg (Düsseldorf, Schwann, 1967) 23ff. 4 See Les Troubadours: Jaufre, Flamenca, Barlaam et Josaphat, ed. and trans. René Lavaud and René Nelli (Bruges, Desclée de Brouwer, 1960) 674–81, lines 592–709. 5 An unambiguous reference to the singing of Italian cantari by two minstrels in a responsorial fashion comes from the first half of the fourteenth century; Ezio Levi, I cantari leggendari del popolo nei secoli XIV e XV, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, Supplemento 16 (Turin, E. Loescher, [1914]) 10.

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exactly this oral milieu consists of, is unfortunately often unclear. The very term “oral” is ambiguous: does it mean “orally composed” or only “orally performed”?6 And if orally performed, then how? In some Middle English romances there is a clear reference to “romance reading” in public, as in Havelok, where there was “romanz-reding on the bok” (line 2328) at the hero’s coronation feast while in others it seems equally obvious that they were meant to be orally performed without the use of a written text.7 The same applies to Middle High German and French narratives.8 There have been many attempts to answer these and further questions, but even a cursory glance at the scholarly literature on the subject reveals that little agreement has been reached over the years, either on medieval orality in general or on the oral nature of particular texts. Despite indubitable advances in our perception of aspects of orality and performance in relation to medieval texts, there is no escaping the fact that all we have to go by are texts that have been written down. Writing, the very antithesis of the living word, is what we have to start with. However awkward, the written testimony is our basis for reconstructing an oral background. As direct access is denied, orality does indeed have to be reconstructed rather than simply observed and described. Hence there must always be a speculative element in our discussion of medieval orality, even if some points might seem incontestable. From an early date onwards scholars have attempted to answer some questions related to medieval orality by reference to living oral epic poetry. In the second half of the nineteenth century the German-Russian scholar Wilhelm Radloff collected and translated a huge corpus of Turkic oral poetry from Central Asia and Siberia. He also wrote extensively (in German) on his travels in Central Asia and Siberia, with graphic sketches of the material culture and poetry of these peoples. Radloff himself compared the art of the Kirghiz bard with that of the Greek aoidós, thus setting the scene for further comparative research.9 Radloff’s material was later popularized for English readers by Nora Chadwick in the third 6 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977) 16–24. 7 For the Havelok passage, see Havelok, ed. G. V. Smithers (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987) 64, 168–9. A well-balanced assessment of the situation in Middle English is given in A. C. Baugh, “The Middle English Romance: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation,” Speculum 42 (1967): 1–31. For a more recent account, see Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling Late Medieval England (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1998) 1–21. 8 For an early survey, see Ruth Crosby, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11 (1936): 88–110. On romance narrative see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999) 164ff; on Middle High German narrative, see D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800–1300 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9 See Proben der Volkslitteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme. V. Der Dialect der Kara-Kirgisen, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Radloff (St. Petersburg, Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1885) xviff; for a partial translation into English, see Wilhelm Radloff, “Samples of Folk Literature from the North Turkic Tribes: Preface to Volume V: The Dialect of the Kara-Kirgiz,” trans. G. B. Sherman and A. B. Davis, Oral Tradition 5 (1990): 73–90. Parry quotes Radloff’s description of the art of the Kirghiz singer in the second part of his “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making,” Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (New York, Oxford Univeristy Press, 1987) 334.

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volume of her and Munro Chadwick’s Growth of Literature.10 Radloff, in the preface to his Kirghiz volume, stressed the formulaic nature of Kirghiz oral epic poetry and explained the ease with which Kirghiz bards can orally perform long narratives by skillfully and creatively using ready-made descriptive passages and formulaic expressions in their recitations. While some scholars have welcomed the possibilities a comparative approach offers, most notably Milman Parry and Albert Lord, others have remained skeptical. Andreas Heusler, for instance, emphatically rejected the idea that Old Germanic narrative poetry was in any way comparable to Kirghiz or Slavic epic poetry. Although he could not deny the formulaic nature of the Germanic lay, he insisted that these formulas were no more than inessential accessories. For him, the Germanic lay was not composed in performance; it avoided longer descriptive passages, and, most of all, it showed a brave, noble spirit, and was an aristocratic, not a popular form of poetry.11 Although Heusler’s Eurocentric (if not Germanocentric) point of view would be viewed with suspicion today, a certain reticence remains among scholars when they see their respective poetry compared to poetic traditions further afield, and often deemed exotic if not uncouth. Although there is no space here to defend a comparative approach against skeptics, it should be made clear that, when in the following pages, the art of the Turkic bard is discussed in relation to that of the medieval entertainer, no influence or genetic relationships are implied. The two areas are set side by side in the same way linguistic typology groups genetically unrelated but structurally similar languages. What is maintained then is that despite variations and differences, at least some of the Turkic traditions to be discussed below belong to the same type of poetry as some of the medieval traditions with which they are compared. A widespread epic tale among Turkic peoples is the legend of Alpamish (or Alpomish). This legend is found in different forms: as a prose tale (e.g. among the Tatars), as an epic in verse (e.g. among the Kazakhs) or as an epic in a mixture of verse and prose (e.g. among the Uzbeks). I will start with an extract from an Uzbek version of Alpamish. From a medieval point of view the prosimetric form suggests prose tales with inserted verse (such as the chantefable of Aucassin and Nicolette or Irish sagas) rather than the epic; however, it can be argued that these extended prosimetric narratives are true epics. This view is supported by native terminology which makes no distinction between verse epics and prosimetric epics, by the scope and style of these prosimetric narratives and also by the fact that in some traditions both the prosimetric and the verse form can be found for the same epic tale, sometimes even with the same bard. The epic of Alpamish is particularly interesting because it shows surprisingly close parallels to the return 10 N. Kershaw Chadwick and H. Munro Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936–40). 11 Andreas Heusler, Die altgermanische Dichtung (Potsdam, Athenaion, 1943) 172–4. “Formelhaft, gemeinplätzig in dieser Art (i.e. as in Kirghiz epic poetry) ist das stabreimende Erzähllied augenscheinlich nie gewesen. Das hat verschiedene Gründe: die nicht stegreifhafte Pflege; die Abneigung gegen zuständliches Schildern. Der Hauptgrund ist der menschlichgesellschaftliche: der kühne, adlige Geist dieser Gedichte; ihre Vertiefung in die Seelenkämpfe; daß es Herrendichtung war, nicht Volkdichtung.” (174)

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of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, parallels that are difficult to explain, but might suggest ancient links between Central Asia and the Mediterranean world of Antiquity.12 The legend of Alpamish recounts that the nomadic tribe of the Kongrat is ruled by two brothers, Baybori and Baysari. Alpamish, the hero of the epic, is the son of Baybori; Baysari has a daughter by the name of Barchin. The children are promised to one another, but after a quarrel, Baysari and his clan move away to the land of the Kalmucks, where Barchin is courted by seven Kalmuck brothers, among them Kokaman and Karajan. She spurns the advances of the Kalmucks and threatens them with her lover Alpamish (or Hakimbek, as he is also called) from the tribe of the Kongrat:13 Ot boshini saqlab gapir, Ko‘kaman! Qahrim kelsa, qora jerga tiqaman. Yo xanjar deya o‘zimga yo senga suqaman. Ot boshini saqlab gapir, Ko‘kaman, ey Ko‘kaman! 5

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Ot boshini saqlab gapir, Qorajon! Qiz bo‘lsam ham, mening achchig‘im yomon. Qahrlansam, yo senga yo menga dur oxir zamon. Ot boshini saqlab gapir, Qorajan! Qirq ming yotgan mening Qo‘ngrat elim bor. Qo‘ngrat elda Hakimbekday yorim bor, Sevgili, sevgili, ey dildorim bor. Agar kelsa so‘rab shaharlaringga, qalmoqlar, Bo‘lasanmi ani menen baravar? Boshim qilma ming bolaga giriftor! Ot boshini saqlab gapir, ey qalmoqlar! [Hold firm the horse’s head and speak, Kokaman! If I get angry, I will throw (you) down on the black earth. I will thrust the dagger either into me or into you. Hold firm the horse’s head and speak, Kokaman, o Kokaman!

5

Hold firm the horse’s head and speak, Karajan! Although I am only a girl, my anger is deadly. If I get angry, life will have come to an end either for me or for you. Hold firm the horse’s head and speak, Karajan!

12 On Alpamish, see V. M. Zhirmunsky, “The Epic of ‘Alpamysh’ and the Return of Odysseus,” Proceedings of the British Academy 52 (London, British Academy, 1967) 267–86. For a recent translation of an Uzbek version of the epic into German (with introduction and commentary), see Das usbekische Heldenepos Alpomish: Einführung, Text, Übersetzung, ed. and trans. Karl Reichl, Turcologica 48 (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2001). For the mixture of verse and prose in Turkic epic poetry, see “The Mixture of Verse and Prose in Turkic Oral Epic Poetry,” Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, eds. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1997) 321–48. 13 The Uzbek text is transcribed in the official Latin alphabet of modern Uzbek. The translation is mine. In the translation and discussion I have, for the sake of convenience, simplified and anglicized the spelling of Uzbek words.

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I have my tribe Kongrat of forty-thousand peoples. In the tribe Kongrat I have my beloved Hakimbek (Alpamish), My darling, my darling sweetheart. If he comes and asks for your abode, Kalmucks, Will you then be his equal? Don’t bring over my head a thousand sorrows! Hold firm the horse’s head and speak, o Kalmucks!]

This passage continues for another seventeen lines, in which Barchin names her conditions for accepting a suitor and sets up various contests. In the further course of events, Alpamish is successful in the suitor contests, marries Barchin and takes her back to the land of the Kongrat. While Barchin is happily married to Alpamish, who now rules his tribe, her parents and relatives, who had stayed behind, become oppressed and enslaved by the Kalmucks. On hearing of their misfortune, Alpamish together with his companions comes to their rescue but is treacherously tricked into getting drunk and then imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon. After seven years he is able to regain his liberty with the help of his heroic horse and returns home. Disguised as a shepherd, Alpamish arrives just as his wife is forced to remarry the tyrannous ruler of the Kongrat, who had usurped the hero’s position in his absence. Alpamish probes the faithfulness of his wife, of his former friends and of his subordinates; he is recognized by his loyal shepherd, by his mother and by his camel, and, like Odysseus, he alone is able to bend his mighty bow. The epic ends with the happy reunion of Alpamish and his wife, his family, friends and tribal companions and with the punishment of the traitors. The epic of Alpamish cannot only be compared to the return of Odysseus; it is also very similar to a number of medieval epics in plot, motifs and characterization, as well as in the conception of a heroic past. The bride-winning exploits and suitor contests of the first part have parallels in a number of Middle High German epics, the Nibelungenlied among them, and the return of the hero in disguise is a widely distributed folktale motif, found for instance in the Middle English romance of King Horn. More important is the characterization of the various figures by a combination of realistically drawn human traits and heroic hyperbole and the conception of one’s own past as a heroic age, a somehow historicized and yet distant period of tribal beginnings. The Turkic heroic epic as represented by Alpamish has many similarities to medieval heroic epics and chansons de geste, and it can be argued that typologically the two poetic cultures belong together.14 The passage quoted above was recorded by me on June 18, 1981, from the Uzbek singer Chori-shoir Egamnazarov (b.1927) in the kolkhoz [collective farm] in which he then worked (in the Buka district of Tashkent province). At that occasion, Chori-shoir sang extracts from various epics as well as shorter songs— called terma. He accompanied himself on the dombra, a two-stringed plucked lute. This instrument (its name is etymologically related to tanbur and its various derivatives) is typical of the Uzbek bakhshi, as the singer of epics is called; it

14 I have argued for the comparability of Turkic and medieval heroic poetry in Karl Reichl, Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Heroic Poetry (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001).

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differs from the dutar, another widely distributed two-stringed lute in the Middle East and in Central Asia, by its smaller size and the absence of frets.15 The top string is generally tuned a fourth, a fifth or an octave higher than the bottom string. In epic performance, the dombra takes up the melody of the text, adding both a chordal accompaniment and a strongly marked rhythm.16 The singer begins by playing the dombra, and whenever there is a pause in the singing, the playing of the accompanying instrument continues. In our example the dombra clearly marks four beats to the bar. As to the melody of the text, it is characterized by various musical and stylistic traits:17 (1) the melody is predominantly syllabic, i.e. there is one note per syllable; (2) the melodic ambitus is fairly small, staying in our example within a minor third; (3) the melody is basically “stichic,” i.e. the “same melody” is repeated in every line; (4) in verse passages like the one quoted above, the singers have the tendency to begin in a lower register of the voice and then move into higher registers in the course of a passage, sometimes ending in a kind of high recitative; (5) the ending is generally sung in a more florid, ornamental style, with long drawn-out notes and occasional melismas. In our example, we have a 4/4 bar, with four equal beats, in a fairly fast tempo (approximately 176 beats per minute). The metre of Uzbek folk poetry is syllabic and every verse line in our text comprises ideally eleven or twelve syllables. Musically a verse line consists of three bars, with either four notes per bar or four notes in bar 1 and 2 and three notes plus a rest in bar 3. If there are too many syllables in a line, they are incoporated into the melody by singing several syllables to one note, and if there are too few syllables, one or more notes are prolonged or a pause is added. Sometimes, as in line 4 of the first stanza, there are repeats (ey Ko‘kaman). The melody of the first line has the following contour: d–e flat–f–f f–e flat–f–f f–e flat–f — . Although this melodic contour is roughly preserved throughout the passage, there are variations on this pattern, making the melodic progression more diversified than might be deduced from the melody indicated. That this melody is anything but monotonous despite its simplicity is guaranteed by the accompaniment, which, in particular in the instrumental “interludes,” is melodically richer (the 15 On the Uzbek dombra (not identical with the Kazakh dombra, but more or less identical with the Tajik dombrak) see K. Vertkov, G. Blagodatov, and E. Jazickova, Atlas muzykal’nyx instrumentov narodov SSSR [An Atlas of Musical Instruments of the Peoples of the USSR] (Moscow, Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1963) 125; Mark Slobin, Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 54 (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1976): 219–24. 16 For musical transcriptions, see F. Karomatov, Uzbekskaja dombrovaja muzyka [Uzbek dombra Music] (Tashkent, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo xudo
estvennoj literatury, 1962) and Viktor M. Beliaev, Central Asian Music: Essays in the History of the Music of the Peoples of the USSR, ed. and trans. Mark and Greta Slobin (Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1975) 288–92. 17 For a more detailed description of the musical style of this singer, see Karl Reichl, “Oral Tradition and Performance of the Uzbek and Karakalpak Epic Singers,” Fragen der mongolischen Heldendichtung III, ed. Walther Heissig, Asiatische Forschungen 91 (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1985) 616–24; on the musical performance of Uzbek oral epics, see also A. Jabbarov, “Uzbekskij dastan (èpos)” [The Uzbek dastan (epic)], Voprosy muzykoznanija [Problems of Musicology], vol. 2. (Tashkent, Fan, 1971) 13–35.

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melody moves here within an octave); it is also rhythmically more varied than the sung melody. Finally, it should be added that generally all verse passages in an epic are sung, while the prose passages are spoken. Sometimes the singers add a kind of rhythm to the prose parts of the epic by strumming the dombra. Also, there are frequent passages in rhymed prose, which are, however, never sung, but recited in declamatory style that marks them as poetry rather than prose. Although one can discern a certain pattern in the musical performance of the verse parts, this is not to say that all verse passages are sung in the same way and to the same melody. There are singers who use basically just one or two melodic patterns, while others might use dozens. This depends partly on individual skill, but partly also on local tradition, type of singer and type of epic. As this is not the place for technicalities, this brief analysis of a short extract from an Uzbek oral epic will have to suffice. Two questions, however, need to be asked at this point: (1) How typical is what has been said of the performance of Turkic epics in general? (2) What inferences can we draw from the manner of performance as described here for the performance of medieval oral epics? As to the first question, the type of performance that is characteristic of the Uzbek bakhshi as in our example is fairly widely distributed among Turkic peoples. It is found, with variations, in the epic recitation of Azerbaijani, Turkmen and Turkish minstrels, of Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kirghiz and Uighur singers, as well as in the performance of epics among the Turkic peoples of the Altai. What these various traditions have in common is that verse passages are indeed sung rather than spoken (this applies also to epics composed entirely in verse), that as a rule the singer accompanies himself on a stringed instrument, that the melodies tend to be syllabic, with the exception of more florid stanza-endings, refrains or inserted exclamations, that the predominant type of melodic structuring is that of using “stichic” melodies (or melodic formulas) with a comparatively small melodic ambitus, and that the music has a clearly marked beat, quite unlike the “flowing rhythm” often found in Oriental music. Having said that, one must, however, immediately add that there is also a good deal of variety in the performance of epic poetry among the Turkic peoples, a variety that accounts for a number of marked differences and contrasts. While in most traditions the singer accompanies himself on an instrument, the Kirghiz singer of heroic epics as well as the Yakut epic singer perform without the help of an instrument. Actually, there are various types of Kirghiz singers; it is only those singers who perform epics of the Manas cycle who sing unaccompanied. This epic cycle recounts the heroic deeds of Manas, his son Semetey and his later descendants; it is a cycle of enormous proportions, which in one version, that of the Kirghiz bard Sayakbay Karalaev, runs to over 500,000 lines. The akyn, whose repertoire comprises the so-called smaller epics (some heroic, some of the romance type), generally plays the komuz (a plucked, two-stringed fretless lute). Other traditions also have different types of singers (e.g. the Karakalpaks), who are distinguished by their repertoire as well as by their manner of performance. In most traditions the accompanying instrument is plucked, but in some it is bowed. Finally, in some cases the singer is accompanied by a further musician (as in some 174

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Turkmen and Karakalpak traditions) or even by a small ensemble (as in Khorezm in Uzbekistan). The Turkic-speaking world, leaving recent migration out of consideration, stretches from the Balkans to north-eastern Siberia. Although the different Turkic languages are fairly closely related (with some exceptions, such as Chuvash and Yakut, even as closely related as the Romance languages), there is great cultural diversity among their speakers. It can be shown that the epic traditions of the Islamicized Turkic peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East form a fairly close group, and it is to their epic traditions that my remarks in the following pages refer.18 Depending on the formal and metrical structure of the text as well as on the epic subgenre, performance styles may also vary. Heroic epics tend to have verse passages in lines of seven or eight syllables, of varying length, with irregular rhyme and assonance and (in some traditions) also alliteration. Lyrical romancelike epics favour verse passages in eleven- or twelve-syllable lines, often in stanzas, mostly of four lines, with frequent refrains or refrain-like lines. These formal differences entail stylistic differences; the performance of non-stanzaic verse tends towards stichic melodies, while that of stanzaic verse is characterized by more elaborate melodies, with a larger ambitus, a greater variety of melodic motifs and phrases and melismatic passages. We can think of a scale of styles ranging from unaccompanied, stichic, repetitive, comparatively simple and restricted melodies to virtuoso performances with elaborate, song-like melodies and “orchestral effects” brought about by the cooperation of a group of musicians. Put differently, we have a scale of styles that ranges from performance modes in which the word is in the foreground and the music in the background to performance modes in which the music is in the foreground and the word in the background. It goes without saying that this characterization is only approximative and that when we look at specific examples the differences established are by no means as clear-cut as this description might suggest. The performance of Kirghiz manaschis, singers of epics of the Manas cycle, is a case in point. These singers do not accompany themselves; they use stichic melodies, and they are representatives of a performance style which places words rather than music in the foreground. While they employ several melodies, some of them recitative and as it were speech-like, they also use a melody (or melodic formula) which has a very distinctive melodious ending, a triadic succession of minor third and major third or major third and fourth. The contour of this melody is typical of Manas and easily recognizable. There is hence a certain contradiction here: while many stylistic features of the performance of Manas point to one end of the scale, the melodic contour of the typical “Manas melody” points to the other end of the scale. Coming back to the first question of how typical the Uzbek style described is of other Turkic traditions, one can say that while there is a great deal of variety, there is yet a pattern discernible in the bakhshi’s performance that forms a kind of groundwork for other styles as well. It should also be stressed that in all traditions 18

For a short survey, based on earlier work, see Reichl, Singing the Past 12–43.

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the main concern is that of telling a story, even if aria-like song interludes seem to shift the emphasis. The narrative character of epic and romance has not led to the emergence of properly dramatic elements in the recital of oral epics among the Turkic peoples. There is no dancing or acting, as is for instance found in some African traditions. Narrators do, however, use gestures. The Kirghiz singers (manaschis) have their hands free for this; their gestures are highly conventionalized movements, such as making the gesture of shooting with a bow and arrow or of striking the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. These gestures add insistence to the singer’s words, they accompany his declamation, but they do not actually illustrate the action described. There is no iconic relationship between gesture and word.19 As to the second question posed above, we might ask how relevant the manner of performance described here is for a better understanding of the performance of medieval oral epics. For reasons of space, I would like to make briefly just four points. (1) The performance of Turkic oral epics shows incontestably (as does the performance of oral epics in other traditions) that the most common mode of performance is singing rather than reciting. For Turkic traditions it is furthermore typical that the singing is accompanied by a stringed instrument. This tallies with many medieval sources, as far as they can be interpreted. Although verbs like Middle High German singen, Middle English singe(n) or Old French chanter are notorious for their polysemy, with sense nuances as ambiguous as “pray in song, word or thought” or “relate a story in song or verse,” it seems likely that when the performance of minstrels is mentioned in a text and an oral recitation of an epic or romance is implied by the description, verbs like singen or chanter actually do mean “sing” in the narrow sense of the word. While descriptions of feasts and the catalogues of various musical instruments heard at such occasions tend to be set and highly formulaic scenes, with sometimes an unlikely profusion of instruments (as in the passage in Flamenca referred to above), there is never- theless no reason to doubt that medieval entertainers used the instruments they played also when singing oral narrative poetry.20 19 Although there is some literature on the musical performance of Turkic epics, it is generally fairly specialized and not easily accessible. For discussions and analyses in European languages, see Beliaev (Kirghiz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek); Kurt and Ursula Reinhard, Musik der Türkei, Taschenbücher zur Musikwissenschaft 95–6 (Wilhelmshaven, Heinrichshofen, 1984) (Turkish); S¿awomira òeranska-Kominek, “The Concept of Journey (¥ol) in Turkmen Music Tradition,” Ethnomusicology 42 (1998): 265–82 (Turkmen); Dzhamilya Kurbanova, “The Singing Traditions of Turkmen Epic Poetry,” The Oral Epic: Performance and Music, ed. Karl Reichl, Intercultural Music Studies 12 (Berlin, WVB, 2000) 115–128 (Turkmen); Karl Reichl, “The Performance of the Karakalpak Zhyrau,” The Oral Epic 129–50 (Karakalpak). Some epic melodies are also available on records; see Ursula and Volker Reinhardt, Song Creators in Eastern Turkey, Smithsonian Folkways, 1993 (Turkish); S¿awomira òeranska-Kominek, Turkmenistan: La musique des “bakhshy,” AIMP & VDE-GALLO, 1991; S¿awomira òeranska-Kominek, Turkmen Epic Singing/Köroglu, Buda Musique, 1994 (Turkmen); Henri Lecomte, Musique du Kirghizstan, Buda Musique, n.d., band 8 (Kirghiz); Wolf Dietrich, Kazakhstan: Musique d’Almatï, AIMP & VDE-GALLO, 1996, band 1 (Kazakh). 20 For sources, see Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300 (London, Dent, 1987) 151ff.

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(2) What would these melodies have been like? Can material from oral epics, in our case epics of the Turkic peoples, help us here? Some epic melodies from the Middle Ages have in fact survived or can be reconstructed from other melodies, and we also have a fairly detailed description of the singing of the chansons de geste by a thirteenth-century music theorist, Johannes de Grocheio.21 It is interesting to note that there is a clear tendency to use stichic melodies just as in our Uzbek example and its Turkic parallels. In fact, the ethnomusicologist Walter Wiora, in his survey of European folk song melodies, groups melodies of Old French chanson de geste and European folk ballads together with melodies of Russian oral epics (byliny) and of a heroic epic of the Vogul (a Finno-Ugrian people of western Siberia) under the heading “Stichic Tunes.”22 Although one could not, in contrafactum style, underlay the text of a metrically suitable medieval epic to the melody of a Turkic oral epic, the living sound of oral epic does help us to realize that text and music form a unity, a unity that can be postulated also for medieval oral epic poetry. There is a caveat, however. Despite the tendency to sing oral epics to stichic melodies, there is so much variety among Turkic epics (and indeed among oral epics in other parts of the world) that no one mode of performance can be supposed to be the prototypical one. Similarly, we must allow for the possibility of various traditions, styles and modes in the performance of medieval epics. While no new melody can be added to our stock of medieval epic melodies, consideration of the Turkic material can contribute valuable insights to the ongoing discussions about the right way of transcribing and interpreting the medieval evidence. (3) There is a certain amount of drama in the performance of Turkic bards. The Kirghiz manaschi uses his hands for gestures; other singers often perform the prose parts of prosimetric epics in a lively narrative style, also incorporating gestures, variations in voice loudness and speed of speaking, sometimes by using their voice to imitate persons or descriptive details. Also the structuring of a verse passage is often musically dramatic in that the singer might use a fast recitative type melody for particular scenes (such as a battle scene) or move to higher registers in the course of his singing. The latter is typical of the singing of Turkmen bakhshis (in some traditions); Uzbek bakhshis also generally reach a musical climax towards the end of a verse passage, appropriately called qaynamoq in Uzbek, which means “to boil.” Despite these (and other) musical and perform21 On the music of medieval oral epics, see, inter alia, Friedrich Gennrich, Der musikalische Vortrag der altfranzösischen Chansons de geste: Eine literarhistorisch-musikwissenschaftliche Studie (Halle an der Saale, Niemeyer, 1923); Horst Brunner, “Strukturprobleme der Epenmelodien,” Deutsche Heldenepik in Tirol: König Laurin und Dietrich von Bern in der Dichtung des Mittelalters, ed. Egon Kühebacher (Bozen, Athesia, 1979) 300–28; John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986) 199–234. The relevant passage in Grocheio’s treatise is translated in Christopher Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2 (1993): 17–41. For a fuller discussion of this question (with further references), see Karl Reichl, “Comparative Notes on the Performance of Middle English Popular Romance,” Western Folklore 62 (2003): 63–81. 22 Walter Wiora, European Folk Song: Common Forms in Characteristic Modifications, Anthology of Music 4 (Cologne, Arno Volk, 1966) 18–19.

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ative means of increasing the liveliness and drama of an epic tale, the overall impression of epic performance is strangely “objective,” even “impassive.” By this I mean that music (and metre) move forward in a traditional way, i.e. whatever dramatic or mimetic elements there might be in the musical performance are not subjective dramatizations such as a modern performer might favour, but rather the elements inherited from the tradition. Despite all his skill and individuality, the singer recedes as it were into the background and becomes the vehicle for a traditional tale and the way it is traditionally performed. It is conceivable that modern performances of medieval epics err in trying too hard to fit the meaning of individual words and phrases to the melody.23 It should, however, be added that in traditions where music is in the foreground (as for instance in the performance of lyrical romance-type epics in Khorezm in Uzbekistan) the bard is just as much admired for his musical as for his narrative skills; a shift from the “objective” singer-narrator to the virtuoso perfomer is noticeable. (4) Finally, the performance of a live epic makes it clear that we are not dealing with a text, to be pursued at leisure, but with a communicative event which only comes into being at a particular occasion, time and place and with a particular singer and audience. Although such awareness of what orality means can be no more than an imaginative extension of our reading of the appropriate medieval texts, it is important to take this oral dimension into account in our interpretations. This has been remarked by a number of medievalists interested in orality, and, in the context of the present book, there is no need here to insist on this. I would just like to add one observation connected to the musical aspect of oral epics. The singing of epics means that a verse passage takes up far more time in actual performance than when it is recited or, of course, read. This makes listening to a sung epic into a totally different experience from listening to a spoken poem. It is almost comparable to the difference between listening to an opera and reading the libretto, although, of course, the relationship between words and music in an opera differs from that in an epic. Even if some medieval melodies are recoverable, the experience of listening to an authentic sung performance of medieval epics is beyond our reach. But as early music groups have been inspired by the experience of living musical traditions typologically (if not genetically) related to medieval music, our imaginative reading of medieval oral epics can be enriched when we learn from living oral traditions what this dynamic unity of words and music, bard and tradition, singer and audience, performance and setting is like. What then a living epic tradition can tell us about oral performance in the Middle Ages concerns specific matters such as melody types, performance styles or the use of instruments. Most important, however, is the more general appeal these living traditions have to our imagination: they urge us as readers of medieval texts to remain open to the voice of the bard, even if it can no longer be heard.

23 An instance, in my opinion, is Eberhard Kummer’s singing of parts of Das Nibelungenlied. Der Kürenberger. Walther von der Vogelweise. Im “Hildebrandston” gesungen (Vienna, PAN, 1983).

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Part IV PERSPECTIVES FROM CONTEMPORARY PERFORMERS

Beowulf, the Edda, and the Performance of Medieval Epic: Notes from the Workshop of a Reconstructed “Singer of Tales” Benjamin Bagby

Over the years of performing my reconstructions of Beowulf and the Eddic poems, I have often given presentations about my work, either in the form of a pre-concert talk or as a question-and-answer session following the performance. I am always struck by one enormous difference between these two formats; there are usually just some general and hesitant questions before the performance (“Is it like Gregorian chant?”), but afterwards, a genuinely critical dialogue often ensues, provoked by what the listeners have just experienced, and by their curiosity—or in some cases, consternation—about my working process. I am grateful for the ease with which the listeners can comprehend what I have to say about my work after having heard the performance itself. A brief demonstration of a spoken or sung text, a modal gesture played on the harp, or a visual examination of the instrument itself, can only make sense in the context of performance, and can hardly be replaced by written words. In this same spirit, the following “notes from the workshop” attempt to provide some background on my work with epic and narrative, much as I would do following a performance (my remarks are generally not intended for an expert, medievalist audience, but rather for listeners who come to medieval epic performance for the first time). In this format, however, the crucial element of sound itself—the audible and visual presence of performer and instrument in live performance—will be lacking.1 So I aim to find a common ground—a workshop—where listeners (and potential listeners) can meet with the performer, where practical issues confronting a modern-day “singer of tales” can be discussed plainly, so that the listener can examine some of the factors leading to one possible reconstruction of medieval epic poetry in performance.2 1 A DVD of my performance of Beowulf is, however, forthcoming. Moreover, video clips from performances, including a passage from my Beowulf, may be viewed on the website Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase, eds. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, 2005, New York University, 7 January 2005 . 2 I gratefully borrow the term “Singer of tales” from the title of Albert B. Lord’s important and influential book, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960), which discusses the structures and performance of oral poetry from Homeric verse to the sung epic traditions of

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Regardless of the historical period of music which interests us, the concept of “historically informed performance” thrives on the conviction that today’s performers can find knowledge and instruction in the documentation which has survived from past musical practices: musical notation, descriptions of performance situations, treatises, methods, visual representations of music-making, playable instruments, etc. Unfortunately, all of this documentation, which we performers assiduously track down and study, is still missing the one crucial element of musical performance that we would most need and desire to possess: the actual sound, the presence of a living master. Barring the discovery of time-travel, we shall never meet our master (and of course, there is always the terrifying sub-scenario of this time-machine fantasy: what would happen if we had access to the original sound and to the master’s living art, but we simply did not like what we heard?). Deprived of this essential face-to-face musical experience, we are forever doomed to confront our own past musical cultures “through a glass darkly.” This situation is challenging enough in the cases of most European repertoires, but it has obviously not kept generations of contemporary performers and scholars from fashioning a thriving early music scene (especially in Baroque music), complete with living masters and identifiable traditions, so that our vision of the past seems bright and clear. However, the situation becomes much more complex and clouded when we seek to perform the musical arts of early medieval cultures which were largely pre-literate, which knew neither notation nor treatises, and from which we possess only a few descriptions of performance or surviving fragments of instruments. The notationless world of medieval epic song is one such musical culture (a patchwork of cultures, actually) to which I am drawn, a world in which we know that northern peoples—in their huts, their fields, their boats, on horseback, around their cooking fires, their pagan shrines, and even in the first Christian monasteries—were singing and listening to song: narrative, heroic epic, myth, instrumental music, and long sung tales of their own ancestors’ deeds, real and imagined. What kinds of witnesses have survived from the early Middle Ages which we might use to reconstruct a performance art that has been silent for a thousand years and more? Are there other sources of information to which we might turn in making such an attempt? These are some of the questions I have tried to answer in my reconstructions of northern European oral epics such as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and more recently, in stories from the Icelandic Edda. Together, with the members of my ensemble, Sequentia, my initial work with the Eddic poems (songs of the Norse gods Odin, Thor, Loki, and others) took place in the years 1995–97.3 The ensemble’s most recent production of the Eddic

mid-twentieth-century Yugoslavia: “This book is about Homer. He is our Singer of Tales. Yet, in a larger sense, he represents all singers of tales from time immemorial and unrecorded to the present . . . Our immediate purpose is to comprehend the manner in which they compose, learn, and transmit their epics” (i). 3 Sequentia, Edda Myths from Medieval Iceland, CD, Deutsche harmonia mundi/BMG Classics, 1999.

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poems4

features tales of envy, gold-lust, revenge, and the horrible power they have over that most sacred human institution: the family. The three singers and two instrumentalists (as soloists and in various combinations) tell of the boy-hero Sigurd who kills the dragon Fafnir to obtain the gold, of the ill-fated Burgundian King Gunnar and his beautiful sister Gudrun, and of Attila the Hun and his passionately suicidal sister (the ex-valkyrie Brynhild). This terrifying family epic is set in poems which are contradictory, weird, and seem to take place in a dreamscape which easily accommodates Mirkwood Forest, the Rhine River, and the glaciers of Iceland. It is a legend in which the names of actual places and people are freely mixed with the old pagan gods, cunning dwarves, dragons, shape-changers, magical swords and horses, supernatural beings, and talking birds. It is an archaic story which enthralled many generations of Europeans as they listened to the bards who formed the fabric of their tribal memories. The Edda (itself an enigmatic Icelandic word whose meaning today is obscure, although it once might have meant something like “ancient knowledge”) is a medieval collection of twenty-nine poems in Old Icelandic including ten which deal with the Norse gods and mythology, and nineteen which recount stories of Germanic heroes5 (a few of whose characters, including Attila the Hun, can even be identified with actual historical figures). This astonishing collection, copied in an unassuming parchment manuscript6 in thirteenth-century Iceland (by which time Attila had been dead—and stories about him in constant oral circulation—for eight hundred years) is universally recognized as a precious treasure of European culture, and one of the only (and certainly the oldest) detailed witnesses we possess to the practices, beliefs, and myths of pagan Germanic peoples. The Eddic texts, set in the sophisticated, Germanic alliterative verse-forms which the Icelanders practiced and valued long after other poetic forms prevailed on the Continent, were transmitted in the uniquely oral tradition of tribal and itinerant “singers of tales” over hundreds of years. They have not survived in the other Germanic languages in which they were originally sung, but thanks to the profoundly literary-minded medieval Icelanders (who were themselves newcomers to that volcanic North Atlantic island, arriving from the western Norwegian fjords in the ninth century) who re-shaped the texts in their own Norse language, we can still hear today much of the sound of an ancient storyteller’s art. How could I possibly resist trying to rediscover a voice for these thrilling and mysterious oral poems—saved from oblivion by Icelandic singers and scribes—which were once performed during long winter nights, not only in Iceland but all across the north of Europe? It seemed like an impossible task at first, fraught with the pitfalls of pseudo-historical kitsch and new-age banality. I was determined, however, to draw upon my long experience in performing medieval song, together with a series of carefully-considered reconstructive 4 Sequentia, The Rheingold Curse: A Germanic Saga of Greed and Revenge from the Medieval Icelandic Edda, CD, Marc Aurel Edition, 2002. 5 For complete English translations, see The Poetic Edda, ed. and trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996). 6 Reykjavik, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Gml. kgl. sml. 2365 4to (“Codex Regius”).

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tools—which I explain here briefly—to take these sung poems off the printed page and back into the world of storytelling, where the human voice becomes an instrument of cultural identity and transformation, the oral medium of an ancient narrative energy. Although it is generally accepted—based largely on descriptions of performance situations—that medieval epic poetry was the domain of tribal or itinerant bardic entertainers, no written musical sources of the Eddic poems dating from the Middle Ages are known to exist. In fact, we would have no reason to expect such sources to have been written at all. The milieu in which these poems were originally transmitted, sung, and acted out was that of a uniquely oral culture, and professional singers passed on repertoires and techniques from generation to generation without the hindrance and expense of writing. As is almost always the case with medieval song, the use of musical notation is linked to world of the scriptorium and the noble or ecclesiastical collector, not to the world of the practicing musician. (A Christian scribe can hardly have looked kindly on songs about the pagan gods, at least not while his abbot was watching.) If we assume that the living traditions of Eddic performance in Iceland itself were already in decline by the time the oldest and most important text manuscript, the Codex Regius, was copied by a sympathetic scribe in the thirteenth century, then how can we possibly reconstruct sung performances of Eddic poems as they would have been known, say, around the time of Iceland’s official conversion to Christianity in the year 1000?7 The earliest witness we possess to musical settings of the Edda is an account found in Benjamin de la Borde’s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, published in 1780.8 Among other examples (collected for de la Borde by a musician at the Danish Royal Court, whose source was the Icelandic scholar Jón Ólafsson), we find a strophe from the Edda set to a simple melody. Unfortunately, we will never know if this rather pedantically-noted melody is indeed the surviving vestige of an oral formula for the vocalization of Eddic poetry, or if it comes from a non-Eddic Icelandic folk tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or if it is merely an example of how a musique ancienne Islandaise might have sounded in the fantasy of a homesick Icelander in eighteenth-century Copenhagen. Manuscript sources of secular medieval song from northern Europe are extremely rare, and the sources of surviving Christian music in Scandinavia tend to come from a late-medieval, Latin-speaking, ecclesiastical milieu which had strong contacts with continental Europe. Although individual religious pieces can indeed demonstrate unusual, regional characteristics (such as the prevalence of parallel thirds in the two-voice “Hymn to Saint Magnus” from the Orkneys), they do not shed much light on the performance of oral poetry in the pagan world hundreds of years earlier. 7 For an analysis of the problem, see Joseph Harris, “The performance of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: A Retrospective,” The Oral Epic: Performance and Music, ed. Karl Reichl, Intercultural Music Studies 12 (Berlin, VWB Verlag für Wiss. und Bildung, 2000) 225–32. 8 Jean-Benjamin de la Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, 4 vols. (Paris, P.-D. Pierres and E. Onfroy, 1780–81) II, 403.

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[It was early in the ages when Ymir made his dwelling: there was not yet sand nor sea nor chill waves.] From the beginning of Völuspá [Prophecy of the Seeress]. Jean-Benjamin de la Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. Paris, P.-D. Pierres and E. Onfroy, 1780–81, II, 403.

In searching for paths to the vocalization of the Eddic texts, it was obvious that more musical information would be needed than late-medieval church music or a scrap of melodic material from the late eighteenth century. It was at this point that I decided to make use of the techniques of “modal language” which my ensemble, Sequentia, has developed over the years in our practical work with European medieval song, a view of musical language which has many parallels in other modal cultures. Briefly stated: a mode is perceived not as a musical scale, but rather as a collection of musical gestures, codes, and signs which can be interiorized, varied, combined, and used as a font to create musical “texts” which can be completely new while possessing the authentic integrity of the original material. (Here, the word authentic—the dreaded A-word of early music—is not used in a historical sense, but in the sense of recognition: in a crowd of strangers and imposters you would always recognize an authentic member of your own family.) However, like the powerfully magic mead-drink which gives the Norse god Odin the gift of poetry, this “modal mead” is a concoction which can be both inspiring and dangerous. An examination of the practice of singing epic poetry as it still exists in various cultures will often show us how such performances can be given both a structure and a soul, and in this way help us to temper the seemingly limitless freedom of modal intoxication. Having temporarily put aside the examples of Monsieur de la Borde, where did I turn first for the basic ingredients of this modal brew? To Iceland, of course. To give one example: in the Icelandic sung oral poetry known as rímur—which in itself is a tradition dating from the late Middle Ages, but whose roots certainly touch much earlier, pre-skaldic poetic practices—I found a vast repertoire of modal material, which clearly could be grouped into several modal families. During research residencies in Reykjavik in 1995 and again in 2001, I was permitted to work in the tape archives of Iceland’s historical text institute, Stofnun 185

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Magnússonar,9

Árna where I listened to hundreds of historical recordings of rímur and related song-types, making notes, analyses, and family trees of the types and uses of modal materials. The result of this process of rumination, which included a weeding-out of obviously later melodic types (including—in one delightful case—an Icelandic contrafactum of “Oh My Darling Clementine”), was a series of modal vocabularies grouped by structural “signals,” which could be transmitted orally to the other singers and applied to (and tempered by) the sophisticated metrics of the Eddic texts as taught to us by the Icelandic philologist Heimir Pálsson. Everything was learned in a process which is inspired by oral tradition: we worked only with our Edda texts and our memories; there were rarely any written musical documents, and certainly nothing which could be called a “score.” And in light of this knowledge, the melody found in de la Borde began to make sense; however one chooses to see its transmission, it is clear that the melody demonstrates characteristics which point to the use of a specific modal vocabulary consisting of a few limited elements which are constantly repeated and varied. And so, an attentive listener might hear its “genetic code” echoed in some of our reconstructions, just as an experienced Icelandic rímursinger hearing us sing these poems might find at times that some undefinable element makes him feel he actually knows the unknown piece being sung. This is the beauty and sophistication of modal song, especially as a vehicle for narrative: the vocalist makes use of a seemingly simple matrix of tones to support an infinitely complex textual structure, so that all elements—tone, text, and performer—merge into one organic process which functions uniquely in the service of the story. For this task, all aspects of the singer’s art are called into use, including the wide and flexible spectrum of vocal utterance: plain speech, heightened speech, sung speech, spoken song, simple syllabic song, melismatic song, as well as the more radical elements of human vocal sound: whispering, moaning, groaning, hoarse speech, barking, shouting, and, yes, even a scream when it’s called for in the story. In addition, the “singer of tales” functions in close physical proximity to his/her listeners; the singer’s entire body, including hands and feet, which are also sources of sound, is part of the instrumentum which serves the story. And speaking of instruments: the possible addition of an actual instrumental partner (whether a separate instrumentalist or self-accompanied) allows for expanded elements of dialogue, commentary, support, and interlude, all of which only serve to make the modal brew richer, the narrative denser, more focused. When examining oral epics as they are still sung today in various cultures, one hears a surprisingly similar attitude to the usage of modal structures in vocal style, vocal usage, and instrumental participation. When performing the Eddic stories or Beowulf, I enter with my voice into a world which is informed as much by the actor’s art as by the singer’s, and in that world I only rarely make use of the techniques suited to the needs of what we might call lyric song (say, a troubadour canso). These lyric techniques—which call for vocal consistency, the nuanced “delivery” of a large strophic form with its

9

Thanks especially to Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir, Vésteinn Ólasson, and Gísli Sigurðsson.

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intricate structure of rhyme and versification, its almost dreamlike disregard for time—are perfectly suited to the re-creation of a formalized state of soul which, for a few moments, conjures up in the listeners’ minds their own similar experiences, their own memories, yearnings, and fantasies. But for the storyteller’s art, in which time passes at various speeds, and in which real-time events are recalled, relived, commented upon, and sometimes quite literally inhabited by the “singer of tales,” the use of lyric techniques must be reserved for those isolated moments which call out for them, usually moments of reflection and introspection. Words are sounds, and an essential musical element of these texts is the sound of the language itself. Since no decisions about modal usage in vocal performance can be made independently of the needs of the Icelandic language, Heimir Pálsson not only taught Sequentia’s vocalists the complex metrical structures of our texts, but also tutored us intensively in the sounds of Old Icelandic. Although almost identical to the language spoken by 290,000 Icelanders today, the language of the Edda does contain different word-forms as well as a pronunciation which was obviously quite different before the mid twelfth century, when the first documents in Icelandic attest to a phonetic system which places particular emphasis on vowel quality.10 In cases where two or three singers declaim the same text, different versions of the modal gestures may sometimes be heard simultaneously, resulting in a kind of heterophonic texture (verging on improvised polyphony) typical of traditional musical cultures. In addition, there are vestiges of improvised polyphonic vocal practices, one of which, tvisöngur, we can still hear sung in Iceland today. Other aspects of the reconstructive work include a study of Icelandic sources besides rímur, as well as a study of the ancient monophonic dance-song melodies of the Faroe Islands; situated on a small group of islands between Scotland, Norway, and Iceland, the 47,000 Faroese still dance and sing ancient ballads telling the story of Sigurd and the Rheingold. Surviving modal musical documents from elsewhere in the world of the far-ranging Vikings (the Baltic region, for example) have also been helpful in understanding the ways in which modal gesture may have been understood in the early-medieval north. I have mentioned the importance of metrical structures in these texts, and how these inform the performance and the use of the modes. The metrical genius and sophistication of alliterative Germanic poetry is apparent to anyone who has come into contact with works such as the Eddic poems or Beowulf, yet, as a performer, the issue which interests me is this: how would such metrical structures have expressed themselves in performance, in a culture which hardly knew reading and writing, and which certainly did not know musical notational systems? Our relationship to the Eddic texts (or Beowulf, for that matter) is based on a “literate” course of study: readings, analyses and exercises, using textbooks, editions, translations, and manuscript facsimiles. There is no one alive today who has learned this poetic art as a uniquely oral phenomenon. As literate beings, we are fascinated by various metrical structures and functions which can be indicated

10

See Heimir Pálsson, “The Eddic Poems,” liner notes, The Rheingold Curse, 14–18.

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in writing, with markings which can show us the carefully graded varieties of “beats,” “accents,” and “secondary stresses”; we take a positivistic delight in expressing metrics by means of musical notation, with its precise—yet unforgiving—font of symbols. We have heard our teachers recite the poems in clearly defined metrical patterns (perhaps with a bit of tapping on the desk for emphasis), and this has become, for us, the “sound” of Germanic alliterative poetry. Like most music students, I was programmed at an early age with a great reverence for notation, metrics, and the unassailable authority of “the score,” but a subsequent lifelong involvement with medieval European song has provided me with some more pliable, more differentiated tools for the shaping of texts and melodies, for the telling of stories. When I approached the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf for the first time, with the intention of reconstructing a performance, I listened to all of the available recordings of experts reading the original text. I was struck by what I perceived as an exaggerated emphasis on the pure mechanics of metrics; the metrical patterns of various lines, which for an oral “singer of tales” would normally function on a deeper structural level, had broken the surface of the text (and the story), becoming obvious and heavy in the mouth of the reciter, and intrusive in the ear of the listener. The musician (and storyteller) in me imagined a subtler role for these delightfully vivid and supple metrical patterns, and I resolved to work on the text of Beowulf (and later, the Edda) in such a way that the metrical structures are servants of the performance and not its master. Through long hours of practical work, I searched for ways to give the metrics a powerful yet less superficial function in support of the the text, so that the story would be free to emerge as an aural experience, held together from within by an almost imperceptible array of interlocking sounds and impulses. As a performer of metrically structured texts, I do not have the role of teaching metrical theory to my listeners, but of telling a story. This does not mean, however, that the metrical structures are being neglected. On a very deep level I do experience the metrics as I sing and speak the story; they are influencing and shaping my use of voice, instrumental accompaniment, timing, speed, and rhetorical gesture, in short, all of the variables of performance. Assuming a small medieval audience of cognoscenti who had heard a given story already dozens (if not hundreds) of times, there would be among the listeners a subtle appreciation of the text’s inner structures, even a certain delight in the singer’s masking of the obvious and in the performance’s interplay of sounds, patterns, and meaning. I work to create metrically aware performances of the Eddic poems and Beowulf, based on a written source, but I aim to re-create the spirit of an oral poem performed in a notationless culture. My goal is to allow the metrical structures their important place in the text, so that they function, but subtly, creatively, almost subconsciously. All elements of measured time must be free to help shape the story: from the smallest unit of the individual syllable to the single, long pulse of an entire performance. Equally important in these musical reconstructions are the instruments, especially the harp, flute, and fiddle, which are mentioned in early northern sources describing or depicting music-making. The harp used for the Edda is a copy based on the remains of an instrument found in a seventh-century Allemanic burial site 188

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in Oberflacht (Germany), as reconstructed by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden, Germany). This earliest type of harp would have been known throughout the northern world,11 and much interesting work in the field is still being done by musical archeologists.

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.

Reconstruction of Germanic harp by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden, Germany).

This Germanic harpa is often referred to as a lyre, in order to differentiate it from the triangular cithara (with its distinctive front pillar, which we still recognize as the most common harp form), and in the Edda text itself it is also known as a harp. Such instruments commonly have very few strings (the Oberflacht instrument probably had six), and the possible tuning systems—based on medieval theories of consonance, scraps of information from medieval sources, the limitations of medieval string technology, and harp-tuning traditions from other cultures —yield a series of basic intervals which in turn can inform the text being accompanied. I believe we can fairly say that a six-string harp such as Oberflacht was tuned according to some kind of system of tones yielding a certain number of consonant intervals (the principal intervals being the octave, perfect fifth and perfect fourth); this would be consistent both with the laws of physics and with the theoretical European concepts of consonance inherited from antiquity. Even for a Germanic bard who had never heard of Pythagoras or Boethius, we could expect certain consonant intervals to sound between the various strings of his harp. There are

11 Christopher Page, “Instruments and Instrumental Music Before 1300,” The Early Middle Ages to 1300, vol. 2 of The New Oxford History of Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 455–84.

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several plausible tunings which would yield these intervals in various combinations. One such tuning, which I have chosen for my work with Beowulf, is what I call an “open” tuning, since it encompasses an octave between the highest and lowest strings, and the central tone (or finalis) of the resulting mode is situated on the lowest tone. The resulting row of six tones, encompassing an octave, includes a series of gaps which give the tuning its characteristic pentatonic color. Besides the octave, the resulting consonant intervals include a series of three perfect fifths and their corresponding perfect fourths, making this “open” tuning extremely stable and modally flexible. It is ideal for the spontaneous outbursts needed in a six-hour performance of the complete Beowulf, and it is the most resonant of all the tunings I have tried.12

A similar tuning, which I have used in several Eddic poems, retains the principle of an octave span between highest and lowest strings, but places the modal finalis on the second-to-lowest string, with the lowest string one whole tone below it. This also results in a series of perfects fifths and fourths, and I call this the “centered” tuning because the weight of the mode is now placed on the central perfect fifth/fourth, and emphasized by the powerful sub-finalis of the tone below it. It is a less open tuning, demanding more discipline of the principal playing hand; it therefore requires more attention to precision when shaping stories.

If the idea of an octave span (from highest to lowest string) is replaced by the idea of a six-note consecutive scale of tones, we hear a very different sound altogether, much more concise and much less resonant. As Christopher Page has demonstrated,13 there is an eleventh-century source containing a cithara tuning attributed to Hucbald of St. Amand (c.880) which tends to support the idea of a diatonic harp tuning, at least within Christian communities which were trying to tame a pagan instrument used to accompany the telling of heroic epics.

There are other plausible tunings for harps, such as a tetrachordal tuning system in which a series of four tones in a fixed relationship (for example: tone / semitone / tone) is repeated, or even overlapped. For this, however, we lack direct

12 There were no medieval standards of absolute pitch in the tuning of instruments; all tunings shown here simply depict the relation of tones and semitones, and are normalized for clarity of comparison. 13 Page, Instruments 458 (includes facsimile).

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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.

Reconstruction of swanbone flute by Friedrich van Huene (Boston).

evidence. We can only make an informed guess at the exact tuning of the harp which provoked the legendary Caedmon’s abashed retreat to the cowshed, but it cannot have been far from one of the tunings given here. The tuning system of any such instrument will be closely related to the mode which the tradition of the song demands, so that the instrument must sometimes be re-tuned to accompany in a new mode. Regarding playing technique, it hardly needs stating that an instrument of six strings is not suited to playing the elaborate melodies with accompanying chords which we tend to associate with later harps. Instead, we have here a harp type (such as is still known and played in nonEuropean musical cultures, especially in Africa) which has as its means of expression the use of pattern, inversion, and variation, and the “playing out” of modal vocabularies. Since one hand must hold the instrument upright on the player’s knee, there can only be one principal playing hand, although several players have found that the holding hand can easily spare a thumb to thicken up the patterns by emphasizing the top strings. Some iconographic evidence (especially depictions of King David playing the cithara) might even point to such a practice. Just as the singers rely on a small repertoire of potent modal gestures for the vocalization of their texts (the “matrix” I mentioned earlier), the harp makes a virtue of its seeming limitations and, like an interlaced Viking design, brings a richness of articulation to the expression of the mode, and hence to the telling of the story. The fiddle used by Sequentia in some Eddic reconstructions is based on one of the earliest depictions of a bowed instrument in northern Europe, dating from the early eleventh century, and was created by Richard Earle (Basel, Switzerland) especially for this production. Techniques of early northern fiddle playing can possibly still be found today, hidden within the thriving hardingfele tradition of 191

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Norway. Elizabeth Gaver’s own practical research into the possible medieval antecedents to this tradition have yielded a convincing style of stringing, tuning, and articulation.14 Likewise, the use of the flute in Sequentia’s work with the Edda is based on concepts of tuning and consonance from the early Middle Ages. One instrument in particular has an almost shamanistic quality: a tiny flute made from a swan’s bone, reconstructed by Friedrich von Huene (Boston) based on the remains of a tenth-century instrument found near the city of Speyer on the Rhine River.15 In collaboration with flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen, much was learned about the placement of finger holes, and therefore the tuning system, of such an instrument. In developing instrumental pieces and accompaniments, the players have made use of the same modal vocabularies and language as the vocalists, but then they have factored in the particular playing and tuning characteristics of their own instruments. There is no “improvisation” as such, but then there are also no written scores aside from a few sketches; we think of ourselves as working within a rather strict oral tradition. We can never know if our performances precisely duplicate the art of a particular medieval bard, in Iceland or elsewhere; nor can we ever rediscover the “original melody” to which any epics were sung in the early Middle Ages, since the original melody certainly never existed for any one narrative or story. In each local tradition, in each language and dialect there were varieties of originals being passed along in their own oral traditions. However, I am convinced that by making careful use of specific information and techniques, as described here, coupled with an intuitive spirit based on a working knowledge of both medieval song and the essence of sung oral poetry, it is possible to reconstruct highly plausible performance models which allow our venerable ancestral stories to live again.

14 Examples of solo fiddle-playing can be found on Sequentia, “Edda Myths.” The eleventhcentury fiddle reconstruction by R. Earle can be heard on “The Rheignold Curse.” 15 The swan-bone flute can be heard on the first track of The Rheingold Curse.

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The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell: Performance and Intertextuality in Middle English Popular Romance Linda Marie Zaerr

Actual performance by a particular voice and body for a physically present audience can provide information that validates and redirects theoretical understanding of textual variation. Paul Zumthor’s concept of mouvance, a graphic representation of intertextuality in which virtual models function as the vertical axis and actual variations the horizontal axis,1 has provided a vehicle for addressing the variation so characteristic of Middle English verse romances. The term mouvance may also be used to describe the degree and quality of variation of a performance event from the text on which it is based.2 The mouvance recorded in a memorized performance of The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell presented at the Annual Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1996 displays similarities to textual variants in romance manuscripts. The modern performance may thereby provide clues to the generative process behind some manuscript variants. A prepared, memorized performance distills characteristic elements in texts that cannot easily be envisioned without embodiment. The process of reconstructing performance of medieval texts must rely on considerable speculation, and historical features cannot readily be isolated from modern features. None-

1 Paul Zumthor, “Intertextualité et mouvance,” Littérature 41 (1981): 8–16. He concludes: “une typologie des textes serait concevable, qui les classerait en vertu de la plus ou moins grande amplitude de leur mouvance” (16) [a typology of texts would be conceivable in which they were classified according to the greater or lesser amplitude of their mouvance]. 2 Zumthor has demonstrated the significance of gesture (“Body and Performance,” Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey [Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994] 217–26) and the vitality of physical presence (“Les traditions poétiques,” Jeux de mémoire: Aspects de la mnémotechnie médiévale, eds. Bruno Roy and Paul Zumthor [Montreal, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1985] 11–21). Scholars in the more general field of performance theory use different terminology to define performance and discuss variations in tone of voice, gesture, body position, costume, and other features unique to performance. See, for example, Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York, Routledge, 1988); Marco de Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance, trans. A’ine O’Healy (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993).

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theless, when grounded in available textual and historical evidence, performance can stimulate fresh thinking. The question of whether the Middle English verse romances were performed at all has been the subject of some controversy. Much of the early skepticism derived from reaction against assertions based entirely on internal oral references.3 Despite subsequent evidence that romances were intended to be heard,4 that musical performances of English romances were likely,5 and that some romances were “modified in performance-from-memory,”6 models of minstrel performance were met with suspicion by many critics.7 In the 1990s and early 2000s other approaches and some new information have made the performance concept more credible. External historical records8 and new textual evidence9 strongly indicate at least some instances of performance of late-medieval romance. A reworking of the oral-formulaic theory,10 has given impetus to consider oral aspects of written texts. Along similar lines, many critics have argued for more confluence among categories previously established by scholars.11 Interdisciplinary approaches such as these urgently call for complementary experimentation with actual perfor3 See Ruth Crosby, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11 (1936): 88–110; Albert C. Baugh, “The Middle English Romance: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation,” Speculum 42 (1967): 1–31. 4 William A. Quinn and Audley S. Hall, Jongleur: A Modified Theory of Oral Improvisation and its Effects on the Performance and Transmission of Middle English Romance (Washington, University Press of America, 1982). 5 John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6 Derek Pearsall, “Middle English Romance and its Audience,” Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, eds. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (Groningen, Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985) 41. 7 See Janet Coleman, English Literature in History 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers (London, Hutchinson, 1981); P. R. Coss, “Aspects of Cultural Diffusion in Medieval England: The Early Romances, Local Society and Robin Hood,” Past and Present 108 (1985): 35–79; W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romances (London, Longman, 1987); Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1987). 8 See, for example, John Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1989). 9 See Murray McGillivray, Memorization in the Transmission of the Middle English Romances (New York, Garland, 1990); Andrew Taylor, “Fragmentation, Corruption, and Minstrel Narration: The Question of the Middle English Romances,” The Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 38–62 (developed more fully in his “Was There a Song of Roland?” Speculum 76 [2001]: 28–65); Tim William Machan, “Editing, Orality, and Late Middle English Texts,” Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, eds. A. N. Doan and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 229–45; Rosamund Allen, “Performance and Structure in the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron, eds. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2000) 133–47. 10 See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960); Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. Adam Parry (London, Oxford University Press, 1971). 11 See Karl Reichl, “The Middle English Popular Romance: Minstrel versus Hack Writer,” The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. Joseph Harris (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991) 243–68; David Hult, “Reading It Right: The Ideology of Text Editing,” The New Medievalism, eds. Marina S. Brown, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 113–30; D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York, Garland, 1994);

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mance to understand and characterize performance of what have been termed “popular romances.” In an attempt to explore possible dimensions of medieval romance performance, I memorized the entire text of The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. Under the auspices of the Medieval Romance Society, together with harpist Laura Zaerr, I performed it in May 1996 at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. The experience corroborated the aesthetic of variation that has recently developed in several branches of Middle English studies, and it validated the performative value of a fluid language matrix, a flexible and interchangeable set of narrative patterns. Elements that had seemed awkward in a literary context were revealed as characteristic and graceful features of performable texts. The greatest theoretical drawback to using evidence from modern performance to understand historical performance is our inability to replicate the medieval performance context. Recent work in theory of oral performance, however, has indicated that aspects of oral tradition can be retrieved from texts. John Miles Foley argues that texts rooted in oral performance retain enough information that audiences educated in that context can reenter the original performance arena: [W]ord-power derives from the enabling event of performance and the enabling referent of tradition. Even when performance modulates into transcription or authored text, the empowering use of register and (now rhetorical) entry of the performance arena can lead to some degree of communicative economy, assuming that the audience or reader is sufficiently fluent in that register and able to join the performer or author in that arena.12

A collection of eighty medievalists approximates the terms of contextual fluency for the Middle English romances as well as any modern audience could. Members of the Kalamazoo audience were capable of understanding the language and the cultural context and thus able to enter into the closest modern equivalent of the performance arena. The sequence of aural and visual events in a community context characteristic of performance is sharply distinct from the more homogenous experience of reading a written text, in which only the receiver is physically present, and the only medium of communication is uniform letters.13 The heterogeneity of the performance experience includes infinitely variable tone of voice, dynamic volume, complex interactions between the rhythms of poetry and the rhythms of music, movement and gestures of varying amplitude and velocity, plastic facial expressions, and complex, often intuitive, communication among performers and between performers and audience.

Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 26 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12 John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995) 213. 13 See Paul Zumthor, “The Vocalization of the Text: The Medieval ‘Poetic Effect,’ ” Viator 19 (1988): 273–82.

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Further, the reader of a written text cannot comprehend the compelling necessity of pleasing an audience who will listen only if intrinsically motivated. Andrew Taylor suggests that this pressure to please audiences with varying demands led minstrels to fragment and recombine romances according to need.14 In other words, popular romances suggest an undisciplined audience, out to be entertained easily, but willing to be quiet for something they want to hear. Taylor suggests that an audience’s needs and responses would vary from one occasion to another, and therefore the minstrel would need to be able to vary the material. Given these theories, we would expect to find potential for flexibility in written relics deriving from an orally-performed tradition. This potential may be most effectively recognized by returning to the performance context in which flexibility is most requisite. That is, by returning to the performance arena that gave rise to performance-related elements, we might most effectively identify those elements and understand their function. Before presenting the entire text of The Weddynge, I experimented with performing excerpts from this popular romance15 together with parallel excerpts from the two polished literary analogues: Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales, and Gower’s “Tale of Florent” from the Confessio Amantis.16 Performance of the texts themselves provided the most useful information about performability. According to the theories above, a performable text should be expandable or contractible to address the whims of varying audiences. The verse should not require too rigorous a pattern, since it is easier to improvise to cover memory slips if there are not too many restraints, and the performer is thus freed to devote energy to interaction with the audience. Finally, the surface texture should allow considerable aural variety to keep the audience’s interest. These features are present in many Middle English popular romances,17 and they 14

Andrew Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” Speculum 66 (1991): 43–73. P. J. C. Field (“Malory and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 219 [1982]: 374–8) has suggested that Thomas Malory may have written The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. This identification of an author would not affect the classification of The Weddynge as a popular romance because the composition in verse rather than prose renders the work so different from Malory’s Morte Darthur in terms of performability. 16 Carl Lindahl argues that “all three versions were orally performed” (“The Oral Undertones of Late Medieval Romance,” Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. W. F. H. Nicolaisen [Binghamton, New York, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995] 59–75), but he acknowledges that Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions are “more bookish” (75). Most of the criticism of The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell has addressed it as an analogue of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” or as an exemplar of the “loathly lady” archetype. Susan Dannenbaum (“The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, Line 48,” Explicator 40 [1982]: 3–4) has discussed a textual crux, and, more recently, Edward Vasta (“Chaucer, Gower, and the Unknown Minstrel: The Literary Liberation of the Loathly Lady,” Exemplaria 7 [1995]: 395–418) and Manuel Aguirre (“The Riddle of Sovereignty,” Modern Language Review 88 [1993]: 273–82) have considered social implications of the loathly lady. 17 Thomas Garbáty points to the generic ambiguity of romances: “A clear distinction, therefore, between medieval ballads and romances, based on presentation, vocabulary, narrative, or improvisation cannot be made” (“Rhyme, Romance, Ballad, Burlesque, and the Confluence of Form,” Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager [Hamden, Connecticut, Archon, 1984] 287). 15

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are particularly marked in The Weddynge in contrast with the analogues by Chaucer and Gower.18 In Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” invariable couplets approach iambic pentameter in their regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and in Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” even couplets similarly approach a refined tetrameter. In both the rhyme scheme is followed with precision. In contrast, the form of The Weddynge is more flexible. The basic structure is a six-line, tail-rhyme stanza rhymed aabccb.19 Many passages can be expanded or contracted as needed, and even the lines follow variable groupings, with a loose rhyme scheme allowing considerable liberty. “Anoder” can rhyme with “other” or “answere” (lines 196–7, 203–4), and “thing” can rhyme with “yong” (lines 414–15).20 In an oral context, close rhymes become more viable than they are in a written text. The lines are grouped in either twos or threes, the tail rhyme being optional. Similarly, tail-rhyme lines can contain either three or four stressed syllables, and each line can have a variable number of unstressed syllables. Almost any set of words can fit into the pattern, and the rhythm of the language can vary across a wide range, while preserving a pattern of regularly spaced stresses which has a certain hypnotic power. For popular performance, this is flexible and powerful language. Purely on the level of artistic use of language, Chaucer and Gower are indisputably superior, but they proved much more difficult to perform at a practical level. I had to memorize the texts very thoroughly and accurately, and flaws in memory were evident and difficult to cover, not because the passages were so well known, but because the rigid texture of the language showed minor variations so readily. In this performance context, The Weddynge proved to be much more useable. It is quick-paced, self-contained, vivid, funny, adventurous, and the metric structure of the language, because it is not tightly organized, is highly adaptable. The Weddynge has the flexibility that allows me to interact most creatively with the audience. I find myself inverting the two rhyming tag lines, leaving out some of the tag lines or adding them in where they do not exist in the manuscript 18 All references to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, Houghton, 1987); references to Gower’s Confessio Amantis are from The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, vols. 1 and 2 (London, Oxford University Press, 1900); and references to The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell are from my transcription of Bodleian MS Rawl. C. 86, fols. 128b–140a. 19 The opening of the poem provides a typical example: Lythe and lystenyth the lif of a lord riche Hearken, listen to The while that he lyvid was none hym liche like Nother in boure ne in halle chamber In the tyme of Arthour thys adventure betyd befell And of the greatt adventure that he hym self dyd That Kyng curteys & royall (lines 1–6) No full translation is given since The Weddynge is generally comprehensible to a modern reader of English when it is read aloud. 20 Readily-available editions of The Weddynge may be found in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York, Norton, 1995) or Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo, Michigan, Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).

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or even making up an entire stanza with perfect confidence that my variants fit into the patterns established by the romance. To my surprise, no one seems to mind variations in rhyme and stanza structure. My friends and colleagues are graciously honest about my performances, yet people who object strongly to stanzaic variations and imprecise rhyming when they occur in written texts do not seem to mind those features at all when they are swept up in an fascinating story. The story is inherently involving. Coming upon Arthur alone in the forest, Sir Gromer Somer Jour threatens to kill him unless he can return in a year and answer a question: What do women love best? King Arthur and Sir Gawain assemble two books of answers, but a hideous woman in the forest tells Arthur that his answers are wrong, and that she will give him the true answer if Sir Gawain will marry her. Gawain agrees, and Ragnell reveals that women desire sovereignty. Upon hearing this answer, the infuriated Gromer is forced to let Arthur go free, and Ragnell marries Gawain amid great distress at court. On their wedding night, Gawain turns to embrace the loathly lady, and discovers that she is beautiful. She gives him a choice: either she will be beautiful at night and ugly during the day to all others, or she will be lovely during the day and hideous at night. Considering the options, Gawain leaves the choice to Ragnell, thus giving her sovereignty and disenchanting her. She tells him that now she will be beautiful both during the day and at night, and the entire court rejoices. While the basic stanza involves six lines rhymed aabccb, in the manuscript a unit of aab seems to suffice (e.g. lines 149–51). The scribe does not seem to mind when the text falls into couplets omitting the tail lines entirely (e.g. lines 82–93), or if a tail line does not rhyme with its pair (e.g. lines 455–60), or even if pairs of lines do not end up rhyming (e.g. lines 653–4), or if the line length varies from the norm (e.g. lines 91 and 202). The rhythm itself is so flexible that a norm would be difficult to derive. These variations are present in the manuscript, and there they have been a source of irritation to modern editors21 who must create visual divisions out of a text where the linking patterns sometimes overlap in ways that cannot be shown simultaneously in print, though they can be appreciated when spoken aloud. For example, in the midst of a passage that Shepherd in frustration calls “obviously corrupt” (249) certain thematic end-rhymes are employed consistently (-ere and -aye or -ey), but not necessarily according to a set pattern. They establish a pleasing aural resonance which does not need to be codified in performance and which would be very difficult to break down into stanzas. The one deviation from the pattern, the word “man,” emphasizes Arthur’s outburst of frustration with his dilemma: And also I shold com in none oder araye Butt evyn as I was the same daye

other, attire just

21 The variants have caused critics generally to dismiss the romance, as does Helaine Newstead, with the word “mediocre” (“Arthurian Legends,” A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, fasc. 1 Romances, ed. J. Burke Severs [New Haven, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967] 65), or to castigate the redactor as “an indifferent artist,” as even as sympathetic a reader as Donald B. Sands does in his edition (Middle English Verse Romances [New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966] 324).

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And yf I faylyd of myne answere I wott I shal be slayn ryght there Blame me nott though I be a wofull man Alle thys is my drede and fere Ye s(yr) make good chere Lett make yo(ur) hors redy To ryde into straunge contrey And eu(er)wher as ye mete owther man or woman in faye Ask of theym whate thay therto saye And I shall also ryde anoder waye And enquere of eu(er)y man and woman and get whatt I may Of eu(er)y man and womans answere (lines176–89)

failed if be of either, faith another inquire

The aural variations, when committed to print, seem undesirable corruptions of a stanza form that demands consistency instead of natural and free alternation of rhythmic patterns. In a written text, consistency is more perceptible and more important than in a live performance. Shepherd catches a glimpse of the salient flexibility of the text, the overlapping irregular patterns; in his description of his editorial approach, he states that where the rhyme scheme “breaks down,” he assigns divisions “according to sense and cadence, not always to rhyme” (243). The manuscript, however, does not assign stanza divisions at all. Further, if a scribe had felt that a rigid stanza form were vital, he could easily have adjusted it with very little effort. Instead of assuming the scribe to have been lazy, uneducated, or prey to some computer-virus-like textual corruption, it may be well to follow Machan’s assertion that “the vernacular was the language of the people, impermanence, and change,” thus placing a premium on vitality and aural appropriateness rather than a written standard (249). This invokes the question of the “minstrel manuscript,” which has been the focus of so much of the discussion of popular romance performance. Maria Dobozy, discussing the German minstrel tradition, suggests the minstrel may not have needed books, but “unfortunately, maintaining the myth of minstrel books continues to focus attention on fixed texts and away from a transitional, progressive literary situation in which performance was a seminal component.”22 Andrew Taylor also notes the paucity of manuscripts in the English and French minstrel tradition, and concludes that the concept of a wandering minstrel is inaccurate since, by the fifteenth century, there is strong evidence that many performers “led stable, prosperous, respectable lives” and had become private readers (“Myth” 73). By setting aside for the moment the issue of manuscript transmission, we may more fully explore text generation and variation from another standpoint: the perspective of the performer, a performer with a “stable, prosperous, respectable life.” When I perform, I often feel that I am creating the tale for the first time ever, but simultaneously I am aware when I vary significantly from a verbatim 22 Maria Dobozy, “Minstrel Books: The Legacy of Thomas Wright in German Research,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 536.

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representation of my base text. This is true whether I have learned a tale or song from a written text or orally from another performer.23 Some minor variants, such as substituting “she said” for “said she,” go unremarked, but, while I am aware of making larger changes, they do not worry me. I feel no guilt leaving out whole stanzas or improvising a rhyme scheme to match a change I have fallen into through a memory slip. Of greatest importance, ultimately, are the pragmatic necessities of live performance. Given a choice between hesitating and being true to the text or managing to say something to maintain the pace, a performer must choose to keep the pace. It is of primary importance to keep the audience involved and unaware of the performance dimension, so that their focus remains on the tale or song itself rather than on the performer and the mechanics of presentation. Audiences respond best to performances that seem effortless; any evidence of effort shifts attention away from the performance material to the performer, who is the mediator of the text, not the text itself. As I have since become more familiar with the written text of The Weddynge, I am now able to reproduce it verbatim (I have done this as well with The Tournament of Tottenham), but I have thereby lost some flexibility in responding to a variety of audiences. A focus on delighting the audience rather than reproducing a text verbatim is more congruent with the actual thought process in which I have the impression of creating the story as I go. By the time I performed in Kalamazoo, my renditions were fairly stable and accurate, but the variants between the Kalamazoo performance version and the unique manuscript provide a useful record of some of the natural tendencies of memorized performance and of this text.24 It is information of a sort that has not been made available before. The Appendix to this article provides a complete list, based on a recording that was made of the performance, of all variants from my transcription of the original text. The variants generated by a memorized live performance of about fifty minutes turn out to be remarkably like variants among manuscripts of other Middle English popular romances. There are minor alterations within lines: verbal inversions (lines 82, 144, 242, 315, etc.), synonymous substitutions (lines 52, 322, 334, 512, etc.), rhythmic alterations (lines 8, 97, 129, etc.), simplification based on previous patterns (lines 211, 531, etc.), more specific substitutions (lines 31, 297, 656, etc.), less specific substitutions (lines 115, 306, 405, 752, etc.), omissions (lines 76, 274, 402, etc.), additions (lines 97, 450, 581, etc.), and inversion of two rhyming lines (lines 312–13). There are also minor substantive variants. Changing “contrey” to “time” (line 10), for example, shifts the emphasis from place to time, and this change was probably triggered by line 4, which mentions “the tyme of Arthour.” Changing “bowre” to “hall” (line 401), in combination with the paired word “bed,” has the 23 While I have not learned Middle English romances orally, I have learned several lengthy traditional ballads and an Old French lament in this way from Laura Zaerr, and I have learned a number of medieval melodies on vielle from other musicians. 24 This data corroborates the textual work of Murray McGillivray, and it supports the concepts of intertextuality and orality developed by Zumthor, Machan, and others.

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effect of broadening Arthur’s promise to the lady. Omission of tag lines (line 529) or of a non-essential couplet (lines 552–3) demonstrates the sort of changes the manuscript redactor appears to make or preserve on a regular basis. Some of these minor variants provide insight into which elements are most susceptible to variation. For example, in lines 52–3 I substituted “bold” for “strong” and “strength” for “myght.” The lines originally read: A knight full strong and of greatt myght And grymly word(is) to the Kyng he sayd

spoke

Initially when I read the text I thought I should substitute “dyght” for “sayd” so that the lines would form a couplet. As I memorized the work, though, the need for rhyme diminished, and I kept the lines as they were. This, however, created a locus of variation: in performance, when I changed the end rhyme to “strength” it did not damage an existing and intact rhyme. “Strong” has been replaced by “bold” (which occurs in similar passages in other popular romances) and moved to the end of the line in a form that can follow “of”: A knight full bold and of greatt strength And grymly word(is) to the Kyng he sayd

But it is the larger-scale variants that provide the most intriguing material. Following are the two versions of lines 170–5: Manuscript And also I shold tell hym att the same day Whate wemen desyren moste in good faye My lyf els shold I leve This oth I made vnto that knyght And that I shold neu(er) tell itt to no wight Of thys I myght not chese

on faith otherwise, lose oath creature choose

Performance And also I shold tell hym att the same day Whate wemen desyren moste in good faye Of thys I myght not chese And also I swore that I shold tell itt to non / / other wight Of thys I myght not chese

Anticipation caused me to substitute the second tag line for the first, which I then, rather unartistically, repeated instead of improvising the second time. I conflated the two intervening lines into one very long line; this process helps explain some of the “orphaned” lines and unusually long lines scattered through the text. In a similar manner, in lines 333–5, I combined the tag line with the first line of a couplet and then omitted the tag to avoid repetition. It is interesting to note that, just as there are passages in the romance that scholars have called “more corrupt” than others, so in my performance there are definite loci of multiple variants, but these are also the places where I felt the most creative freedom. It is in 201

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improvisation that the excitement and tension of live performance is most effectively realized. Lines 354–65 provide the most intriguing “corruption,” since this represents a significant memory slip, an instance of recollection that caused me to back up over two hundred lines and then have to work my way back to the correct place in the plot without faltering. Manuscript Iwys gawen I mett her in Inglyswod She told me her name by the rode That itt was dame Ragnell She told me butt I had of her answere Ell(is) alle my laboure is neu(er) the nere Thus she gan me tell And butt yf her answer help me well Ell(is) lett her haue her desyre no dele This was her couen(au)nt And yf her answere help me and none other Then wold she haue you here is alle to geder That made she warraunt

Indeed cross unless nearer

together

Performance gawen I mett her in Inglyswod Thou knowest well I slew an hart by the rode She sayd to me my lif she wold saue Butt fyrst she wold the to husbond haue She sayd to me butt I had of her answere Ellis alle my laboure is neuer the nere This was her covenaunt And yf her answere help me and none other Then wold she haue the here is alle to geder Thus made she warraunt

In the first couplet (lines 354–5), the Inglyswod/rode rhyme caused me to recall lines 152–3, which employ the same rhyme: Forsoth I was on huntyng in Ingleswod Thowe knowest well I slewe an hartt by the Rode

Cross

This couplet occurs in Arthur’s first conversation with Gawain, so the context (Arthur reporting to Gawain) is similar. To recover, I dropped the tag lines and borrowed a couplet from twenty lines before the couplet that had moved me back in the text: She sayd to me my lyfe she wold saue But fyrst she wold the to husbond haue

(lines 338–9)

I then conflated six lines (lines 357–62) into three, preserving the rhyme between the tag line (“covenaunt”) and the following tag line (“warraunt”). The result is that I fell into couplets while I was recovering, drawing from 202

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analogous passages while I gathered my wits, and then I gradually made a transition back into the tail-line stanza, condensing material where necessary. All the information in the original passage remains in my performance, but it is rearranged and rephrased. This follows McGillivray’s description of the process of recollection and demonstrates the feasibility of such improvisations in a Middle English romance. There is a smaller-scale instance of recollection in lines 619–21, where I moved to a couplet only seven lines earlier and adjusted by omitting the tag line and simply jumping back to the point just after the three lines I had intended to deliver. Although quite substantive in nature, the omission at the end of the poem of lines 838–52 (the narrator’s lament over his imprisonment) does not function well as an instance of memorial interaction with a text because I planned the change in advance to provide a stronger ending, more appropriate to me as a narrator. On the other hand, the omission of lines 760–804, an account of the major characters’ responses to the events of the tale, was entirely spontaneous in the first instance and provides insight into the motivation and generative process of this significant transformation of the text. Two days before the Kalamazoo performance I presented The Weddynge in Idaho for a general audience unfamiliar with Middle English. The audience remained intrigued and immersed in the story until the plot itself had concluded. At that point I sensed they were nearing the end of their tolerance of Middle English. The performance dynamic is unequal in that the performer is consciously aware of subtle responses and emotional tones in the audience that they themselves are not aware of communicating. As I was reciting, I realized that the audience needed a different shape or structure for the romance. The formality of the closure seemed out of harmony with modern tastes. It occurred to me that the recapitulation section was not essential and not linked inextricably with the rest of the text. So I cued the harpist with a glance and skipped ahead to the conclusion. The change worked so well that I preserved the revision in Kalamazoo. The initial spontaneous transformation demonstrates the intensity of a performer’s compulsion to meet a specific audience’s needs, the most powerful motivation for revision. Furthermore, the process involved in the transformation reinforces how many thought processes and interactions can occur simultaneously in performance. Although textual elements demand the most discussion in a literary context, and although our only record of medieval performance is strictly textual, it is important that we go beyond theory in acknowledging that performance is not merely the aural embodiment of a text, that a popular performance is just as concerned with consideration of pace, volume, characterization (verbal and physical), movement (patterns associated with characters and concepts), scene (awareness of environment and effective use of the stage), level (alternating kneeling, sitting, stooping, or lying with standing to provide variation), and music.25 25 Paul Zumthor distinguishes between “text,” which is “a unified linguistic sequence whose overall meaning cannot be reduced to the sum or particular effects of meaning evoked by the

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Music is worthy of much fuller consideration, since, whether the narrator or another person provides music, there is a continual and equal interaction between the two elements. Though in narrative the audience’s focus is never centered on the music, it is as important as the text in establishing emotional response and involvement with the tale. As in any performance, available resources determine the parameters. I live in Idaho, so rehearsing with large numbers of professional performers experienced with medieval material is normally not feasible. I play vielle, and my sister is a professional harpist, so it has been natural for me to use harp or vielle to accompany Middle English romances.26 The different character of the two instruments is key. The vielle punctuates words and phrases, while the harp interlaces patterns around words. The bowed vielle is a sustaining instrument which can surge and recede beneath the words, whereas the harp is a percussive instrument which would interfere if it coincided with the words, but can develop interactive rhythmic patterns in counterpoint with the rhythms of the text. Both instruments have considerable versatility in timbre and dynamic. The vielle ranges from sharp wailing to seductive melodies to quick fiddling. The harp employs clear melodies, glissandos, tremolos, and rapid arpeggio passages.27 That interaction between text and music can more effectively be addressed once a channel for performance-based criticism has been established in the realm of literature as it has in the realm of musicology. We use music to reinforce thematic elements, but also to evoke character. One melody or motif may be associated with Gawain and another with Arthur. Both Sir Gromer Somer Jour and Dame Ragnell test Arthur and his court, and that similarity can be readily apparent to an audience when we link them musically and positionally. Both characters may face the same direction when they speak and utilize certain patterns of vocal delivery. Yet these features are not invariable. In some performances Arthur is more foolish and ignominious, in others more wise and noble. For some audiences Ragnell is funny; for others she is pitiable. Our energy also varies. Sometimes the connection between us is so solid that we can transform our material with perfect concord, certain that our audience is immersed in the experience; other times we struggle for a unified dynamic and lack confidence in our audience. We work within a matrix of possibilities. The concept of performative integrity based on a fluid range of narrative patterns, while it has been discussed in our era, must be very foreign to us as we live in an age steeped in recording. Flexibility is impossible in a recorded medium because recordings are by their very nature identical each time through. The

sequential parts of the text” and “work,” which is “what is poetically communicated (text, sounds, rhythms, optical elements). The term includes the totality of performance characteristics” (“Body and Performance” 218–19). 26 I have experimented with singing Middle English romances. While I have found this approach to work well with French, the Middle English romances militate against a sung version, perhaps because of the stress-based character of the language. I have instead adopted a spoken approach with a varied rhythmic delivery matching the rhythmic fluidity of the texts themselves. 27 These techniques involve rapid movement among many notes.

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evocative skill of film, audiorecording, or photograph is entirely different from that of live performance.28 Performance is often regarded as a pleasing entertainment in the midst of the more serious business of analyzing literature and music, but the performer’s perspective and emphases make theory more productive. When significant theory relating to the Middle English romances has discussed orality and performance in the past, it is now of vital importance that the constraints and considerations universally involved in performance be incorporated into that theory. In the case of The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell we are left with a record of the perspectives and priorities of a performance version of the text. A reconstructive performance, applying theories of intertextuality, can be useful in illuminating the value of a text that welcomes and necessitates variation. By such a process, we may gain a clearer understanding of the process of mouvance in performance.

Appendix

Following is a complete list, based on a recording that was made of the performance, of all variants from the original text, Bodleian MS Rawl. C. 86, fols. 128b–40a.29 The terms before the square brackets are from my transcription of the manuscript, and the variants following (in bold) are from the performance on May 9, 1996 in Kalamazoo: 8 10 11 31 33 34 52

the hono(ur)] th’onour contrey] time that doughty] that were doughty (planned variant) a] his that] the When that he cam] When the kyng cam strong] bold myght] strength

28 TEAMS and the Chaucer Studio have produced a video of our performance (The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, VHS, Provo, Utah, TEAMS and the Chaucer Studio, 1999), but the experience of the video is very different from the experience of one of multiple and distinct live performances of the same romance. The use of costuming is one of many differences. In live performance an audience can tune out the simple black dress I wear, imagining for themselves the different characters represented; the literal nature of video, in contrast, renders any costume specifically male or female, lovely or unlovely. In a live performance, body position, facial expression, and tone of voice are sufficient to convey the difference between the loathly Ragnell and the lovely Ragnell. For clips of the video, see the website Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase, eds. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, 2005, New York University,7 January 2005 . 29 The manuscript dates from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and the romance itself is generally placed in the second half of the fifteenth century.

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54 56 62 67 76 78 79 82 87 91 92 97 107 115 118 119 129 130 131 144 165 172 173 174 181 182 187 188 207 211 213 219 222 224 225 229 236 242 254 257 274 297 303 306

Well I mett] Well mett And] Now he sayd] I am nowe] here shold] om. that] this so] as thou shalt] shalt thou thys] the shewe] tell send] ony send bryng] bryng me withoute] withouten Thy lyfe] For thy lyfe Kyng Arthure] the kyng Far well S(yr) Knyght and evyll mett] om. woll] shall Kyng Arthure] Arthure the kyng lord(is)] knyghtis That] om. I met] met I ther] om. My lyf els shold I leve] Of thys I myght not chese (see 175) This oth I made vnto that knyght] And also I swore that I shold tell it to non other wight And that I shold neu(er) tell itt to no wight] om. (two lines conflated; tag line repeated) fere] care Ye s(yr) make good chere] Ye lord anoder] the other enquere] ask goten] getyn (see 204, 205) pamplett] answerys By god] For soth ye lyst] thou wold Doute] Drede Els] Or els Kyng Arthoure] The kyng man] men syde] wyde (planned variant) she was] was she haue with the] with the haue fynde] knowe (see 263) shortly] om. she] the lady he sayd] sayd the kyng lady] wyght 206

THE WEDDYNGE OF SIR GAWEN AND DAME RAGNELL

312–13

314 315 316 318 319 322 333 334 335 343 347 354 355–6

357–62

364 365 366 381 382 385 397 398 401 402 405 428 450 458 478 486

When thou comyst agayn to thyne answer Ryght in this place I shall mete the here] Ryght in this place I shall mete the here When thou comyst agayn with thyne answer I wott] om. farewell sayd the kyng] sayd the kyng farewell she sayd] om. yo(ur)]thy you]the kyng] knyght way] jorney (see 387) Nay sayd gawen that may nott be] Thys is ill tydand sayd gawen lever] rather Thys is Ill tydand] om. shall] woll nott I] I nott Iwys] om. She told me her name by the rode That itt was dame Ragnell] Thou knowest well I slew an hart by the rode She sayd to me my lif she wold saue Butt fyrst she wold the to husbond haue She told me butt I had of her answere Ell(is) alle my laboure is neu(er) the nere Thus she gan me tell And butt yf her answer help me well Ell(is) lett her haue her desyre no dele This was her couen(au)nt] She sayd to me butt I had of her answere Ellis alle my laboure is neuer the nere This was her covenaunt you] the That] Thus shall] I shall (planned variant) rode] sett No] And no Sir] om. Tell me yo(ur) answere nowe] Saue my lyfe shall] woll bowre] hall Therfor] om. quod dame Ragnell] sayd the lady manlyest] manlyest man ther] here dare] dare well me help] itt wott travayll] labour woll] shall 207

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508 512 529 530 531 552–3

woll] shall you] the yo(ur)] thy Before alle thy chyvalry] om. yo(ur)] thy Fett] Fetch A mowth full wyde and fowll I grown With grey herys many on] om. 558 in] thorough 572 she sayd] sayd she 579 I woll] woll I 581 sayd] then sayd 589 Fyrs withoute lesyng] om. 603 So sayd they] I tell the 619–21 So she ete tyll mete was done Tyll they drewe [tho clo]thes and had wasshen As is the gyse and man(er)] Ther was no mete ca(m) her before But she ete itt vp lesse and more 644 she sayd] sayd he 656 she sayd] sayd the lady 665 which] that 677 nowe] om. 678 The choyse I putt] I putt the choyse 688 shall] shalt 698 sycurly] serteynly 700 s(yr) knyght curteys gawen] corteys knyght and hend gawen 714 you] the 716 And] om. 719 And] om. 722 quod] sayd 731 to] unto 733 quod] sayd 738 I am full loth to ryse] I am full well att eas 743 hed] hair (planned) 746 Syr] om. 752 Syr Gawen] He 760–804 om. (tentatively planned) 805 Gawen] Sir Gawen 807 you withoute lesynge] the in serteyne 810 Ther att] that Kyng Arthoure] Arthoure the kyng 811 for] of 822 securly] in serteyn 838–52 om. (planned)

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“Une aventure vous dirai”: Performing Medieval Narrative Anne Azéma

Singing is a dangerous enterprise; singers are often tempted to focus their efforts on peripheral issues. It is best for performers to have a clear idea of priorities. For me, the potency of the word, the strength of the poetic gesture,1 and the act of storytelling are what is central to singing medieval music. These seem much more important goals than that of simply attaining a beautiful sound (however one chooses to define that notion). The combination of word with poetic gesture and sound makes for an interesting dialogue—a complex series of dance steps into which the public is ultimately invited to participate. Medieval storytelling lives in a space of freedom won from two kinds of bondage: that of seeking either beauty or entertainment for its own sake. Some of this freedom resides in the wide variety of medieval narrative forms, a repertoire which includes the reverie, pastourelle, alba, chanson d’ami, chanson de croisade, chanson de toile, chanson de mal-mariée.2 All of these offer excellent opportunities for performers. I have also been interested in taking less traveled roads—namely performing narrative texts without music, especially in French, my mother tongue. It seems clear that these purely narrative texts were in fact performed, or contés.3 Gautier de Coincy himself tells us at the beginning of his Miracles de Nostre Dame [Miracles of Our Lady]: “Translater voel en rime et metre / que cil et celes qui la letre / n’entendent pas puissent entendre” [I want to translate into verse so that men and women who do not know how to read can apprehend].4 Without entering further into the scholarship that justifies modern perform1 In my experience, poetic gesture is defined by metrical and linguistic structures (rhymes, rhythms, assonance and so forth) combined in a “musical manner” with an emotional content, resulting in an aesthetic pleasure. 2 See Pierre Bec, La Lyrique française au Moyen Age, XIIe–XIIIe siècles: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux: études et textes, 2 vols. (Paris, Picard, 1977–78). 3 On this subject, see Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986) and Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999). 4 Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. Frederic V. Koenig, 4 vols., Textes littéraires français (Geneva, Droz, 1955–70), I Pr 1 (D.1), lines 7–9. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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ances, I would like to present a number of issues and reflections arising from my work on medieval song narrative. I draw from my own experience as a performer and editor with references most particularly to the following works: two by Gautier de Coincy from his Miracles de Nostre Dame (the Leocadia story5 and Dou Cierge qui descendi au jongleour [The Candle Sent Down to the Minstrel]),6 and the well-traveled production of Tristan et Iseult.7 Other remarks derive from my performances of Marie de France’s Guigemar, various fables, a Provençal Passion play, Philippe de Thaon’s poetry, Le Roman de Fauvel [The Romance of Fauvel], and several of the narrative Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X el Sabio. The creators We all have the notion of the poet as a primal creator. While this idea is still quite present in the mind of modern singer-interpreters, it is naïve and oversimplified. We know that these narratives are multiform, and that they were reshaped and retransmitted any number of times. The medieval performers themselves faced the same challenges as we moderns; there is no definitive version of a story, only various enlightened and informed solutions in the here and now. The enmeshing of the inherently fluid oral tradition with the strictness of the written word is frequently evident in the medieval sources themselves. However, there again lies the great privilege of working with narratives and medieval storytelling; 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.8 Narration in the first person is a compelling element for a vocalist. The je lyrique [the poetic I] of the medieval poet provides a wonderful driving force for a contemporary performer. Many French medieval narratives use a personal reference in the opening and closing. For instance Marie de France writes: “Les contes que je sais verais / dont li Bretons on fait les lais / vos conterai assez briefment” [The tales—and I know they’re true—from which the Bretons made their lais];9 or “Dit vos en ai la verité / du lai que j’ai ici conté” [I have given you the truth about the lai that I have told here];10 or “Une aventure vos dirai” [I shall tell you an adventure];11 or Chrétien de Troyes: “Je seuls come païsanz / aloie querant 5

Miracles, I mir 44 (D. 49), and Anne Azéma, L’Unicorne [The Unicorn], CD, Erato, 1994. Hereafter called the Rocamadour miracle, since it takes place at the pilgrimage town of Rocamadour in the south of modern France. See Anne Azéma, Etoile du Nord, CD, Calliope, 2003. 7 I performed Iseult in Tristan & Iseut, dir. Joel Cohen, The Boston Camerata, CD, Erato, 1989, reissued 1995. 8 La Poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, Collège de France: essais et conférences (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1984) 21–2. 9 Marie de France, Guigemar, lines 19–20. All text citations for Marie de France are from Poètes et romanciers du Moyen Age, ed. Albert Pauphilet, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade 52 (Paris, Gallimard, 1952); translations from The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (1978; Grand Rapids, Labyrinth-Baker Books, 1998). 10 Marie de France, Chievrefueil, lines 117–18. 11 Marie de France, Laostic, line 1. 6

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aventure” [I wandered alone like a peasant seeking adventure].12 Gautier, however, moves far beyond such a convention. His voice seems more present, truly a partie prenante, a full participant, in the development of the story. He is happy to share with us his emotional state: “Pourquoy me remuai / quant je ma dame perdue ai / la vierge leocade / qu’amoye de tout mon cuer” [Why did I change when I lost my lady, the virgin Leocadia, whom I loved so much with all my heart].13 In this sense, medieval narrative is a form of self-revealing song. However, it combines several “voices”: those of the composers, of the performers and of the characters. All are sustained by a form, a musical line, and sometimes accompanied by an instrument. I choose narratives based on my evaluation of their appropriateness to such treatment. Above all, the crucial determining element for me in choosing to perform this repertoire is its potential for musical expressivity. Vocal performance Both secular monody and medieval narrative are problematic, as no treatises are directly linked to this repertoire, no recordings, and no living performance traditions from distant generations exist to be emulated! Only sound archives from recent generations seem to lead the way for some modern performers. Both public and artists have many expectations concerning vocal performance. Singers and performers want to make sure that their vocal abilities are used to best advantage. The public on the other hand expects to be rewarded with a “beautiful” sound. Of course, standards of vocal beauty have varied a great deal across the centuries and even, in the same generation, among different genres. Recent early music performances of early secular monodies have tended to be dogmatic in their choices. Frequently performers have chosen either to reject or emulate previous interpretations. By necessity these performances are linked to the personality of the singer/performer. Some early sources of medieval narrative do provide important hints concerning different sorts of vocal timbres, even indicating that a range of approaches might be possible. One can imagine different types of sounds, different timbres and volume depending on the situation and the singer: “Dunc chante haut et cler” [Thus (the mermaid) sings loud/high and clear];14 or “Ysolt chante molt dulcement / la voiz acorde a l’estrument / les mains sunt beles / li lais buens / dulce la voiz e bas li tons” [Ysolt sings very sweetly, her voice in tune with the instrument. Her hands are fair, the lai good, her voice sweet and soft/lowpitched];15 or “Ouch sanc diu saeldenrîche / suoze unde wol von munde” [The

12

Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, Poètes et romanciers 173, lines 2–3. In his song “Las! las! las! par grant delit” [Alas! Alas! Alas! Through great delight], liner notes, The Unicorn, trans. Peter T. Ricketts. 14 Philippe de Taon, “Serena en mer hante,” Poètes et romanciers 267, line 10. 15 Thomas, Tristan, in Les Tristan en vers, ed. and trans. Jean Charles Payen (Paris, Garnier, 1974) 171, lines 843–6. 13

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beautiful maid sang to them sweetly and full throated].16 These examples of idealized singing (in the case of the mermaid) or of public singing of secular monody show how many choices and different approaches to sound—intensity, pitch, colour and volume—are available to the performer. Narrative genres in general seem to free up expectations regarding vocal qualities, and this generalization holds true from Gautier to Wagner and beyond. Listeners to performance of narrative will allow for a wider range of vocal sounds, and will qualify a good performance primarily by its value as entertainment. We are no longer in the realm of Mozart arias, and nor are we within the aesthetic of the troubadours’ cansos. For all participants there is an informality, a relaxing of boundaries in narrative that is not always possible for other types of singing. Potency of the word If a modern performance is to be effective, the underlying text must be strong. In the stories of Tristan, or Guigemar, powerful archetypes involving sexual passion, jealousy, betrayal, quest or death carry in themselves most of the weight of the performance. By virtue of these primal forces these stories have a strong appeal to the human imagination. Performers and their performance are carried along by the inherent appeal of the material. Some other texts, while beautiful, speak less powerfully to the subconscious, but might appeal for other good reasons discussed later. The value of form Formal structure is more than an element of interest for a performance of medieval narrative. It is also a necessity. To be efficient, and memory-friendly, a story needs to operate within very strict formal boundaries. We see formal matrices at work in certain kinds of modern performances such as the oral poetic joust of Corsica.17 In that repertoire the length of the phrase and the sustaining “cantilation” formulae are very much respected by the performers—even if slightly ornamented. Not only can the improvising poet display virtuosity in that way (showing who can best “create” within these formal boundaries), but also, form is a mnemonic device for further creation. Meter and formula are sustaining frames for the next poetic idea and its rhyme. Similarly it is impossible to memorize any of Gautier’s long renditions of miracles, without having internalized its versification and meter.18 The spontaneity of an interpretation in front of a live audience can only happen in the context of the formal shell—verses, rhymes and meter. I find that internalizing this matrix is critical to the performance of versified narration. Performers of purely prose texts may have other observations to give. 16 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, in Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke (Leipzig, Reclam, 1980) lines 7996–7. 17 See Chjama é rispondi, Centre national des lettres-Academia di Vagabondi, Bastia, Scola Corsa, 1986. 18 On octosyllables, see Vitz, Orality and Performance 8–25.

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The possibility of creating a story within a story is a formal device that has appealed to me, as it provides an effective performance mode. In the Rocamadour story (one of the episodes of Gautier’s Miracles de Nostre Dame), the miracle story and the song we have chosen to pair with it are notated quite separately in the sources. Despite the clerical separation of the song (“Ma viële” [My vielle]) and the text (Dou Cierge qui descendi au jongleour [The Candle Sent Down to the Minstrel]), Gautier does seem to want the story to be told out loud: “Un mous grant livre en est fais / plusieurs fois leüs l’ai / d’un jongleor, d’un home lai / un mout courtois myracle I truis / pour faire entendre a aucune ame / la cortoisie Nostre Dame” [A great book was written about it, I have often read it. In it I find a very noble miracle about a minstrel, a layman, which I wish to tell if I can, to help all souls understand the courtesy of Our Lady].19 Although Gautier’s miracle text is given without music, I chose an accompanying song, “Ma viële,” which is transmitted with musical notation elsewhere in the manuscript. I created a modern performance by combining elements of both of these pieces, interweaving stanzas of the song with a shortened, edited narrative text. In our performance of the Rocamadour story, we have a mixture of the narrative in pseudo-epic style punctuated by the chosen song. Since the narration of the miracle contains descriptions of a jongleur singing and playing, this new synthesis seems appropriate. Juxtaposing and combining these elements allows the performer to retell Gautier’s story for modern audiences in a new way, based on words and music from his hand. We are aiming, as I have said above, for a unified conception of Song. To cite Paul Zumthor: “The final aim of medieval writing is vocal communication, with (at least in principle) all the sensory stimulations that are linked therewith.”20 As in the best films of Hollywood, a good medieval story includes suspense, action and other proven recipes of storytelling. In this way it creates a dynamic space for the performer. This process of narrative tension and release is evident for instance in Gautier’s Leocadia miracle. The actual loss of the statue, the pain and heartache of the poet, followed by the quasi-erotic climax of the recovery are performance opportunities too good to be passed over! “Quant les noveles en oy / Si joyeusement m’esjoy / Qu’il m’ert avis que je voloie / Quant vins a li, si me doloie / Faillue ja m’estoit l’alainne / Ains n’embraca Paris Helainne / Si doucement con je le fis / Mon duel eu tot enseveli / Tout maintenant que je la tins” [When I heard this news, I felt such joy that it seemed to me I was flying when I came to her, and I was suffering so much that I almost stopped breathing. Never did Paris kiss Helen so sweetly as I. My pain was quite buried as soon as I held her].21 In this case Gautier has himself composed songs that mirror the narrative action. Here, the miracle text and songs follow each other closely in the main sources. The songs, some of which carry their own storytelling, are included in our performance, interspersed into the narrative text. 19 Miracles, II Mir 21 (D. 69), lines 4–9, and liner notes, Etoile du Nord: Mysteries and Miracles of Medieval France, trans. F. Regina Psaki, CD, Calliope, 2003. On reading and performance, see also Vitz, Orality and Performance 164ff. 20 La Poésie et la voix 92. 21 Miracles, I Mir 44 (D. 49), lines 293–301, and liner notes, The Unicorn.

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Each of the three songs has its own distinct character. The first and third can be conceived of as commentaries while the second (“Sour cest rivage” [On this shore]) is itself a narrative recapitulation of the miracle. The first (“Las, las, las” [Alas! Alas! Alas!]) utilizes the je narratif [the narrative I], and paints the emotions of the poet as he bewails the loss of the statue: “Las, las toz jors mais gemirai / noyer en aisne je m’irai” [Alas, alas forever more I will moan, and I shall go and drown myself in the Aisne].22 The last (“De sainte Leocade” [About Saint Leocadia]) is a more classic trouvère song with refrain, replete with the glories of Saint Leocadia and the Virgin Mary. The delicious world created by Gautier challenges us to re-create a living model of Song. Language as sound and music There is a special pleasure in working with a language that is closely related to one’s own. Yet there is also another important aesthetic pleasure for the performer: the use of language as a musical sound. In my experience the rhymes and rhythms of the verse forms carry a musical weight which is complementary to, but also to some extent independent of, literal meaning. A declamation with good rhythmic progression creates psychological and somatic expectations in the audience. These expectations may be fulfilled, or creatively thwarted, according to the demands of the text and the concept and creativity of the performer. Performers who successfully internalize the formal structure of their text will inevitably share its musicality with the public. Furthermore, the sonorous substructures of a text can have their own weight and effect. For example, the conclusion of Gautier’s Leocade, has an extensive passage of word play and pun based upon the word “Mugue”: “Qui ne s’enmugue de son mugue / Enmuguiez est de mugue mugue / Mais tuit cil bien s’enmuguelient / Qui entor aus son mugue lient / Diez doinst toz nos enmuguelit / Et qu’entor nos son mugue lit / Amen” [He who doesn’t “balsam” himself with her balsam is “balsamed” with a bad balsam. But all those are well “balsamed” who tie their lily of the valley around themselves. God grant us the grace to be “balsamed” and entwine us with her lily of the valley. Amen].23 The playful, funny aspects of this passage are first of all apparent to the reader, and secondly, to any performer. Audiences, whether or not they are French-speaking, react with amusement and delight to Gautier’s wordplay in performance. For Dutch, American or German listeners, literal comprehension is secondary to the “musical” wordplay. The question of literal comprehension should never be neglected. We try to help this along by supplying translations, and using of material that is generally well known. Everyone understands that Tristan and Iseult are fated to meet, to drink, to love and to die. But the sheer pleasure in sharing the sonorous details of the language can deepen the storytelling experience, both for the performer and 22

Liner notes, The Unicorn. Miracles, I Mir 44 (D. 49), lines 841–6, and liner notes, The Unicorn. This passage plays on the sonority of words and puns on the word “mugue” [lily of the valley; perfume, balsam]. 23

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public. In some sense, an isolated focus on the sound of language is manneristic, affected, and could be conceived as a distraction to the performance. But communicating these sonorities to a public leads all involved to another plane of communication. This transcendence of the difficulty of literal comprehension of a text or song deepens the overall experience. Gesture and space Storytelling creates a realm of gesture (musical, rhetorical, physical) and of new spatial relationships on stage. Performers occupy an actual physical space (e.g., concert hall, stage), but they must create an area larger in imagination than the physical boundaries of the actual performance space. The means to be used are in themselves simple—sitting, standing, walking, gesturing. When used effectively with texts and music, they enable the audience to transcend the physical place in which they find themselves. Clearly, none of the material we perform—music or text—was intended for “theatre” in the traditional sense, nor was it “concert hall” material. Nor do we create these performances with costumes, or sets, etc. There is nonetheless an element of mini-drama in the performance of medieval narrative, which unfolds in front of and in collaboration with the public. Of course, good narrative performances of any genre (from Monteverdi monodies to Schubert’s Erlkönig or Kurt Weill’s Macky Messer) partake of the same principles. But I would maintain that medieval storytelling allows, encourages, even demands a greater range of freedom than other genres: physical freedom (for one) to alter expectations of spatial relationships on stage, to the instrumentalist, or to the hall; technical freedom as well, to bridge the gap between song and speech, weaving them all together in collaboration with the instrumental accompanist/creator in an interdependent performance. The performers comment on each other’s work, as though each one were a singer or a narrator. Some of this dialogue is improvised anew at each performance. The quality of these improvised exchanges has a great deal to do with the ultimate success or failure of a given performance. Such freedom cannot be fruitful without a corresponding and extensive commitment to historical and linguistic discipline. But when discipline and freedom are in balance, we may travel less familiar roads; uncovering material previously unperformed for modern audiences and make it accessible, real and enjoyable for the public. The role of the instrumentalist24 Most of our experiments with Gautier’s Leocade were done with the vielle (a recorded performance also includes harp and flute). Based on historical evidence, the choice of a bowed string instrument or the harp seems appropriate for medieval monody. For example in the Rocamadour miracle, the vielle is especially appropriate because in the story itself the jongleur sings and plays the vielle. The

24

I thank my long-time musical partner, the viellist Shira Kammen for her insights.

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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.

Anna Azéma and Shira Kammen in concert at the Musée National du Moyen Age, Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny, Paris (Photo: Trobador).

help of an attentive instrumentalist is crucial in the development of the singer’s narrative powers. The vielle acts as a sustaining pillar, a commentator, a facilitator and even a mirror of the performer’s musical and declamatory decisions. The instrument centers the sung pitches in an appropriate mode and helps to focus all the other choices allowing the text to bloom and develop. Certain kinds of interpretive decisions can be made independently from the pitches supplied by the instrumentalist and singer. The style of declamation itself can be varied in many ways: it can be incantatory, be fully legato, or it can tend more towards speech. The rhythm of declamation can be slow or fast, the vocal color can be full and rich, or intentionally thinned out, or loud or soft. In contrast to the bel canto aesthetic which strives for a seamless vocal sound from the top to the bottom of the voice, here the vocal registers can be contrasted with each other for dramatic effect. Evolving within this sound world, the vielle creates another lyric or even narrative “voice” that extends and complements that of the singer. Language will also determine the instrumentalist’s choices of articulations and rhythm. The angular sounds of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan texts—“Ich var dort mit Tristande / und sitze hie by Marke / und criegent am mir starke / beidiu tôt unde leben” (lines 18527–30) [I travel there with Tristan, and sit here, by Mark; and within me life and death lead a fierce battle]—may suggest other approaches to accent and bow stroke than the more liquid sounds of Gautier’s Old French: “Le cors la sainte damoysele / la sainte virge, la pucele / la plaisant, la douce, la 216

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sade / qu’apelons virge Leocade” [The body of the holy damsel, the holy virgin, the maid, the agreeable one, the sweet one, the charming one, whom we call the virgin Leocadia].25 The performer’s responsibility is multiplied when the sources give no musical notation whatsoever. The instrumentalist in collaboration with the singer must choose appropriate modal characteristics such as modal cells and cadence formula. From these fundamental choices flows a selection of other appropriate choices to the piece, as well as a tuning that will sustain these choices. The shape of the instrument and the bridge affect the colors which will be drawn out from both the player and the singer. When combined with a flat bridge, an open tuning based on roots and fifths is appropriate to a drone-like accompaniment, whereas another type of tuning using fourths and fifths, with a rounded bridge, might encourage more melodic participation. The tessitura chosen will also be affected by the personality and the vocal range of the singer, as well as by the morphology of the instruments and the collective will to depict shadings of emotions. These pragmatic choices flow from the expressive goals, and determine the effect of the performance. Yet in the end, these technical concerns are poetic choices. The vielle becomes the singer’s ally in creating expectancies of time and pacing. The instrumentalist is truly a co-narrator, a part of the poetic voice. This collaboration is essential to the ethos of Song; all participate to declaim the pathos of human emotions in the space of freedom the performers have created. Freedom? We come here to the most interesting aspects of medieval storytelling. These texts, scrupulously researched and re-edited, offer a larger terrain of freedom than one normally finds in sung literature, whether it be medieval or modern. There is freedom to explore one’s physical instrument, as well as new sounds, new spaces and new expressive possibilities. Such possibilities are not always permitted in the more structured and conventionally bound landscape of song recitals or concerts. As performers, we have the possibility of conveying a story with all the means available to the instrument contained in one’s body: whisper, cries, singing, speech, Sprechgesang [speech-song], coup de glotte [a type of vocal attack with an overarticulation of the glottis], overemphasized consonants, liquid legati, staccatti, etc. . . . this list is far from exhaustive! The parallel with modern contemporary music performance practice hardly needs to be emphasized. From Gautier to Berg the road is short, and the laurels rest on the head of performers who have the courage to use all the material resources available to them. Physical gestures and body language are a part of narrative performance. It is difficult to imagine an effective rendition without the help of the hand, the gaze, the language of the body in general. If appropriately performed, a sigh, a foot moved forward or a hand opening can do more to enhance expression than the

25

Miracles, I Mir 44 (D. 49), lines 186–9 and liner notes, The Unicorn.

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aggressively forced timbre of late-twentieth-century verismo singing. Although we can perhaps learn much from medieval iconography,26 I do not here propose to codify a repertoire of medieval gestures along the lines of the Baroque or Romantic body “Esperanto” as seen in opera houses. Combining knowledge of iconography with awareness of the instinctive tendencies of the human body, while telling a story, we can begin to create elements of a physical language with which to support and sustain medieval storytelling projects. Another freedom within this repertoire is the possibility of reshaping and re-forming a new object within the boundaries of scholarship and taste, crafted from pre-existing source material. Performers neither can nor should replicate a 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. Like the manuscript sources, any sound recording or video is merely a snapshot of one moment in such a continuing process. When interpreting primary sources we need to know their history, their importance (or perhaps unimportance), as well as the process of their construction. Knowing these things will have an enormous influence on our contemporary performances. By internalizing written sources, which may to some degree be based on oral tradition, and by re-oralizing them in performance, we liberate important dimensions of the original material. We treat the medieval scribe(s) as collaborators in a continuous process, in some sense as performers like ourselves, shaping and interpreting the material to the best of their ability. The cases of Leocadia and the Rocamadour miracle I believe that Gautier de Coincy intended live narration of both the Leocadia story and the Rocamadour miracle. The particular versions we present to the public can never replicate Gautier’s precise intentions, nor could exact replication be our goal. The modern concept of time and the contemporary public’s attention span require condensation. We need to adapt the lengthy and sometimes prolix texts, if only because perception of time in our day is so different from that which prevailed in the Middle Ages. For instance, members of a religious community living in a priory in the thirteenth century would have experienced this narration in real time in a more leisurely way than any modern concert audience can. Given the social constraints of the modern concert world, no concert organizer would allow more than a certain amount of spoken narration in an unfamiliar language! In preparing the material, we are thus obliged to abridge it to fit the conventional temporal spaces of modern concert halls or compact discs. Gautier’s entire Leocadia poem runs to 872 lines. It was reduced to approximately 100 lines for our performances. Once again, we see that the performers assume the role of creators; by selecting the elements to be presented, they bring into being something which is new. 26

François Garnier, Le Language de l’image au Moyen Age (Paris, Le Léopard d’Or, 1982).

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The structure of the Leocadia story makes this task easy: there is a beginning, a crisis (the theft of the statue) and a happy ending (the recovery of the same statue). The simple and effective story line helps to ease the editor’s task. Within this simple scheme, there is a first-person narrative that is easily transmittable in performance: “Que de memoyre ne dechaie / Talens me prent que vos retraie / Une merveille que je vi / Queque prieus ere de Vi” (lines 1–4) [Before it disappears from memory, I have the desire to tell you of a wondrous thing I saw, when I was prior of Vic]. Throughout the poem, Gautier intersperses personal asides into the narration. He frequently becomes the active subject of the story: “Pour moy honnir, pour moy grever / Pour moy le cuer faire crever / . . . / Si me fist ravir et embler / Le cors la sainte damoysele” (lines 181–2, 186–7) [To pour contempt on me and make me suffer, to break my heart … (the Devil) had removed and taken away from me the person of the holy damsel]; “Mais cele a cui m’en atendi / Devant cui piez m’en estendi / Plus de cent fois a tous le mains / Droit au quint jour entre les mains / Nos renvoia no damoysele” (lines 223–9) [But She to whom I directed myself and at whose feet I lay down, more than a hundred times at the very least, gave us our damsel back into our hands]. The task of recreation is somewhat different in the case of the Rocamadour story. Here only one song of Gautier has been used, instead of the three for Leocadia. The song acts as a continuous thread uniting the various events of the story. Again the modern performer must make important decisions concerning the length of passages of spoken text and the rhythm of the narration, creating a new piece from pre-existing material. Gautier was not a witness to the miracle, and his involvement here is less directly personal. The jongleur Pierre de Sygelar, devoted to the Virgin, asks her for a candle for his dinner. His prayers are heard by the Virgin, who causes a candle to settle on his vielle. The jealous monk Gerard snatches the candle, and returns it to the altar. The Virgin repeats her miracle twice more, to the dismay of the malevolent monk. Despite the accusations of sorcery against him, the minstrel sings and plays better and better, so well that “de pitie fait plorer maint ame” [He made many a soul weep in pity].27 Throughout the story, the public has a voice, and comments: “Chascun s’ecrie ‘Sonez sonez / plus biau miracle n’avint mais / ne n’avenra ce cuit ja mais’” (lines 160–2) [Each one cried: “Ring the bells! A more beautiful miracle never occurred, nor ever shall, so we believe”]. Just as the witnesses in the text see the Virgin operate the miracle on behalf of the jongleur, the public in the concert hall witnesses the performance of the story performed by a singer and a vielle player. If the alchemy works, the modern public will become an active participant in this performance, and like the witnesses in the old text, will cheer the miracle as it is retold. Such can be the power of storytelling which unites public and performer, Story and Song.

27

Miracles, II Mir 21 (D. 69), line 148 and liner notes, L’Etoile du Nord.

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The case of Tristan In the case of the Tristan and Iseult production, the overall architecture was devised by The Boston Camerata’s Music Director, Joel Cohen. The texts chosen for its CD included excerpts from the romances of Gottfried von Strassburg and Thomas; for live performances, excerpts from an anonymous Tristan Folie were added.28 Musical episodes were interspersed within the texts. Most of these episodes came from the well-known Tristan en prose29 which contains several lais. Other musical works, not directly related to the story, were incorporated for their appropriateness to the situation. Certain musical episodes were contrefacta, combining a portion of the Tristan text with a contemporary, or nearly contemporary, medieval melody. Although I did not have a hand in composing the scenario, I found it a challenging opportunity that mobilized all the performing skills mentioned earlier. But in this performance I was not the omniscient narrator, but rather one character, Iseult, discovering and internalizing the potent and revelatory weight and complexity of that character. The various medieval sources depict a complex persona for Iseult. She is, of course, passionately in love but also politically astute, vengeful, manipulative and even at times, murderous. These character traits are overtly present in the sources, independent of any modern “psycho-babble.” These “new” elements of the story (new because most people in the public are unaware of them) offer enormous opportunities for the performer. The Tristan script has had several incarnations; the most successful in my opinion is the version that keeps the original language throughout. There have also been concert versions in which the narrated text was translated into modern English or modern French. These versions performed in translation were less effective. The “word music” of the Old German and French texts bring a sense of completion to the whole, whereas the modern languages, with their very different sonorities, seem somewhat flat in comparison. The unity of music, word and gesture seems better served with the use of original texts throughout. We also produced two different fully-staged versions of this Tristan (including costumes, sets and lights), as well as a semi-staged version (using only minimal gestures and lights, ordinary concert dress and whatever concert space was available). I found the simplified and modernized approach more effective than the conventionally theatrical versions, perhaps because its very simplicity brought the material closer to its medieval ethos. Over the decade during which the Camerata’s production of Tristan was performed, a specific Iseult character was born and developed. Both Cohen and Wagner’s Iseults are somewhat simplified abstractions. But the Camerata’s treatment allows dimensions of the medieval Iseult their place in the story at critical junctures where Wagner suppressed or edited out these traits of her character. Two episodes will illustrate my point: first, Gottfried’s narration of the wedding 28

La Folie de Berne, Les Tristan en vers, lines 166–83. Le Roman de Tristan en prose [Vienna ÖNB ms 2542], eds. Philippe Ménard et al., 6 vols. to date, Textes littéraires français 353, 398, 408, 437, 450, 462 (Geneva, Droz, 1987–). 29

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night, and second, Gottfried’s version of Iseult’s lament when the lovers separate. In the first scene, hoping to avoid scandal, Iseult asks Brangäne, still a virgin, to replace her in Mark’s bed on their wedding night (lines 12435ff). Brangäne sings “Do wir zwô vuoren von Irlant” (line 12805) [When we both left Ireland],30 in which the image of two dresses, one clean and the other soiled, serves as metaphor for lost purity/virginity. Once the king has deflowered Brangäne, Iseult surreptitiously takes her place next to Mark,31 and the two share wine together. In a later episode, Tristan, banished by Mark, leaves the court. Iseult mourns his departure in the passage: “Tristandes zunge und mîn sinn / diu varnt dort mit ein ander hin / . . . / mit disem zwein ist mir vergeben” [Tristan’s voice and my mind have left far away together . . . with these two, I am doomed].32 Iseut participates in each of these scenes, but the challenges to the performer who takes her role are quite different. The wedding night, with its obscene undertones, is mimed by the performers. Here, a few movements by a silent Iseult convey her emotions and advance the action. In the lament, Gottfried’s superbly crafted text, spoken to a vielle accompaniment, places Iseut at the epicenter of the situation. It is an inward looking passage, personal in its rendition of separation, and powerful in its depiction of Iseult’s pain. For me at this point, the artifices of technique—both poetic and vocal—fall away and some eternal human reality is confronted. From the peripheral participation of Iseult in the wedding to the centrality of her speech in the separation lament, we see the range of challenges to the performer of the role. Neither acting nor singing is the final goal. What is most important is to lead the public into the story, and into its essence, so that those who listen will for a time forget themselves: “Daz maneger dâ stuont unde saz / der sîn selbs namen vergaz” [So that many who stood and sat forgot even their own name].33 The public As we probe new emotional landscapes using these “disciplined freedoms,” new possibilities open for both the performer and the public. There is an ease to the storytelling that draws the audience in, maintains its attention, and allows it to savor the dialogue, the alliteration, the rhymes, the wordplay and the outcome. The public can be liberated from expectations too often linked with “classical” vocal performances, from the tired gestalt of “louder, faster and higher.” Freed from the obligation to admire a beautiful sound as such, the public can relax, penetrating deeper in the material at hand, exploring along with the performer other channels of meaning and satisfaction. The archetypical elements in these stories can allow audience members to connect with a deep reservoir of meaning and experience. Joel Cohen’s treatment of the Tristan story, discussed 30

Gottfried, lines 12805ff, sung to a contrefact by Joel Cohen. Gottfried, lines 12635ff. 32 Gottfried, lines 18527ff. The “zwei” are Mark and Tristan. 33 Gottfried, lines 3591–2, describing the reaction of the listeners to Tristan’s playing and singing. 31

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above, provides a good example. The Tristan story itself, or some version of it, is already lodged in the consciousness of the performers and the public. But despite our preconceived notions, rarely have any of us confronted the original texts. And so, paradoxically, a presentation based entirely on old sources is received as something fresh and new. The measure of success Assessing the success of such projects and their value to others is a difficult and subjective endeavor. It is interesting to reflect on the opinions of medieval writers. Gautier, Grocheo and Gottfried—each reflects on these issues. Like we who are modern interpreters, Gautier sees himself as a link in an ongoing process; he translates and vocalizes for a wider public texts and concepts that would otherwise be reserved for clerics and scholars. “Miracles que truis en latin / translater voel en rime et metre / que cil et cele qui la letre / n’entendent pas puissent entendre” [Miracles which I find in Latin, I want to translate into verse so that men and women who do not know how to read can apprehend].34 The theoretician Grocheo believes performance should serve the general public interest: “This kind of cantus ought to be provided for old men, working citizens and for average people when they rest from their accustomed labor, so that, having heard the miseries and calamities of others, they might more easily bear up under their own, and so that their own tasks might be more gladly approached. Thus, this kind of cantus is a support of the whole state.”35 Finally, Gottfried’s Iseult reading aloud, singing and playing, wakens her audience to new thoughts and ideas: “Von îr wart maneger slahte / gedanke und ahte vür brâht.” [Through her (singing) she awakened many a thought and reflection.]36 No amount of verbalization, dissection, analysis or reading can replace the impact of a vital performance. The editorial and musical choices made during the hours of preparation reveal themselves as successful (or not) in the throes of the action. In the course of these performances we can only hope to have shared worthwhile and important poetic and musical material. These can awaken our listeners and also bring to them both pleasure and a measure of solace. According to our medieval authors, and in my opinion as well, the final measure of value remains the enrichment of life.

34

Miracles, I Pr 1 (D.1), lines 6–9. Johannes Grocheo, Concerning Music (De musica), trans. Albert Seay (Colorado Springs, [Colorado College Music Press], 1967). Grocheo addresses here the “cantus gestual,” from “gesta” [deeds]. 36 Gottfried, lines 8078–9, describing Iseult’s performing and its effect on listeners. 35

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Afterword The experience of performance The essays in this book inspire new appreciation of the art of the medieval storyteller. They show how stories are brought into performance from manuscripts, and from a common fund of narrative motifs and storytelling practices. While several of the articles encourage readers to imagine performance of works now received in writing, the essays by contemporary performers go even further. They show how live performances can be reconstructed from manuscripts, from surviving narrative and musical practices, and from instruments depicted in medieval images or long buried underground; they bring us into the world of professional artists as they tell a tale before an audience. These essays awaken the desire for the experience of performance itself. To enable readers to view medieval narratives in actual performance, we have created a website—Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase.1 The website illustrates and complements the essays in this volume with video clips of recent performances by students, scholars, and professional artists (including Azéma, Bagby, and Zaerr, contributors to this book). The clips provide examples of many works discussed in these pages, such as Beowulf, Celtic stories, chivalric romances, pious tales, stories of Renart, and fabliaux. They represent several genres, periods, and languages, and demonstrate a broad range of performance styles and strategies. The website also offers clips of performances of narratives that are analogous to medieval works (such as contemporary epics from Egypt and Turkey); these clips, recorded by anthropologists and historians of performance, suggest how similar medieval narratives might have been performed. Readers of the essays in this volume may use its companion website to further their appreciation of medieval narrative in performance. Experiencing narratives through performance enables readers to consider these works through different faculties and senses: to see performers’ bodies in motion, hear their voices and instruments, and witness audience response. As the studies in this book demonstrate, medieval narratives were not conceived to be read only privately and silently, which is our norm today; they invited and were intended for performance. Evelyn Birge Vitz Nancy Freeman Regalado Marilyn Lawrence 1

The current address is .

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Disclaimer: Pages 225-244 have not been included in the eBook. To view these pages please refer to the printed version of this book.

Index Note: Page numbers in bold type refer to illustrations and their captions. abbreviation 61, 63–5, 67, 70, 71 see also word-grouping accent 4, 132, 162, 188 accompaniment see under instrument acrobat 168 see also professional under performer acting out see drama; enactment; mode under performance actor 24, 26, 49–50, 107, 109, 114, 136, 140, 153, 164, 186 see also enactment Adgar 142 Gracial 145 n.17 Africa/African 19, 176, 191 Albertano da Brescia De arte loquendi et tacendi 42 see also rhetoric Alfonso X el Sabio Cantigas de Santa Maria 210 allegory 29, 89, 95–7, 99, 106 alliteration 4, 23, 29, 35, 175, 183, 187, 188, 221 Alpamish/Alpomish 170–2 see also epic; Turkic ambitus 173–5 see also music Anceïs de Cartage 70 Andrieux-Reix, Nelly 66–7, 71 Anglo-Norman 6, 65, 77 n.7, 123 Anglo-Saxon 33, 63, 182 animal 26, 52, 137, 156, 166 ass 163 bear 163, 165 fox see Renart; Le roman de Renart kite 163 lion 105, 113–19, 160 beast epic 163 costume 114, 164 anthology see collection under narrative antiquity 50–1, 58, 62, 171, 189 see also Greece; Latin Apuleius Metamorphoses 50

artes poetriae 131 Arthur, King xvi, 1–3, 15, 17–18, 23, 103 n.3, 106–9, 147, 162, 197–8, 200, 202, 204 Arthurian 8, 17–18, 103–19 interlude 8, 103–19 legend 8, 17, 104, 106–7, 115 romance 103, 108–9, 111, 116 theme in tournament 103, 108 see also Guinevere Asia/Asian 169, 171, 173, 175 aside see under performance assonance 7, 175 Auberée 133, 137 audience 3–4, 27–8, 32, 35, 38–9, 42, 46, 92–3, 108, 111–12, 123, 125, 127, 130, 135, 141, 144–5, 159, 161, 164, 168, 178, 181, 188, 195–6, 200, 203, 211, 213, 215, 218, 220–2 address to 3, 8–9, 18–19, 22, 33, 96, 126, 134, 139, 142, 156, 158, 160, 165 Boccaccio’s 42, 46–7, 55, 57 courtly 45–6, 112 Dante’s 57, 77 familiarity with story 108, 144, 162 female 45, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 55 n.38, 101, 116, 131, 134–5, 141 listening 32, 38–9, 61, 64, 95–6, 126, 129 live 5, 10, 127, 156, 193, 212, 223 male 97, 136 mixed male and female 135–6, 141 participation of 24, 108, 134, 149, 153 performer’s interaction with 22, 97, 127, 129, 130–1, 133, 134, 147, 195–7, 200, 204, 209, 211, 215 see also hear; hearing; listen; listener; reader; reading; reception aurality/aural 3, 18, 30–3, 38–9, 62, 95–7, 148, 160–1, 188, 195–6, 198–9, 203 see also audience; hear; hearing; listen; listener; auditory under memory; orality; aloud under reading D’Aussy, Legrand 163

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author/authorship 2–4, 6, 8, 17–21, 27–39, 41–3, 47, 51, 54–7, 73, 77, 89, 90–7, 100–1, 128–31, 134–5, 139–52, 157–60, 163, 165, 195, 211, 222 amateur 8, 90–4, 97, 100–2 anonymous 18, 43, 57 see also authors by name autobiography 32, 89–102, 131 Azéma, Anne 10–11, 209–23, 216 see also The Boston Camerata Bagby, Benjamin 10, 181–92, 223 see also Sequentia bagpipes 51 see also instrument bakhshi see under professional under performer see also epic; Turkic ballad 177, 187, 200 n.23 banquet 8, 36–7, 103, 105–11, 113, 116 see also event under performance bard see under professional under performer bardd stafell 16 see also professional under performer bardd teulu 16 see also professional under performer Le Bel Inconnu 69 bell 219 see also instrument Benoît de Sainte-Maure Le roman de Troie 69, 106 Beowulf 1–2, 181–2, 186–8, 190, 223 Bernard of Clairvaux 145 Bernier La housse partie 124, 143 Bible Bible moralisée 146 Gospel 136 biography 34–7 see also autobiography bishop 37, 47, 123, 145 see also Church; clerk The Black Prince 34, 36–7 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron ii, 2, 6–7, 41–58, 78 n.8 Il Filocolo 78 n.8 Filostrato 49, 51, 58 Teseida 49, 51 body 5, 10, 77, 80, 82–5, 88, 132, 140, 186, 193, 205, 217–18 body language 133, 135–6, 138, 217 breast 52, 55, 152, 160 brow 152 ears 1, 43 n.9, 128, 133, 155, 168 eyes 77, 84–5, 125, 132, 138, 160

face 112–13, 133 n.30, 137–8, 152, 195, 205 n.28 hand 75, 82, 84, 85, 113, 125, 132, 137, 139, 146, 176–7, 186, 217 head 132, 139 lips 7, 77, 85, 132, 133, 139 mouth 7, 75, 77, 82, 84–5, 137–9, 166 neck 25, 109–10, 139, 152 shoulder 119, 132 smile 77, 133, 138 testicles 138, 139 torso 152 see also gesture; movement; erotic under reading book 5, 7, 31, 45, 49, 65, 76–82, 84, 86–8, 95–7, 102, 103–4, 126–8, 146 commissioning of 8, 37, 103 festival 104, 116 image of reader with 61 preacher handbook 126 printed 163 production of 6, 26, 37, 65 religious 80, 84, 88 sing from 49 tournament book 104, 106 n.10 women and 88 n.22, 96–7 see also manuscript; reading; scribe; List of manuscripts Book of Hours see religious under book La borgoise d’Orliens 133 The Boston Camerata 210 n.7, 220 see also Azéma; Cohen Le bouchier d’Abeville 134 bow see under instrument Bozon, Nicolas see under Nicolas Britain/British Isles 1, 16, 18, 63, 166 n.27 see also England; Wales Brittany/Breton 18, 162, 167–8, 210 Bromyard, John Summa predicantium 37 Brunain la vache au prestre 124, 128 n.15 see also Jean Bodel Brunetto Latini 42, 44, 50 Li livres dou tresor 42 see also rhetoric buffoon 16, 28 see also professional under performer Busby, Keith 142 n.5 byliny 177 Caedmon 191 caesura 7, 69–70 see also word-grouping Camille, Michael 78 canso see lyric

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“Cantare de’ cantari” 43 cantari 43, 49 The Canterbury Tales 2, 196–7 see also Chaucer carole 47, 151 n.49 see also dance castle see under space under performance Cavalcanti, Guido 46 Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari 137 cembalo 47 see also instrument cerddor 16 see also professional under performer chamber 100–1 see also space under performance Chandos Herald La vie et gestes du Prince Noir 6, 32, 34–9 Chandos, Sir John 34, 36 chanson de geste see French under epic La chanson de Roland/Roland cycle 1, 43, 49 n.30, 163 chant see under song Chaucer, Geoffrey 10, 39 The Canterbury Tales 2, 196–7 Wife of Bath’s Tale 196–7 Le chevalier au barisel 141, 145, 152 Le chevalier qui fist parler les cons 135 n.40 see also Garin The Chieftainship of Britain (Unbeiniaeth Prydein) 16 child 2, 29–32, 75, 78–9, 84, 164, 171 see also young under age under performer chivalry 5, 8, 26, 49 n.30, 104, 106, 115–16, 223 Chrétien de Troyes Le chevalier au lion (Yvain) xvi, 1–2, 7–8, 18, 61, 83–4, 106, 210–12 Knight of the Lion, character of2 see Robert, Count of Artois Cligès 68, 108 Erec et Enide 23 n.52, 109 n.18 Perceval 106 see also List of manuscripts Christ 54 Christianity/Christian 79, 88, 146, 148, 182, 184, 190 see also Bible; Church; Mass chronicle 106, 114 n.22, 116 Les chroniques 32 see also Froissart Church (as institution) 125, 145, 148 see also bishop; clerk church (as place) 80 see also space under performance

chwedl 15 see also professional under performer cithara 189 see also instrument city 43, 100, 130 see also space under performance Clanchy, Michael T. 3 n.7, 87 n.20 Claris et Laris 76 n.4 clerk/clergy/clerical 6, 36–8, 123, 128 n.13, 132, 141, 213, 222 opposition to secular entertainment 6, 38 see also bishop; Church; preacher clothes 117, 128, 132, 135, 150 n.46, 153 see also costume Cohen, Joel 220–1 see also The Boston Camerata Coleman, Janet 30 Coleman, Joyce 2 n.4, 18 n.16, 31 n.14, 33 n.26 collection see under narrative comic 30–2, 35, 38–9, 105, 113, 115, 138, 148, 152–3, 162–3 see also fabliau; genre; laughter; works by author, title competition (of performers) 27–8, 30–3, 35, 37–9, 48 compilation 5, 124, 127 see also manuscript composition see author; under orality written 20–2, 30–1, 96 Du con 129 n.17 see also Gautier le Leu conclusion, narrative 54, 87, 95, 130, 134, 139, 203, 214 see also epilogue Congés 141 see also Jean Bodel Connebert 128–9, 134 see also Gautier le Leu Des cons 129 n.17 see also Gautier le Leu conteor 123, 127 see also professional under performer Conti di antichi cavalieri 45–6 contrafactum 177, 186, 220 see also music conversation 15–16, 22, 56, 106, 163, 202 Corsica/Corsican 212 costume 8, 11, 109, 113–14, 205 n.28, 215, 220 animal 114 headgear, furry or feathered 164 see also clothes; disguise; makeup couplet 201–3 see also rhyme

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INDEX

court (as social group) 8, 15, 25, 38, 74, 97, 101, 102, 104–15, 117–19, 135 n.40, 198, 224 Arthurian 23, 108–9, 167, 204 see also courtly under audience; courtly under narrative; courtly under performance; under space under performance; courtly under performer Le couvoiteus et l’envieus 124, 142 see also Jean Bodel Crapaud 149 see also La vie des Pères La crote 135 n.39 Culhwch and Olwen (Culhwch ac Olwen) 17, 19, 23, 26 Curtius, Ernst Robert 28 cyfarwydd 15, 17–18 see also professional under performer cyfarwyddyd 15, 17 see also genre La Dama del Vergiù 49 La damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre 36 La damoisele qui sonjoit 35 dance/dancing 47, 52, 116, 138, 149, 151–2, 169, 176, 187, 209 Dante Alighieri 49 n.31, 57 Inferno 7, 54, 76–8, 79, 84 Purgatorio 50 n.32 Vita nuova 46 David, King 191 De La Soul 27 Decameron see under Boccaccio declamation 23, 41, 42, 176, 187, 189, 214, 216–17 Denis Piramus La vie de saint Edmond le Rei 33 Denmark/Danish 184 Deor 32–3 Les deus chevaus 128, 142 see also Jean Bodel Des deus vilains 129–30 see also Gautier le Leu devotional text 33, 84, 87–8, 123 n.1 see also edification; pious tale; saint’s life dialogue 3, 8–9, 15, 22–4, 80, 106–7, 111, 125, 129 n.18, 131–2, 138–9, 145, 150, 152, 163, 181, 186, 209, 215, 221 see also speech The Dialogue between Arthur and the Eagle (Ymddiddan Arthur a’r Eryr) 15 dicerie 42 dicitori 6, 43 see also professional under performer

didacticism 46, 124 see also edification; ethical concern Dino Compagni 44–6 Brevia dicta et facta 45 Canzone del pregio 46 Dioneo see Decameron under Boccaccio direct speech see under speech disguise 8, 15, 89–102, 105, 115, 133, 162, 165, 172 as minstrel 8, 89–102, 162, 165 as poet 15 see also costume Disticha Catonis 46 dit 90, 94, 96, 102 Dobozy, Marie 199 Dodici conti morali 45 Dominican 124 Douin de Lavesnes Trubert 126 drama 5, 8, 103–16, 142, 144, 145, 149 see also enactment; genre; interlude; dramatic under performance; mode under performance dream 18, 25, 135 dream-poem 29, 35, 38 The Dream of Maxen (Breuddwyd Maxen) 18, 22 n.40 The Dream of Rhonabwy (Breuddwyd Rhonabwy) 18, 22 n.40 drum 115, 138 see also instrument Du Fail, Noël Propos rustiques 9, 156 dulcimer 93 see also instrument Durand Les trois boçus 132, 140 dwarf see professional under performer Edda 1, 10, 181–92 edification 45, 143, 148 see also didacticism; education; ethical concern; exemplum education 42, 78, 195 Edward, Prince see The Black Prince Edward III 38–9 Egamnazarov, Chori-shoir 172 Elizabeth of Ulster 39 emotion 4–5, 11, 25, 48, 85, 91, 132, 139, 140, 143, 203–4, 211, 214, 217, 221 dramatization of 4, 132, 139–40, 221 see also laughter; weeping enactment 3–5, 8–9, 103, 106, 108, 165 reenactment 3, 73–88, 136 enclisis see word-grouping

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The Encounter of Lludd and Llefelys (Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys) 18, 22 n.40 end rhyme 201 see also rhyme Enéas 79 England/English 27–9, 33–9, 62, 65, 77 n.7, 106, 123 n.1, 124, 162, 168–9, 172, 176, 195, 199, 203, 220 see also Anglo-Saxon under epic; Middle English under romance; works by author, title entertainer 6, 8, 17, 27–35, 37–9, 84–5, 104, 109, 125, 167, 170, 176, 184 see also performer entertainment 1, 2, 5, 27–35, 92–4, 103, 108, 110, 127, 136, 143, 205, 209, 212 epic Anglo-Saxon 182, 188 beast epic 163 see also Le roman de Renart Franco-Venitian 49 n.31 French 61, 66, 69–70, 161–2, 172, 177 German 172 Homeric 20, 171, 181 n.2 Icelandic 1, 10, 19, 181–92 Italian 43 living tradition of 9, 167–78 oral 2, 9, 10, 169–78, 181–92, 193–208 performance of 169–78 reconstructing medieval performance of 10, 181–92 Russian 177 Slavic 170 South Slavic 20 sung 1, 10, 178, 181 melodies of 10, 176–8, 184–92 Turkic 167–78 see also genre; works by author, title epilogue 129, 134, 143, 147–8, 164, 165 episode see under narrative L’ermite et le jongleur 141, 149–51 eroticism 81 erotic reading 5, 7, 73–88 erotogenic 73, 80–1, 83, 85–6 L’espinette amoureuse 7, 81 see also Froissart Estormi 140 ethical concern 25, 74, 79, 84, 88 see also didacticism; edification; morality Etienne de Bourbon 124 Eustache d’Amiens Le bouchier d’Abeville 134 event see under performance exemplum 9, 32, 43, 45, 76–7, 123–7, 133, 135 n.39, 139, 141, 146, 152

see also genre; collection under narrative; works by author, title eyes see under body fableor see under professional under performer fabliau 4, 8–9, 49 n.30, 123–40, 142–3, 146–50, 161–2, 223 audience of 123–40 manuscript 127–8, 136 see also comic; genre; fabliau by author, title face see under body farce 23, 140, 149 Faroe Islands/Faroese 187 feast 1, 17, 20, 168–9, 176 chivalric 103–19 religious Pentecost 1 of Saint Denis 104–5 of Saint John the Baptist 130 see also Good Friday secular coronation 169 May Day 130 see also event under performance festival book 104, 116 fiddle 188, 191 see also instrument; vielle under instrument Filippo Ceffi 42 see also rhetoric Fiori e vita di filosafi 45–6 Flamenca 80–1, 88, 144, 168, 176 Flanders/Flemish 104, 163 Floire et Blancheflor 7, 78–81 Floris et Liriope 7, 74 see also Robert de Blois flute see under instrument Foley, John M. 195 La folie Tristan 2, 220–2 fool 52–3, 132 n.28 see also professional under performer formula 2, 20–1, 24, 126, 148, 170, 174–5, 184, 212, 217 formulaic 6, 10, 24, 129, 170, 176, 194 see also oral features of under narrative; orality fox see Renart France/French 1, 6–11, 28, 35, 49 n.30, 61–7, 77 n.7, 83, 89, 104, 123, 140, 144, 157, 162–9, 176–7, 199, 209–22 see also Anglo-Norman; under epic; under romance; works by author, title Francesco da Barberino 50 Flores novellarum 45

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Franciscan 124 friar 43, 123, 125 Froissart, Jean 32–3 Les chroniques 32 L’espinette amoureuse 7, 81 gag 126, 139 garden see under space under performance Garin Le chevalier qui fist parler les cons 135 n.40 Le prestre qui menga mores 124 Gaunt, John of 37 Gautier de Coinci Dou cierge qui descendi au jongleour 210, 213 Les miracles de Nostre Dame 7, 141, 143, 149–50, 209–10, 213, 215, 218–19 De sainte Leocade 210, 214–15, 218–19 La vie de sainte Cristine 143 Gautier le Leu Du con 129 n.17 Connebert 128–9, 134 Des cons 129 n.17 Des deus vilains 129–30 Le prestre taint 128 n.16, 130 Le sot chevalier 129 n.17 La veuve 124 gender see female under audience; mixed male and female under audience; women under book; female under listener; female under performer; male under performer; female under reader; women under romance; women (as characters); female under writer genre 3, 7–9, 16, 28, 33, 38, 52, 73, 85, 128, 136, 141–2, 215 see also works by type (e.g.: cantari; chronicle; cyfarwyddyd; drama; epic; exemplum; fabliau; festival book; joke; lyric; miracle; novella; pious tale; proverb; riddle; rímur; ritmus; romance; saga; saint’s life; sermon; ymddiddan) Geoffrey of Monmouth Historia Regum Britanniae (Brut y Brenhinedd) 18 Geraint Son of Erbin (Geraint fab Erbin) 17, 19, 26 Gerbert de Montreuil La continuation de Perceval 106 n.10 Le roman de la Violette 106 n.10 Germany/German/Germanic 11, 77 n.7, 107, 145, 163, 168–76, 183–92, 199, 214, 220–2

see also Anglo-Saxon; under epic; Iceland; Norway; under romance; works by author, title gesture (physical) 3–5, 8–11, 24, 116, 125, 131–3, 135 n.39, 137–9, 140 n.50, 146–50, 153, 168, 176–7, 181, 185, 187–8, 193 n.2, 195, 209, 215, 217–18, 220 see also body; movement; under music; under rhetoric Giovanni da Viterbo Liber de regimine civitatum 42 see also rhetoric giullari 6, 43 see also professional under performer Gollancz, Israel 30–1 Gombert et les deus clers 142 see also Jean Bodel Good Friday 152 Gospel 136 see also Bible Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan 167–8, 214, 216, 220–2 Gower, John 38 Confessio Amantis 196 Tale of Florent 196–7 Gracial 145 n.17 see also Adgar grammar 7, 21, 62, 64–7, 69, 71 see also word-grouping Greece/Greek 62, 169 see also antiquity Griselda 54–6 Grocheio, Johannes de 177 Gsteiger, Manfred 32 Guido Faba Parlamenta et epistole 42 see also rhetoric Guidotto da Bologna 42 see also rhetoric Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun Le roman de la rose 86–7 Guillaume le Normand Le prestre et Alison 130 n.21 Guinevere, Queen xvi, 1, 8, 77, 78 n.11, 103, 105–9, 111, 115–16 hagiography see saint’s life Haisiau Les quatre prestres 140 Les trois dames qui troverent l’anel 134 hand see under body; see also gesture Haneray 36 harp see under instrument harpist see musician

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INDEX

Havelok 169 hear/hearer 1, 4, 9, 31, 32, 108 invitation to hear 131, 133, 196 refusal to hear 147 see also audience; aurality; hearing; listen; listener; auditory under memory; aloud under reading hearing 110, 125, 148–9, 162–3, 181–3, 186–90, 223 a work spoken or sung 10, 23, 94–6, 101–2, 149, 155–6, 222 a written work 21, 30–3, 38, 76–7, 159, 194 see also audience; aurality; hear; listen; listener; auditory under memory; aloud under reading Heinrich der Glichezaere 163 herald 32, 34–8 hermit 147, 149–53 Heusler, Andreas 170 Historia Regum Britanniae (Brut y Brenhinedd) 18 historical figure (as character) 8, 104–5, 106 n.10, 109–16, 183 Holland/Dutch 163, 214 home 6, 79 see also space under performance Homeric diction 20 horn 109 see also instrument La housse partie 124, 143 Hucbald of St. Amand 190 Hues Piaucele Estormi 140 Hugh of Reggio 43 see also preacher; rhetoric hymn 149, 184 “Hymn to Saint Magnus” 184

drum 115, 138 dulcimer 93 dutar 173 fiddle 188, 191 flute 10, 188, 191, 191–2, 215 harp 1, 10, 93–4, 101–2, 168, 181, 188–91, 189, 204, 215 horn 109 liuto 47 lute 47, 49, 172–4 psaltery 93–4 tabor 115, 119 tanbur 172 trumpet 115, 119 vielle 1, 10, 93–4, 144, 149, 204, 213, 215–17, 219, 221 viuola 47, 49 n.30 accompaniment 1, 4, 9, 49 n.30, 90, 93–4, 100–2, 148, 164, 168, 172–6, 186, 188–92, 204, 211, 213, 215, 217, 221 bow/bowed 49 n.30, 174, 191–2, 204, 215–16 stringed 1, 9, 93, 172–4, 176, 189–92, 215 tuning 168, 173–5, 189, 190–2, 217 instrumentalist see musician interlude 8, 103–19, 186 musical 173, 176 interpolation, narrative 90–1, 99–102, 106, 111, 113–14, 135 n.40 interpunct 62, 64 intertextuality 10, 78, 128, 193, 200 n.24, 205 intonation see voice Ireland/Irish 15, 20–1, 63, 65, 170, 221 irony 9, 123, 125, 132, 140 Iseult/Isolda 85, 89, 162, 214, 220–2 see also Tristan Italy/Italian 6, 7, 11, 41–58, 77 n.7, 168 n.5

Iacopo Cessole Ludus scaccorum 45 Iceland/Icelandic 10, 19, 182–7, 192 see also Edda imitation 7, 35, 38, 73, 79, 81, 87, 146 see also reenactment under enactment immorality see morality improvisation 3, 4, 8–11, 30, 39, 51, 61, 90, 187, 190–1, 196, 200–3, 212, 215 Inferno see under Dante insertion see under lyric instrument, musical 94, 149, 168, 176 bagpipes 51 bell 219 cembalo 47 cithara 189 dombra 172–4

Ja Rule 27 Jacques Bretel Le tournoi de Chauvency 104, 116 Jacques Dinant Ars arengandi 42 see also rhetoric Jacques de Vitry 146 Sermones feriales et communes 123 Sermones vulgares 123–4 Jean Bodel 143 Brunain la vache au prestre 124, 128 n.15 Congés 141 Le couvoiteus et l’envieus 124, 142 Les deus chevaus 128, 142 Gombert et les deus clers 142 Le jeu de saint Nicolas 141 Le vilain de Bailluel 142

251

INDEX

Jean le Bel 33 Jean de Meun Le roman de la rose 86–7 jester 16, 35 see also professional under performer Jesus Christ 54 Le jeu de saint Nicolas 141 see also Jean Bodel Joachim de Fiore 144 Joan of Kent 35 John of Gaunt 37 John of Salisbury 38 joke 6, 32, 35, 43, 48, 51–2, 56, 132 n.27, 135 jongleur see under professional under performer Jouglet 124, 125–6, 139 n. 35 joust/jousting 8, 103–19, 135 n.40 Le jugement des cons 134 juggler 125–6 see also professional under performer Juitel 149 see also La vie des Pères Kammen, Shira 216 Karakalpak 174–5 see also Turkic Kazakh 174 see also Turkic King Horn 172 Kirghiz 169–70, 174–7 see also Turkic kiss/kissing 75, 77, 78 n.11, 79–81, 88, 213 liturgical kiss of peace 80 knight 1, 15, 18, 23, 26, 36–7, 92, 101, 104–19, 135 n.40, 137, 152, 201 Knight of the Lion see Le chevalier au lion under Chrétien character of see Robert, Count of Artois Kongrat see Alpamish Lacy, Norris J. 126, 140 The Lady of the Fountain (Iarlles y Ffynnon [Owain]) 15, 17, 19, 26 lai/lay 49 n.30, 85, 90–1, 93, 95, 100–1, 162, 167–8, 170, 210–11 Langland, William 33 Piers Plowman 32–3 Latin 16, 41–3, 50–1, 56, 62–4, 66, 71, 97, 167, 184, 222 see also antiquity; rhetoric; authors by name; works by title laughter 4, 35, 50, 51, 53, 81, 96, 112, 125, 128, 132, 135, 137, 140, 142, 157 see also comic lay 42, 123, 141, 145, 150, 213

letter (of alphabet) 62–6, 71, 195 letter/epistle 18, 55, 85, 95, 99, 115, 117–19, 145, 159–60 Levy, Brian J. 8–9, 123, 146, 150 n.46, 151 Lianja 19 Liber exemplorum 124 Libro de li exempli 45 lion see under animal Lionel of Antwerp 39 lips see under body listen/listening 10, 24, 95–6, 111–12, 178, 183, 196, 221 invitations to 156–8 see also audience; aurality; hear; hearing; listener; auditory under memory; aloud under reading listener 9, 84, 87, 149–50, 182, 188, 214 female 135 interactions with 16, 87, 133–4, 188, 222 knowledge of 24, 186, 188 reaction of 6, 25–6, 51, 77, 143, 148, 168, 181, 187, 198, 212 storyteller and 2, 95–6, 161, 186 see also audience; aurality; hear; hearing; listen; auditory under memory; aloud under reading literacy/literate 30–2, 38–9, 41–2, 50, 55, 57, 78, 83, 87–8, 91, 95, 97, 144, 187 see also reader; reading Lord, Albert 20, 30, 170 lute 47, 49, 172–4 see also instrument Luttrell Psalter 138 lyric 2, 10, 99, 175, 178, 186–7, 212, 216 insertion 90–1, 99–102, 170, 174 refrain 91, 143, 174, 175, 214 see also singing; song Mabinogi/Mabinogion 6, 15, 17–20, 22, 24–6 magician 17 see also professional under performer makeup 133 n.30, 134, 135 n.39 see also costume Malaquin 147 see also La vie des Pères Manas 174–5 see also epic; Turkic manaschi 175–6 see also professional under performer manuscript 5, 7, 17, 19, 25, 31, 46, 50, 57–8, 61–7, 70–1, 126–30, 133, 136, 143, 160, 162, 183–4, 187, 193, 197–202, 205, 213 compilation 5, 124, 127 copyist see scribe

252

INDEX

illuminated/illustrated 1, 2, 61, 132, 143 minstrel manuscript 61–2, 127–8, 199 page layout 7, 61, 71 variant see textual under variant vernacular 7, 57, 61–71 see also word-grouping; mise en texte under writing; List of manuscripts Marie de France Les lais Guigemar 210 marionette 140 n.50 Mass, Catholic 80 May Day 130 see also feast meal 9, 101–2, 128, 136, 156, 219 see also event under performance melody see under music memory 6, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 26, 126, 148, 183, 186, 187 auditory 62, 65 commemoration 44, 104 memorate 15 memorisation/memorize 24, 55, 126, 128, 136, 156–7, 212 memory-friendly 6, 19–21, 87, 137, 148, 163, 212 performance from memory 1, 3–4, 9, 10, 11, 73, 156, 193–208 performance from memory or a manuscript 16, 31, 49, 61, 111, 157, 160, 163 slip 196, 200, 202 messenger 95, 97, 100 Metaphorae 123 n.1 see also Nicolas metrical feature/form 4, 7, 20, 69, 148, 173, 178, 187–8, 197, 212 see also music; rhyme Le meunier et les deus clers 132 Middle English see England; Middle English under romance mime 28, 37 see also professional under performer miming/mimicry 3–4, 28, 37, 116, 125, 131–2, 137, 139–40, 178, 221 miniature see illuminated under manuscript minstrel/minstrelsy see professional under performer see also minstrel manuscript under manuscript miracle 9, 142, 149, 212–14, 218–19, 222 play 143 tale 142 of the Virgin 143 Le miracle de Théophile 141–2

see also Rutebeuf Miracle par personages 142, 145 n.17 Miracles de Nostre Dame see under Gautier de Coinci Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages 149–50 miscellany see collection under narrative misperformance 6, 27–39, 150 see also performance modes, musical see modes under music D’un moigne 148 n.35 monastery/monastic 63, 65, 182, 218 monk 133, 142, 145, 150–2, 219 monody 211–12, 215 see also music monologue 15, 91, 111, 147, 153 Monsonégo, Simone 66–7, 71 morality/moralization 5, 25–6, 43–6, 74, 77, 79, 123–5, 127, 132, 141–2, 146–7 see also ethical concern motif musical 175, 204 narrative see under narrative mouth see under body mouvance 193, 205, 210 see also variant; version (of story) movement (physical) 4, 8, 43, 75, 104, 109, 115, 132, 139, 152, 168, 176, 195, 203, 215–16, 221 see also body; dance; gesture music/musical 3, 9–11, 27, 47, 50–2, 90, 93–5, 136, 148–9, 164, 167–8, 173–4, 176–8, 182, 184–92, 194–5, 204–5, 209, 211, 213–17, 220, 222, 223 accompaniment see under instrument ambitus 173–5 Baroque 182 beat 173–4, 188 form 4, 8 gesture 10, 181, 185, 187, 191 instrument see instrument melisma/melismatic 173, 175, 186 melody 10, 49, 168, 173–5, 177–8, 184–8, 191–2, 204, 217–18, 220 modes 10, 181, 185–92, 216 monody 211–12, 215 motif 175, 204 notation 10, 182, 184, 187–8, 213, 217 recording 9, 164, 186, 200, 204–5, 211, 218, 220 polyphony 184, 187 see also tvisöngur score 186 tone 186, 189–90 see also musical under variant; voice

253

INDEX

musician 10, 16–17, 93, 105, 115, 143, 148 n.36, 174–5, 184, 188, 191–2, 195 see also instrument; singer; singing mythology 10, 17, 183 name of author 128–30 of character 4, 23, 48, 57, 75, 89, 103 n.3, 107, 108–9, 111, 115, 163, 171 place name 6, 20, 57, 130, 183 stories about naming 20 see also onomastic narrative collection/collected tales 6, 9, 17–18, 45–7, 50, 55–8, 124 courtly 45, 127, 136, 162, 167 episode/episodic 1, 6, 8, 18–20, 24–5, 124, 126, 152, 164, 213, 220–1 motif 6, 51, 54, 103, 106, 108–9, 172, 223 oral features of 8, 18–21, 31, 67, 140, 148, 160, 170, 194, 212 plot 9, 98, 109, 113, 134, 137, 149, 172, 202–3 prose 6, 17, 19–20, 33, 45, 66–7, 85, 89–90, 100, 148, 170, 174, 177, 212 repertory 6–9, 43, 45–6, 48–50, 53, 57–8 repetition 4, 6, 19–21, 49, 91, 148, 201 verse 10, 33–7, 61–5, 69, 71, 73, 85–6, 90, 96, 100–3, 111, 130, 143, 148, 151, 170–8, 183, 193–6, 209, 212, 214, 222 decasyllable 69, 165 octosyllable 7, 9, 69, 143, 148, 156, 165 see also metrical feature; rhyme narrator 29, 47, 53–4, 56, 79, 81–2, 84, 125, 148–9, 153, 163–5, 168, 176, 178, 203–4, 215, 217, 220 news-bearer 34, 37 Nicolas Bozon 123–5, 135 n.39 Metaphorae 123 n.1 Noiret, Philippe 164 Noomen, Willem 126, 129, 131–2, 136 Norway/Norwegian/Norse 10, 182–3, 185 notation see under music novella 6–7, 43–58 Il novellino 46 obscenity 9, 37, 48, 51, 53, 73, 125, 129, 132 n.27, 135–7, 139, 142–3, 147, 221 occasion see event under performance see also banquet; feast; meal Occitan 80, 144, 168, 210 octosyllable see under verse under narrative Oculus pastoralis 42 see also rhetoric Odin 182, 185 Odysseus 171–2

“Oh My Darling Clementine” 186 oïr 126, 148–9, 157, 159 see also audience; aurality; hear; hearing; listen; listener; auditory under memory Old French see France onomastic 6, 18–20 see also name; tag under speech opening, narrative 19 n. 20, 20, 37, 128–30, 133, 135 n.40, 157, 163, 197 n.19, 210 see also prologue orality/oral 5, 6, 9, 18, 21 n.39, 22, 39, 95–7, 131, 140, 169, 178, 197, 205, 210 composition 30–1, 89–96, 99–102 and literacy 30, 32, 38, 91, 95–7 source 9, 18, 23, 91–5, 140, 169, 194, 202, 218 and textuality 6, 41, 57, 62, 63, 65, 91, 140 tradition 4, 8, 41, 167–78, 181–92, 195 living 178, 186, 212 vs. written narrative 3, 91, 95–6, 140, 144, 161, 169, 194–200, 210, 218 see also aurality; oral under epic; oral features of under narrative; oral under performance Ovid/Ovidian 76, 78 n.8, 79, 88 Owain see The Lady of the Fountain pagan 79, 182–4, 190 Page, Christopher 190 Pálsson, Heimir 186–7 parody 18, 32, 51, 54, 140 Parry, Milman 20, 170 Passion play 210 patristic text 58, 141, 150 patron/patroness/patronage 4, 6, 28, 31–2, 36–8, 92–4, 97, 150 n.46 misdirected patronage 6, 28, 33 see also audience pause see under performance pencerdd 16 see also professional under performer Penitentia 37 Les perdriz 124, 125, 138–9 Peredur 17, 19 performance aside 18, 126, 130 n.21, 132 n.27, 133, 137, 139, 149, 219 contemporary performance of medieval narrative 1, 5, 10, 210, 213, 217–18, 220, 223 contemporary reconstruction of medieval performance 10, 67, 181–2, 186, 188, 191–2 courtly 1, 6, 104, 116 cue 108, 203

254

INDEX

dramatic 3, 4, 8, 9, 15, 23–5, 73, 103–16, 124–5, 142–53, 163–5, 168, 176–8 see also drama; dramatization of under emotion; direct under speech event 4, 5, 9, 16, 26, 178, 193, 195 see also banquet; feast; meal live 4, 10, 124, 166, 181, 199–200, 202, 205, 220, 223 misperformance 6, 27–39, 150 mode 5–7, 9, 18, 31, 56, 61, 63, 73, 85, 89, 93–5, 100–2, 113, 139, 141, 143, 175–7, 213 see also aurality; drama; enactment; performance from under memory; reading; recitation; singing; performance from under writing omission in 200–3 oral 3, 6–9, 21, 32, 35, 41, 53, 57–8, 61–71, 89–102, 148, 155–66, 168–78, 181–92, 193–208, 209–22 pace of 152, 200 pause in 4, 70, 107–8, 115, 132, 136, 173 private 4, 42, 46, 90–2, 99–102 public see audience; listen; listener; under space under performance; under reading; under speech re-performance 73–88 see also reenactment under enactment request for silence in 4, 8, 18, 156, 164 space/location castle 1, 36, 102, 109, 123 chamber 100–1 church 80 city 43, 100, 130 commune 6, 41 court xvi, 1, 39, 50 n.32, 85, 89, 92–4, 97, 101–2, 114, 144, 164–5 see also court (as social group) field 182 fireside 156 garden ii, 7, 11, 83–4 grandstand 105, 107, 110, 115, 117, 119 home 6, 79 horseback 96, 101, 105, 113, 115, 182 hut 182 jousting lists 115, 117, 119 museum 216 pagan shrine 182 private 6, 84, 85, 92, 100, 136 n.41 public 6, 84, 85, 92 pulpit 123, 125, 127, 140, 146 room 16, 101–2, 164 standards, decline of 6, 37 successful 6, 26, 28, 30, 151, 158, 168, 212–15

traditions analogous to medieval narrative 5, 9, 137 n.45, 223 variant in see under variant see also body; costume; entertainment; gesture; improvisation; interlude; performer; procession; prop; stage; from written text under writing performer age of 28 mature/old 6, 31–2, 38 young 6, 30–2 amateur 4, 6, 8, 16, 33, 43, 71, 90–4, 97, 100–2, 128 n.13, 156 apprentice/apprenticeship 98 n.8, 128 contemporary 1, 5, 9–10, 21, 164, 178, 181–2, 186, 191–2, 210–11, 218–19, 223 courtly 7, 115 female 7, 8, 49 n.31, 51, 89–102, 107, 116 male 89–92, 97, 101–2, 115 poet-performer 32 see also author professional 1, 4, 6, 8, 16–17, 28, 43, 49 n.31, 62–3, 71, 84–5, 89–102, 104, 125, 156, 184, 186, 204, 223 acrobat 168 bakhshi 172, 174–5, 177 bard 16, 18, 169–70, 174, 177–8, 183–4, 189, 192 bardd stafell 16 bardd teulu 16 buffoon 16, 28 canterini 43 cantimpanche 43 cerddor 16 chwedl 15 conteur/conteor 123, 127 cyfarwydd 15, 17–18 dicitori 6, 43 dwarf 89, 95–7, 100, 102, 104–5, 107, 115 fableor 128–9, 130 n.19, 133, 140 favellatori 93 fool 52–3, 132 n.28 giullari 6, 43 jester 16, 35 joculator 16 jongleur 33, 35, 37, 123, 125–33, 135–40, 142–4, 150–2, 165, 213, 215, 219 juggler 125–6 magician 17 manaschi 175–6 menestreus 130 n.21 mime 28, 37

255

INDEX

Performer cont. professional cont. ministeralis 97 minstrel 8, 30, 32, 73, 85, 89–102, 114, 125, 130 n.21, 150, 153, 162–3, 168, 174, 176, 194, 196, 199, 213, 219 novellatori 43 novellieri 43 pencerdd 16 romanzieri 43 tumbler/tumbeor 17, 151–2 uomini di corte 43 reader 50, 55, 57, 73–88, 89, 95–6, 99–102, 150–2 repertory of 6–8, 43, 45–6, 48–50, 53, 57–8, 127–8, 140, 162, 178, 182, 184–5, 191, 209, 211, 218 solo 4, 92, 94 n.9, 100–1, 168, 183 see also performer’s interaction with under audience; entertainer; performance; preacher; singer Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase 181 n.1, 205 n.28, 223 Le pescheor de Pont seur Seine 130, 135 Petrarch, Francesco Seniles 55, 56 Philippe de Thaon 210 Pierre de Sygelar 219 Piers Plowman 32 see also Langland pious tale 5, 8–9, 141–53, 223 piper see musician Piramus 74–6, 79, 167 place see space under performance plot see under narrative polyphony see under music popular romance 195–205 see also romance pornography 73, 136 see also eroticism; obscenity Le povre clerc 128 n.13 prayer 142–4, 146, 149–53, 176, 219 Le pré tondu 124 preacher/preaching 6, 9, 43–5, 49 n.30, 123, 125–6, 133, 136, 141, 144–6, 149, 153, 157 artes praedicandi 123 see also sermon prelector/prelection see professional under reader; aloud under reading pre-literate see literacy Le prestre comporté 140 Le prestre crucefié 137 n.47 Le prestre et Alison 130 n.21

Le prestre et le leu 124 Le prestre mis au lardier 124 Le prestre qui menga mores 124 see also Garin Le prestre taint 128 n.16, 130 see also Gautier le Leu Le preudome qui recolt son compere de noier 124 private see under performance; under space under performance; under reader; under reading procession 108, 114–15 proclisis see word-grouping profane literature see secular prologue 28, 33, 37, 127, 129, 131, 133, 143, 146–8, 155, 158, 163–4 see also opening prop ii, 4, 9, 109, 115, 125–6, 132–3, 136, 138, 149, 153, 159–60 imaginary 125, 132 Propos rustiques 9, 156 prose see prose under narrative Prose Lancelot 77–8, 106, 108 Provence/Provençal 80, 144, 168, 210 proverb 6, 43–4, 133 n.32, 146 psaltery 93–4 see also instrument public see audience; listen; listener; under space under performance; under reading; under speech pun 125, 129 n.17, 132, 214 puppet 140 n.50 Les quatre prestres 140 see also Haisiau Les quatre sohais saint Martin 131 n.26, 132 n.27 Radloff, Wilhelm 169, 170 rap 27–8, 32 reader 3, 5, 8, 11, 41, 46, 53, 55–6, 58, 62, 85, 99–102, 108, 150, 161, 178, 195–6, 214 female 18 n.17, 53, 79, 81–6, 88, 141, 222 literate/illiterate 187, 209 see also literacy private/individual 30, 39, 46, 74, 81, 83–4, 87, 199 professional 7, 62–71, 84–5, 150–2 social class of 7, 19, 50, 52, 85 vernacular 50, 55, 195 young 165 see also audience; book; reenactment under enactment; performer; reading; reception; reader of under romance

256

INDEX

reading 4, 5, 10, 18, 50, 61, 67, 73, 89–91, 99–102, 157, 178, 188, 195, 214, 222 aloud 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 18, 21–2, 30–3, 38–9, 59–71, 73, 74, 77, 80, 83, 85, 95–6, 100–2, 111, 115, 143, 157 from book or letter 30–3, 38–9, 73–88, 89, 95–6, 102, 115, 118, 126, 159–60 devotional 80, 84, 88, 136, 143 erotic 5, 7, 73–88 private 2, 3, 5, 39, 46, 63, 73, 83–5, 90, 223 public 3, 16, 30–3, 38–9, 46, 65, 82 ruminatio 70–1 silent 2, 3, 7, 23, 41, 63–5, 70, 73 see also audience; book; reenactment under enactment; mode under performance; reader; reception reception 4, 18, 21, 28, 39, 54–7, 61, 95–8, 108, 112, 133, 196, 221–2 see also audience; aurality; hear; hearing; listen; listener; reader; reading recitation 3, 16, 32, 61–4, 67, 73, 128–32, 136, 140, 170, 174, 176 see also mode under performance recording see under music; video The Red Book of Hergest 17 n.13 refrain see under lyric religious/religion see bishop; Church; clerk; pious tale; preacher; saint’s life Renart/Reynard the Fox 2, 3, 8, 94 n.8, 136 n.44, 155–66, 223 see also animal; Le roman de Renart Renaut de Beaujeu Le Bel Inconnu 69 Renieur 146 see also La vie des Pères re-performance 73–88 see also reenactment under enactment repertory see under narrative; under performer Rheingold 187 rhetoric/rhetorical 8, 23–4, 27, 32, 38, 131 n.25, 133, 146, 161, 195 gesture 188, 215 question 126, 148 treatises 42 see also works by author, title Rhetorica ad Herennium 32 rhyme 4, 10, 23, 175, 187, 197–202, 212 couplet 201–3 end rhyme 201 tail rhyme 197 see also metrical feature; verse under narrative rhythm/rhythmic 45, 69, 71, 147, 173, 174, 197, 198, 200, 204, 216, 219 pattern 4, 7, 10, 67, 199, 204

Richard II 37 riddle 6, 25, 43 rímur 185–7 see also Iceland ritmus 49 n.31 Robbins, Rossell Hope 30 Robert, Count of Artois 8, 104–5, 109, 111–15, 119 Robert de Blois 74–7, 79 Floris et Liriope 7, 74–6, 77 Robert Grosseteste 38 Robert Mannyng de Brunne 33, 38 Story of England 33 Roland cycle see La chanson de Roland rolet see script Le roman de Fauvel 114, 210 Le roman de Flamenca see Flamenca Le roman du Hem 8, 103–16 Le roman de Renart 2, 9, 94 n.8, 155–66 see also Renart Le roman de la rose 86–7 Le roman de Troie 69, 106 romance allegorical 89, 95–7, 99 erotic reading of 7, 73–88 French 73–88, 89–102, 103–16, 220 genre 4, 7, 73, 85–8, 104 German 77 n.7, 167–8, 220 inserted (in Ysaÿe le Triste) 95–9, 102 Middle English 169, 172, 193–205 misreading of 78 performance of 107, 111, 115–16, 195 by minstrel 73, 85 musical 194 on website 223 from written text 73–88, 89, 95–6, 99, 102 popular 195–205 prose 85, 89 reader of 73–88, 89, 95–6, 99, 102, 103–16 reading aloud of 8, 29, 31–3, 73–88, 89, 95–9, 102 romance-style epic 174–6, 178 staging of episodes fom 7, 109–11, 116 verse 73, 90, 102, 193–4, 198 see also verse under narrative Welsh 18–19, 26 women reading 8, 81–3, 88 writing 95–9, 102 see also under Arthurian; autobiography; genre; authors by name; works by author, title rubric 4, 22, 61 see also manuscript

257

INDEX

Russia/Russian 169, 177 Rutebeuf 131, 143 Le miracle de Théophile 141–2 Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne 141–2 Le sacristain 140 Saenger, Paul 62, 64, 87 n.20 saga 19, 170 saint’s life 9, 33, 37, 87, 141–50, 162, 184, 214–19 Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne 141–2 see also Rutebeuf Salter, Elizabeth 35–6 salvation 33, 150 Sarrasin Le roman du Hem 8, 103–19 satire 37, 146 Scandinavia 1, 184 scatology 128 n.12, 135, 142 Scattergood, John 36 Scheidegger, Jean R. 159–60, 164 score 186 see also music Scotland/Scots/Scottish 165, 187 scribe 7, 22, 58, 63–7, 71, 127, 160, 183–4, 198–9, 218 book hand 57 as reader 7, 63–4, 71, 127 script (for performance) 4, 37, 126, 136, 138, 220 scriptorium 65, 184 scriptura continua see word-grouping scriptura continua interrupta 64–5 see also word-separation secular 6, 33, 64, 84, 88, 125, 144, 147, 184, 211–12 Le segretain moine 133 Sequentia 182, 185, 187, 191–2 see also Bagby sermon 9, 21, 43 n.12, 44, 123, 125, 138, 141, 144–8, 150, 152, 157 mock-homily 123, 129 see also genre; preacher Sermones feriales et communes 123 see also Jacques de Vitry Sermones vulgares 123–4 see also Jacques de Vitry sex/sexuality 51–4, 73–88, 135–8, 138, 142, 148, 163, 212 Shakespeare, William 5 Shareshull, William 35–6 silence 32, 43 n.9, 132, 151 request for see under performance singer 9, 30, 43 n.9, 50, 169, 172–4, 177–8, 181, 186–8, 210–11, 215–19

see also performer; singing; song; voice singing/sing/sung 1–2, 9, 10, 16, 33, 47, 49, 50 n.32, 90–6, 100–2, 105, 115–16, 119, 148 n.36, 149, 151, 167–78, 181–92, 204, 209–22 see also singer; song; voice Sir Tristrem 33 slapstick 142 Slav/Slavic 20, 170 sleight-of-hand 125 smile 77, 133, 138 see also body song 3, 4, 8, 43, 47, 49–50, 75, 90–4, 100–2, 162–3, 167, 175–7, 181–92, 200, 209–22 chanson 90, 92–6, 100–2, 209 chant 49, 90, 100, 181 terma 172 vernacular 6, 47, 50 see also epic; lyric; singer; singing; voice Le sot chevalier 129 n.17 see also Gautier le Leu sound (in performance) 4, 10, 23, 107–8, 110, 144, 163, 177, 181–90, 209–18, 221 Spearing, A. C. 38 spectator 82, 84 veoir 126 see also audience Speculum laicorum 124–5 speech 9, 41–3, 50, 62 n.5, 96, 142, 147, 168, 175, 186, 215, 217 direct 4, 8–9, 21, 22 n.40, 107, 111, 115, 125, 132 n.27, 135, 149, 160–1, 163, 221 see also dramatic under performance public/consuetudo 41–2 tag (identifying speaker) 6, 19, 22 see also declamation; dialogue; voice stage/staging 43 n.9, 215 contemporary 10–11, 164–6, 203, 220 imagined 123–40 medieval 8, 43 n.9, 109, 127 n.10, 140, 161, 163, 203, 215 see also costume; drama; prop stage business 9, 125, 136, 138–9 stichic melodies 173–5, 177 Story of England 33 see also Robert Mannyng de Brunne storyteller see performer storytelling see performance style 6, 18, 23, 47, 170, 173–5, 177, 186, 192, 213, 216 Suffolk, Wingfield family of 36–7 Summa predicantium 37 syllable 7, 23, 62, 72 n.23, 173, 188

258

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taboo 50, 53, 135, 137, 139 tabor 115, 119 see also instrument tag line 197, 201–3 tail rhyme 197 see also rhyme Taylor, Andrew 196, 199 teller see performer terma 172 see also song Thaïs 147 see also La vie des Pères Thisbe 74–6, 79, 167 Thomas Tristan 220–2 Thomas de Cabham Penitential 37 Thurau, Rainer 189 Tommaso Gozzadini Fiori di virtù 45 tone (voice) 132, 139, 142, 145, 147, 148, 149, 193 n.2, 195, 205 n.28, 221 see also under music tournament 8, 103–4, 106–8, 111, 113–14, 116, 134–5 see also theme in tournament under Arthurian; chivalry; Le roman du Hem The Tournament of Tottenham 200 Le tournoi de Chauvency 104, 116 translation 24 n.54, 24 n.57, 56, 187 use of in performance 11, 145, 157, 159, 214, 220 transmission of narrative see under writing Les tresces 133 Trigg, Stephanie 32, 35 Tristan 85, 89, 96, 110–12 legend of 161–2, 214, 220–2 as storyteller 2 see also La folie Tristan; Tristan under Gottfried von Strassburg; Iseult; Sir Tristrem; Tristan under Thomas; Tristan en prose; Ysaÿe le Triste Tristan en prose 220–2 Les trois boçus 132, 140 Les trois chanoinesses de Couloigne 129 n.18, 135 Les trois dames qui troverent l’anel 124 see also under Haisiau Les trois meschines 134–5 troubadour 164–5, 186, 212 Trubert 126 Trugoy the Dove 27, 32 trumpet 115, 119 see also instrument

Le tumbeor Nostre Dame 141 tumbler 17, 151–2 see also professional under performer Turkic 9, 167, 169–72, 174–7 Turkmen 174–5, 177 see also Turkic Turville-Petre, Thorlac 36 tvisöngur 187 see also polyphony under music Tyson, Diana 36–7 Uighur 174 see also Turkic Ulrich von Liechtenstein Frauendienst 103 n.3, 115 n.26 Uzbek 170, 172–5, 177–8 see also Turkic Vale, Juliet 104, 111 Le vallet aus douze fames 129 n.19 Van Huene, Friedrich 191, 192 variant/variance/variation 91, 170, 174, 186 musical 173, 191 in performance 9–10, 90, 134, 147, 156, 173, 177, 188, 191, 193–206 textual 5, 10, 65, 71, 129, 134, 193–206 vernacular 6, 7, 21, 38, 43, 45, 47, 49 n.30, 50, 55, 57, 71, 123, 141, 143–4, 152, 195, 199 see also literacy; under manuscript; under reader; under song; works by author, title verse see under narrative; see also lyric version (of story) 56, 67, 124–5, 129, 130, 133, 135 n.39, 142, 160, 170, 174, 200, 204 n.26, 205, 210, 220–2 La veuve 124 see also Gautier le Leu video 181 n.1, 205 n.28, 218, 223 La vie des Pères 9, 141, 143–50 Crapaud 149 Juitel 149 Malaquin 147 Renieur 146 Thaïs 147 La vie de saint Edmond le Rei 33 La vie de sainte Cristine 143 see also Gautier de Coinci La vie et gestes du Prince Noir 6, 32, 34–9 La vieille truande 132 vielle see under instrument Viking 191 Le vilain asnier 124 Le vilain de Bailleul 142 see also Jean Bodel

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Le vilain mire 124 Le vilain qui conquist paradis par plait 136 n.43 Vitz, Evelyn Birge 2 n.4, 18 n.17, 26, 73, 96 n.10, 143, 148, 169 n.8 vocalist see singer Vogul 177 voice/vocal 88, 151, 166, 178, 183–4, 186, 193, 216–17 characterisation by 8, 22, 131, 145, 163, 177 expressive quality of 9, 10, 47, 131, 132, 136, 139, 149, 153, 186, 195, 211, 216 and music 4, 195 of reader 7, 219 register 9, 173, 216 rhythm 147, 188, 195 sounds 186, 211, 217 speed 9, 177, 195 volume 9, 107–8, 110, 145, 147, 177, 195, 211 and writing 22, 25, 147, 211 see also polyphony under music; rhythm; singer; speech Wales/Welsh 1, 6, 15–18, 20, 23, 26, 167 Watriquet de Couvin Les trois chanoinesses de Couloigne 129 n.18, 135 The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell 10, 193–208 weeping 76, 112, 145, 153, 219 The White Book of Rhydderch 17 Wingfield family of Suffolk 36–7 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 28 women (as characters) 9, 23, 26, 52–4, 74–5, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89–102, 134–6, 147, 166, 198, 220

see also female under audience; mixed male and female under audience; women and under book; female under listener; female under performer; female under reader; women under romance; female under writer word-grouping 5, 7, 62–7, 69, 71 oral performance and 7, 61–71 word-separation 62–7, 70–1 wordplay 214, 221 writer 31–2, 38–9, 42, 95–7, 222 female 89–102 see also scribe; writing writing/written 1, 3–11, 17–18, 20–2, 30–2, 37, 39, 41–2, 50 n.32, 61–7, 85, 88 n.20, 89–102, 104, 116, 126–9, 130, 136, 140, 141, 144, 147–8, 184, 186–8, 213, 223 composition 20–2, 31, 96 mise en texte 61–71 performance from written text 6, 7, 18–21, 30–3, 38–9, 50, 67, 89–102, 126, 128, 130, 132, 136, 139, 141, 146, 148, 152, 160–1, 181, 189, 200, 213 transmission of narrative 95, 98 see also author; book; manuscript; scribe; under voice; writer Wynnere and Wastoure 6, 27–39 ymddiddan 15 Ysaÿe le Triste 8, 89–102 Yseut see Iseult Yvain see Le chevalier au lion under Chrétien Zaerr, Linda Marie 10, 193–208, 223 Ziolkowski, Jan 88 n.20 Zumthor, Paul 210, 213

List of manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 4 and 5 (The White Book of Rhydderch) 17 n.13 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Hamiltonian 90 (Decameron) 57 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 354 (fabliaux) 127 Chantilly, Musée Condé, 472 (Le Bel Inconnu) 69 Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, 2524 (Ysaÿe le Triste) 89 n.1 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana; 54, 32 (Apuleius) 50–1

Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Gaddiano reliqui 193 (novelle) 46 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Martelli (Conti di antichi cavalieri) 46 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Palatino 566 (novelle) 46 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Panciatichiano 32 (novelle) 45 n.20 Gotha, Herzoglich Gothaische Bibliothek, 668 (Ysaÿe le Triste) 89 n.1 London, British Library, Additional 31042 (Wynnere and Wastoure) 29 n.6

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London, British Library, Additional 42130 (Luttrell Psalter) 138 London, British Library, Harley 2253 (fabliaux) 127 n.10 London, British Library, Royal 20. B. XIX (Les Narbonnais) 70 Lyon, Palais des Arts, 59 (Anseïs de Cartage) 70 Nottingham, University Library, Middleton L.M. 6 (fabliaux) 129 n.17 Oxford, Bodleian, Rawlinson, C 86 (The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell) 197 n.18, 205–8 Oxford, Jesus College, CXI (The Red Book of Hergest) 17 n.13 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 146 (Roman de Fauvel) 114 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 819–820 (Miracles de Nostre Dame) 145 n.17, 149

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 837 (fabliaux) 127, 137 n.47 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 1433 (Le chevalier au lion) 1 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 1450 (Roman de Troie) 69 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 2173 (fabliaux) 127 n.10 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, It. 482 (Decameron) ii Princeton, Princeton University Library, Garrett 125 (Le chevalier au lion) xvi, 2 Reykjavik, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Gml. kgl. sml. 2365 4to (“Codex Regius”; Edda) 183 n.6, 184 Serrières (Ardèche), Private Collection, Annonay fragments (Cligès) 68, 68 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2542 (Tristan en prose) 220 n.29

261