medieval French literature – Elizabeth Eva Leach

Another Machaut patron revisited

A decade after I blogged about a web-only version of my paper proposing the Melun brothers as possible Machaut patrons, a revised version has been published in print.

The original version of this thesis was deemed unsuitable by Gesta because it was too much about music and unpublishable by JAMS because it was too little about music. Feeling that it was simply one of those articles that needed to be out there but which the current configuration of university disciplines was never going to permit to be in a peer-reviewed journal, I self-published it online.

That version has been relatively widely used and cited by Machaut scholars in the years since 2012, so when the editors of a festschrift for the great Machaut scholar Lawrence Earp asked me to offer something, I eventually thought that an updated version of this paper might work well. This volume has now appeared and is exceptionally handsome, with plenty of fully integrated colour reproductions, including in my chapter where they have dutifully put the two recto MS pages on book rectos so that a reader re-experiences at least some of what a reader of the manuscript being discussed would experience.

Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?’
in Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp, ed. Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 291–307.

Sadly I can’t offer an electronic offprint (I don’t have one) but I hope that you might be able to request this very beautiful book to your librarian if you want to read the many wonderful essays in it.

Podlecture 3: The Trouvères

General reading

Read the Grove Music Online entries on:

‘Troubadours, trouvères’ and then section II: Trouvère poetry.
‘Sources’ then go to Section III.4: French

For further reading and an overview of the secondary literature, see:

Doss-Quinby, Eglal. The Lyrics of the Trouvères: A Research Guide (1970-1990). Garland Medieval Bibliographies. New York and London: Garland, 1994.

Edition

Tischler, Hans. Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. 15 vols Neuhausen: American Institute of Musicology and Hänssler-Verlag, 1997.

On the music of the Trouvères

Epstein, Marcia Jeneth, ed. “Prions en chantant”: Devotional Songs of the Trouvères. Vol. 11, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva. “Do Trouvère Melodies Mean Anything?”. Music Analysis 38, no. 1-2 (2019): 3-46.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva. “Imagining the Un-Encoded: Staging Affect in Blondel de Nesle’s Mes cuers me fait conmencier.” Early Music 48, no. 1 (2020): 29–40.
Mason, Joseph W. “Structure and Process in the Old French jeu-parti.” Music Analysis 38, no. 1-2 (2019): 47-79.
O’Neill, Mary. Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
O’Sullivan, Daniel E. “Editing Melodic Variance in Trouvère Song.” Textual Cultures 3, no. 2 (2008): 54-70.
Page, Christopher. “Listening to the Trouvères.” Early Music 25 (1997): 638-59.
Quinlan, Meghan. “Can Melodies be Signs? Contrafacture and Representation in Two Trouvère Songs.” Early Music 48, no. 1 (2020): 13-27.
Saltzstein, Jennifer. “Cleric-Trouvères and the Jeux-Partis of Medieval Arras.” Viator 43 (2012): 147-64.

On manuscripts:

Haines, John. “Aristocratic Patronage and the Cosmopolitan Vernacular Songbook: The Chansonnier du Roi (M-trouv.) and the French Mediterranean.” Chap. 4 In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, edited by Jennifer Saltzstein. Brill’s Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 95-120. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, chapter 2.

For digital images, see:

https://eeleach.blog/2012/01/17/the-wonders-of-gallica-some-troubadour-and-trouvere-sources/

Some important trouvères:

Thibaut de Champagne, or use your Grove Online login
Gace Brulé, or use your Grove Online login
Blondel de Nesle, or use your Grove Online login
Richard de Fournival, or use your Grove Online login
Gautier d’Espinal, or use your Grove Online login
Gautier de Coinci, or use your Grove Online login and see a list of his MSS here
Moniot d’Arras, or use your Grove Online login
Jehan Bretel, or use your Grove Online login
Audefroi le Bastart, or use your Grove Online login
Adam de la Halle, or use your Grove Online login

CONTINUE TO LECTURE 4

Vernacular Song (list A) lecture 2

This podlecture continues a discussion of the troubadours, looking at song themes and genres.

Podlecture 2: The Troubadours 2

Good general reading

Cheyette, Fredric L. Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Paterson, Linda M. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100-c.1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Schulman, Nicole M. Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150-1231). London: Routledge, 2001.

Definitions of courtly love

Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Kay, Sarah. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Some history of the term ‘Courtly Love’ via Wikipedia, which has some useful links.
Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. 1936. NY: Oxford University Press, 1958.

On the role of music

Aubrey, Elizabeth. ‘References to Music in Old Occitan Literature’, Acta Musicologica 61/2 (1989): 110–149.
Levitsky, Ann. ‘Song Personified: The Tornadas of Raimon de Miraval’, Mediaevalia 39 (2018): 17–57.
McAlpine, Fiona. ‘Authenticity and the “Auteur”: The Songs of Hugues de Berzé’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 4 (1995), 1-12.
Peraino, Judith A. Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume De Machaut. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

As before (in podlecture 1):