Voice and Citation in the Chansonnier d'Urfé

Scholarship on troubadour lyric has always been haunted by the paradox that this poetry, lyric in the etymological sense of a text set to music and created for performance, is accessible to us only through manuscripts created in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after the phenomenon of troubadour composition had waned. These codices present a similar paradox: it is traditional to call them chansonniers, and yet of the 36 anthologies devoted primarily to this lyric that survive in more or less complete form, the seven fragments, and the four copies of lost anthologies, only two include musical notation.¹ The vast majority of these books transmit no music at all. The term chansonnier has therefore begun to occasion discontent among scholars; Stephen Nichols has even suggested that we stop using it altogether ("Art" 120).² In the present article, however, I shall argue that we need this word. The term chansonnier is indeed catachrestic when applied to books that contain no melody, and yet it is often the one thing that reminds us, silent readers of the twenty-first century accustomed to distinguishing verse from prose visually (how else does one identify free verse?), that troubadour lyric remained an acoustic phenomenon even when read from a manuscript. The term chansonnier therefore invites us to consider the conflicted and ambiguous relation that these books entertain with the voice and the letter.

In order to describe the relationship between voice, letter, and book, I shall offer an argument in two parts, the first general to all the troubadour chansonniers, the second specific to one. I shall begin by considering the different ways that written texts were read (that is, through what processes readers deciphered the words on the page). Reading practices may be inferred from definitions of the letter offered by late antique and medieval writers, from descriptions of the book or of reading by the same writers, and from the visual aspect of the written page. Since much research has already been done on this subject, I shall limit this opening section to a brief review of the findings most relevant to the present topic. (I shall also have occasion to discuss a few trends in recent scholarship on manuscripts that have, I believe, obscured the diverse ways in which the page could be read.) This historically broad discussion of reading will be followed by a more focused one, in which I shall use the historical and theoretical parameters developed in the first section to define the differences between purely aural reception of troubadour song (i.e., listening to a performance or public reading) and the hybrid aural/visual reception proper to reading a chansonnier oneself. Throughout these two sections, I shall construe the "voice" quite literally, as a phenomenon present, if not on the page, then above it, in any encounter with certain kinds of codices. Although no manuscript or other instance of writing can preserve the voice, there are various ways books exploit it, through the transcription of its sounds and through the repetition of those sounds that chansonniers require of the reader. In order to tease out the theoretical implications of the role of the voice in the reception of texts, I shall consider the temporality of signs (one means to distinguish acoustic from graphic signs, musical performance from the book), and the polyphonic or citational quality of any sign that has been successfully decoded in a culture where even reading involves giving voice to a text.³

The first two sections will establish the historical and theoretical parameters for the third, devoted to the fascinating and enigmatic chansonnier R. This anthology is often called the chansonnier d'Urfé and occasionally the chansonnier Lavallière (according to the names of its former owners). It was made by an unknown copyist in the region of Toulouse, for an unknown patron, likely a wealthy burgher or minor noble,⁴ sometime between 1292 and 1326,⁵ and it is now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (fr. 22543). The chansonnier d'Urfé is remarkable on a number of counts—chief among them that it...