Research on the French Medieval Lyric

Research on the French Medieval Lyric

This is, of course, a vast and intractable subject:¹ some four centuries, and a number of competing disciplines.² I can do no more, therefore, than concentrate on what I would see as the main lines of investigation that scholars are currently pursuing, and invite those interested to turn to a major research bibliography specific to this area, Encomia (published annually by the International Courtly Literature Society). I shall intend principally to address more thematically based work, or studies of individual poets which have a resonance beyond their single subject — which is not, let me emphasize, to underestimate the value and importance of studies on individual poets: on the contrary, I recognize that the last twenty years or so have witnessed the publication of some of the best and most imaginative analyses that we have so far seen. Simply, in the limited space available, it is impossible to do them justice — and it will be more valuable for the reader, perhaps, to have some idea of the wide range of current critical discussion, and indirectly therefore of the directions which research might usefully follow. I shall also, incidentally, separate the earlier Middle Ages (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) from the later, partly because it has been traditional to do so, partly because, whereas the courtly lyric of the earlier period maintains the link between music and verse, the fourteenth century, as crystallized in Eustache Deschamps's distinction between musique naturelle and musique artificielle, voice and music,³ sees a growing distinction between the poem proper and any musical accompaniment.⁴

Twelfth and thirteeenth centuries

Let me start, here, with some of the major research tools published in the last couple of decades. The most obvious, I suppose, is the second volume of the Grundriss, which was published in 1980 and deals exclusively with the lyric, and which is an invaluable compendium of information about the form and substance of the lyric⁵ — but rather more recent are the invaluable répertoires: Eglal Doss-Quinby's research guide, current to 1990,⁶ and her catalogue of trouvère refrains,⁷ the exhaustive and invaluable repertory of metres we owe to Ulrich Mölk and Friedrich Wolfzettel,⁸ Keith Val Sinclair's exhaustive repertories of religious and pious lyric to which he has devoted himself for some ten years and which have made identifying poems, and themes, infinitely easier.⁹ We might perhaps add to these the useful and often quite comprehensive anthologies of particular lyric genres, which again make us aware of just how large and broad-ranging the repertories of such genres can be: we now possess anthologies of débats and jeux-partis and songs voiced by women, to say nothing of pastourelles and politics.¹⁰ It is probably useful to mention, moreover, some of the more general and usually bilingual anthologies,¹¹ including a Pléiade anthology,¹² which are bringing trouvère lyric to the attention of wider audiences — and, in particular, the remarkably complete collection, with music, entitled Chanter m'estuet.¹³

These latter are not, however, scholarly editions in the strict sense of the term; scholars have of course been busy providing precisely such editions — most usefully perhaps Michel Zink's edition of the complete works of Rutebeuf,¹⁴ and Pierre-Yves Badel's of those of Adam de la Halle.¹⁵ What have, however, proved especially valuable have been a few examples of true editorial collaboration between textual scholars and musicologists: I think, for instance, of recent editions of the works of Andrieu d'Arras or Gace Brulé or Blondel de Nesle,¹⁶ where philological allied to musicological expertise enables the reader to gauge just what is the aesthetic pleasure of word allied to melody, of rhetoric governed and disciplined by music. I think also, of course, of Hendrik van der Werf's invaluable anthology of the music attached...