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  • The Lyric Encyclopedia:Citation and Innovation in Matfre Ermengaud's Breviari d'amor
  • Mary Franklin-Brown

Matfre Ermengaud began his Breviari d'amor ca. 1288, towards the end of two significant literary movements of the later Middle Ages. One was led by the troubadours, who had begun composing their lyric at the end of the eleventh century and would continue to do so through the mid thirteenth, when, for reasons that are still debated, the number of troubadours waned. Paradoxically, this decline occurred at the same time that the great chansonniers (large lyric anthologies) began to be compiled, as if the mise par écrit were a response to the loss of vitality in the movement. The other, scholastic encyclopedism, was not yet in such dire straits.1 Supported by strong twelfth-century precedents, it produced over the course of the thirteenth century four major Latin encyclopedias and a few in the vernacular. By the mid fourteenth century, however, most encyclopedic work would involve copying, revising, or translating existing texts, rather than drafting new ones. The creation of a new encyclopedia was a daunting task, and most readers seem to have judged the earlier texts sufficient to their needs. Matfre clearly did not take such a view; his Breviari constituted an unprecedented attempt to wed the highly allusive and formally complex love poetry of the troubadours to the exhaustive but prosaic erudition of the encyclopedists, partly through direct quotations of the lyric.2 [End Page 389]

It must have been difficult to harmonize two such different genres, so the strangeness of the Breviari should not surprise us. Perhaps because of it, the text has not appealed to a great many modern scholars, as a comparison of the bibliography on the Breviari to that on any one of the major troubadours attests.3 Nonetheless, Matfre's text had a modest success just after its publication: it is the only Occitan text treating courtly subjects to have been copied in numbers approaching those of the chansonniers and in volumes of comparable dimensions.4 The text's manuscript history thus indicates its importance to the literary circles of its time. The Breviari d'amor is indispensable if we are to understand the paradigms that shaped late medieval reading.

In the present article, I should like to consider one such paradigm, citation, for Matfre could only weave the lyric into his text through a peculiar, hybrid form of this practice.5 The encyclopedia was always a bookish genre, well adapted to the visual strategies of scholastic reading. Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), for example, details in the prologue to his Speculum maius the difficulties posed by the placement of attributions on the page (ch. 3). On the other hand, prior to the creation of the chansonniers and the Breviari, troubadour lyric had been experienced aurally, and so it lacked the determinate visual components of the written text.6 Even the makers of the chansonniers failed to visually represent the lyric form, for they set out the strophes as paragraphs in which each metrical line follows the last without a return to the left margin. This mise en page suggests that readers such as Matfre were still pronouncing the lyric aloud as their eyes scanned the page. Accordingly, the troubadours practiced a different kind of citation. Yet broad theoretical [End Page 390] investigations of citation and intertextuality have tended to approach these phenomena as beginning and ending with written text, on the page.7 I should like to suggest here that a fuller understanding of acoustic citation makes it possible not only to (partially) demarcate the quotations in the Breviari, which are visually obscured by this text's own mise en page, but also, and especially, to discern the degree to which lyricism permeates this most erudite of texts.

Scholars of Occitan lyric have shown that the troubadours developed exquisitely subtle forms of citation, particularly in the genre of the sirventes, which came to maturity in the work of Bertran de Born (ca. 1150-1215) and was practiced in the thirteenth century by such notable troubadours as Peire Cardenal. Sirventes were frequently based upon the rime or metrical structure or melody of a pre-existing song...

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