From Song to Book

The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry

Sylvia Huot

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501746680
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics.

Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.

PART ONE ON THE NATURE OF THE BOOK IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

Et je vous monstrerai comment cis escris a painture et parolle. Car il est bien apert k’il a parole, par che ke toute escripture si est faite pour parole monstrer et pour che ke on le lise; et quant on le list, si revient elle a nature de parole. . . . Et meesmement cis escris est de tel sentence k’il painture desire.

[And I will show you how this writing has illustration and speech. For it is quite clear that it has speech, since all writing is made in order to show forth speech, and in order to be read; and when it is read, it reverts to the nature of speech. . . . And similarly this writing is of such a topic that it desires illustration.]

Richard de Fournival, Bestiaire d’amours

Chapter 1 Scribal Practice and Poetic Process in Didactic and Narrative Anthologies

The subject of vernacular codex organization and production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is a vast and largely unexplored area; the following discussion makes no claims at being comprehensive. Its aim is to identify certain organizational principles typical of French literary codices of this period and certain aspects of manuscript format and text presentation. The implications of these codicological features for thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poets will be discussed in subsequent chapters; before a given poet’s manipulation of his work as a written medium can be assessed, a certain understanding must be established of what a vernacular literary book was in the later Middle Ages and how it functioned as a poetic system in its own right. In this chapter, I set forth some basic avenues of inquiry into the architectonics of the codex and the poetics of the manuscript text.

Many medieval codices are miscellanies, containing a seemingly random mixture of didactic, courtly, and bawdy texts in prose and verse;1 others, at the opposite end of the spectrum, contain but a single text. Even in those having more uniform contents, it is not always possible to discern any logic to the order of pieces. Many codices, however—many more, I suspect, than are currently recognized—are organized according to principles ranging from rudimentary groupings of thematically related texts to an elaborate overall design. Similarly, whereas some are decorated for purely ornamental and even ostentatious purposés and others lack any decoration at all, many are true “critical editions,” with carefully designed programs of rubrication and illumination that clarify the structure of the book and provide textual commentary. No doubt the tastes, the degree of literary sophistication, and the financial capacities of the manuscript owner influenced the selection of texts and the degree and type of ornamentation; and the degree of patron control over manuscript production was probably itself variable. Whether the scribe was executing a plan of his own creation or one dictated by his patron, though, is less important for the present context than an understanding of what this plan was and how it was put into effect: in either case we are witnessing the processes by which a scribe or team of scribes shaped a group of texts into a book. In the following examples, therefore, I have not attempted to distinguish patron-initiated from scribally initiated features. I analyze the evidence of the manuscripts as artifacts and the work of the scribe as it appears therein in order to arrive at a critical reading of the books themselves.

Examples of Thematic Unity: MSS Bibl. Nat. fr. 24428 and 12786

In referring to this category of manuscript organization as “thematic,” I purposely choose a term of general rather than precise meaning, for it is meant to cover a range of possibilities. The distinction of “thematic” and “narrative” organization is itself somewhat artificial, and it is used here purely as a device for imposing some kind of order on an extremely diverse field. The two examples I have chosen exhibit different kinds of organization. In both, certain themes and motifs governed the selection of texts. In MS 24428 the pieces have been arranged in a linear progression, emanating from the first text and building up to the last; in MS 12786 the pieces are grouped in loosely defined categories around a central text.

MS 24428, copied in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century,2 is an anthology of didactic texts translated or adapted from various Latin sources:

L’Image du monde (first verse redaction)

Li Volucraires, a poem attributed to Omond, treating the allegorical significance of birds and trees

Li Bestiaire divin of Guillaume le Clerc

An anonymous allegorical lapidary (Pannier ed., Lapidaires français, pp. 228–85)

Marie de France’s Fables d’Ysopet

A treatise on sin and penance, beginning “Qui veut faire confession . . . ”

(He who wishes to make confession . . .).

The uniform appearance of the manuscript suggests that it was written and compiled at one time, so the existing arrangement can be assumed to reflect an original plan.

The Image du monde is, as its name suggests, a description of the natural world.3 Its fifty-five chapters include an account of the creation of the world; enumerations of the plants, birds, animals, and precious stones to be found in various places; and discussions of geography and astronomy. The texts that follow elaborate upon the discussions of the natural world, providing more detailed information about individual species and also revealing the allegorical significance of each. These treatises thus constitute a continuation of the Image du monde, one which, moreover, is invited by the text itself. At the end of the chapter on the stones of India, for example, the reader who wishes further information is instructed to “lire ou lapidaire, / Qui dist leur nons & leur vertus” (read in the lapidary, which tells their names and their powers ([fo1. 17]). And at the end of the entire discussion of beasts and birds, plants and minerals, is the following comment:

Maintes choses sont bien apertes

Dont les raisons sont molt covertes.

. . . . .

Par clergie puet bien li hom

D’aucune chose avoir raison.

[Many things are quite evident, for which the reasons are hidden. . . . By means of learning, man can know the reason for something.] [Fol. 22v]

The Image itself is an open text, allowing plenty of possibility for amplification. In particular, it concentrates on that which is “evident,” describing the habits and appearances of earthly things and the motions and properties of heavenly bodies, without attempting to uncover the “hidden reasons.” The latter approach is taken in the three allegorical treatises; they are not only the continuation but also the exegesis of the opening piece.

The middle section of the codex actually offers two different kinds of exegesis: the allegorical treatises are followed by a transposition of birds and animals into the literary language of fable, itself interpreted moralistically. Allegory and morality provide the bridge from the Image, a straightforward account of the natural world placed in the context of God as creator and sustainer, to the penitential treatise, a straightforward account of spiritual salvation. The overall plan reflects the medieval system of fourfold exegesis: we begin with the literal reading of the world, progress to allegorical and tropological readings, and arrive finally at the anagogical reading, an unveiled explanation of the moral life of the human soul.

The Image du monde, then, provides the basis for the entire compilation, whereas the treatise on penance is, so to speak, its final cause. By referring back to the opening treatise, the reader can situate a given motif in the larger context of the world and its relationship to God. Additionally, the admonishments to the reader in the prologue to the Image, by focusing attention on the orderly arrangement and illustration of the text, are applicable to the codex as a whole. The introduction stresses the importance of the astronomical diagrams, stating that without these, “li livres ne porroit estre legierement [entendus)” (the book could not easily be understood [fol. 1]).4 These figures are clearly necessary to the exposition of such phenomena as eclipses or planetary conjunctions and of the general structure of the cosmos. But miniatures also play an important role in the allegorical exposition of the two texts that follow, as well as in the Fables; the introduction to the Image is at the same time an introduction to the entire codex. In the Bestiaire divin, each bird or animal is identified in a rubric and in a miniature that illustrates both the particular trait ascribed to the animal in question and the allegorical interpretation. The image of the pelican (fo1. 57), for example, shows her stabbing her breast to shed life-giving blood on her babies; beside her is the Crucifixion, where Christ is being stabbed by Saint Longinus (Reinsch ed., vv. 521–614). Similarly, the turtle dove (fol. 72v) is shown as a single bird in a tree, next to which Christ is shown bearing the Cross between two guards while a female figure looks on: the turtle dove mourns her lost mate as the Church mourns Christ (vv. 2649–2736). The miniatures are truly a rendition in visual terms of the text in its dual focus, both here and in the single miniature of the Volucraires. Each fable, in turn, is likewise illustrated; and although these miniatures do not portray the “allegorical leap,” they do provide a vivid representation of the central action, thereby helping to fix the moral tale more firmly in the mind of the reader.

The prologue of the Image reminds the reader that the “livre de clergie” (book of learning) has been carefully ordered and that this order should be respected. The reader is instructed to read “ordeneement” (in order), “Si qu’il ne lise rien avant / S’il n’entent ce qui est devant” (Such that he read no further unless he understands what comes before [fo1. 1v]). Like the statement that the illustrations are an integral part of the text, this admonition to attend to the order of the book, and not to proceed until each point has been fully grasped, applies very well to the codex as a whole: here, even more than within the Image itself, each text builds on the last, leading the reader through a series of steps to the final revelation.

Indeed, this very structure—the movement from Divine Creation to the natural world and back again to the spiritual—is itself signaled in the closing section of the Image in a statement equally relevant to the opening text and to the book as a whole. Returning at the end of his treatise to God, who is reached at the outermost limits of the cosmos, the narrator comments, “Ci fenist l’Image dou monde. / A dieu commence, adieu prent fin” (Here ends the Image of the World. It begins with God, it ends with God [fo1. 47v]). The Image du monde, then, provides not only the basic subject matter but also the structural model for the entire anthology. By following this plan, the compiler constructed a book that is itself a livre de clergie, a large-scale description and decoding of the world.

I have chosen a relatively straightforward example to begin with, because it will make it easier to see the editorial practices of the compiler. Clearly, the compiler of MS 24428 was a careful reader, and he chose each element of his compilation with an eye to its participation in an overall plan. Each text contributes to the structure of the whole, and eac...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE: ON THE NATURE OF THE BOOK IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES
• PART TWO: LYRICISM AND THE BOOK IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
• PART THREE: LYRICISM AND THE BOOK IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: The Rubrication of Guillaume de Lorris in MS Bibl. Nat. fr. 378
• Appendix B: Table of Miniatures in Selected Texts by Machaut, MSS Bibl. Nat. fr. 1584 and 1586
• Appendix C: Excerpt from an Unedited Volume of Le Roman de Perceforest, MS Bibl. Nat. fr. 346
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index