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Song and the Soundscape of Old French Romance
The topic of this essay is song’s presence in romance and, in particular, its status and
meaning as sound. The tradition under consideration is that of Old French romance, from
its early incarnation in the 1170s, in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, to the early decades
of the thirteenth century. Romance’s emergence coincided with a period of extraordinary
creativity in the realm of vernacular song, most notably with the emergence of a Northern
lyric tradition of the trouvères, with the continued cultivation of their Occitan inspiration
in the lyrics of the troubadours, and with the earliest efforts at codification of both, in
songbooks or chansonniers, the earliest examples of which date from the 1230s. That
there was a natural sympathy between romance and song culture is self-evident. Both
speak out to, and about, aristocratic habitats of the court, espousing values of chivalry
and fin’ amors; while scenes of festivities, replete with musical performances, were a
familiar feature of the courts represented in romance. There is evidence, too, of a more
practical, creative entanglement of the two, best witnessed in a category of texts dating
from the early thirteenth century in which songs from the lyric tradition are interpolated
into narrative, a genre sometimes referred to as the romans à chansons.1 Jean Renart’s
Roman de la Rose, also known as Guillaume de Dole (c. 1218), claimed to inaugurate the
practice,2 and drew liberally from the stock of vernacular song (both Northern and
Occitanian), using them to animate characters, and to enliven scenes of courtly
celebration.3
Despite the seeming proximity of these two creative media, there remains from a
scholarly perspective a significant distance between them; a gap attributable in part to the
ambiguous status of song as a sounding phenomenon. Thus, for example, song’s
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interpolation in romance has frequently led to a sub-categorisation within the romance
genre, and characterisation of such texts as a “hybrid” mix of two traditions.4 Music’s
quoted presence is a mark of difference, even from the many romances sans chansons
which contain lavish descriptions of music-making. Yet if music is a signal of their not-
quite-literary status, the romans à chansons have had only modest purchase in the
musicological mainstream. This may be attributed, paradoxically, to the fact that as only
partial citations, many without musical notation,5 the songs in romance do not quite
constitute musical works, or fully singable songs, in a historiography of song that more
usually begins with the fully notated chansonniers of the mid thirteenth century.
Meanwhile, literary approaches to romance (with and without song) suggest that what
scenes of music-making connote is not itself a musical act at all, but rather a
representation of an act: the simulacrum, then, of an active performance or voice, but not
the performance itself.6 Finally, in work that most clearly forges bridges between literary
and musical traditions, Sylvia Huot’s and Ardis Butterfield’s exploration of the
interaction of performative traditions with written media of manuscripts in the thirteenth
century points to the ways in which earlier oral traditions underwent a conceptual
transformation in their inscribed, repeatable form. Huot’s proposition of a “poetics” of
manuscripts is specifically concerned with what she perceives to be a shift in lyric from a
“performative toward a more writerly poetics” in the thirteenth century.7 Thus, within the
discourse of the manuscript, romances (with and without song), and songs themselves,
are represented according to a “writerly concept of the song.”8 Butterfield’s work on the
same repertories likewise detects a certain slipperiness in the relationship between
writing and performance.9 Accordingly, works such as Guillaume de Dole “go[es] hand
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in hand with new self-consciousness about the significance of writing songs.” Thus
Butterfield is cautious about the notion that such texts can contain a “real presence” of
performance, and argues that they are rather “always functioning in a borderline area in
which constant negotiations take place between public and private, vocal and aural,
physical and abstract concepts of communication.”10
This brief overview of disciplinary perspectives of song and romance points to the
multiplicity of functions song could have, in and outside romance, and also to the ways in
which early romance and song repertories continued to “live,” in their transformations
into written media. It points, too, to an ontology of song that is more varied and variable,
and often quite different from later, more familiar, concepts of music rooted in the idea of
a work. Yet in all these accounts, song’s most vital qualities, emanating from its sonic
presence, remain muted. Here, I think there is a case to be made for an integrated
approach, more grounded in the possibility that song in romance draws upon effects
derived from oral and aural encounter – in song’s most songish dimensions, as a thing
produced of a voice, and encountered by an ear: a thing drastic, performative, emotive,
alive to human encounter. Approached as an integrated history, the story of romance and
song offers a rare opportunity to attune to that most elusive aspect of music history: a
history of sound’s effects. It is a story that may inform an understanding of vernacular
song, but also invite new modes for listening to romance.
In this essay I pursue one line of enquiry, with the hope of inviting further
investigation of these dual histories, similarly flexible with regards to disciplinary
category and expectations. What follows offers some ways to “turn up the volume” on
romance. While the romance soundscape is made up of a diverse sonic spectrum ranging
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from song to terrifying noises of combat, I will attend primarily to sounds that are most
obviously musical (knights and ladies who sing, or jongleurs who provide instrumental
entertainment). Bound into the impetus to listen is a curiosity about the significance of
musical sound as an event linked to a phenomenological reality, and to its socialising and
emotional potential. My examples are characterised by Northern French production and
reception, and by their largely “courtly” content.11 They include three romans à
chansons: two closely-related romances, Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole, Gerbert de
Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette, and a later thirteenth-century romance attributed to
Jakemés, his Roman du Châstelain de Couci et de Dame de Fayel, a work modelled on
those earlier examples. These texts cite liberally from Northern and Occitanian song
traditions, and in the case of Jakemés roman, base an entire narrative around the life of a
trouvère, the Châtelain de Couci.
My evidence is not limited to romans à chansons alone. It includes examples
from the early romance tradition of the last quarter of the twelfth century. These include
Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle and Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu.
All of these were written without musical interpolations, but contain lengthy episodes
representing music-making. According to John Baldwin, it is texts such as these that
provide the “‘horizon’” for the romans à chansons of Renart and Montreuil.12 Placing
literary and musicological accounts of these texts into dialogue, and drawing, too, on
recent work in musicology and studies on the soundscape, I shall demonstrate that the
soundworlds of romance were not merely decorative, and nor were they incidental to the
narrative. Rather, sound – and in particular musical sound – emerges as a crucial means
of generating a sense of place and community. Equally, it was the means by which social,
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emotional and affective values were forged. These values may not have been limited to
the interior world of romance, and the later part of the essay will consider the extent to
which the musical values depicted in romance connected to the external environments in
which romance and songs were performed and enjoyed.
A brief word finally about the linguistic scope of this study. My essay limits its
review to texts and music from the medieval French tradition. However, the issues
pertaining to sound are by no means unique to this tradition. Early Arthurian romances
from the French tradition of course exerted considerable influence on other linguistic
traditions of romance, and this extended, too, to the presence of sound and
representations of music. In the English tradition, for example, many of the scenarios of
musicking we shall explore here were imported as a site of emulation, and indeed, the
soundscape was itself a topic of invention and expansion in some instances.13 Meanwhile,
writers in traditions from Old Norse saga, to Dante’s Vita Nuova display a preoccupation
with the frictions and compatibilities between narrative and lyric composition. The
concern with sound, then, is a universal concern of romance culture. By retaining a close
focus on a network of texts from romance’s inauguration in France, I hope to offer a
model that may be adapted and applied to the broader romance tradition, with a view to
encouraging readers to listen in on their texts, and to be attentive to the sonic qualities of
the materials of romance.
The Festal Soundscape
Sounds of many kinds abound in French romance. Some recall an older epic tradition:
sounds of warring knights and the clash of hooves and armor, bellowing oliphants, the list
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goes on.14 Indeed, the endurance of such sounds may offer an interesting intervention in
disputes about the generic categories of romance and, in particular, distinctions between
romance and chansons de geste.15 Christopher Page, in his exploration of literary sources
for music-making in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notes that the earliest examples
of romance bring with them a subtle change in the range of sounds evoked. Musical
performance is not an explicit part of epic. The Chanson de Roland has implied
musicality – as its name suggests, it was represented as a song,16 and its hero foresees his
deeds will be remembered in songs, and worries that a false move may result in a “male
chançun.”17 But Roland himself never utters a note, nor are there any other scenes of
song-making in the story. This is in contrast to the hero of an early romance, the Roman
de Horn, which fashions a warrior of a different stripe: one who can “converse with
ladies and deport himself in a way that inspires emulation;” he can also sing and play the
harp.18 As courtly values take hold in the twelfth century – in court life as in literature –
they also, crucially, become audible. They manifest as eloquent, elegant behavior:
behavior that was often musical in nature.
Communal, courtly music-making is perhaps the most stable of a number of
recurring – and highly conventionalized – sonic tropes in romance.19 Christopher Page
and Peter Noble offer a useful “selective typology” of public categories of music in early
romances without interpolation, which includes music associated with feasts (including
those associated with weddings and tournaments); caroles sung and danced at court, and
sometimes within feasting contexts; singing parties, where court members entertain
themselves. There are also categories associated with singing on horseback, examples of
the “lai/harp” complex, where a courtier will sing and accompany himself on the harp;
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solo performances by minstrels or courtiers; and catalogues of musical prowess in
accounts detailing the courtly accomplishments of characters.20 Romans à chansons, such
as Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette, seem to supply songs implied in the
earlier romances. I suggest that the absence of interpolations in those earlier texts should
not inhibit an effort to listen to romance’s musical representations. So repetitive and
stylized can such representations be that it may be tempting to tune them out as signs of
literal sonic effects, and understand them instead as literary devices: decorative, verbal,
or visual effects. Indeed, their conventional nature might be understood as a facet of
genre: that is, as a set component or episode to be deployed in part of what Matilda
Tomaryn Bruckner terms the “art of shaping” in romance.21 In the sense of offering a
predictable interlude within a form given to episodic organization,22 the scenes of large-
scale performance might be understood to operate rather like the ekphrastic episodes
found in romance: the ekphrastic description, a “hyper-conscious creation of art within
art,” also briefly suspends action, representing a kind of “time out” in the flow of then
narrative.23 While there is more to pursue in considering sound’s place in debates about
generic categories of romance, I here wish to consider the sonic implications of such
scenes. Is it possible to understand them as ripples or wrinkles in the experience of the
narrative, borne of a recognition of sound’s effective and affective power?
Scholars of troubadour and trouvère repertories have pointed to close
relationships between the worlds depicted in song lyrics and romance texts, and the
courtly environments in which they circulated, and speculate that scenes of musicking in
romance may have a partially documentary quality.24 Building on that work, I would
propose a somewhat different approach, one that derives inspiration from recent work in
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the field of sound studies, specifically that associated with soundscapes. Here, it will be
useful to follow the lead offered by the foundational text of soundscape studies: R.
Murray Schafer’s 1977 The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning the
World. Schafer sets out a curriculum for an aural engagement with the world – that of the
past as well as present – that has been taken up in a number of scholarly constituencies. 25
Among the most fruitful aspects of Schafer’s project is the invitation to attend to the
keynote of the soundscape – a sonority specific to a particular place, at a given time, and
which participates in shaping the meaning of that environment, and the way its
inhabitants define their community. How, then, might the sounds depicted in romance –
ranging from the non-musical clash of swords to the highly stylized compositions of the
wedding scenes – establish a soundscape? Here it will be helpful to examine two aspects
of this complex area: the way in which sound creates an acoustic space; and how such
space might facilitate and manipulate social and emotional interactions among those
within, and involved in making, this acoustic space.
It will helpful to illustrate one aspect of the soundscape in some closer detail:
those sounds associated with courtly festivities – including weddings, feastings,
tournaments, knightings, and vows. As Noble, Page and Boulton all note, the festal
setting quickly acquired a standardized sonority in early romances; these scenes were
subsequently enlivened with interpolated music in the romans à chansons. The festal
soundscape was also evoked in texts as late as Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, where
courtly festivities were now a source of nostalgia for the chivalrous past.26
Chrétien’s Erec and Enide offers a template for the “classic” festal soundscape,
one frequently emulated and alluded to in later generations of romance authors. The
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wedding of Erec and Enide at Pentecost is marked by a suite of activities: the inviting and
assembling of knights for two weeks of festivities, which included tournaments,
knighting ceremonies, as well as extensive feasting to celebrate the nuptials.27 The feast
that accompanies that union is marked by a specific acoustic:
Quant la corz fu tote assemblee,
N’ot menestrel en la contree
Que rien seüst de nul deduit,
Que a la cort ne fussent tuit.
En la sale mout grant joie ot;
Chascuns servi de ce qu’il sot:
Cil saut, cil tume, cil enchante;
Li uns conte, lis autres chante;
Li uns sible, li autres note;
Cil sert de harpe, cil de rote,
Cil de gigue, cil de vïele,
Cil fleüte, cil chalemele;
Puceles querolent et dancent;
Trestuit de joie faire tencent.
N’est riens qui joie i puisse faire
Ne cuer d’ome a leesce traire,
Qui ne soit as noces le jor.
Sonent timbre, sonent tabor,
Muses, estives et fretel
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Et buisines et chalemel.28
When the court was completely assembled, all the minstrels in the land who knew
any entertainment were present. And the court was not silent. In the main hall
there was great joy; everyone showed what he could do, one jumped, another
tumbled, a third did magic tricks, one told stories, another sang; one whistled,
another played an instrument, this one the harp, that the rote, this the gigue, that
the Vielle, this one the flute, another the shawm. The young ladies made caroled
and danced; everyone outdid themselves to show joy. Nothing that could bring
joy nor plunge the heart of man to happiness was missing from the wedding day.
The sounded tambourines and tabors, musettes, flutes and pipes, and trumpets and
reed pipes.29
There are several aspects to note. These include the wide variety of performances, which
range from singing, playing a comprehensive orchestra of instruments, to story-telling.
There are also specific physical activities associated with them, such as youthful caroling
and dancing. Equally important to register is the almost pedantic typology of instruments
and performances, and the formulaic nature of the writing (for example, the recourse to
listing “li uns… li autres,” and “cil… cil…”). Both the music and activities, and the
writerly devices by which they are inventoried, form part of the convention that moves
across the tradition.30 Thus while this kind of sonority, in particular its detailed
description, is quite rare in Chrétien, the example is among the earliest cases of a musical
representation that persists across the tradition, as far as Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede
de Fortune. Such duplication of the syntax and “paratactic formulae” also carries over
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into a number of other festal accounts; these were as conventional as the sounds
depicted.31
The early romans à chansons enliven festal episodes with the interpolation of
actual music. Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette have both interpolated and
uninterpolated festal scenes. Both texts begin with extended descriptions of the festal
court, in which the copious refrains and dance songs (several with concordances),
performed by the members of the court, establish singing and dancing as integral to the
identity of the group.32 At the end of Guillaume de Dole, the revelation of the seneschal’s
treachery and the ultimate union of Conrad and Liénor unfold against the playbook of
festal conventions, from public performances by minstrels and courtiers from every
corner of the land to dancing and storytelling.33 According to Boulton, Renart’s addition
of songs in scenes of courtly festivities, “did no more than amplify the references to
musical performances that were already conventional in the representations of those
scenes punctuating most romances.”34 However, while agreeing with this, I would argue
that reading interpolated and uninterpolated festal scenes together helps to broaden the
evidential horizon for a consideration of these scenes as soundscapes. Together they
provide a substantial body of evidence not only for the sorts of sounds and music
associated with the festive courtly environment (which has been the primary concern with
these scenes to date). They also offer multiple opportunities to explore the work that
sound performs within the courtly communities and spaces represented. Understood on
those terms, they afford important insight into what sound does in such scenes. The
soundscape, in other words, restores sound, as an effect, to these scenes.
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Accepted and understood as soundscapes, the noises implied by the numerous
instrumentalists and singers in festal settings contribute to the romance keynote by
establishing what Shafer terms a “soundmark”: that is, “a community sound which is
unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by people in
that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for
soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.”35 The repetition of the
festal sonority across centuries of romance may then be understood as just such an act of
preservation. In addition, the presence of that identifiable soundmark brings with it the
implication of an acoustic environment: “the acoustic space of a sounding object is that
volume of space in which the sound can be heard.”36 The sense that sound defines space
is apparent in the example of Erec and Enide. The location of the wedding festivities is
familiar enough: it is the hall at the court of King Arthur. However, the festal soundscape
is implicated in an expansion of the court’s boundaries on this occasion. The description
of music-making is followed by the narrator’s comment that “N’i ot guichet ne porte
close:/ Les issües et les entrees/ Furent totes abandonees,/ N’en fu tornez povres ne
riches” (“Neither gate nor door was closed: the entrances and exits were all abandoned
that day, and neither rich nor poor were turned away”).37 Sound and space interact here,
and the sheer volume of music-making, among the loudest scenes of the whole
romance,38 is marked by a dilation of the festal space. The court is both limitless and
excessive but, at the same time, also benevolently communal.
Another highly dramatic example of music’s role as spatial marker occurs in
Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu.39 One of the most memorable adventures facing the
hero of this early thirteenth-century romance is a trial by music. The scene of his
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challenge is a grande sale. Unlike that depicted in Erec et Enide, this ceremonial
chamber is void of feasting nobles. It is located in the derelict and empty Cité de Ruine,
which is an inversion of the more regular festal setting and, accordingly, deploys music-
making here to perverse effect. The room has a thousand windows, and in each window
space there sits a jongleur, sumptuously attired, and armed with an instrument and a
candle. These form part of an enchantment and perform what is, in effect, an excessive
version of the festal soundscape trope, with instruments and pieces listed according to
convention.40 Not to be outwitted by their enchantment, the hero resists the jongleurs’
sonic temptation, and failure is marked by their extinguishing their candles and noisy
departure.41 Sound and space converge here, and as the jongleurs leave, taking their
music with them, the scene is plunged into darkness – the space becomes literally
indecipherable.42
While sound can establish environment, it can also establish those within it as an
“acoustic community.”43 Acoustics contribute to order and interaction within the
community; sounds which enter the acoustic community from outside are able similarly
to determine actions and reveal the community. In romance, the festal soundscape is most
explicitly bound into communal values, since it is also part of the economy of the court.
Demonstrations of largesse, hospitality and almsgiving were integral to aristocratic life,
and were no less a feature of the courts of the romances. Such occasions were often tied
to demonstrations of benevolence and gift-giving,44 and the acoustic component is
integral to that economy. Thus, the festal scene from Erec et Enide cited above concludes
with payment of the minstrels, while Conrad’s jongleur, Jouglet, in Guillaume de Dole, is
rewarded with a fur cloak for entertaining his lord with his quasi-lyric description of
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Liénor.45 The festal soundscape also articulates – and sometimes suspends – categories of
class and gender. Musicologists have observed that implied or cited festal music is
markedly different from the introspective, emotional songs performed by individuals or
couples.46 Where festal scenes are interpolated they are often filled with rondets de carole
and refrains or rondeaux. The topics are light, with little hint of the lovelorn, inward-
looking style of the chanson courtoise traditions which comprise personal outbursts. This
distinction registers differently in the romance venue, where the acoustic space is also
one where hierarchies of gender and social class are established. In Gautier d’Arras’s
Eracle, a so-called historical romance, in which classical characters are translated into
contemporary chivalric context, aristocratic order is exaggerated around festal
performance. Singing, dancing and instrumental playing dominate communal gatherings
and are explicitly linked to rank.47 With the arrival of the empress Athanaїs, the
soundscape is transformed; it becomes overwhelming (“Grans est li noise environ li,”
“the commotion around her was deafening”) as she is thronged by instrumentalists, all
with noble backgrounds (“… frans et de halt lin,” “…noble and aristocratic family”).48
The more noble they are, the closer they get to the empress, as they dance and leap to the
music (“Et selonc se que cascuns valt/ S’en trait plus prés et tresque et salt,” “the higher
the status the closer they approached the empress, dancing and leaping as they went.”)49
The festal soundscape also permits a shift in gender relations. Women and men of the
court are represented as equal in entertainment, and in Guillaume de Dole, women
instigate singing and dancing as often as men. In the opening scene, undesignated knights
(“chevaliers”) and ladies (“dames”) interrupt one another to sing, while later Renart calls
14
out individuals by rank: the noble sister of the Duke of Mainz, followed by the Count of
Savoy, followed by the Count of Luxembourg, and so on.
The soundscape also permits certain modes of emotional interaction. Thus, it is
not simply that characters in romance marry, or that courtiers gather to celebrate: the
soundscape itself is a factor in determining public actions and private interactions. While
tournaments and jousts might coordinate knights in bodily combat and oppose heroes
against villains, music-making coordinates characters in more intimate, emotionally-
driven interactions. For example, the festal soundscape is a soundtrack to dancing, and
often involves a “call out” of members of the community to sing a song while others
listen or dance. The communal scenes of Guillaume de Dole witness members of
Conrad’s court taking turns to sing refrain songs, or “chansonnettes.”
In Jakemés’s Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel (c.1280?),
based on the life of the eponymous trouvère,50 the socializing effects of the festal
soundscape evolve as the mechanism for intimacy, intrigue, and ultimately deadly
revelation. Thus, shortly after the long-awaited consummation of the relationship
between the Châtelain and Dame de Fayel, courtiers assemble for festivities in the
Vermandois “en un lieu qui fu biaus et gens.”51 While Jakemés takes pains to locate the
event in a specific place, he also articulates it by means of its acoustic – not only in terms
of what was heard, but also, interestingly, in terms of what was not:
Trois jours dura entirement
La fieste ensi en teil deduit
C’on n’i demena autre bruit
De tournoiyer ne de jouster,
15
Fors de treskier, de caroler
Et de bien donner a mangier.52
The festivities lasted three full days in this way, in such delight that the only noise
was of dancing, of caroles, and of copious feasting, without that of tournaments
and jousting.
There follows a check-list of jongleurs, who are once again paid for their services, and
then dancing and singing ensue. In the course of that, one of the ladies present, a “dame
de Vermendois,” who carries a torch for the Châtelain, takes the opportunity of the feast
to try to get close to him. Against the backdrop of music and dance, she observes him,
growing increasingly suspicious that his downcast air and sighs belie a secret – that he is
in love with someone else. This gradual unfolding of suspicion to jealous intent is
punctuated by both her own performance, and that by the Dame de Fayel, as well as of
other ladies of the court, all of whose lyrics reflect their unuttered thoughts of suspicion
and joy.53 The secrets revealed in this musical hiatus set in motion a chain of events that
will prove fatal for the Châtelain. There is of course much more to say about the effects
of song in Jakemés roman, but this example offers insight into how the acoustic
environment can facilitate and stage highly nuanced intimacies. The festal acoustic is
thus also an emotional environment.
Soundscape as “Reality Effect”
Understood as a soundscape, festal sound in romance is infused with significance. Sound
is present in these scenes as a marker of spaces, and makes those spaces briefly
extraordinary, permitting behaviors and interactions among members of the acoustic
16
community that are equally unusual. What, though, of the status of the festal soundscape
of romance as “earwitness” to court performance, and thus as a witness to contemporary
musical traditions? As noted earlier, the documentary status of romance has been much
debated among literary scholars.54 Meanwhile, Schafer himself, and historians who have
followed, have remained sensitive to the difficulties of speaking of the historical
soundscape, particularly with regards the veracity of historical records as earwitness.55 In
the specific context of medieval romance, indeed any literary product of this period, one
needs to be cautious of assigning evidently rhetorically charged scenes with too much
documentary purpose. These texts were not mirror-images of an aristocratic venue, but
highly intricate, highly crafted products, just as was song-culture. However, while there
needs to be some caution about taking them at face value, there are also good reasons to
understand them dialogically – as speaking back to certain social milieu in very specific
ways. Indeed, the chivalric behaviors and values espoused in chansons de geste and
romance by their very nature were not bounded to literary artefact, but were lived, social
values too.56
In the case of romance, there is robust evidence to encourage a dialogic reading.
Early generation romances conversed from within and to an aristocratic audience.
Romances of Chrétien, Renart and Montreuil addressed specific noble patrons, and thus
spoke out to particular court culture.57 And there was a long tradition of the court
speaking – at times singing – back to romance. Archives and documentary histories of
court life testify to audiences who were not only attentive listeners to romance, but who
also, on occasion, sought to emulate it in court ritual and festivities. Broadening the
horizon of romance beyond the literary and musical sources reveals an active,
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participatory audience among the aristocrats of a number of European courts. Understood
in the broader context of chivalric values, and their shift in the thirteenth century, as
aristocratic courts were increasingly brought into tension with an emergent bourgeois
culture, it is hardly surprising that these exchanges between fiction and reality
prevailed.58 Work by historians of court culture reveals the considerable interplay
between fiction and reality, as life imitated art imitating life. Thus, albeit in rather
perfunctory terms, contemporary Latin chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries note numerous festal scenarios, from coronations, to royal entries, to knighting
ceremonies.59 In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a manuscript such as
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, which records the Tournoi de Chauvency (based
on events of a week-long tournament in Chauvency in 1285), demonstrates the complex
ways in which the fictional worlds of romance were woven into construction of the
realities of aristocratic constituencies across Europe.60 By the early fourteenth century,
the festal scene had acquired a historical status, evocative of a bygone age. In his study of
court culture in North-West Europe, Malcolm Vale illustrates the many ways in which
certain public rituals were modeled on activities of romance.61
Returning to the earlier examples of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
song might be understood to serve as an important mediator between the habitat of
literary representation in romance, and the environment of consumption, which was often
itself one of performance. Indeed, it is worth rehearsing some well-known facts about the
early generation trouvères. The most obvious of these is that a significant cohort of early
generation song-writers emerged from aristocratic backgrounds. Bondel de Nesle (ca.
1150-1200), Conon de Béthune (fl. ca. 1180-1219-20), Gace Brulé (fl. ca. 1185-1210),
18
the Châtelain de Couci (fl. 1186-1203), and Thibaut de Champagne (1201-1253) were all
linked to aristocratic families and were themselves of noble birth. Like the troubadours in
the later vidas and razos, their lives were often subject to amplification and restyling in
their later codification.62 But in some cases there is independent corroboration, as well as
internal referencing and self-referencing in song texts, which offer clues to their social
origins. Their social context is all important, since it demonstrates that they were part of
the culture that shared and defined the chivalric values depicted in romance narratives.
The social compatibility of song-makers and the inhabitants crafted into the
fantasy worlds of romance is evident, for instance, in Guillaume de Dole. In his
appropriation of songs into romance, Jean Renart makes the unusual gesture of naming
certain authors, notwithstanding his opening declaration that no one will know the songs
are not his own, because of his careful grafting of them into the story. Among those
named are Gace Brulé, Vidame de Chartres, and Renaut de Beaujeu, who were only
recently deceased at the time Renart was writing. The naming of authors indicates not
just that their songs were in circulation in his milieu, but also that the idea of them as
authors mattered. While it is easy to see this as precursor to the author-bias of the
chansonniers, it also offers insight into older contexts, in which the social rank of the
songmaker was significant to their audience, and significant, also, for their correlation to
the social orders depicted in romance narratives. A closer look at Renart’s cues of
trouvères evokes them along with cast of many nobles named in the text. Guillaume de
Dole is almost pedantic in the way it names and ranks members of the entourage, many
of them known historical figures, and moreover uses the festal scenes as opportunities for
call outs. It is in this context that composers are named, sometimes with the afterthought
19
that their song was the ideal song for the situation. A case in point is that of Renaut de
Beaujeu, whose song Conrad sings, overjoyed at the arrival of Guillaume at his court. In
this instance it is likely that the song is misattributed (it appears in later sources with
alternate attribution, and is, in any case, the only song attributed to Renaut in the
repertory).63 But the attribution itself is fascinating for bringing the romance author,
Renaut, into the cast of characters:
La chançon Renaut de Baujieu,
De Rencien le bon chevalier,
por son cors plus esleechier
de joie dou bon bacheler
commença lués droit a chanter:
Loial amor qui en fin cuer s’est mise…64
Out of joy at the good young man, and to delight his heart, he at once began to
sing the song of Renaut de Beaujeu, the good knight of Reims:
Faithful love which enters a noble heart…
The trouvère, hailing from Reims, and “bon chevalier,” enters the story like any number
of the other characters. Indeed, on finishing the song, Conrad hails Guillaume’s entry
with similar shorthand of name, place and rank: “Dole! Chevalier! A Guillaume!” (v.
1477). Singing the songs performs a kind of resuscitation, as their makers join the
community, briefly, as phantom nobility.
These brief examples point to a degree of reciprocity between the vernacular song
repertories and romance. Indeed, perhaps of all the musical scenarios of romance, the
20
festal interludes invite consideration for their “reality effect”: informed by, and
informing, the musical lives of their audience. Beyond the specific case of festal music,
this essay has sought to demonstrate how much more remains to be learned from an
approach to song and romance which collapses traditional generic boundaries. For
musicology, romance offers fresh challenges to the early history of song. The evidence of
the part of romance in illuminating a darker period of song history prior to its written
transmission should not be underestimated. The fundamental fact that texts such as
Guillaume de Dole or the Roman de la violette predate the earliest examples of musical
theoretical texts and notated chansonniers, the more familiar staple of the discipline, is an
important one. Perhaps the most pragmatic offering of romance studies to musicology,
then, is the reminder that the material life of song should not be constructed as one
bounded by the emergence of notated chansonniers. These are points that have been
underlined by scholars working in the middle ground between musicology and literary
studies, but the fact of song’s history before its material, notated, singable records begin
has yet to claim full purchase in the modern conception of medieval song. The
reconnection of the story of song with the music recorded in the romans à chansons, and
implied in the older romans sans chansons is one example of how broadening song’s
horizons might facilitate an ontological shift in the status of song, placing greater
emphasis on sound’s effects, and their connection to social and emotional values. What
emerges from the preceding discussion is the sense that as modern disciplines work
through the confusion that arises from too reified an approach to song, a new way
becomes apparent, one which invites reconsideration of the essential parameters of what
song is, how it works on those who make it, reiterate it, experience it in book, voice or
21
ear. Romance offers fresh insights into song history; conversely, attending to song as a
sonic presence in romance has the potential to enrich the understanding of that august
literary tradition.
22
1 This is the term used by Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17, and one I adopt throughout this essay.2 Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques français du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1962). For a recent edition with translation see Jean Renart, The Romance of the Rose or of Guillaume de Dole (Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole), ed. and transl. Regina Psaki (New York: Garland, 1995). Quotations from Guillaume de Dole follow Psaki’s translation with minor adjustments.3 The classic study of the tradition, including detailed exploration of the range of song’s narrative functions remains Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 4 For example, in the introduction to her Song in the Story, Boulton states: “A narrative in which lyric poems or songs are inserted is essentially a hybrid creation, combining two disparate forms.” See Boulton, Song in the Story, 1. See also Simon Gaunt, “Romance and Other Genres,” in Roberta Krueger, ed., Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45, for problems of genre in romance scholarship.5 Butterfield and Boulton offer useful appendices which combine to form a comprehensive survey of romances with musical insertions, brief summaries of the numbers and types of songs included, catalogue of manuscripts with some information about the presence of musical notation or otherwise. See Boulton, Song in the Story, 295-299 and Butterfield, Music and Poetry, 303-313. This work can be supplemented by that of John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21-24, which tabulates sources for troubadour and trouvère melody and includes thirteenth-century literary works with notated interpolations (with manuscripts).6 The most provocative example of this is Michel Zink, Roman rose et rose rouge: Le roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole de Jean Renart (Paris: Nizet, 1979). Key elements of his argument about the status of lyrics as performance in Guillaume de Dole are rehearsed in his “Suspension and Fall: The Fragmentation and Linkage of Lyric Insertions in Le roman de la rose [Guillaume de Dole] and Le roman de la Violette,” in Nancy Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 105-121, discussed by Butterfield in Poetry and Music, 18-24. See, too, Maureen Barry McGann Boulton, “Lyric Insertions and the Reversal of Romance Conventions in Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose or Guillaume de Dole,” in Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 87-88.7 Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 1.8 Huot, From Song to Book, 4.9 Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 13, here with reference to accounts of the relationship between written record and sound as framed by Michael Clanchy and Paul Zumthor. For more recent discussion of these issues, see her essay “The Musical Contexts of Le Tournoi de Chauvency in Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 308,” in Mireille Chazan and Nancy Freeman Regalado, eds., Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine médiévale : Autour du Tournoi de Chauvency (Ms. Oxford Bodleian Douce 308) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012), 399-42210 Butterfield, Music and Poetry, 17.11 Here I follow Sarah Kay’s categorization, which posits a common thread of chivalry and courtly love linking lyric, romance, romans antiques and saints’ lives. See her Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 36-37. Kay in turn draws from Reto R. Bezzelo’s important argument linking the origins of courtly literature to “the interaction between aristocracy and clergy in medieval aristocratic courts,” quoted from Kay, Courtly Contradictions, 36. See his Les Origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident (500-1200), 5 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1966-1968).12 John Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190-1230 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1. For a more
extended discussion of the audiences of these romances and their familiarity with the older Arthurian tradition, see 248-55. 13 For an excellent account on the performativity of English romance see, for example, Linda Marie Zaerr, Performance and the Middle English Romance (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2012).14 On which see Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100-1300 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1987), 3-11.15 On which see especially Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and esp. 1-21 for the argument that the two genres were much less distinct that modern scholarship traditionally argues for. See, too, Gaunt “Romance and Other Genres”. 16 On the performance of epic, see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 188-89.17 A point emphasized by Jane Gilbert, “The Chanson de Roland,” in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22.18 Page, Voices and Instruments, 4.19 Peter Noble, “Music in the Twelfth-Century French Romance,” Reading Medieval Studies, 18 (1992), 17-31. 20 These are detailed in Page, Voices and Instruments, 151-59.21 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” in Roberta Krueger, ed., Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. See, too, her Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).22 Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance,” 24-25.23 See Linda Clemente, Literary objets d’art: Ekphrasis in Medieval French Romance, 1150-1210 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), quoting from 5.24 For example Christopher Page, “Listening to the Trouvères,” Early Music 25 (1997), 639-60, Ruth Harvey, “Courtly Culture in Medieval Occitania,” in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8-27. The status of texts as documentary witness has long been a source of debate among literary scholars, however, with scholars such as Zink, Zumthor, Dragonetti among others argue against a “historical-positivist” view in favor of a more purely literary/rhetorical approach. For a succinct review of these positions, and for an alternative, historically-orientated reading of romance, see John H. Baldwin, “‘Once there was an emperor …’: A Political Reading of the Romances of Jean Renart,” in Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 45-82, esp. 45-46.25 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993). Schafer’s original book was published in 1977 under the title The Tuning of the World. For a useful overview on the treatment of Schafer’s soundscape, see Ari Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies,” Sense and Society, 5 (2010), 212-34. 26 Boulton devotes a chapter to “song as description,” which includes a number of examples of festal scenes in the romans à chansons. Her note 2 at 80 also lists examples where singing and dancing are mentioned without lyric quotation: Erec and Enide, Yvain, Panthere d’Amors, Guillaume de Dole, Cleomadés, Sone de Nansai, Escanor, and Froissart’s Chroniques. See Boulton, Song in the Story, 80-119.27 For further examples, see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 163-74.28 Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. Jean-Marie Fritz (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992), vv. 2031-2050.29 Translation by Carlton W. Carroll, Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 62, with adjustments.30 Page, Voices and Instruments, 155.
31 Page, Voices and Instruments, 155. See, for example, the wedding festivities in the Provencal romance Flamenca: The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and transl. E. D. Blodgett (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), vv. 587-713.32 Gerbert de Montreuil, Le Roman de la Violette ou de Gerart de Nevers par Gerbert de Montreil, ed. Douglas Buffum (Paris: Champion, 1928), vv. 65-304, Guillaume de Dole, vv. 259-556.33 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 5169-5656.34 Boulton, Song in the Story, 81.35 Schafer, The Soundscape, 10.36 Schafer, The Soundscape, 214.37 Erec et Enide, vv. 2052-55.38 For discussion of the volume of historical soundscapes (here that of seventeenth-century England) compared to the modern soundscape, see Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 49-51. 39 Renaut de Beaujeu, Le Bel Inconnu, ed. G. Pierre Williams (Paris: Champion, 1929). For a more recent edition with English translation, see Renaut de Bâgé, Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Descouneüs; The Fair Unknown), ed. Karen Fresco, transl. Colleen Donagher, music ed. Margaret Hasselman (New York and London: Garland, 1992).40 Le Bel Inconnu, vv. 2887-2899.41 Philippe Walter has connected the conjunction of candlelight and jongleurs to a number of popular rituals and literary representations, including to the liturgical processions associated with the Feast of the Purification (Candlemas) and to miracle stories retold in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame. For more on the context for the scene in Le Bel Inconnu, see Philippe Walter, Le Bel Inconnu de Renaut de Beaujeu: Rite, mythe et roman (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 213-26.42 Discussed in Noble, “Music in the Twelfth-Century French Romance,” 25-6.43 Schafer, The Soundscape, 215-17.44 On which see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 98-121.45 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 724-25.46 Boulton, Song in the Story, 81.47 Gautier d’Arras, Eracle, ed. and transl. Karen Pratt, King’s College London Medieval Studies, 21 (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2007).48 Eracle, vv. 3450-54. 49 Eracle, vv. 3455-60.50 Jakemés, Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, ed. and transl. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009).51 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, v. 3751.52 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, vv. 3874-3879.53 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, vv. 3831-3863. The lady of Vermendois sings Cescuns se doit esbaudir mignotement, and the Dame de Fayel sings J’aim bien loiaument.54 See note 24.55 See also Bruce R. Smith, “Coda: How Sound is Sound History?,” in Mark Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 389-94.56 The classic resource for this point remains Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), first published 1984. See also Baldwin, Aristocratic Life. The relationship between the values of courtliness as practice, and as literary and intellectual formation are subject, too, of an important new study of chivalry and knightly values by Craig Taylor, see his Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France During the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chapter one, “Texts and Contexts,” 19-53. 57 Joseph Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 4-23 on his dedicatees, and on the patrons for Renart and Montreuil, see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 31-67. Buffum’s commentary to his edition also includes a detailed list with short biographies of characters identified as historical figures. See Le Roman de la Violette, LV-LXXIII.
58 For a classic account of the literary witness to these political and social changes in France, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 11-54.59 Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 163-67.60 The manuscript is subject to an important new study: Chazan and Freeman Regalado, eds., Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine mediévale. 61 Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).62 For a useful discussion, see John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33-38.63 For an edition, translation and discussion of the song see Margaret Hasselman’s appendix to Le Bel Inconnu, ed. Fresco, 416-27.64 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 1450-1462.