Poetry And Music In Medieval France

Ardis Butterfield

In Poetry and Music in Medieval France Ardis Butterfield examines vernacular song in medieval France. She begins with the moment when French song first survives in writing in the early thirteenth century, and examines a large corpus of works which combine elements of narrative and song, as well as a range of genres which cross between different musical and literary categories. Emphasising the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Arras, Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied, including narrative romances, satires and love poems. She uses manuscript evidence to shed light on medieval perceptions of how music and poetry were composed and interpreted. The volume is well illustrated to demonstrate the rich visual culture of medieval French writing and music. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to both literary and musical scholars of late medieval culture.

Bibliographic Details

24 b/w illus. 4 tables 18 music examples

Contents

• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliographical note
• List of abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part I. Text and Performance: 1. Song and written record in the early thirteenth century
• 2. The sources of song: chansonniers, narratives, dance-song
• 3. The performance of song in Jean Renarts Rose
• Part II. The Boundaries of Genre: 4. The refrain
• 5. Refrains in context: a case study
• 6. Contrafacta: from secular to sacred in Gautier de Coinci and later thirteenth-century writing
• Part III. The Location of Culture: 7. Courtly and popular in the thirteenth century
• 8. Urban culture: Arras and the puys
• 9. The cultural contexts of Adam de la Halle
• Part IV. Modes of Inscription: 10. Songs in writing: the evidence of the manuscripts
• 11. Chante/fable: Aucassin et Nicolette
• 12. Writing music, writing poetry: Le Roman de Fauvel in Paris BN fr. 146
• Part V: Lyric and Narrative: 13. The two Roses: Machaut and the thirteenth century
• 14. Rewriting song: chanson, motet, salut, and dit
• 15. Citation and authorship from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century
• Part VI. Envoy: The New Art: 16. The Formes fixes: from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Bibliography.