Interpolated lyric in medieval narrative poetry

My doctoral research concerns the use of song within narrative works in the Middle Ages. I have concentrated first on the substantial tradition in Old French of incorporating songs in this manner; and second, on the importance of this tradition to Chaucer, a poet who includes songs in nearly all his narrative poetry, and who was deeply familiar with many of the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French works of this type. In order to demonstrate the connection between this very large range of French narratives and Chaucer, it has been necessary first to define the French tradition on its own terms, since even by French scholars it has rarely been treated collectively, and some of the works have barely been explored. This assessment of the French material has involved a fresh attempt to define the lyric interpolations themselves, when (as in the majority of thirteenth-century works) they take the form of brief snatches of song known as refrains. Since the nature of these refrains has been a source of controversy among French scholars, my study begins by analysing them both as texts and as melodies, in order to assess their status and function within the narratives. I then go on to discuss works ranging from Jean Renart's Guillaume de Dole to Adam de la Halle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, to the dits amoureux of Machaut and Froissart. The influence of this French tradition upon Chaucer is examined first of all in Chaucer's early poems, through his direct knowledge and assimilation of Machaut and Froissart and other contemporary French poets. It is then traced, more indirectly, through Chaucer's reading of Boccaccio and Boethius. I thus consider Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's Il Filostrato in the light of Boccaccio's own knowledge of this French tradition from his position in the Angevin court of Naples. In addition, by investigating French translations of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, I examine the structural importance of this work as a prosimetrum both upon French narratives containing songs, and upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. In this way I aim to show that the influences upon his practice of combining lyric and narrative are both multiple and multiply connected. The aim of this dissertation is therefore two-fold: first, to contribute to the understanding of a substantial but little-known area of French studies, and second, to renew the discussion of Chaucer's relation to French love poetry by seeing his work as a late medieval development in England of a distinctive, and distinctively French mode of composition. Throughout the course of my work, my wider interest is in the way in which the juxtaposition of the two categories of lyric and narrative shows us that our understanding of medieval genre is in need of refinement. In particular, by taking account of the presence of musical notation in the manuscripts of several of the French narratives, I hope to suggest that some of our assumptions about the 'literary' nature of medieval genres should be revised, especially as works of this type often seem composed precisely in order to create and exploit contrasts of genre of a musical, as well as a poetic kind

FUZZINESS AND PERCEPTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

This article on fuzziness in medieval language use is the second part of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur.” Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 2 discusses “collective intensities” by means of some of the key examples of diplomatic negotiations in the Hundred Years War. The main focus of interest is the Treaty of Brétigny, the funeral of Jean II, and the Treaty of Leulinghen. The article asks how English and French negotiators worked collectively through language to create, identify, and maintain borderlines in their public, political relationships.</jats:p

Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages

Vernacular language use in England throughout the later Middle Ages was a complex negotiation between English and French; that is, between the languages of English and French and the political identities of two peoples engaged in a long war. Clifford Geertz's famous analysis of “blurred genres” is used to think through the fuzzy properties of this period's bilingualism and to argue that to understand the boundaries between English and French as blurred is revealing of the linguistic and social tensions that were the product of conflict between two closely intertwined cultures. This article is the first of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on “blur,” each part corresponding broadly to Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). This first part takes as its main example a duel described by Jean Froissart in his Chroniques, in which a French knight is punished by his own king, Charles V, for fighting and injuring an English knight on the outskirts of Calais in 1383.</jats:p

Afterword

This short coda to the volume draws links with the poetic miscellanies or recueils produced in continental Europe during the same period, noting points of comparison between the two categories of manuscript. This is an important reminder that even insularity has its limits, and that literary and textual traffic permeated international borders even in the pre-modern age.</p