SOURCE: Butterfield, Ardis. “Part V: Lyric and Narrative” and “Part VI: Envoy: The New Art.” In Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 217-72, 273–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

[In the following excerpt, Butterfield analyzes Machaut's poetry and music, finding that both as a poet and a composer Machaut experiments with fixed forms and citation in an effort to explore the limits of his art.]

It is widely acknowledged that with Guillaume de Machaut vernacular song enters a new phase. His lais, rondeaux and ballades have an elaboration and artistic seriousness that sets them apart from thirteenth-century examples. As many have remarked, Machaut's works herald a new kind of relationship between lyric and narrative, a new kind of relationship between music and poetry, and a new vision of authorship and of writing.

So many claims to novelty need some clarification from both a musical and a literary perspective. It is not possible, for instance, to see Machaut as creating any of the genres in which he writes. The paucity of surviving music from the early decades of the fourteenth century makes Machaut's works stand out in isolated, brilliant prominence, but indicates (even in scattered and sketchy ways) that innovations were already well in train. The shadowy figure of Philippe de Vitry looms over these decades with a portentous spectrality as the composer most likely to have created a musical revolution.¹

Nonetheless, by the time Machaut comes to compose his first mixed lyric-narrative work, the Remede de Fortune (c. 1340), change has been signalled and fresh claims made. The Remede makes such a statement more emphatically than any other of his works. Hoepffner was the first to point out that Machaut creates something like a summa of the love lyric by including one example each of a range of lyric types, carefully defined and presented.² The Remede could equally be called a catalogue of lyric citations, or even a bibliography of lyric. In this narrative the ability to define lyric is itself a feat of accomplishment; it gives the impression that a new kind of assertiveness about lyric is possible. The Remede's act of citation functions as a revelation: here, Machaut seems to say, the ars nova has happened. Whether or not the Remede truly defines new forms of writing, the work is an act of definition and on these grounds alone, it creates a new status for lyric and narrative.

Yet it is not merely as an exemplary exemplifier that Machaut has so high a niche in fourteenth-century aesthetics. His most important role lies in his technical mastery of poetry and music together. Only Gautier de Coinci and Adam de la Halle approach his technical range, while yet falling far short of his musical versatility. This makes him a natural point of culmination for an argument about the ways poetry and music are combined in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France; it also makes him a special, even disturbing case. Machaut's art creates a new set of relationships between poetry and music, yet, ironically, the new terms that Machaut defines prove hard to repeat.³

In the last part of this book I consider how changes between Renart's Rose and Machaut's dits might be characterised and explained. I investigate how song and narrative mutually influence and modify each other, and how close the connections are between music and text. Previous studies of the period have tended to blur formal categories and describe a trajectory of change in music or in literature, but not in both. Yet change takes place on a wide variety of fronts in song, in narrative and in musical style and technique. We need to appreciate the nature of change on a broader front than hitherto, and especially to consider together, rather than in separate categories, the interrelations between song and narrative, music and poetry. This will involve developing the discussion in earlier chapters on the kinds of distinction medieval authors make between one genre and another.

Jacqueline Cerquiglini distinguishes between two main kinds of relationship between lyric and narrative: where the lyric insertion functions as a citation (collage), and where it functions ‘comme une matrice du texte’ (montage).⁴ Her prime example of collage is Renart's Rose; of montage Machaut's Le Voir Dit. If, however, we make the Remede the centre of comparison, then the contrast is less clear. For the Remede looks remarkably like a thirteenth-century romance. It is not, of course, an entirely simple matter to summarise the relation of the Remede to earlier narratives. One of Machaut's most widely acknowledged debts is to the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.⁵ However, compared to Nicole de Margival or Jehan Acart de Hesdin, Machaut uses allegory only lightly; instead, his dits have a more episodic structure, based around scenes of dancing, conversation and feasting that are highly reminiscent of the society romances of Renart, Gerbert de Montreuil, Jacques Bretel or Jakemés. Another instance of return to this kind of romance is his use of song: the Remede, especially, is structured around long, multi-strophic citations rather than clusters of short refrains creating, as in Renart, a broad boundary between lyric and narrative rather than a sequence of constant, brief interruptions and alternations.

Put crudely, the Remede, like Tibaut's Roman de la poire, is the product of two Roses. The Remede is a cross between allegorical clarity, didacticism, romance realism and formal variety. The Voir Dit takes up all these features but, more like Fauvel than Renart's Rose in its tendency towards rampant hybridity, casts new light on narrative and lyric again. In short, the Remede and the Voir Dit are not merely ‘lyric insertion’ narratives. Nor are they, in Huot's homogenising term ‘lyrical narratives’. Each is a crucial defining point both for the nature of lyric and for the nature of narrative.

Any discussion of lyric and narrative in medieval vernacular poetry must therefore reckon with two Romans de la rose: one by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun and the other by Jean Renart. We may have learnt to read Machaut through Guillaume and Jean's Rose, but his relation to Renart's Rose remains relatively obscure. In particular, the relationship between these two narrative traditions still awaits detailed consideration. It has been persuasively argued that the authorial persona in Chaillou de Pesstain's version of Fauvel is modelled on Jean de Meun's radical revision of Guillaume de Lorris's Rose.⁶ Yet the formal structure of the two works needs further comment. If Fauvel is indeed profoundly dependent on the Rose, why is it so different in form? The answer, I suggest, must lie in the legacy of the other Rose, Renart's Rose. Until this legacy is reassessed, the significance of Fauvel and, as a consequence, the course of vernacular secular writing in the fourteenth century will not be properly understood.

In regressing to the origins of the hybridisation of lyric and romance, we discover that both Roses are primary. Yet their roles are very different. For where in one Rose the distinction between lyric and romance is fundamental, and fundamentally explicit, in the other it is overridden. Where Guillaume's Rose makes a seamless union between lyric and narrative, Renart's Rose gives special prominence to the breaks and joins. Although the two works confront the same generic opposition, they diverge in their treatment of it. Moreover, it is Renart's work, rather than Guillaume's, which sets the pattern for the great majority of love narratives from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in which formal distinctions between lyric and narrative are both consistently maintained and ceaselessly examined. By the fourteenth century, the traditions of editing and glossing the combined Rose indicate the influence of the Machaut generation on the reception of the combined Rose to be at least as important as the influence of this Rose on the Machaut generation.⁷ One aim of this study, and a particular aim of this section, is to restore a sense of the importance of formal diversity and disjunction to medieval vernacular love writing, a perspective which Guillaume's, and later Jean de Meun's Rose—in its perceived position of dominance—has succeeded in obscuring.⁸

The changes in French song and narrative that take place across the border of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries involve many factors. I have discussed some of these changes in relation to the [Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 146] version of Fauvel. Some are social as well as formal and musical. Lawrence Earp has remarked on a type of inversion that takes place in the cultural status of lyric genres: ‘What was previously a lower-level popular genre associated with the dance is elevated, and what was previously the high-level genre is abased’.⁹ As aristocratic taste turns to the former dance-song genres, so the direct formal descendant of the grand chant, the chant royal, is cultivated not by courts but by urban puys. In addition, whereas monophony was dominant in the music of the grand chant courtois, the new formes fixes are characteristically polyphonic. A further change takes place in the relation between words and music: single-note syllabic (where each syllable of text corresponds to a single note or short note group of music) gives way to the melismatic (where extensive note groups are used to perform a single syllable). This happens by degrees, since the very first polyphonic rondeaux (by Adam de la Halle) are syllabic, and the earliest melismatic rondeau (by Jehannot de Lescurel) is monophonic. All this, meanwhile, occurs in the midst of a crucial period of change in musical notation, one of the earliest attestations of which, as I have remarked, is the Roman de Fauvel manuscript fr. 146.

Such radical rethinking and regeneration in French song does not happen in isolation from narrative. On the contrary, the citation of lyric in fourteenth-century narrative turns out once again to include some of the earliest known instances of formal change. Just as the earliest recorded rondets occurred in narrative (in Renart's Rose), so do some of the earliest recorded rondeaux, virelais and ballades (in the epilogue to Nicole de Margival's Le Dit de la panthère d'amours).¹⁰ That narratives should be among the first places in which the new lyric genres come to be copied down is worth pondering. It is of key importance in understanding both song and narrative. We must recognise that narrative and lyric each change in response to the other.

One reason for this is that innovations in musical techniques mutually interact with fundamental poetic and cultural shifts; another is that the new genres of song and narrative—notably the formes fixes and the first-person dit—are newly combined. Fauvel shows only too clearly how song and narrative are tightly—even intractably—enmeshed in the early fourteenth century. The next chapter revisits some of the evidence for change in pieces of writing that precede or are contemporary with Fauvel. Examples of song genres, narrative genres, and genres that combine song and narrative will all be brought into the discussion, finishing with Jehan Acart de Hesdin's La Prise amoureuse, a post-Fauvelian example, dated 1332, of a new-style dit inset with new-style rondeaux and ballades.

The final chapter of the section concerns the issue of citation and how it relates to authorship, which in turn is usually held to be one of the most significant defining factors in fourteenth-century lyric. Cerquiglini, among others, has not only stressed the importance of citation in Machaut, but also seen it as a decisive point of contrast between his work and the way in which lyric is set into earlier narratives. However, I would argue that citation and authorship are not opposed in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writing so much as interlinked. The practice of citation not only leads inexorably into questions of authorship, it is always already caught up in the issue of how one distinguishes between one form of speech and another. To cite is thus already to pose the question of who is speaking, of who has the authority to speak.¹¹ Even Renart, although he labels the songs clearly as the productions of different well-known authors, makes a joking pretence at claiming authorship for himself: he has made their words fit his romance so well that people will think he is the author of the songs as well as the narrative. It is a typically subtle joke: he claims the rights of authorship even as he denies them, and in doing so shows how fragile the notion of authorship is and how vulnerable to being appropriated by a mere citer and compiler.

Machaut's works never lose that deep-rooted preoccupation with the process of citation (one that is also fundamental to the Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun). The Remede may pass from citation to self-citation, but it betrays a keener absorption than ever in the boundaries between one kind of utterance and another. It is with the form of these utterances, and their history, that the next two chapters will be preoccupied. …

.....

That sense of a new fixity in form which we find in the first quarter of the fourteenth century is hard to locate in terms of a specific time, place or individual. In this chapter I want to consider the nature of change in song and narrative by way of the practice of citation. If the formal shifts and contrasts among the pieces that cite refrains are symptomatic of a profound attention to generic differences among thirteenth-century poets and composers, then the formal discontinuity of refrains is a symptom of their character as citations. They are distinct voices or perhaps, more precisely, a voice adopted by the speaker, ‘the image of another's language’, as Bakhtin puts it,¹² or ‘comme des éléments d'un code particulier, intercalés à l'intérieur de messages échangés’.¹³ As ‘other’ kinds of speech, they also act as a signal of difference: the moment of citation is the moment at which a sense of boundary between one form of speech and another is perceived. They mark out that these are someone else's words, not mine, or again, since refrains are a form of common language, that this is everybody's way of speaking, not just mine. Refrains both set up and break down barriers between different kinds of hold over speech: between mine and yours, ours and theirs, hers and his.

Yet refrains are difficult to understand as citations—in the way that proverbs are difficult—by being the kind of common currency that does not belong to a particular person but rather to a whole community. Refrains share many features with proverbs. In the analysis of A. J. Greimas, the twentieth-century structuralist and semiotician, these include a clear, closed structure with the dimensions of a phrase, proposition or a proposition without a verb, a certain archaic, atemporal character, a predominance of indicative present or imperative tenses and moods, and (although this is less frequent among refrains) a binary rhythmical structure which can be supported by means of rhyme or assonance. Despite these similarities, refrains do not fully lie under a proverbial description. Proverbs themselves resist neat classification: the sliding scale between idioms, sayings, sententious remarks, proverbial phrases and clichés has few fixed points.¹⁴ Although some descriptions amongst these suit refrains, such as Greimas's comment on ‘idiotismes’ as ‘une unité de signification saisie comme une totalité’¹⁵ the looser, lighter construction of many refrains, their dominating (though not exclusive) topic of love, and in particular, their existence as forms of melody as well as of speech takes them out of the orbit of most proverbial analyses.

The difficulty with thinking of either refrains or proverbs as forms of citation is that it is hard to specify any one refrain-citation as a source for another. As we saw in Chapter 2, the attractions of thinking of refrains as ‘primal’ texts are acute, and were felt particularly strongly by scholars of the generation of Jeanroy and Bédier. Yet refrains pose seemingly insurmountable problems in the quest for their original contexts: such anonymous, inclusive forms of speech and melody do not easily admit a notion of original, authorial creation. We seem to be led towards an intertextual sense of refrains as part of a ‘mirage’ of citations, an unstable matrix of mutually determining textual traces, in which ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’.¹⁶ In this perspective, the search for origins is itself a mirage: all discourse presupposes another discourse, and much of it has no origin as such. We are constantly speaking in words and phrases which have been set by generations of use, yet which have no possibility of being traced back to the moment when they were first coined.

To think of language as bound by the constraints of clichés is a salutary counter-argument to the notion that literary language is at the other extreme from cliché. An opposition is commonly set up between language as capable of being newly minted, coined, or created and a currency that is constantly devaluing itself through a process of endless circulation and exchange. Yet this distinction is not easy to maintain. Most literary language is dependent on ordinary speech. The view that literary language has special access to the new is cultivated through a very literate understanding of the processes of communication. It takes little account of oral culture, of a use of language that is dependent on common, anonymous phrases, and hence favours the proverbial over original forms of speech. Roland Barthes's remarks on the character of a text as made up of ‘quotations that are anonymous, untraceable, and nevertheless already read’ fit many textes à refrains in the Middle Ages with uncanny exactness.

Yet however important such insights are into the intertextual structure of language, questions remain. One of these is posed by refrain-citation itself. In certain contexts, refrains stand out clearly as citations; in others, refrains merge so closely into cliché that, especially in motets, they are hardly distinguishable.¹⁷ One of the teasing characteristics of refrains is that they identify clichés as citations.¹⁸ Frequently, a line has the function of a refrain in one context, but fades into the background in another. In its purer reaches intertextual theory effaces difference: it provides no way of saying why all language is not perceived in the same way. While it may be true in some sense that all language is formulaic, we still make distinctions between ordinary language, clichés, proverbs, famous sayings, quotations and allusions. These distinctions may be difficult to explain, but that does not alter the fact that we make them.

Refrains bear directly on these issues because they raise questions of how we ascribe identity to language, and how we demarcate this identity. Their relation to music introduces a further complication. Refrain melodies are generally light and easily memorable. A refrain's identity is thus formed by its character as a melody (if it survives with one) as well as a unit of speech. In common with other medieval song genres, however, the relation between a refrain's text and its tune is not simple. As we have seen in earlier chapters, a single text may be found in different contexts with several separate tunes; conversely a single refrain tune may be shared by more than one set of words.¹⁹ There is a musical intertextuality among refrains which forms an archaeology of sound as deeply layered as the submerged clichés of their texts, but sometimes with rival structures of identity.

.....

GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT, REMEDE DE FORTUNE AND LE VOIR DIT

I want to compare, finally, the use of refrain-citation in two works by Machaut, one written towards the start of his career (the Remede), the other at the end (the Voir Dit).²⁰ The first refrain in the Remede functions as an archetypal citation—it is the only non-authorial song citation in the Remede—summing up the history of refrain-citation in romance. Because Machaut does not set it to music its presence has received little comment.²¹ It bears all the characteristics of the thirteenth-century type. It occurs straight after the virelai that the lover has been asked to sing during his turn in a carole:

Aprés ma chançon commença
Une dame qui la dança,
Qui moult me sembla envoisie,
Car elle estoit cointe et jolie,
Si prist a chanter sans demeure:
‘Dieus, quant venra li temps et l'eure
Que je voie ce que j'aim si?’
Et sa chanson fina einsi.

(3497-3504)²²

After my song a lady, who had been dancing there and who seemed to me very charming, gracious and pretty, began at once to sing: ‘Dear God, when will the time and hour come that I may see the one I love?’ And she finished her song with this refrain.²³

No refrain appears in precisely this form in van den Boogaard's bibliography (which does not, of course, extend this far in date), but several resemble it.²⁴ It is striking that Machaut should give the refrain so firm an association with dance-song. This whole scene in the Remede, exquisitely illustrated in [Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français, 1586],²⁵ undoubtedly re-creates the querole described in the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris where Leesce starts up the singing of refrains:

Bien sot chanter et plesanment,
ne nule plus avenanment
ne plus bel ses refrez feïst.

(729-31)²⁶

She knew how to sing well and pleasingly, no one could do it more attractively or perform refrains more beautifully.

It is important to recognise that, in its direct citation of dance-songs and refrains, the scene equally recalls Renart's Rose. … Machaut's inclusion of a refrain amongst all the other lyric genres suggests that he regarded the refrain as a distinct genre, a status which, as we saw in Chapter 2, scholars have often been reluctant to grant it. Machaut emphasises the typicality of the setting at least as much as the song, by implying that a refrain is an intrinsic element of the tradition of reporting such scenes in romance.²⁷

But dance-song is not the only context for refrains in romance. Like Tibaut, Baudouin de Condé and the Salut poets, Machaut also employed refrains as amorous epithets. A favourite of his was one of the most current refrains of the period, Qui bien aimme, a tart oublie [He who loves well forgets slowly] (4258) which he quotes as the last line of the Remede (before the brief epilogue) in a way that partially recalls its flyleaf citation in the [Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français, 2186] copy of the Roman de la poire.²⁸ It is the first line of his Lai de Plour, and occurs in the triplum of “Motet 3,” and repeatedly in the Voir Dit.²⁹ Another epithet, which also recalls refrains used in the Poire, occurs in the complainte set into La Fonteinne amoureuse:

Dont vient cils maus? Il vient d'outre la mer,
Si m'ocirra …

(493-94)

Where do these pains come from? They come from beyond the sea, and will kill me …³⁰

In his last great work, the Voir Dit, Machaut reverts to the large-scale refrain-citation of Renart le Nouvel, Baudouin de Condé's Li Prisons d'amours, and Fauvel. The work as a whole is deeply discontinuous (to use Jacqueline Cerquiglini's apt designation).³¹ The plot is divided between two characters, Guillaume, the aged poet, and a young girl, Toute Belle, who writes to him, seeking friendship because she is so admiring of his poetic reputation. They exchange forty-six prose letters, and over sixty lyrics; the narrative couplets that describe the progress of their relationship are also gradually exchanged, so that the writing down of the love affair becomes indistinguishable from the affair itself. In contrast to the Remede, Machaut moves away from the single, inclusive perspective of the lover towards a split narrative. The lady, silent and passive in the structure of the Remede, becomes active and articulate in the structure of the Voir Dit: language and music are no longer the unassailable possession of the author but a shared commodity between two authors.³² It is not clear whether Toute Belle represents a real female author; but even if we were to understand her as a fictional character, Machaut has ensured a genuine sense of rupture in the narrating voice. The uncertainty among modern readers of the Voir Dit over Toute Belle's historical status testifies to her success as a rival author figure in the narrative.

This ambiguous notion of authority fractures the narrative mode of the Voir Dit. Narrative verse and lyric verse do not merely alternate (though this is not a simple process even in the Remede), but rather, as in Fauvel, pass between all kinds of verse and between verse and prose. The effect of these formal shifts is that narrative is subjected to frequent disruption: the same event is told several times in lyric, in verse narrative and in prose letters which causes narrative time to keep restarting, pausing, partially recapitulating, partially amplifying. Divided as it is between two characters, a further change in perspective arises as one and then the other narrates and comments. At first, when the relationship is blossoming, the formal discontinuities tend to work in a similar emotional direction and hence towards a convergence of view. However, later in the story when distrust begins to breed, the issue of veracity becomes more pressing, and it is no longer clear whose narrative, at any one time, has better claim to truth. The last part of the Voir Dit places greatest strain on ‘true speaking’, and the formal breaks, changes and reduplications stretch the tension to the breaking point.

Such a complex structure makes citation a subtle and unstable process in the Voir Dit. Our view of how citation works depends in part on our view of Toute Belle. For some, she is a separate historical figure who wrote a large collection of letters to the poet and sent him several of her own lyrics; for others, she—and the writing attributed to her—is a fictional construct created by the poet.³³ The puzzle of Toute Belle raises the same questions as the razos and vidas of the lives of the troubadours, poised between the life of the author and the life as author, the life as composed of the lyrics in the narrative, and the life as lived while composing these same lyrics. Machaut's title—Le Voir Dit—is an understated but pointed declaration of this punning, double-voiced relationship between veracity and verisimilitude, fictionality and authenticity.³⁴

It comes as no surprise, given his far-reaching exploration of the border between language and history, that Machaut should weave refrains into the Voir Dit with such purpose.³⁵ Machaut makes creative use of refrains in three major ways: by quoting common refrains as if they were proverbs (as in Qui bien aimme); by requoting refrains from his inset lyrics within the narrative or the letters; and finally, by linking together pairs of lyrics with the same refrain, a practice fairly common in his Louange des dames.³⁶

The importance of these procedures, as Cerquiglini demonstrates, is that it creates a close interlinking (‘l'enchaïnement’) between lyric and narrative, in which themes and phrases from the inset lyrics provoke repetition and amplification in the form of narrative.³⁷ In the light of the study of refrains in this book, and of their use in a wide number of narrative, motet and chanson texts reaching back to the early thirteenth century, these interesting observations can be augmented in several directions. We see in Machaut's frequent requotation of them, refrains in the act of being created. What starts as the refrain of a ballade becomes, through the course of several citations throughout the work, a newly independent phrase which may itself become the subject of narrative discussion. One precedent for this technique in Machaut is Li Prison d'amours. The difference is that Machaut now makes explicit what in Baudouin was only implicit: where Baudouin had to seek for variants of refrains to create an accretion of authority for his case, Machaut indulges in self-quotation.

The case of Qu'assez reuve qui se va complaignant [[That] he asks enough who complains] shows the relation between Machaut's technique and Baudouin's particularly clearly. The narrator and Toute Belle are together for the first time and meeting each other every day in the vergier. Guillaume performs to her the ballade ‘Le plus grant bien qui me viengne d'amer’ [The greatest benefit that comes from loving] [Guillame de Machaut. Le Livre du voir dit/The Book of the True Poem, ed. D. Leech-Wilkinson, Lines 2641-64], in which he complains at not being completely cured from love's pains. This prompts a conversation between them in which he amplifies the message of the ballade at length. Finally, he concludes:

Je weil ci finer mon sermon
Que trop longuement vous sermon
Et say bien prouvé par mon plaint
Quassez rueve qui se complaint

(2801-04)

I mean to finish my sermon at this point, having lectured you too long; In my complaint, I've proved well ‘That he asks enough who complains.’

In reply, Toute Belle quotes the same refrain back at him:

Par quoy vo conclusion prueve
Que qui se complaint assez rueve
Si quamis ie responderay …

(2823-25)

And all this supports your conclusion ‘that he asks enough who complains’. And so, darling, I intend to respond …

Just as in the Prison d'amours the refrain is used to conclude the argument, here it is taken as representing the essence of the ballade, and also as a proof or testimony of Guillaume's feelings. In this we see a change from Baudouin: in the Prison d'amours the refrains bolster the poet's allegorical analogy, whereas here they are supposed to guarantee the ‘truth’ of the poet's sentiments.³⁸

We considered in the last chapter how the salut, the chanson avec des refrains and the motet are all examples of genres in which small elements of text and melody are used to open up generic categories, creating structures which cause us to redefine our notions of lyric and narrative. Machaut continues this process, by using different forms of lyric, and different forms of narrative (verse and prose), and by treating lyric as narrative (in the ‘operatic’ sequences) and narrative as lyric (in the repetition and discussion of refrains). He grafts and interweaves, using refrains as ways of liaising between the different forms of writing. He even uses them to liaise between his different works, a practice we have seen to be characteristic of the compiler(s) of the Fauvel MS fr. 146, and will shortly investigate in Adam de la Halle. The result is that composition—as a procedure—looks increasingly like creative compilation and recategorisation. By the time he puts together the Voir Dit, Machaut seems to turn authorship into something both fractured and distinctive. He looks, as an author, not for seamless control, but for an increasingly intense ability to distinguish between different types of language, different modes of utterance. The refrains, as ever, break out from formal boundaries—in this case the examples of formes fixes—to work as independent units. Even the formes fixes are used by Machaut as a means of rethinking and representing narrative, producing a work that leaps imaginatively into a new kind of citational art.

I have argued that vernacular authors were acutely sensitive to the differences between one voice and another and to the challenges of turning a common, ‘popular’ language into something more personally authoritative. Machaut's obsession with citation links him with much earlier explorations of the limits of genre. The relation between song and narrative offers a means for authors to articulate new versions of authority.

The link between formal revision in various song and narrative genres and an increasingly prominent use of refrain citation is worth emphasising. It is unlikely to provide us with a single key towards understanding the processes of compositional change across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Change, even of a very marked and deep-seated kind, does not always yield to attempts to find a specific cause or impetus, but rather reveals itself as arising out of a complex nexus of small and larger factors. This is especially true of the extraordinarily emphatic way in which the forme fixe takes over from grand chant as the dominant mode of medieval song, and reigns as such for two centuries. We need to find a way of grasping this change as a process that was both dynamic and volatile. The last chapter will now turn to the formes fixes themselves in the hope of discerning further aspects of their transformation into a new art. …

EPILOGUE

O flour des flours de toute melodie,
Tres doulz maistres qui tant fuestes adrois,
Guillaume, mondain diex d'armonie,
Après vos fais, qui obtendra le choys
Sur tous fayseurs?

(1-5)

O flower of flowers of all melody, very dear master who was so skilful, Guillaume, worldly god of harmony, after your achievements, who will be pre-eminent above every poet?³⁹

There is much to observe in this celebrated remark. One feature is the way Deschamps draws attention first to Machaut's music rather than his poetry. Deschamps does famously use poète of Machaut elsewhere, in so doing applying the word for the first time in French literary history to a contemporary (as opposed to a Classical) author.⁴⁰ Here he chooses the more common fayseur. This term has a useful neutrality that can apply to his music as well as to his poetry.⁴¹ It draws out a retrospective pun on fais, which can mean not only ‘achievements’ or ‘deeds’ but ‘compositions’. In other references to Machaut, Deschamps talks of ‘l'art de musique et le gay sentement’, as well as ‘le noble rethouryque’. Deschamps appears able to find the terms to do justice to Machaut's achievements in both music and poetry. Perhaps this is because he does not make any hard-fought distinction between them; the skills of rhetoric and of music meet together in Machaut to create a maistre. Machaut is not, or at least not quite, at this stage in the fourteenth century, either a poet or a musician, but a craftsman with a range of accomplishments. It is possible, moreover, that even poète means author, rather than necessarily the more modern meaning of poet; given this ambiguity, what we are reading in Deschamps's eulogies amounts to a comment less about music and poetry than about music and authorial status.

The plausibility of this reading is strengthened by Machaut's own comments about music and poetry. I want briefly to consider the Prologue, written, it seems, especially to introduce his collected works in [Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 1584] (MSA), dated to the 1370s. Placed at the front of the manuscript, and not included in the index, the Prologue appears to be a remarkable aesthetic statement written by Machaut at the end of his career as a way of epitomising his entire artistic production. This work takes the form of four ballades, in pairs, followed by 184 lines of narrative. In the first pair of ballades, Nature commands him to make ‘nouviaus dis amoureus’. For advice and encouragement, she offers him three of her children: ‘Scens, Retorique et Musique’. The second ballade takes the form of the poet's reply in which he duly accepts her charge with appropriate gratitude, humility and commitment. In the next pair, Amours offers three more of her children: Dous Penser, Plaisance and Esperance as ‘matere’ for his compositions. He responds again accordingly. As in the Remede, Machaut makes a three-fold classification.⁴² He is a rhetorician and a musician, employing rhyme and melody, whose sens is derived from the matere of Amours.

The Prologue as a whole has been much discussed and debated. Some have argued, via the terms musique artificiele and musique naturele used in Deschamps's L'Art de Dictier, that music has so encompassing a meaning in Machaut that we should ‘assume that he defines poetry as music’.⁴³ This is to ignore the plain and unambiguous way Machaut talks of rhetoric and music. Music is not subsumed under rhetoric, neither is rhetoric equivalent to poetry. They are separate skills working towards a similar goal, the praise of ladies and the Art of Love. There is a danger in so overreading the term musique in Machaut that one loses sight of the pragmatic, technical meaning of the word to any composer. Music and poetry have a professional rather than sentimental relationship in Machaut. His rather academic, unglamorous remarks especially in the Voir Dit on his musical settings are of a piece with the fact that he sets relatively few of his poems to music. This was not, I suspect, because he thought it all music in any case, but because (on the evidence of the Voir Dit) he found the technicalities of musical composition more time-consuming than those of poetry. The more mystifying views of music found in Deschamps and Froissart, it must be remembered, are those of non-musicians.

The manuscript presentation of this Prologue, as Earp points out, is intriguing: two later manuscripts [fonds français 9221 and 881] start with the four ballades only, which introduce, in turn, Machaut's lyrical poems as the start of his complete works.⁴⁴ Other, earlier manuscripts (fr. 1584, fr. 22545, and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 396) include the narrative section of the Prologue as well as the ballades, and start with Machaut's narrative poems. The logic of these arrangements appears to point towards a desire to match up the generic order of the codex with the generic structure of the Prologue. If a choice is made in the works as a whole to begin with lyric, then they are given a lyric introduction, but if the choice falls to narrative, then narrative introduces the works.⁴⁵ Whether or not it was Machaut himself in every case who made this decision, it indicates how thoroughly generic issues dominate the manner in which Machaut's compositions were presented.

Machaut's Prologue is deeply interesting for the sense it gives of Machaut's looking over his complete works and pondering an appropriate way to introduce them. We gain an immediate insight into the balance and order of his codices, and a strong impression of a single individual seeking to control the public image of his writings. [Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 146] the Fauvel manuscript, comes closest to this impression, but in that case, the energy behind the careful plotting of design, juxtaposition and interpolation is driven by a political polemic, rather than by a single, and highly personal aesthetic aspiration. Three author collections predate Machaut's: those of Adam de la Halle in [fonds français 25566] the chansons of Thibaut, Roi de Navarre which introduce so many of the chansonniers, and Gautier's Miracles. Each varies in the kind and degree of unity they manage to impose on the writing. Thibaut's has unity in the first instance of genre, for the notion of authorship is added on to an already cohesive group of high art grands chants. In Adam's works the notion of authorship pulls against that of genre. Authorship wins out but by acknowledging the extreme generic diversity of the compilation. Generic diversity is also a feature of Gautier's collections, but his poetic authority is subsumed to the authority of the Virgin. She is the single, cohesive topic that justifies and indeed impels his work.⁴⁶ Adam's oeuvre does not have this kind of cohesion: its justification—a newly exposed position—is Adam himself.

Adam's works in [fonds français 25566] are usually taken as the most important immediate precedent for Machaut's oeuvre. Nonetheless, fr. 25566 was compiled for Adam rather than by him, which leaves Gautier in splendid early isolation as a vernacular author who tried to exert unusual control over the manuscript presentation of his own work. Machaut's efforts connect in this way with the earliest bold gestures of the thirteenth century. As I have argued, continuity exists in the issues concerning music and poetry throughout the 150 years that this book spans. The traditional view of a linear change ‘from song to book’ relies too straightforwardly on the obvious point that authors in the period partake in a climate of increasing literacy, in which books survive in greater numbers. Music, as well as poetry, becomes a more literate activity, but this does not result in a decline in performed music. Both poets and composers of music adapt with enormous creative energy to the changing stimulus of writing song. It sometimes seems as if we are being told that books gradually replace the art of performance: on the contrary, books become all the more important to the pragmatics of performance. The more literate music becomes, the more it participates in the bookish cultural circumstances of poetry, the more, ironically enough, it becomes a distinct performance art. We are privileged that in the Fauvel manuscript and the Machaut manuscripts survive examples of mise-en-page that are an extraordinarily sophisticated coordination of both kinds of performance.

A major concern of this book has been to trace the role of narrative in the writing down of song. Narrative is a permanent presence in the absorption of vernacular song into a literate world, and an influential one. We have seen how its influence consists partly in form, in the stretching and abbreviating of song into semi-lyric and semi-narrative. This fascination with creating and examining the differences between genre, between music and poetry, between languages, registers, and cultures is symptomatic of deep tendencies towards hybridity in the creative practice of thirteenth-century composers, from motet to romance. Much of this is enabled by the refrain, by its fundamentally double characteristic of being on the one hand an element that creates stability in a song structure by its pattern of repetition, and on the other, an element that creates division by introducing boundaries between one genre and another. In the transition from anonymity to authorship, refrains offer an illuminating perspective on the means by which formulas become part of the process of exerting greater types of control over language, over language in writing, over musical language and musical writing.

Above all, the presence of narrative shows us the importance of context to the way that song is presented in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century works and their manuscripts. It reminds us that song is never abstracted from its social form, but is mirrored, invented and reproduced by means of narrative throughout this period of its history. We might wish to avoid, in conclusion, the retrospective literary hegemony that sees the relationship between music and poetry as doomed to end in the middle of the fourteenth century. This suppresses the contribution of music to poetry as well as of poetry to music in medieval writing. Rather than finish (as so often) with the thought that this period ends with divorce and dissolution, we might seek instead to celebrate the superlatively inventive set of relationships between the two arts that it contains, and which continues to find new forms throughout the fifteenth century and beyond.

Notes

1. Vitry's importance as composer, poet and ars nova theorist is qualified only by the relatively small number of surviving works that can be confidently attributed to him. For the suggestion that Vitry may be associated with the creation of the ars nova ballade, see Page, ‘Tradition’; see also Leech-Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars Nova’; Wathey, ‘The Motets’ and ‘Myth and Mythography’.

2. Hoepffner, Introduction to the Remède de Fortune, II, xiv.

3. There has not been space to include Froissart and other later fourteenth-century authors in this book: they will be discussed in a forthcoming study.

4. Cerquiglini, ‘Un Engin si Soutil’, 24. She also refers to a combination of the two (collage-montage). For a refinement and further discussion of this distinction, see Taylor, ‘The Lyric Insertion’.

5. Amongst others, Badel, Le Roman, and Brownlee and Huot, eds., Rethinking the Romance of the Rose.

6. Brownlee, ‘Authorial Self-Representation and Literary Models in the Roman de Fauvel’, in Bent and Wathey, eds., Fauvel Studies, 73-103.

7. Badel, Le Roman de la Rose; Brownlee and Huot, eds., Rethinking; and Huot, The Romance of the Rose.

8. Discussion of Guillaume's Rose in relation to lyric and romance models includes Uitti, ‘From Clerc to Poète’; Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, 186-262; Huot, From Song to Book, 84-85.

9. Earp, ‘Lyrics for Reading’.

10. The date of the Panthère is uncertain: Todd, ed., Le Dit de la panthère d'amours, dates it between 1290 and 1328. Other early citations of formes fixes occur in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, and fr. 146 in the Roman de Fauvel and the songs of Jehan de Lescurel.

11. Kristeva, Le Texte du roman, 139-76.

12. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 44.

13. Greimas, ‘Idiotismes’, 57.

14. On proverbs, see the contrasting approaches of Whiting, ‘The Nature of the Proverb’, and ‘Proverbial Material’; and Rhétorique du proverbe: Special Issue, especially J. et B. Cerquiglini, ‘L'Ecriture proverbiale’.

15. Greimas, ‘Idiotismes’, 50.

16. Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, 66 (adapting Bakhtin).

17. Doss-Quinby, Les Refrains, 55.

18. For further discussion, see Butterfield, ‘Repetition’.

19. For examples, see Chs. 4, 6 and 9 above [Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France, 2002].

20. Recent work on citation, mainly on the ballades and the later fourteenth century, includes Plumley, Boogaart, and Leach. See also Günther, ‘Zitate’, and Arlt, ‘Aspekte’.

21. Hoepffner mentions the refrain in passing, along with the priere; however, with the exception of Earp, Guide, 212 and 238, modern accounts of the work's inset pieces (such as Huot, 249, Wimsatt and Kibler, eds., Guillaume de Machaut, 39 and Boulton, The Song in the Story, 188) have ignored it.

22. All citations from the Remede are taken from Wimsatt and Kibler, eds., Guillaume de Machaut.

23. Wimsatt and Kibler's translation of line 3504 is more specific than the original.

24. For example, vdB, refrs. 823, 822, 575, 576, 577 and 1811.

25. Avril, Manuscript Painting, Plate 24, and p. 86.

26. Ed. Lecoy, Le Roman de la rose.

27. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, Ch. 5, also his ‘Court and City in France, 1100-1300’, in McKinnon, ed., Antiquity, 197-217.

28. See vdB, refr. 1585; Morawski, ed., Proverbes, no. 1835; Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, A63; Ludwig, ed., Musikalische Werke, II, 33*-34*. On its circulation in England, see Butterfield, ‘French Culture’, 103-07.

29. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, ed., Le Livre [hereafter L-W & P], Letter 10, p. 122; Letter 30, p. 394; line 7372, p. 506. Deschamps also uses it as the refrain of a ballade (No. 1345 in Oeuvres complètes, VII, 124-25).

30. Ed. Hoepffner, Guillaume de Machaut, III. This is a close variant of: ‘Don[t] vient li maus d'amer qui m'ocirra?’ [Where do the pains of love come from that will kill me?] (vdB, refr. 595), Butterfield, ‘Repetition’.

31. Cerquiglini, ‘Le Clerc et l'écriture’, 158. Taking the Voir Dit as exemplary in its discontinuities of form, narrative sequence and time, Cerquiglini further argues that discontinuity is a defining and polemical characteristic of the dit: ‘le dit est une genre qui travaille sur le discontinu’ (158).

32. The sharing of authorship characterises both the Rose of Lorris and Jean de Meun, and the revised fr. 146 version of Fauvel.

33. The issue of the historical ‘truth’ of the Voir Dit has been thoroughly re-examined by Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame’, ‘Le Voir Dit: a Reconstruction’, and Le Livre dou Voir Dit, ‘Introduction’. On the identification of Toute Belle as Peronne d'Armentières, and full references to the differing interpretations of Machaut's anagrams and riddles see ‘Introduction’, xxxviii-xl, nn. 4 and 5.

34. Cerquiglini, ‘Le Clerc et l'écriture’.

35. The far from satisfactory 1875 edition by Paris has now been superseded by L-W & P, cited here, and Cerquiglini-Toulet and Imbs, ed. and trans., Le Livre.

36. Some poems share the same refrain (e.g. Wilkins, ed. La Louange, Nos. 148 & 155), or the first line of one becomes the refrain of another (e.g. Nos. 32 & 149). Lines from No. 188 are used as the refrains of the next four ballades in the manuscripts (Wilkins, ibid., Nos. 206, 12, 34, 49). See his note to No. 188, 177; Earp, Guide, 349-50.

37. Cerquiglini, ‘Un Engin’, 37-38.

38. A further two citations of this refrain occur still later in the work, in Letters XVII (232) and XXXVII (456).

39. From the double ballade ‘Armes, Amours, Dames, Chevalerie’ that Deschamps wrote to lament the death of Machaut, set to music by Andrieu. Cited and translated in Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 246-47.

40. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, 9-12.

41. Compare the opening stanza of this ballade (line 2) and also the often quoted lines of Gilles li Muisis, writing of Jehan de la Mote: ‘Or ye rest Jehans de le Mote / Qui bien le lettre et le notte / Troève, et fait de moult biaus dis, / Dont maint signeur a resbaudis, / Si k'a honneur en est venus / Et des milleurs faiseurs tenus’ (Now there remains Jean de le Mote, who composes both words and music well, making very lovely poems, from which many lords take pleasure, so that he has come to honour because of them and is accounted among the best poets); Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 51.

42. Lines 2099-100.

43. Lukitsch, ‘The Poetics’, 264, cited approvingly by Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 5, n. 5.

44. Earp, Guide, 205.

45. The question of which, and how many of the surviving ‘complete works’ manuscripts were supervised in their copying arrangements by Machaut has not been fully settled: fr. 1586 and 1584 are generally agreed to be the likeliest candidates. See Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, and Huot, From Song to Book, 246-48 and 274-75.

46. Gautier's role in presenting his own work deserves a separate and more extended account than I can give here.

List of Abbreviations

Manuscripts

Fr.: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français

Lat.: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds Latins

n.a.fr.: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouvelle acquisitions francaises

Sources

BBSIA: Bulletin bibliographique de la société internationale arthurienne

BECh: Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes

CCM: Cahiers de civilisation médiévale

CFMA: Classiques français du moyen âge

CMM: Corpus mensurabilis musicae

CSM: : Corpus scriptorum de musica

EMH: Early Music History

FMLS: Forum for Modern Language Studies

Gennrich: Friedrich Gennrich, ed., Rondeaux, Virelais und Balladen aus dem Ende des XII., dem XIII. und dem ersten Drittel des XIV. Jahrhunderts, mit den überlieferten Melodien, 3 vols.: vols. I and II, GRL 43 and 47 (Dresden, 1921, and Göttingen, 1927); vol. III, SMMA 10 (Langen bei Frankfurt, 1963)

GLML: Garland Library of Medieval Literature

GRL: Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur

HLF: Histoire littéraire de la France

JAMS: Journal of the American Musicological Society

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

JRMA: Journal of the Royal Musical Association

M Friedrich Gennrich, Bibliographie der ältesten französischen und lateinischen Motetten, SMMA 2 (Darmstadt, 1957)

MD: Musica Disciplina

MHRA: Modern Humanities Research Association

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

MLR: Modern Language Review

MMMA Monumenta monodica medii aevi

MQ: The Musical Quarterly

New Grove: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, gen. ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. 2nd edn (London, 2001)

NM: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen

PL: Patrologia Latina

PMFC Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century

PMM: Plainsong and Medieval Music

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

PRMA: Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association

R: G. Raynauas Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes, neu bearbeitet und ergänzt von Hans Spanke, I, ed. Hans Spanke (Leiden, 1955; reprinted with index, 1980)

RILM: Répertoire international de littérature musicale

RISM: Répertoire international des sources musicales

SATF: Société des anciens textes français

SMMA: Summa musicae medii aevi

SP: Studies in Philology

TLF: Textes littéraires français

Tobler-Lommatzsch: Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, ed. Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1925-76)

vdB: Boogaard, Nico H. J. van den, ed., Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris, 1969)

ZFSL: Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur

ZRP: Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie

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