Eye, Mouth, and Heart: The Female-Voiced Contrafacta of Can vei la lauzeta mover

Abstract

The canso Can vei la lauzeta mover, attributed to the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, has a long and wide-ranging reception through contrafacture and interpolated lyric as an exemplum of male desire. Among the song’s contrafacta, however, are three female voices airing their own responses to desire and unrequited love. One voice, a female lover in the jeu-parti Amis ki est li meulz vaillanz, debates her male partner on the question of whether desire is more enjoyable when satisfied or when prolonged; another, the complainte Plaine d’ire et de descomfort offers a sonically intricate account of unrequited love, rich in assonance; and a third, the voice of Saint Agnes in an Occitan play on her life, re-uses Bernart’s melody as a response to unwanted male desire. Noting the songs’ material transmission, this chapter engages in a combination of context-rich analysis and close musico-literary reading to consider how melody shapes, undercuts, and extends the desires expressed in these female-voiced lyrics, and how meaning arises when the same melody is applied to different texts. While clerical re-workings of Bernart’s song are transmitted alongside moralising and misogynistic texts, these female voiced contrafacta offer much more varied representations of women, so that the melody becomes a repository of associations on desiring women and on women desiring.