Abstract
Together with its companion piece, Francesca M. Nicholson’s ‹Branches of Knowledge: The Purposes of Citation in the Breviari d’amor of Matfre Ermengaud’, this article deploys the image of the grafted tree, used by Matfre Ermengaud to describe the structure of his remarkable encyclopaedia, to explore Matfre’s reliance on poetry to transmit and shape knowledge. Concentrating on the opening of the Breviari, this article asks why, when Matfre also has recourse to the expository power of prose and images, he should prefer to compose the major part of his work in verse. Verse, it appears, is identified with the vernacular, with the community of lovers and poets for whom Matfre is writing, and with the faithful transmission of what, unbeknownst to them, they already know: their capacity for love which gives them community with God. The vernacular verse book both celebrates community and conjures it into being. The relation of scion to root in the grafted tree is a way of figuring the way all are bound into unity with knowledge, but not necessarily in the same way or at the same time.
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