Paraphrased and parodied, extracted and inserted: the changing meaning of Folquet de Marseille’s “Amors, Merce!”

Abstract

The transmission of verses extracted from troubadour poems and inserted into new works has been recognized and studied since scholars began to examine the corpus using modern philological methods. Most previous studies focus on the transmission process rather than the effect extraction, rewriting, and insertion has on the meanings of the excerpts in their new contexts. In this paper, I compare the meanings of the extracted parts of Folquet de Marseille’s “Amors, merce!” in their new contexts with their meanings in the original poem. The first line and parts or all of the second and fifth stanzas were extracted and inserted into ten new works, ranging from collections of abbreviated poems to quotations in longer works. Most later writers revise the excerpts to better suit their purposes through idiosyncratic readings of key passages or outright paraphrases. These revisions, in conjunction with the juxtaposition of the “Amors, merce!” quotations with quotations from other poems, usually produce new meaning contradictory to that in the original poem. Even in manuscripts of abbreviated poems, which purport to maintain the original meaning, the abbreviation alters the logical structure of the song and meaning to the point of contradicting the meaning in the original poem.