Abstract

Abstract The thirteenth-century prior and poet-musician Gautier de Coinci is known for his extravagant wordplay, which relies on the recursive patterning of verbal sound. This article considers Gautier’s penchant for sonic repetition in the light of the music that frames his book of miracles, focusing on the song Por mon chief reconforter, a chanson à refrain written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his imminent death. The song’s exclusion from Frederic Koenig’s standard edition of the Miracles means it has received little scholarly attention, yet its earliest source is linked with Gautier’s original exemplar. The article examines how repeated musico-poetic forms—within the stanza, between stanzas, and in the more temporally extended repetition of contrafacture—interact with notions of temporality and mortality voiced in the song’s texts and contexts, suggesting that such structures reshape the experience of time into one that is less linear, and therefore less final.

Highlights

  • Mother of God, from my youth I’ve made you a new chasc’an te doi noveau son song every year; I have kept the covenant until none je t’ai bien tenu covent and vespers

  • Manuscript o’s intriguing ‘fake’ musical notation, written below each line of text on two stave lines, precludes it from being used in musical transcription, so the examples that follow are based on M.24. Despite this questioning of Por mon chief’s authorship, the song is, ironically, one of the most autobiographical in tone of Gautier’s lyrics, written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his own impending death.[25]

  • On the level of contrafacture, in sharing a melody that circulated within two different cultural milieux, Por mon chief opens itself to a wider circle of recognition among both religious and lay people (‘soit clercs, soit lais’, in Gautier’s words), and, in its reception, potentially incorporates a subtext of theological depth into Gautier’s project of redirecting the pleasures of the courtly

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Summary

BY MEGHAN QUINLAN *

WITH ITS AIM OF BRINGING both ‘clerkly and lay’, the educated and the ‘unlettered’, to lives of Marian devotion, Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Notre Dame envisages itself as a text and a process.[1]. All textual quotations from the Miracles de Nostre. Dame (Miracles) are taken from Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. (Geneva, 1955–70) and follow the numbering and abbreviation of sections outlined on pp. Ligatures are shown with slurs or square brackets; plicas with quavers in non-rhythmic notation and slashed stems in rhythmic notation; manuscript line changes with check marks; and clef changes with Cx, Fx, or, in the case of one source, Ax, where the letter indicates the type of clef and x shows the stave line number on which the clef appears

Bibliotheque nationale de France
ANALYSING POR MON CHIEF
POR MON CHIEF WITHIN THE STANZA
WITHOUT TERM AND WITHOUT END
Absque Dei numine
Rubus non conburitur
Ab hoc ergo medio
Bien me puis apercevoir
Full Text
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