Guillaume De Machaut Research Articles

Ранняя поэма Чосера «Книга о Герцогине»: особенности топики

The article discusses the meaning of the poem The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer, which is considered as a multi-layered structure. Traditionally popular topics in Chaucerian studies related to this work are those that involve discussion of questions about the validity of the publishers’ choice of one of the surviving titles for the poem, about the correlation of the images of the main characters, including the Dreamer, in the plot and narrative, about the motivation for the two-part type of composition (The Proemium and The Dream) and the function of using in the plot of the retelling from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the story of Ceyx and Alcyone), and finally, about the connection of this retelling with the “Boethian” poems of Guillaume de Machaut. The author of the article consistently touches on the essence of the listed issues, in order to finally present his own concept of the form and meaning of Chaucer’s early poem. In particular, the primacy of the image of the lady lost by the knight is questioned. The author of the article proposes to consider the structure of the work as a voluminous, multi-layered object, under the outer layer of which (the praising of the queen stolen by Fortune, whose prototype was Blanche the Duchess of Lancaster) there is a layer with a focus on the complaining knight (and the implicit function inherent in the elements of this layer of praising this knight for his courtliness, education, and qualities of a lover), which, in turn, hides the third layer, the semantic core of which is in the theme of Chaucer’s own competition with Guillaume de Machaut and Ovid in the realm of poetic fantasies.

The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut

Abstract This article considers debates in French literature before Guillaume de Machaut, with some references to Occitan and Latin. It demonstrates that debates were a widespread practice of the period, one which was frequently represented in texts and manuscripts. The first part of the article describes the practice of debate in terms of approaches that debaters can take: an intrinsic approach whereby the terms of the debate dictate the debaters’ strategy, and a contextual approach whereby debaters let their own particulars weigh in on the conversation. It shows how, far from imposing rigid modes of participation, these two complementary approaches gave debaters the opportunity to exploit the debate form for argumentative purposes. The second part discusses two manuscripts to show how the material presentation of texts could bring about debates in literary texts and compilations. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 presents demandes d’amour as debates through illumination. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2609 exemplifies how the juxtaposition of texts creates a debate that runs across them. This article contributes to scholarship on debate literature on two different levels: it proposes that we consider the corpus of debate literature in French in terms of practice rather than genre; and it also makes the case for a thriving literary tradition of debate in the twelfth to early fourteenth century, a period often considered only as a prequel to a more robust late medieval tradition.

Hidden colouration: deep metrical flexibility in Machaut

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a metrical adaptation to the contrapunctus method of pitch reduction commonly used to analyse Ars Nova counterpoint. Expanding the medieval concept of colouration from the mensural to the metrical, my contrapuncti highlight the flexible toggling between perfect and imperfect groupings at various rhythmic levels in selected motets by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–77). The viewpoint advanced here assumes no a priori metrical grid to parse the musical surface, but rather allows the articulation of sonority, cadence and form to reveal a fluid and unique metrical grouping structure for each piece. With metrical emphases shown as inextricable from contrapuntal and harmonic ones, the metrical contrapunctus captures a more comprehensive picture of Machaut's musical language.

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

Symmetries In Classical Music. From Guillaume de Machaut to Cesar Franck

Reflection, translation, rotation are terms frequently used in mathematics and generally associated with the sense of sight: we can use tiles or stained glass to clarify these concepts, but it is possible to exemplify the same concepts using the sense of hearing. In the first case the x and y coordinates of the plane are, for example, the width and height of a stained-glass window, in the second case the variables are respectively time and sound height, but instead of vision, we need hearing and memory to recognize the symmetry. Musicians and composers are aware of these con- cepts and use them with rigor and ingenuity. We present several musical examples from different eras, analysing compositions ranging from Guillaume de Machaut (14th century) to Cesar Franck (19th century), through Mozart's joviality and Bach's genius (18th century).

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle

Reviewed by: The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle Sarah Wilma Watson Kara A. Doyle. The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 306. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Kara A. Doyle's new book uncovers an exciting early chapter in the reception of Chaucer's poetry. Exploring six manuscript compilations dating to [End Page 397] between 1410 and 1450, Doyle demonstrates how early compilers placed Chaucer in a French literary context that encouraged readers to focus on Chaucer's female-voiced critique of fin'amors. Creators of fifteenth-century compilations developed Chaucer's reputation as "womanis frend" by positioning his poetry alongside French and English texts that highlight female perspective, agency, and voice. Through codicological interpretation and comparative literary analysis, Doyle reconstructs the intertextual reading experience of medieval audiences, showing how compilers and readers encountered Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate through the lens of French lyric sequences and dits and debats amoureux. This French literary context foregrounded for medieval readers a concept that Doyle terms "the female hermeneutic dilemma"—"when confronted with fin'amor gallantry, should women believe men's protestations of love and fidelity or treat them with skepticism?" (3). Tracing the development of this idea in Chaucer's poetry and in the works of his French and English contemporaries and successors, Doyle explores how medieval authors, compilers, and readers responded to bids for female agency and challenges to courtly and chivalric masculinity. Before turning to the six manuscript compilations that structure her book, Doyle devotes Chapter 1 to exploring the "female hermeneutic dilemma" featured in all six collections. Influenced by Ovid's Heroides; the Ovide moralisé; the dits amoureux of Guillaume de Machaut; and the French lyric sequences of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and John Gower, Chaucer developed a female-voiced critique of fin'amors that is portrayed especially prominently in Anelida and Arcite. Analyzing this poem, Doyle identifies five tropes that constitute the female hermeneutic dilemma: "female ventriloquism, exposing male fickleness, skepticism about male fin'amor rhetoric, demonstrating female fidelity, and warning the female audience" (21). Doyle argues that this critique of fin'amors runs through much of Chaucer's work prior to the Canterbury Tales and receives especially extended and sincere treatment in Anelida and Arcite, a text popular among Chaucer's early readers. With the female hermeneutic dilemma in mind, in Chapter 2, Doyle turns to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1410–25), the earliest known attempt to compile a complete works of Chaucer. Doyle observes that the compiler opens the collection with "French-inflected materials" to create a "French lyric backdrop" (13) for Chaucer's works, and closes the collection with John Lydgate's Temple of Glass, a text that offers "an unusually thoughtful retrospective on the female-voiced tropes [End Page 398] in Chaucer's work" (14). The compiler of Gg.4.27 thus "encourages readers to see Chaucer through the lens of late fourteenth-century French literature and sets audiences up to think of Chaucer as 'womanis frend'" (52). Next, in Chapter 3, Doyle analyzes Durham Cathedral Library, MS Cosin V.ii.13, an anthology dating to between 1425 and 1450 that includes Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid (an adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours). Doyle argues that by pairing these texts, "the compiler gives Chaucer's masterpiece a French framework and helps construct a Chaucer who teaches women to be wary readers of [fin'amors] rhetoric" (76). In Chapter 4, Doyle returns to Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, considering how this text is positioned within two anthologies created by John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20. In both manuscripts, Shirley situates Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism of fin'amors rhetoric, placing Chaucer's poem alongside lyric poems that question the morality of courtly life and show the wide range of male intentions that women must interpret. Through prologues, headers, and marginal...

“What me is”: Insomnia Cures, Saintly Miracles, and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess as Illness Narrative

Unlike its immediate sources, French dits amoureux by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart that privilege love adventure, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is centrally concerned with illness and healing and the ways that they shape embodied experience. The medicalized attention Chaucer’s poem brings to the narrator’s insomnia in particular reveals connections to both contemporary natural philosophy and hagiographic miracle collections, which sometimes included insomnia among conditions cured through saintly intervention. In the Book of the Duchess, sleeplessness is a canvas for an immersive meditation on the body, its creative processes, and problems of identity, or “what me is” (line 31). Looking beyond the French courtly register that has dominated critical interpretation, this essay reframes Chaucer’s poem in its contemporary intellectual context as an early instance of “illness narrative,” drawing methodological support from theories of intertextuality as well as the sociology and ethnography of illness. The poem’s healing trajectory, differently relevant to the dreamer, the Man in Black, and White, ultimately affirms the communicative movement from self to other and the therapeutic value of empathy as necessary conditions for the poet’s creative agency.

The Elements of Contemporary Turkish Composers’ Solo Piano Works Used in Piano Education

It is thought that to be successful in piano education it is important to understand how composers composed their solo piano works. In order to understand contemporary music, it is considered that the definition of today’s changing music understanding is possible with a closer examination of the ideas of contemporary composers about their artistic productions. For this reason, the qualitative research method was adopted in this study and the data obtained from the semi-structured interviews with 7 Turkish contemporary composers were analyzed by creating codes and themes with “Nvivo11 Qualitative Data Analysis Program”. The results obtained are musical elements of currents, styles, techniques, composers and genres that are influenced by contemporary Turkish composers’ solo piano works used in piano education. In total, 9 currents like Fluxus and New Complexity, 3 styles like Claudio Monteverdi, 5 techniques like Spectral Music and Polymodality, 5 composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Guillaume de Machaut and 9 genres like Turkish Folk Music and Traditional Greek are reached. It is thought that the results will contribute to the field because it will cause a better understanding in the artistic viewpoints of contemporary composers, as well as being a step for the piano and music educators and the students who have studied academic piano education in order for them to be able to understand the contemporary music.

From Socially Distant to Socially Engaged: Exploring the Soundscape and Material Environment of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Ostensibly a story about gaining confidence in love, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has been explored as a summa of contemporary musical styles and a treatise on the memorial arts. It has also been examined as an important example of the use of citation and allusion in the fourteenth century because it incorporates references to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose. This essay enhances these studies by focusing on a particular aspect of the narrative: the use of soundscape and material environment to express the protagonist’s emotional growth. After exploring key concepts such as soundscape, authorial self-presentation, and melancholy, it considers how sound is introduced and presented in relation to the narrator’s emotional world and how music is woven through the narrative. An analysis of how sound and touch play a role in the narrator’s interaction with Lady Hope leads to a discussion of the use of soundscape and material environment in the description of the Park of Hesdin and the festivities at the manor house. As this examination of soundscape and environment will show, Machaut chooses to use them as a means to convey the narrator’s burgeoning confidence: he gives a minimal and cliched description of the wonderful park when the narrator is mired in melancholy yet offers an elaborate, exciting treatment of the manor house after the narrator’s confidence-building interaction with Lady Hope. The essay closes with a consideration of how the presentation of sound and material environment relates to Machaut’s use of Boethius. In the context of the material turn within medieval studies, I argue that we can view sound and objects within medieval literature as media for the communication of ideas about narrative and character development and that this form of analysis sits comfortably with other lenses of interpretation.

A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt

Book Review| December 01 2020 A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2018. xx, 397 pp. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel TAMSYN MAHONEY-STEEL is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. Her research interests include medieval French music and literature and the use of text mining and text encoding. She has published on the application of the Text Encoding Initiative for editing the works of Guillaume de Machaut, medieval motets, and soundscapes in medieval narratives. She is an editor of the new complete works edition of Machaut. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (3): 800–806. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel; A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2020; 73 (3): 800–806. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Motet scholars see the world in terms of motets: that which is complex, beautiful, and multivalent can be deemed motet-like. Jared Hartt claims this esteemed identifier for his own volume on medieval motets, and he has earned the right to do so. Like those of medieval motets, the contributing voices are competing yet harmonious, working together to provide a rich understanding of the genre, but never attempting to reduce these pieces to a common core. Hartt's A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets is what the field of motet studies needs: a volume that captures the complexity of the evolution of motets in a manner that is satisfying for scholars yet accessible for students. The introduction contains the best summary of medieval motets I have read, alerting the reader to all the traditional definitions, while acknowledging outliers and edge cases—such as the monophonic motet—that may in fact allow us to reorient... You do not currently have access to this content.

Machaut's motets on secular songs

ABSTRACTIn his three motets with tenors taken from secular songs, Guillaume de Machaut experiments with upper voice structures that borrow from the talea principle used in chant-based motets, creating hybrid forms that reflect aspects of the motet's overall subject. In two cases, Machaut sets up upper-voice taleae that do not coincide with their song-based tenor but interact with it in interesting ways. Trop plus est bele / Biauté paree de valour / Je ne sui mie certeins (M20) balances these formal principles to reflect a perfect love balanced between the dedicatory and the sacralised, while Lasse! comment oublieray / Se j'aim mon loyal ami / Pour quoy me bat mes maris? (M16) creates three opposing forms that reflect a Lady looking in two different directions, towards a beloved and a husband who abuses her. Dame je sui cilz qui weil endurer / Fins cuers doulz, on me deffent / T. Fins cuers doulz (M11) does not define regular upper-voice taleae, but rather uses the tools by which taleae are defined in the upper voices – long rests, hocket sections, and melodic repetition – to merge disparate formal principles in the service of a motet that discusses a woman who merges a soft appearance with a hard reality. Here Machaut also uses hexachordal punning, combining sharps and flats to express the Lady's contradictory qualities.

The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut

Reviewed by: The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut Alice V. Clark Guillaume de Machaut. The Motets. Edited by Jacques Boogaart, translated by R. Barton Palmer and Jacques Boogaart, with art historical commentary by Domenic Leo. (Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, vol. 9) (Middle English Text Series.) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; pref., p. xi–xii; introd., p. 1–23; editorial policy, p. 25–32; The Motet Miniature: A Commentary, p. 33–45; score, p. 47–186; crit. commentary, p. 187–246; bibliog., p. 247–260. ISBN 9781580442879 (paperback) ISBN 9781580443029 (hardback) $39.95 (paperback); $99 (hardback).] Guillaume de Machaut is generally considered the most important poet and composer of fourteenth-century France. This assessment rests to a large degree on the fact that we have a large body of work securely attributable to him because he, unlike Philippe de Vitry and their mostly anonymous contemporaries, collected his poetry and music in books devoted entirely to his work. Six of these "Machaut manuscripts" containing both words and music survive, most copied during his lifetime and therefore representing different stages of his output; other sources exist, some only fragmentary and most without notation, and there are references to still others. All of this is clearly laid out in Lawrence Earp's magisterial 1995 study, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland composer resource manuals, v. 36 [New York: Garland Publishing, 1995]), affectionately known as the "Machaut Bible" and still unsurpassed, though it has been supplemented by his more recent work, done in collaboration with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau, on the Ferrell-Vogüé manuscript. Because Machaut's works extend across genres, including both polyphonic and monophonic music as well as narrative and lyric poetry, they were edited in stages. Most of the narrative poems were published by Ernest Hoepffner in the early twentieth century (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, 3 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1908–1921]), following up on earlier editions and excerpts, while the lyric poems (including those set to music) were edited by Vladimir Chichmaref (Poésies lyriques, 2 vols. [Paris: H. Champion, 1909]). While individual narrative poems have been newly edited in recent decades, Lawrence Earp observes that "modern editions of Machaut's poetry are on the whole not as solid philologically as the material now available for, say, Froissart." (Earp 1995, 197) Machaut's music was first edited in full by Friedrich Ludwig. The initial work was done in the first few years of the twentieth century, although the edition was published mostly in the 1920s and the final volume, devoted to the lais and the Mass, only became widely available in 1954, decades after Ludwig's death (Musikalische Werke, 4 vols [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926–1954]). Another edition, by Leo Schrade, appeared only two years later [End Page 491] (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vols. 2–3 [Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956]), but, as Earp has shown, it is "totally dependent on Ludwig" (Earp 1995, 281), though its use of modern clefs and convenient reprinting in 1977 means it is the edition most often encountered by students today. It is to be hoped that will change, starting with this new edition of the motets. The volume is part of a plan to edit anew all of Machaut's literary and musical works, overseen by R. Barton Palmer (a literary scholar at Clemson University) and Yolanda Plumley (a musicologist at the University of Exeter). Though it may seem strange at first to publish Machaut's works under the auspices of the Middle English Text Series (a program of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, associated also with TEAMS, the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), the edition fits well the series's goal of making available editions suitable for classroom use. The two volumes published so far in this series are eminently affordable: the volume under review lists for $39.95 in paper, or $99.00 in hardback. The first volume of the edition, on the debate poetry, appeared in 2016; in addition to the French text and a facing English translation of Machaut...

Récit à la première personne, autographie, autobiographie

In the 13th century, two major works employed the ‹I› as a narrative device. They put forth two types of texts which would serve as templates for authors of first-person narratives: the dream and the quest. In this period, another type of narrative text also appeared in French which was characterized by the presence of an ‹I›: the ‹dit›. What does this ‹I› represent? The ‹dits› analyzed here can be divided into two broad categories: the love ‹dits› (Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan) and the ‹dits› in which the theme is no longer the conquest of the love object but the quest for knowledge (Christine de Pizan). We can locate a foreshadowing of these two templates in the ‹Roman de la Rose› in the transitional passage from one to the other of its two parts. The analysis describes a typology distinguishing the open-ended ‹I› from the ‹I› characterized by the fact that it leads to questions regarding the ‹I› as a figure of literary authority around two essential concepts: experience and sentiment. It concludes by examining the inflection taken by the ‹I› when a shift occurs from the love of love to the love of knowledge.

The Dream of Language: Chaucer "en son Latin"

Taking its cue from the efforts to revive the Ojibwe language in the aftermath of residential schools' closure in Canada, this lecture draws on Giorgio Agamben's essay "The Dream of Language" to make a fresh exploration of the medieval history of language change. Reviewing Agamben's argument that the bilingual Latin–Italian Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (1499) marks the moment when Latin starts being viewed as a dead language, it traces the complex earlier perspectives on Latin and vernacular through a reverse chronology from Villon to Chaucer via Guillaume de Machaut and Dante's writings on language. The case is made that it is misleading to view the relation between Latin and vernacular in the Middle Ages as clear-cut and oppositional. Once we understand medieval writers to be working in a plurilingual and hence only semi-grammatical environment it becomes possible to see how notions of vernacularity and Latin were much more subtly entangled than it is usually assumed. Medieval writers, even in ostensibly monolingual texts, do not deal with a hard-edged distinction between Latin and vernacular, but instead work creatively with the often painful recognition that the power relations between languages involve loss and extinction. The figure of the dream, and also of a female dream-body, central to the playful multilingualism of the love between Polia and Polifilo in the Hypnerotomachia, is shown to be an earlier preoccupation of Chaucer through his creation of Criseyde. Drawing on Machaut's use of dreams to figure linguistic boundaries, Chaucer presents Criseyde as a prototype of Polia, the name and love of language, a figure of linguistic loss and death, yet also of hope and aspiration.

William (Bill) Calin (1936-2018)

William (Bill) Calin (1936-2018) F. Regina Psaki William Compaine Calin died on May 20, 2018 at Lake City Medical Center in Gainesville, Florida at the age of 82. Bill Calin was born on April 4, 1936, in Newington, Connecticut, only child of Isadore ("Jack") Calin and Nettie Compaine, originally from Romania and Russia. Bill often described his parents as committed communists; their son, as some apples do, rolled as far from the tree as possible. Bill loved talking politics; he relished disagreement and debate, and never saw any reason for such conversations to become aggressive or divisive. He deplored the factionalism that has riven American politics and the disappearance of the concept of "loyal opposition." If Bill could have bottled his gift for lively yet friendly—even affectionate—political wrangling, he'd have made a fortune, and the entire polity would have been the better for it. Click for larger view View full resolution Bill in 1963 (Guggenheim archives) Click for larger view View full resolution Bill in May, 2017 (photo by Kathryn Klingebiel) Bill studied in Paris during his junior year in college. There he fell in love with French Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which led him to his research and teaching specialities of medieval French and Occitan literature and culture—as well as to middle English and, later, to modern Occitan, Breton, and lowland Scots. His published obituary noted that "While he published more in one lifetime than many could do in five, his creative and analytical energies would have taken five lifetimes to exhaust." This is no exaggeration, and no short tribute can do justice to the variety and copia of his publications. Fully 25% of [End Page 224] his published articles are dedicated to Occitan; this tribute will highlight some of his Occitan professional activities. Bill took his undergraduate degree at Yale College (1957) and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1960). From then on, in his teaching and writing alike, he communicated both his knowledge and his love of the rich contributions that France has made to world culture. He taught at Dartmouth, Stanford, the University of Oregon, and, since 1988, the University of Florida, as Graduate Research Professor in French Literature. He was a visiting professor at academic institutions in North America and Europe and delivered 230 conference papers and invited lectures. A quintessential teacher and researcher, Bill won eleven major grants from national and/or international scholarly organizations, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was an International Vice President of the Association Internationale d'Études Occitanes (1993-2002). He was on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Tenso, and served in many international organizations, such as the Centre international de l'écrit en occitan (1996 until his death) and the MLA Division of Provençal and Catalan. He was proud to have been elected a Sòci dóu Felibrige in 1993. Bill published twelve books covering a broad range of French literature, from the earliest epics of France, through the lyric production of poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, to modernity and medievalism. His expertise also included the so-called 'minority' languages and literatures of the British Isles and France, on the one hand, and the ways in which the modern world imagines, studies, and understands the Middle Ages, on the other. His later books include The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England; Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990; The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye; and The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland; Essays in Criticism. In addition, Bill published over 120 articles and book chapters on many topics (see below for those on Occitan) and reviewed [End Page 225] 27 books in learned journals. His last Occitan essay appeared in Spring 2018 in this journal, a fitting conclusion to his career as an occitaniste. Bill was twice married and remained dear friends with his former wives. Though he had no children or siblings, he is survived by many whom he called "academic daughters and sons," whom he mentored...

Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft by Douglas Kelly

Reviewed by: Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft by Douglas Kelly Claire Konieczny (bio) Douglas Kelly. Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft. D.S. Brewer, 2014. 378 pages. ISBN-13: 978–1843843726. Having composed nearly 400 poems of different types during his life, spanning from ballads to rondeaux to laments, Guillaume de Machaut was not only one of the most popular poets of the fourteenth century, but also one of the most influential. Douglas Kelly's book, Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction, and Poetic Craft, is a comprehensive study of this seminal figure of medieval writing. While taking into account most of Machaut's works, Kelly accords special significance to Machaut's chef d'œuvre, his narrative poem the Voir Dit. In this poem, an aged master poet named Guillaume takes on a beautiful apprentice, a young woman given only the name "Toute Belle." In a letter containing a sample of her poetry, Toute Belle requests that Guillaume instruct her in the art of poetry; Guillaume agrees, and the two fall instantly in love. The Voir Dit then narrates both the development of their love, as well as the apprenticeship of Toute Belle and her study of the art of poetry. While forming the basis for his analysis around this tale, Kelly takes into account the full scope of Machaut's influence—his "art of love, his art of poetry, and his legacy" (xi). These three aspects of Kelly's analysis of Machaut structure his book as well: first, Kelly explores Machaut's changing perspectives on love throughout his corpus (Machaut's art of love), culminating in the Voir Dit; second, Kelly focuses on the technical elements of Machaut's poetry (Machaut's art of poetry); third, Kelly addresses Machaut's influence upon other poets of the time (Machaut's legacy). Focusing first on Machaut's art of love, Kelly addresses Machaut's search to define what Kelly terms "good love," that is, the "perfect" way to love another. Kelly analyzes Machaut's developments on the concept of "good love" throughout all of his major works. Broadly speaking, Kelly draws out a trend in Machaut's writings that redefines "good love" not as based in physical desire, but as one that is chaste, pure, and therefore perfectly happy. This idea of Machaut's concerning "good love" is for Kelly epitomized in the Voir Dit, as Kelly points to the fact that desire on the part of the beautiful young Toute Belle for the ugly old poet is unlikely. Their love is a chaste one, and when Guillaume allows desire to lead him astray from the path of "good love" and cloud his judgement, Toute Belle recalls him to virtue. Thus, the Voir [End Page 1123] Dit narrates the story of two apprenticeships: that of Toute Belle in the art of poetry as well as that of Guillaume in the art of "good love." Continuing his investigation of Machaut's "art of love," Kelly then turns to Machaut's ideas on the relationship between truth and fiction, as Machaut understands it. Kelly states that the narrative of the Voir Dit suggests that there must be some underlying truth to writing poetry about love; that is, good love poetry cannot be written in the absence of love. Further adding to this basis of truth is the fact that one of the main characters in the Voir Dit is a master poet named Guillaume—whether "de Machaut" should follow that first name is unclear, and Kelly shies away from fully clarifying this ambiguity. However, I suggest that the name of the master poet in the Voir Dit again points to an underlying structure of truth in the fictional poem. As the dit genre of poetry is both poetic and narrative in nature, one must recall that the Voir Dit is in reality a fictional narrative. Kelly writes that while the Voir Dit may be inspired by reality, its fictitious nature allows Machaut to convey what Machaut believes to be universal truths concerning love; a fully autobiographical story would limit the universality of the truths. Exploring further Machaut's "art of...

Introduction: Translation and Reception of Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Literature

IntroductionTranslation and Reception of Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Literature Marta Marfany The articles published in this volume emerge from a day of seminars entitled "Traduction et réception: La littérature française des xive et xve siècles" that took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, in July 2016. This special issue focuses on French language, literature, and translation, and explores the translation and reception of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French texts, especially in the Crown of Aragon and within Catalan culture. The following essays also look across Europe at the translation and reception of texts in other languages during this period; it looks at translations from French, adaptations, and influences. We believe that the following articles will be of interest to the readership of Digital Philology given their comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, combining medieval French literature with related fields such as medieval Catalan literature, medieval Italian literature, and medieval translations. We take a broad view of literature, exploring historical works (Livy and his translator into French, Pierre Bersuire); manuals of chivalry (such as that of the great philosopher Ramon Llull); a popular fourteenth-century allegorical work (the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine by a French Cistercian monk); as well as the great texts of medieval French literature, for example, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the works of Alain Chartier (compared with those of Dante), the Roman de la Rose, and Paris et Vienne. We also analyze political and philosophical texts and include reflections on language and translation as seen in the works of Nicolas Oresme and Jean Juvénal des Ursins. Under the overall heading of French literature and with the aid of some representative examples, the range of topics covered in this special issue provides a broad view of translation during the fourteenth and [End Page 135] fifteenth centuries. Considered as a way of transferring doctrinal content from one cultural context to another, translation played a central role in the dissemination of knowledge and the appropriation of scholarly and learned discourse by Romance vernacular languages. Translations from Latin therefore were key in the culture of the Late Middle Ages, as they provided access to classical and scholastic works to an educated audience possessing insufficient or no knowledge of Latin. Translations, therefore, lie at the roots of the literary innovations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Late Middle Ages, in addition to the usual legal, biblical, and generally religious texts, there were translations of historical, philosophical, and doctrinal texts, largely classical Latin texts and medieval texts on classical subjects. In broad terms, the increase in types of texts translated caused translation to become a discipline in its own right and to develop its own tradition, its own approaches and certain theoretical elements that generated a range of different ideas and practices. Translation prologues are an example of this, as they provided translators with an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of translating Latin into the Romance languages, to consider the linguistic toils of translation, and to comment on the noble and arduous task of transferring content from a higher culture to a lower one. All these issues appear in the first of the three sections of articles in our collection, which deals with general reflections on translation and reception in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially around concepts of translatio imperii and translatio studii. These reflections are exemplified in the work of two great French figures of the period: the polymath Nicolas Oresme, one of the best known official translators for Charles V of France, and the politician Jean Juvénal des Ursins, who was writing in the early fifteenth century. The first article, entitled "Nicole Oresme's Cultural Translatio in Question," is by Anne-Hélène Miller. Although Oresme's translation of Aristotle is among his most celebrated works, it only represents a part of his overall written production. Miller suggests viewing these official works of translation within the context of Oresme's philosophical thought and literary culture. This enables a study of the cultural inheritance (studii) of his works in the light of the political inheritance (imperii). In the second article of the first section of...

Guillaume de Machaut at the Court of Aragon, 1380–1430

Knowledge of Guillaume de Machaut's literary and musical works is attested since 1380 in the Francophile court of Aragon, where his art exerted an influence that endured well into the fifteenth century. Catalan poets such as Andreu Febrer and Pere Torroella were greatly influenced by Machaut's poetry. This can be seen in the way they adapted the lay and ballade forms, and in the French section of chansonnier Vega-Aguiló (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MSS 7–8), an important witness to the poetry that originated with the troubadours and was fashionable in the Crown of Aragon until the end of the fifteenth century. This article approaches the role of Machaut's poetry and music in the construction of a literary canon in the Crown of Aragon.

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381. Lynn Arner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+198.

<i>Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381</i>. Lynn Arner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+198.