Roman De Fauvel Research Articles

Cannibal, Scorpion, Horse, Owl: Institutional Hypocrites and the Early Fourteenth-Century Church

The status of hypocrisy as a vice has varied historically, but analysis has tended to stress the issue in relation to individuals, rather than institutions. Taking Judith Shklar and Boccaccio as points of departure, this article explores how and why hypocrisy mattered in the context of the early fourteenth-century church. Analysing charges of hypocrisy made by and against Pope Boniface VIII at the papal Curia; Angelo Clareno within the Franciscan Order; and the later Capetian court in relation to the Roman de Fauvel allows us to see how anxiety about hypocrisy became especially acute across a range of early fourteenth institutions. Contemporaries questioned what their institutions meant and increasingly put their claims to the test, often in heightened apocalyptic terms. In and around the early fourteenth-century church, worry about institutional hypocrisy shows how responsibility was increasingly on trial.

14세기 프랑스 필사본 ‘Roman de Fauvel’ 연구

Roman de Fauvel conveys the turbulent politics of France during the reign of Philip IV (1268-1314) through poetry, music and painting. This thesis discusses how such political themes were expressed in paintings in Roman de Fauvel. Before discussing the paintings, a discussion of the two authors of Roman de Fauvel will examine the context in which they were created and their intentions. Because the manuscript was created from the perspective of Roman de Fauvel's alignment with political forces and criticism of his time. Based on this understanding, the painting techniques used in Roman de Fauvel to convey the intent of the work include the choice of colors according to the characters, Fauvel's imitation of the French royal family, and the use of anti-biographical techniques, which expose the fake as a clumsy imitation of the real thing. Through this study, we hope to get closer to the achievements of Roman de Fauvel, who achieved a complete fusion of literature, music, and painting.

More on a friend of Philippe de Vitry: Johannes Rufi de CrucealiasJean de Savoie

AbstractWho was Jean de Savoie, the clerk with whom the composers Jean Campion and Philippe de Vitry penned the jeu-partiUlixea fulgensin 1350? This article uses Jean's hitherto unnoticed will and foundations at the church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bestourné, Paris, with other documentation, to bring together Jean's two identities in a unified biography (including a new date for his death, in 1354); to illustrate the close parallels between his own career and that of Philippe de Vitry, and to map the scope of opportunities for contact between them in and around the French royal court from the early 1320s onwards. Jean was also an artist and illustrator, and his career as one of the more prominent cartoonists of Philippe VI, king of France, throws light on potential contact with Vitry via the adoption by Louis I de Bourbon of the hitherto largely royal practice of charter illustration. In addition the properties acquired to support two chaplaincies endowed by Jean at Saint-Benoît demonstrate the extent to which he was professionally embedded in a network of royal councillors working in and around the Parlement in the 1330–50s, in which Vitry was also active. Also identified is a house acquired at Saint-Benoît by Gervès du Bus, author of the Roman de Fauvel.

Reception of the Notre Dame School’s Conductus in the early French Ars Nova: For the 700th Anniversary of the Manuscript F-Pn fr. 146

An extended edition of the poem “Roman de Fauvel” by Gervais du Bus, made by Chaillou de Pesstain and completed in 1317–1318, includes 169 musical numbers, of which 30 are based on the Notre Dame school’s conductus. This is the most extensive reception of the conductus in the notated sources of the beginning of the 14th century. The article reveals the reasons for the appeal of “Roman de Fauvel”, a satirical allegory of contemporary political and church life in France, to the conductus. Most of the pieces are monophonic and attributed to the “prosa” genre by the compilers of the manuscript. On the example of two proses, the author of the article traces the transformations that took place in relation to the primary conductus, preserved in earlier manuscripts. Monophonic pieces, in which the conductus is used, fit into the general development trends of the conductus genre at the end of the 13th–beginning of the 14th century. Five compositions are polyphonic; they are designated as “motez” by the authors of the manuscript. Almost all of them reveal the influence of the conductus genre: at the level of a single party, and in a number of the motets — at the level of the composition. The sign of belonging to the “Roman de Fauvel” becomes the “fauvelization” of many conductus, which consists in adding (or re-writing) poetic lines linking the content of Notre Dame school’s conductus texts to the central figure of the novel, Fouvel, and thereby updating them.

Vitry in the Rhineland: new discoveries

The front and rear pastedowns of a collection of sermons preserved at the Landeshauptarchiv in Koblenz (Middle Rhine) contain previously unknown concordances of two Ars Nova motets: Firmissime fidem teneamus / Adesto sancta trinitas from the Roman de Fauvel, probably composed by Philippe de Vitry, and the anonymous Mater formosa / Gaude virgo, previously known from the rotulus Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België/Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Ms. 19606. This article investigates the history and provenance of the fragments in the context of late medieval music culture in the Rhine valley, and traces previously unnoticed connections between the Rhineland, the southern Low Countries, northern France and Paris as mediated through the studia of the Carmelites and other orders. The chant underlying the tenor of Mater formosa / Gaude virgo is identified for the first time.

Finding Fortune in Motet 13: insights on ordering and borrowing in Machaut's motets

ABSTRACTOn first glance, Machaut's Tans doucement/Eins que ma dame/Ruina (M13) is a typical motet with few musical or textual anomalies. Perhaps this is why, with the exception of a brief article by Alice V. Clark, little extensive, individual study of M13 has been conducted. This article examines the musico-poetic cues for Fortune found in M13’s many forms of reversal, duality and upset order. The discovery of a new acrostic which references the Roman de Fauvel, whose interpolated motet Super cathedram/Presidentes in thronis/Ruina (F4) is the source of M13’s tenor, further supports a Fortune-based reading of this motet. M13 may therefore be included among the Fortune-prominent motets proposed by Anna Zayaruznaya and Jacques Boogaart (M12, M14 and M15). Understanding that Machaut intentionally ordered his motets, M13 fills a sequential gap, suggesting that M12–15 may serve as a meaningfully ordered group of Fortune-based motets. The acrostic's Fauvel reference also provides additional connections between M13 and F4, offering insight into ways Machaut may have responded to and cleverly cited his sources.

Madame Meed:Fauvel, Isabella, and the French Circumstances ofPiers Plowman

This essay returns to the uses of the Roman de Fauvel in Piers Plowman, in order to show the unusual depth of Langland’s engagement with that poem and Fauvel’s close association with Isabella of France, Edward II’s much-maligned widow - and in turn to claim that the figure of Meed begins in part as a topical satire on Isabella herself. In this and other ways, Meed epitomizes ‘topicality’. Yet the process of revising Piers Plowman (the essay argues) included increasing distance from any one topical meaning. The essay traces the literary and historical reputation of Isabella, and measures that against more immediate evidence of her resolutely pro-French patronage and cultural agenda in the realm of Essex and London to which the poet was probably connected. This context helps explain Langland’s response to the topical Fauvel, a surprising spur for his own assessments of literary value and his production of a unique selfreflective and philosophical satire.

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet by Anna Zayaruznaya

Reviewed by: The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet by Anna Zayaruznaya Bradford Lee Eden The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. By Anna Zayaruznaya. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xvii, 301 p. ISBN 9781107039667 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781316190982 (e-book), $80.] Music examples, illustrations, companion Web site, appendices, glossary, bibliography, indexes. This book focuses on the motets of the French Ars nova period, roughly ca. 1315– 70, encompassing the careers and compositions of Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) and Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377). The author begins her study of this period by relating an interesting interaction on the topic of isorhythm that is recorded in conference proceedings from 19–23 September 1955 near Liège, Belgium. The account of this discussion shows that it anticipated many of the chief debates in Ars nova research during the next sixty years, and the author frames her introduction around the diverse views of these early experts. The themes of monstrosity and hybridity appear in Ars nova motet texts, and Zaryaruznaya attempts to illustrate a similar approach to form and musical texture by Ars nova composers as the focus of this particular study. Zayaruznaya opens with a detailed description of the state of research on Ars nova motets. She begins with their structures, which exhibit an almost obsessive [End Page 285] approach to planning in terms of rhythm. Interlocking patterns of rhythms (talea) and pitches (color) form the well-known foundation of isorhythm, and current research has moved from a focus on deep structural understanding to that of sonic surface, supported by musicologists who are also medieval ensemble instrumentalists and conductors. This “supermusical” structure takes into account the excessive rhyme, assonance, and alliteration in the music that is meant to subsume and even drown out the words. On the other hand, some musicologists insist that the words have priority over the music, showing that the text often preceded and influenced the complex mathematical musical structures. In this book, the author indicates that she is taking a somewhat middle ground in her examination of the topic, paying attention to those aspects of form that are apparent to the listener, such as repetitive rhythms, the more audible and active upper voices (especially hockets), changes in declamation (when voices slow down or speed up), and changes in range. In the end, the goal is to add a new level of detail to the debate about the relative importance of words and music in the Ars nova motet. As indicated previously, hybrid and monstrous creatures are the subjects of a number of Ars nova motets (see table 5.1, p. 174); in a sense, the monsters are as colorful and vibrant as the musical and textual complexity that surrounds them, a reflection of the motets themselves and vice versa. Chapter 1 examines how musical form, monstrosity, and bodies are woven together in the texture of the Ars nova motet. This anthropomorphization of the music results in both song and bodies “coming alive” in this repertory, and the author explores this topic as found in musical treatises and literary theory. A number of songs are explored to illustrate this practice, from notational ligatures to Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (where the music represents dragons, serpents, and the stinging tail of the scorpion) to Johannes de Grocheo’s description, ca. 1300, of the motet De animalibus. There are also examples of self-referential songs, such as Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement and Baude Cordier’s Tout par compas, two rondeaux that essentially describe themselves and their structures in the first person during their performance. Finally, the profusion of creatures represented in the Roman de Fauvel adds substance to the argument for the interconnection between music and bodies, as the reader witnesses songs being born into the world and then endowed with bodies. In sum, Chapter 1 sets up a framework for how song, bodies, and structure have been woven together in medieval music and literature to the ultimate height of complexity and union in the work of the Ars nova composers and their motets. Specific music examples of this and their dissection (so...

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet

Anna Zayaruznaya. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Pp. 234 + appendices. Broadly speaking, Zayaruznaya's The Monstrous New Art is about text-music relations in the ars nova motet with a focus on the period spanning 1315 to 1370. Zayaruznaya demonstrates with aplomb that late medieval motet composers were far more sensitive to the texts they were setting than has previously been realized, responding to their matiere (or subject matter) in myriad subtle ways. Her focus is, specifically, on texts concerning fragmentation and disjunction--themes especially frequent in representations of the monstrous, but also present in works on the Trinity (three in one), the stratified body politic, and the two-faced courtly lady. The book's introduction situates the analysis it precedes within ars nova scholarship. It also justifies its focus on monsters, which are characterized, in Zayaruznaya's reading, primarily by a lack of unity. Zayaruznaya rightly notes that her findings--even as they focus on the monstrous--point towards broader aesthetic strategies in ars nova composition and, consequently, that her methodology might productively be applied to other repertoires. Chapter 1, Songs Alive, sets out to show that songs were not infrequently imagined as having bodies. Medieval theorists' zoomorphization and anthropomorphization ranged from the passing reference, such as the Summa musice's description of the cauda as a kind of tail, to full-blown metaphorical identification (e.g. Dante). Sometimes, Zayaruznaya shows, songs are treated as creatures that can both talk and travel. Such a conceit is common in the envois and tornadas of the grand chant. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Je voi/Fauvel in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS. fr. 146 version of the Roman de Fauvel. Zayaruznaya convincingly reads this piece as a kind of monstrous birth of an embodied song. The final section of the chapter preemptively responds to the objection that medieval composers would not have conceived of their works as works, let alone works with shapes (instead, the argument goes, they would have conceived of them as sounding events). In response, Zayaruznaya proposes a creature concept of composition (p. 66). While not exclusively about ars nova motets, the chapter's analyses set up what is to follow in that they show the creative interrelations of songs and sundry creatures. The main strength of this chapter lies in its demonstration of the commonality--corporeality--underlying many theorists' discussion of song, envois, and pieces such as Machaut's famous Ma fin est mon commencement and Tout par compas, whose shapes are explicitly thematized. The second chapter, How (not) to Write a Motet: The Exemplary In virtute/Decens, turns to Phillipe de Vitry's motet and its depiction of the monster evoked in Horace's Ars poetica via tale a and hocket. …

Reimagining the facsimile: project report on The Digital Fauvel

The Digital Fauvel is an interactive facsimile edition of the Roman de Fauvel as preserved in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. fr.146. It enables a variety of user interactions with the manuscript using a large multitouch tabletop computer, including viewing and navigating high-resolution scans, viewing superimposed translations of the text, searching manuscript text and metadata, viewing modern editions of musical items, and listening to musical audio. These modes of interaction synthesize information traditionally available in different places (editions, facsimiles, translations, editorial commentary) to create new modes of interaction with digital manuscripts for students, scholars and the general public. The project has been developed using standard design practices from human–computer interaction, mindful of the implications of adapting such practices for a digital humanities domain. Engaging students in the design and implementation of these new tools has also created unique educational opportunities by raising fundamental questions about encoding practices and manuscript culture alike. Work currently in progress involves the creation of an ‘application programming interface’ for Fauvel and other digital manuscripts, which will enable other scholars and programmers to build new and different types of interactions on top of our existing project infrastructure.

The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 by Emma Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 by Emma Dillon Robert Curry Dillon, Emma , The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 (New Cultural History of Music, 7), New York, Oxford University Press, 2012; hardback; pp. xxvi, 367; 64 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £45.00; ISBN 9780199732951. Making sense of sound is a complex process entailing far more than just decoding auditory experience. Memory, visual stimuli, physical movement, and language can all play a role in conditioning the listener's response just as music's expressive power can register without our having to experience the physical sensation of sound: silent music, music recalled, read, or imagined, can move us almost as powerfully as sounding music. The Sense of Sound is a clever and apt title for a highly original, persuasively argued book. Emma Dillon's monograph explores with verve how within certain milieux in late medieval France the sensory and sensual, ambient and random, sensible and nonsensical may have been factored into the experience of music. Revealed is 'a world captured in words, images, and music, in which sounds of all kinds shaped human experience, and which also shaped musical listening' (p. 8). Taking cognisance of this world opens a vista on to the 'supermusical', a term and concept Dillon frequently uses but the precise meaning of which by its nature remains somewhat elusive. It signifies a realm of sound, real and implied, that is extraneous to (the piece of) music, in the sense of being above and beyond it, and yet integral to it also, in its potential to reveal the gamut of music's possible meanings. What does not come into the embrace of the 'supermusical' is information derived from a consideration of the music as [End Page 181] transmitted in notation. Possible musical meanings revealed and alluded to in Dillon's book, for all their subtlety and provocative insight, sit outside, that is, are tacitly divorced from a consideration of their potential interplay with musical structure, form, pitch, and rhythm. Her methodology 'position[s] sound, listening, and creative community at the center of the picture normally driven by analytic, textual, and philological imperatives' (p. 332). How this approach works in practice is the stuff of Chapter 1 in which a range of text-critical approaches is brought to bear on a genre of prime interest to Dillon, and an aspect of it that has long puzzled musicologists, namely: In what sense do polytextual motets make sense? To press the case for verbal sound in this genre taking precedence over verbal sense, Dillon explicates in turn each voice of Le premier jor/ Par un matin/ Je ne puis plus/ Iustus demonstrating their intelligibility as independent monophonic songs before revealing that, in fact, they constitute a single composition: three French-texted parts sounding simultaneously over a Latin-texted tenor. Chapters 2 to 4 deal with external sound worlds. Adducing evidence from sources such as the manuscript illuminations of the Vita of St Denis, and literary works by Guillot de Paris, Jean de Jandun, and John of Garland, Dillon proceeds to a close reading of a trouvère chanson de recontre and two motets from the Montpellier Codex H.196. In Chapter 3, the focus is on the rambunctious carry-on of charivari as evidenced in Paris, BnF. fr. 146, the illuminated reworking of the Roman de Fauvel by Chaillou de Pesstain that is suffused with over 169 musical interpolations. Readers familiar with Dillon's first monograph, Medieval Music-Making and the 'Roman de Fauvel' (Cambridge University Press, 2002), will recall the imaginative flair and analytical insight she brought to this much-studied manuscript showing how music can be expressive in ways that are unperformable apart from visual representation. In The Sense of Sound, Dillon turns to the sotes chançons, specifically, the sub-genre of fratras. Its playful use of nonsense lyrics and sparseness of musical notation she sees as the very embodiment of charivari. She deftly traces the complex web of interconnections that link the refrain of the fratras, An Diex, with one of the most complex pieces in the Roman de Fauvel, the polytextual motet Quasi non ministerium...

Jehan Maillart e il Roman de Fauvel (MS Paris BnF fr. 146)

The article discusses the problematics of the relation between the ‘royal notaire’ Jehan Maillart and the authors of the Roman de Fauvel (Gervais du Bus), in his audiences in the court of Philip the Fair’s performances, as revealed through the contemporary version of the manuscript Paris BnF fr. 146. In the prologue to le Roman du Comte d’Anjou Maillart shows the problems that arise in exchange between his audience, with a moral aim.

Deus est sphaera infinita: Réflexions sur l’image de l’Histoire dans la Bible historiale (à partir du manuscrit 8 de la BnF)

Seminal book of the Middle Ages, the Bible historiale itself has never been the subject of study. Written at the end of the twelfth century for the laity, Bible historiale by Guyard des Moulins is the first to present the integral French translation. From the fourteenth century, it was the subject of a significant manuscript production, which contained many images. Conceived as a history book, the Bible historiale recounts the history from the Creation to the second Parousia. Thanks to the dual concepts of time and history-both linear and circular, past and present-these manuscripts are the locus of the Unveiling of divine plan. We chose, for this study, a manuscript of the Bible historiale painted, around 1320-1330, by a brilliant painter, the Master of Roman de Fauvel. This painter attempts to give form to the history or, in other words, to the Word through the visual journey he proposes.

Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: Learning from the Learned (review)

Reviewed by: Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: Learning from the Learned Jason Stoessel Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Culture: Learning from the Learned. Edited by Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 4.) Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2005. [xxxii, 260p. ISBN 1-84383-166-X. $105.00] Bibliography, music examples, index. Fourth in the series entitled Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music from Boydell Press, this Festschrift honors Margaret Bent on her sixty-fifth birthday. It is a fitting tribute to a scholar whose generosity to generations of researchers is matched by the depth of her scholarship and dedication to the discipline of musicology. This collection's sixteen essays on subjects in music and music theory of Western Europe from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries are arranged in approximately chronological order divided into three sections: "The Tradition of Music Theory," "Vitry and Machaut," and "Influence, Models and Intertextuality." The essays are preceded by an introduction by the editors and a list of selected publications by Margaret Bent. Like others in this series, this volume's production standard is high and editorial rigor has ensured its overall very good quality of presentation. Inconsistencies in the typesetting of music examples from chapter to chapter might distract some readers but all are well formatted and, especially in the case of Theodor Dumitrescu's diplomatic examples, effective. Several common threads run through the essays in this collection. Foremost for this reviewer is the issue of intertextuality, although examinations of different repertories and practices are for the most part articulated through more commonplace (and perhaps less controversial) terms like citation, authority, types (topoi), borrowing, adoption, and models. John Milsom's essay "'Imitatio,' 'Intertextuality,' and Early Music," though found at the beginning of the last section of the volume, is perhaps the most thought-provoking and important contribution for framing the issues at the heart of this volume. Observing that recent studies of intertextuality in early music have tended towards definitions based upon intentional borrowing, Milsom adopts a definition of intertextuality dependent in part on Kevin Brownlee's spectrum of apparent intentionality ("Literary Intertextualities in 14th-century French Song," in Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998], pp. 295–99). In doing so, Milsom confronts cases of intertextuality where, in Brownlee's terms, "intentionality is much less clearly visible." Although not signaled in the essay, Milsom's positioning of contrapuntal "grammar" in fifteenth-century canonic writing as intertextual process resonates with Robert Hatten's use of style and compositional strategy as regulators of musical intertextuality ("The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies," The American Journal of Semiotics 4 [1985]: 69–78). Greater emphasis on the other end of Brownlee's spectrum of intentionality is witnessed in the two essays in this volume concerning the motets of Philippe de Vitry. Leofranc Holford-Strevens' essay humorously entitled "Fauvel Goes to School" examines citations of classical authorities in the text of motets by de Vitry and others found in the musical interpolations to the Roman de Fauvel. Although some concession is granted to florelegia as sources of proverbial phrases in the Middle Ages, Holford-Strevens argues that uses of classical models in a new context often rely on a greater understanding of the narrative context of the original. Andrew Wathey, in his "Authoritas and the Motets of Philippe de Vitry," argues that florelegia provided the impetus for the transmission of classical text models in de Vitry's motets. At the same time, Wathey suggests that the existence of a learned culture possessing minds capable of ingesting in an orderly fashion large quantities of texts, rather than the consultation of florelegia, facilitated the circulation of lines of classical texts in medieval culture. For those familiar with the scholarship of Mary Carruthers (The Book of Memory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]), Wathey's hypothesis is tantalizing in assessing the role of memory in intentional and less-intentional acts (through unreflective reference). Kevin Brownlee's own contribution to this volume, "Fire, Desire, Duration, Death: Machaut's Motet...

Review: Medieval Music-Making and the 'Roman de Fauvel'

1Pembroke College, Cambridge Medieval Music-Making and the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ Emma Dillon Cambridge University Press 2002 xii + 304; 43 b-&-w plates; 4 tables Hardback£50.00; $70.00

LABOURING IN THE MIDST OF WOLVES: READING A GROUP OF FAUVEL MOTETS

Il finera car touz iourz vivreNe pourra pas.(He will meet his end, for he cannot live for ever)The ensemble of texts brought together in the celebrated MS 146 of the fonds français in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, makes up a complex and many-sided essay on government and kingship, one directed to the French monarch Philip V (1317–22) at or near the beginning of his reign. Its various elements reflect on the problem-laden final years of the rule of his father, Philip IV ‘le Bel’ (1285-1314), and the troubled succession that followed in 1315 and 1316. Each fascicle of the manuscript, the so-called Roman de Fauvel, the dits of Geffroi de Paris, the collection of songs and dits ascribed to Jehannot de Lescurel, and the anonymous verse chronicle of the years 1300–16, interacts with the others in myriad ways and on many levels to yield a collective commentary on the state of the monarchy and the realm, and an admonitio on wise rule.

Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds. Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xix, 666 pp. ISBN 0-19-816579-X (hardcover)

Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds. Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS francais 146. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xix, 666 pp. ISBN 0-19-816579-X (hardcover). This enormous collection of essays combines the work of 27 authors, including ten musicologists, seven literary scholars, and ten historians, four of whom specialize in the history of art and architecture. Few musical manuscripts would warrant the breadth of attention and scholarly scrutiny found here, but Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, MS francais 146 (henceforth Fauvel) is an indisputable exception. Dating from the first decades of the fourteenth century, this is the oldest and largest (93 folia, measuring 33 ? 46 cm) of the thirteen extant manuscripts containing an interpolated version of the Roman de Fauvel, written by Gerves du Bus. A satirical allegory, the Roman encapsulates the last decades of the reign of the French king, Philip the Fair (d. 1314), and the downfall of his finance minister, Enguerran de Marigny, using the mocking image of a horse called Fauvel, whose name (an acrostic) and nature is representative of the vices ijlaterie, avarice, vilanie, variete, envie, and laschete. This grand literary creation, written in Old French and intended for a sophisticated audience, is richly decorated with both highly detailed illuminations and interpolated music. It includes settings of both French and Latin poetry, in the form of motets, conductus, and monophonie songs, early examples of the formes fixes. Also included in the manuscript are the complete works of an otherwise obscure composer, Jehannot de Lescurel, a verse chronicle of French history (1300-1316), and several French and Latin narrative dits (moralizing poems) by Geffroy de Paris. A modern edition of the Latin examples, by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, appears for the first time in the present volume (The Latin Dits of Geffroy de Paris: An Editto Princeps); this article alone is an unquestionably valuable contribution to the existing literature. Any musical scholar approaching this extremely complex manuscript for the first time would do well to begin with a detailed reading of this volume, which not only handily summarizes all relevant scholarship to date (and provides a valuable introduction to the source by the volume editors) but also considerably advances our knowledge of compositional technique and manuscript organization in early Ars nova France. Several articles are essential reading for an analytical understanding of the music of this period. Wulf Arit (Jehannot de Lescurel and the Function of Musical Language in the Roman de Fauvel as Presented in BN fr. 146) shows Fauvel not only as a substantial early source of the separate genres of rondeaux, ballade, and virelai, but also as a previously unrecognized exemplar of new compositional methods in these monophonie songs. Joseph C. Morin (Jehannot de Lescurel's Chansons, Geffroy de Paris's Dits, and the Process of Design in BN fr. 146) posits a credible theory that the works of Geffroy and Lescurel, like the Roman, were manipulated carefully by the compilers of the manuscript in order to best reflect its political focus. Included as evidence is a useful appendix of column widths and ruling markings, showing the careful design of the copyists. Christopher Page shows the manuscript as an early source for an innovative new genre, the ballade, which had only recently appeared on the scene in Paris, some time between the writing of the treatise of Johannes de Grocheio (c. 1300) and the compiling oi Fauvel (Tradition and Innovation in BN fr. 146: The Background to the Ballades). This volume also provides a new catalogue, by Susan Rankin, for all the short plainchants of the manuscript (The 1AUeIUyS, antenes, respons, ygnes et verssez' in BN fr. 146: A Catalogue Raisonne). Anne Walters Robinson (Local Chant Readings and the Roman de FauveF), contributes a comprehensive study of variants for several Fauvel chants in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury French manuscripts (most of which are Parisian). …

Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex

ABSTRACT Perceptions of authorship in the late medieval period are in a state of transition. This essay assesses ways in which ideas of authorship in French books provide a context for interpreting authorship in Gower's Confessio amantis. I consider author portraits, rubrication, and the use of the prologue in Le Roman de la Rose, Le Roman de Fauvel, and collections of works by Machaut and Froissart. Gower's use of Latin, far from being a sign of conservatism in any simple sense, emerges as a strikingly distinctive means of investigating the complex guises under which authorship was emerging in the books of vernacular writers. As everyone knows, there are four Gowers in Confessio amantis. As well as the historical author of the work, there is the who is named as such in the Latin glosses: there is also the celebrated identification of Amans as towards the end of the work. The fourth Gower--Gower as narrator--is harder to isolate, since in a sense he emerges only through that double shock that Amans is at once the author, and old. Through this disorienting revelation, the distinction between author and persona that had seemed so clear earlier in the work appears to fail. Confessio amantis causes the collapse of its distinction between auctor and amans to upset that between auctor and narrator. This is a powerfully unsettling manoeuvre, especially since it is performed both within and without the narrative frame of the work. It heavily qualifies our ability to regard author, narrator, and lover as either stable or distinct categories. (1) Perceptions of authorship in the late medieval period are in a state of transition. We find considerable evidence of this both in Latin and in several European vernaculars. (2) Yet despite, or perhaps because of the dominance of Chaucer, the evidence for such perceptions in English writing remains to be fully explored. Here, as in the broader Latin and European context, it is not just a matter of considering an author's self-fashioning, but also the ways in which authorship is shaped by external factors located in the physical form of the book. Gower's Confessio amantis is a conspicuous instance of a work in which a debate about the author occurs on both fronts. I investigate this debate in by means of the layout of copies of the Confessio, and that of books in a related, and highly influential vernacular. In both types of material, the relationship between authorship and the anthology is central: these are books in which authorial control is visible through decisions about how one kind of material connects with another. They are examples of compilations created by authors of their own work. The naming of Amans, in what I have referred to as the inner frame of the Confessio, that is, where the device of the lover's confession is introduced, displayed, and concluded, marks the moment when the first-person narrator has ceased to be a lover. Teasingly, 'as it were halvinge a game', Venus asks for his name: ' Ma dame, I seide, John Gower ' (viii, 2319--21). (3) This utterance closes the device. He is now 'John Gower' because his confession is over. To seal the process, Venus hands him a mirror. Through that marvellously macabre vision of his abruptly ageing face, the narrator can stop pretending to be a lover and reveal himself to be the author. Yet as Burrow has subtly expounded, auctor and amans turn out to be not so much sharply distinguished as ironically united. What seems to be a transparent 'reidentification of narrator with author' through a rejection of the device of a persona becomes instead a recognition that the author and the persona are after all uncomfortably intertwined. The pose of lover is not so easily cast o. either by an author or a narrator of love poetry. (4) The outer frame also has a profound role to play in our apprehension of Gower. By outer frame I mean two things: the Latin material (both the verse and the glosses) that physically as well as structurally frames the English text, and the various devices of mise en page--rubrics, headings, running titles, and various forms of paragraphing sign, and the pictures, initials, and other types of decoration--that further contribute to the articulation of the work. …

The Art of Interpolation in theRoman de Fauvel

The music of Paris, BN fonds fr. 146 has long held a special place in medieval musicology as one of the most abundant records of musical taste and style in the early decades of the 14th century, particularly so in its famous version of the Old French satire of the Roman de Fauvel, interpolated with no less than 169 musical items. In the last decade, however, perspective on the manuscript has radically altered in a new climate of interdisciplinary research. If there was once a tendency for scholars to extrapolate information from the manuscript, to allow its abundant visual, musical, literary and political texts to speak of cultures exterior to the book's bindings, recent collaborative approaches have focused attention on how those different media work together within the boundaries of the parchment. One consequence of such an approach is to raise new questions about music's role in the book, most particularly about its relationship to the narrative into which it is cast. This study explores perhaps the most startling and perplexing aspect of music's position in Fauvel: the numerous occasions where music is uncued and unprepared in the narrative. I focus on the most famous moment of narrative disjunction brought about by the presence of song: the interpolated bifolio, 28 bis and ter, containing the lai Pour recouvrer alegiance. Long viewed by musicologists as an ill-conceived afterthought, it is suggested that the song's intrusion (narrative and bibliographic) may be interpreted poetically, as a moment of lyric suspension engineered by its singer, Fauvel, in der to defer his lady's final, deadly refusal of his marriage suit. That deferral occurs not just in an abstract moment of lyrical time, but in the real, unfurling space of the parchment: As time passes (the reader turning the folios), Fortuna's impatience finally becomes palpable as she dramatically enters the landscape of the song in its closing moments. Song may thus be understood to occupy not only time but also space; the manuscript, it is argued, is witness to a new form of music-making in France at the turn of the 14th century, music-making that is material as well as sonic.

Publishing Watriquet's Dits

Publishing Watriquet's Dits, Watriquet de Couvin, fourteenth-century vernacular poet and minstrel, served the coterie of the counts of Valois in the late Capetian court. His poems, nearly all dits, survive in five manuscript collections produced by a single Parisian libraire whose identity can be surmised. Something of the contents of five other collections of Watriquet's verse, formerly in the library of King Charles V, can be identified from descriptions in the library's inventory. Although the collections were not identical either in content or in sequence, one sees within them smaller groupings that indicate how the poet kept his texts, Watriquet was involved in the production of the collections of his works, especially in devising the iconography of the illuminated manuscripts. In both text and image he indicates his acquaintance with an important contemporary book, the Roman de Fauvel in BNF fr, 146-whose creators, like Watriquet, probably also belonged to the Valois circle.