EN XII CHANTS. Texte provençat et traduction française.
Le Poème du Rhône
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“Singing to another tune” is from Las Leys d’amors (The Laws of Love), a poetic treatise compiled by Guilhem Molinier in the first half of the fourteenth century. Guilhem’s phrase pertains to a compositional technique known to modern scholars as contrafacture, in which the troubadour fashions new lyrics after the poetic structure of a preexistent song, thereby allowing his work to be sung to the earlier melody. The technique of contrafacture is documented not only by Guilhem and contemporaneous theorists but also by the troubadours themselves, who on a number of occasions acknowledge composing a poem “el so de,” or “to the tune of” another composer. Both theory and practice demonstrate that structural imitation came to be most closely associated with several specific genres, including the sirventes (moralizing piece), tenso (debate song), coblas (song of few strophes), and planh (lament), their poetic structures commonly modeled after those of the canso, the dominant genre of troubadour composition. Despite abundant structural indications of contrafacture within the troubadour repertoire, melodic traces of the practice are surprisingly scant. Confirmation of melodic borrowing depends upon the preservation of a model and its contrafactum with their concordant musical readings, yet the small proportion of surviving troubadour melodies (with only one in ten lyric texts transmitted with its tune) poses a significant impediment to melodic corroboration. Only three sirventes have been preserved with melodies that duplicate those of preexistent cansos. In the remaining instances in which a sirventes, tenso, or other imitative type is preserved with a melodic unicum, scholars of troubadour song have tended to maintain that, absent melodic corroboration, the tune must be presumed original rather than borrowed. In view of the sparseness of the musical record, however, one should give consideration to an alternate interpretation, namely that the tune preserved exclusively with a given troubadour’s sirventes and thereafter transmitted as his invention may actually have been borrowed from a preexistent canso whose melody is no longer extant in its original setting. Isolating viable structural models for such suspected contrafacta allows the possibility of reascribing potentially borrowed melodies to their original composers. The study of contrafacture can thus lead us to question the received attributions of a number of tunes, thereby posing a challenge to the readily made assumption that the manuscript rubrics consistently pertain to both text and melody. By examining several suspected cases of contrafacture within a web of relevant indices– e.g., generic norms, intertextual correlations, socio-historic context, rhetorical motivation, transmission, and melodic style– we gain greater insight into a compositional technique that indelibly marked the art of the troubadours.
The chansonnier Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, f. fr. 22543 (known as “R”) has been recognized for over 200 years as a precious repository of the literature of the medieval troubadours of southern France. It transmits almost 950 lyric poems and 160 melodies, along with many other important writings in the Occitan language, many of which are unica.
The paleography, decoration, and dialect of the manuscript are described thoroughly, and their distinctive features are seen to support the hypothesis that R was compiled in northern Languedoc or western Provence around 1300. While most of the texts of R were copied by one scribe, the relatively few melodies it contains were probably notated by at least four different copyists. Over eighty percent of the poems were never supplied with their melodies, even though musical staves were provided; these staves were left empty. The notation is in the style of the so-called Notre Dame school of Paris, and the rhythms of the notes are not apparent, although a few seem to be in rudimentary mensural notation.
The manuscript contains some works of the troubadours of the early twelfth century, and also a large number of works by late thirteenth-century poets. By examining internal paleographical data and making comparisons with other extant codices, it is possible to offer suggestions on the nature of the exemplars of this heterogeneous collection. The problems of determining how the texts and melodies were transmitted are investigated, including the issues of oral transmission, the lack of extant autographs, the disparity in the origins of the surviving manuscripts, and the variant attributions. The musical transmission is especially problematic, since only three other sources containing music survive. The forty-five concordances that R shares with these other codices are discussed.
A review of the modern history of the manuscript shows that the earliest known owner was the Marquise d’Urfe of the early eighteenth century. The commonly accepted belief that R was in the library of her ancestor the poet Honore d’Urfe in the seventeenth century is found to be unsupported by the available evidence.
In 1209 Simon of Montfort led a war against the Cathars of Languedoc after Pope Innocent III preached a crusade condemning them as heretics. The suppression of heresy became a pretext for a vicious war that remains largely unstudied as a military conflict. Laurence Marvin here examines the Albigensian Crusade as military and political history rather than religious history, and traces these dimensions of the conflict through to Montfort’s death in 1218. He shows how Montfort experienced military success in spite of a hostile populace, impossible military targets, armies that dissolved every forty days, and a pope who often failed to support the crusade morally or financially. He also discusses the supposed brutality of the war, why the inhabitants were for so long unsuccessful at defending themselves against it, and its impact on Occitania. This original account will appeal to scholars of medieval France, the Crusades, and medieval military history.
LAURENCE W. MARVIN is Associate Professor of History at the Evans School of Humanities, Berry College, Georgia.
The medieval troubadours of the South of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is the first full-length study of the first-person subject position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using modern theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a “self” or “character,” and how far it is self-determining. Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, providing many close readings and translating all medieval quotations into English. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anyone investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.
Cette méthode d occitan donne à voir toutes les variétés (ou dialectes) d occitan. La première partie de l ouvrage présente le languedocien standard une variété qui permet de comprendre assez aisément la plupart des autres dialectes occitans puisque l aire languedocienne occupe le centre géographique de l espace occitan. La méthode revient ensuite sur les six principaux dialectes de l aire occitane (auvergnat, gascon, languedocien, limousin, provençal, vivaro-alpin) parlés dans trois pays (France, Espagne, Italie) et donne également accès à l occitan médiéval sur une série de leçons. Les acteurs locaux, très actifs dans la promotion de leur langue, ont été partie intégrante de cet ouvrage à la fois par le biais des relectures et des enregistrements. Cet ouvrage a été publié avec le soutien de la Direction Générale de la Langue Française et des Langues de France (Ministère de la Culture) et de l Union Latine.
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