The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies [Illustrated] 2503520723, 9782503520728

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T HE M AKING OF P OETRY

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KATERN 1

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TEXTS AND TRANSITIONS: STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF MANUSCRIPTS AND PRINTED BOOKS General Editors M artha W. Driver Derek A. Pearsall Editorial Board Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, University of London) Jennifer Britnell (University of Durham) Ardis Butterfield (University College, London) Philippa Hardman (University of Reading) Dieter Mehl (University of Bonn) Alastair Minnis (Yale University) Oliver Pickering (Brotherton Library, Leeds) John Scattergood (Trinity College, Dublin) John Thompson (Queen’s University, Belfast)

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T HE M AKING OF P OETRY Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies

by

Jane H. M. Taylor

H

F

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Taylor, Jane H. M. The making of poetry : late-medieval French poetic anthologies. - (Texts and transitions ; 1) 1. Verard, Antoine, d. ca. 1513. Jardin de plaisance 2. French poetry - To 1500 - History and criticism 3. Literature and society - France - History - To 1500 I. Title 841.1'09 ISBN-13: 9782503520728

© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2007/0095/36 ISBN: 978-2-503-52072-8 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

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C ONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Tables

xi

Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction: Ditties of Pleasure

xiii xv 1

Chapter 1. Courtiers and Crafts Men: The Social and Manuscript Context of Fifteenth-Century Lyric

13

Chapter 2. Preserved as in a Violl: Charles d’Orléans’ Circle and his Personal Manuscript

83

Chapter 3. Sundrie Occasions, Sundrie Gentlemen: The Coterie Manuscript

147

Chapter 4. A Priest of Poetry to the People: Antoine Vérard and the Anthology

229

Conclusion. Wounding the Text

293

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.

London, British Library, Harley MS 4431, frontispiece. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

2.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1719, fols 1v–2r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

3.

Epinal, Bibliothèque Intercommunale Epinal-Golbey MS 217, fol. 82r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Intercommunale Epinal-Golbey.

4.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

5.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 164. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

6a.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 233. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

6b.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 234. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

7.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 439. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

8.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, pp. 440–41. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

9.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 504. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Illustrations

10.

Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 375, fol. 56v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine.

11.

Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 375, fol. 76v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine.

12.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9223, fol. 12r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

13.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 15771, fol. 19v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

14.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 15771, fol. 51r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

15.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 122. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

16.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9223, fol. 81r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

17.

Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 10572, fol. 21v . Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Royale; copyright Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels.

18.

Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 228, fol. 50v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Royale; copyright Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels.

19.

Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168, fol. Giiiv. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

20.

Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168, fol. Gviv. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

21.

Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168, fol. 126r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

22.

Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168, frontispiece, fol. aiir. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Illustrations

23.

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Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168, frontispiece, fol. 60v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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T ABLES

1.

Distribution of ‘Jaulier’ keywords, p. 134

2.

Contents and copying history of Carpentras 375, pp. 148–49

3.

Contents of fr. 9223 compared with fr. 25458 and n.a.f. 15771, pp. 168–73

4.

N.a.f. 15771 compared with fr. 9223 and fr. 25458, pp. 177–82

5.

Complete works of Vaillant, pp. 189–91

6.

The theme ‘En la forest de longue attente’, pp. 202–03

7.

‘Prison’ poems, nos 424–462 (fols 103r–110v), pp. 271–75

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P REFACE

M

edieval love poetry, said the Observer newspaper recently, is no way to get ahead; for career success, it said, try engineering, or physics, or accounting … Medieval love poetry, however, has given me considerable pleasure — and much of that pleasure comes from the support of friends and the kindness of strangers. Without our libraries, none of us would flourish: I owe a particular debt to Durham University Library, and especially its Inter-Library Loan department, which does far more than it need to decipher my scrawls and track down volumes whose titles or authors I can only half remember. And I have depended on other libraries too, notably the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the rue de Richelieu (especially Marie-Thérèse Gousset) and the Salle de Réserve at Tolbiac, the Bibliothèque Intercommunale EpinalGolbey (and especially Hélène Hamon), the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine in Carpentras, and the always-helpful Taylorian Library in Oxford. I am deeply grateful to friends: to Angus Kennedy and Jim Laidlaw, who lent me their precious microfilms and allowed me to keep them for an unconscionably long time; to Roger Middleton, who knows more about the travels of manuscripts and incunabula than anyone else; to Linda Gowans, who is such a reliable, and reliably acerbic, copy-editor, and to Kaele Stokes, who picked up the few typos Linda had left, and set the text with such efficiency; to Anna Olatokun, whose German was invaluable. Others have helped in less obviously identifiable ways: Adrian Armstrong, David Cowling, Emma Cayley, Helen Swift, Rebecca Dixon, Claire Croft — because every time I have a conversation with them, or listen to any of them read a paper, I am interested and inspired; to Martha W. Driver and Derek Pearsall, who welcomed this book into their new series (and incidentally, along with an external reviewer, made such helpful comments: unsung heroes of the academic book-publishing

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Preface

business). As ever, I am more than grateful to my daughter Jessica and my husband John Gurd for their staunch support. But I have one particular, and incalculable, debt: to all my staff at Collingwood College. If I had not been able to be confident that they would run the College efficiently and intelligently and successfully without me, this book would never have been finished — and it is to them, with real gratitude and real affection for their loyal support over the last six years, that I dedicate it. Jane H M Taylor Collingwood College, Durham University

An early version of part of Chapter 2 appears as ‘Courtly Gatherings and Poetic Games: “Coterie” Anthologies in the Late Middle Ages in France’, in Book and Text in France, 1400-1600: Poetry on the Page, ed. by Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 13–29, and a small part of Chapter 1 as ‘“Flables couvertes”: Poetry and Performance in the Fifteenth Century’, in Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, ed. by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Roberta L. Krueger, and E. Jane Burns (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 45–53. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 were read as papers at the Early Book Society Conference in Durham, at King’s College London, at Cambridge University and at Edinburgh University, and at the ‘Courts and Courtiers’ Conference (Durham, 2004). Early versions of Chapter 4 were given at Johns Hopkins University and at Bordeaux University in 1999. I am grateful to friends and colleagues for their comments and suggestions. Unfortunately, Christine Dara’s interesting thesis, ‘Recueils collectifs entre Orléans et Bourgogne: les mss B.N. n.a.f. 15771 et B.N. fr. 9223’ (unpublished thesis, University of Paris IV: Paris–Sorbonne, 2004), reached me too late to be taken into account other than in footnotes to Chapter 3.

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A BBREVIATIONS

BL

London, British Library

BM

Bibliothèque Municipale

BnF

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France

BR

Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale

CFMA

Classiques français du Moyen Age

EETS

Early English Text Society

FEW

Walther von Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes, currently 24 vols (Bonn: Klopp, 1928–)

fr.

fonds français

Godefroy

Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Vieweg, 1881–1902)

GRMLA

Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. by Hans Robert Jauss and others, currently 10 vols (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981–)

Huguet

Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle, 7 vols (Paris: Didier/Champion, 1925–73)

MS

manuscript/manuscrit

n.a.f.

nouvelles acquisitions françaises

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Abbreviations

Poésies

Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. by Pierre Champion, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1923–24)

SATF

Société des anciens texts français

T.-L.

Adolf Tobler and E. Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, currently 11 vols (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung; Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1952–)

TLF

Textes littéraires français

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INTRODUCTION : D ITTIES OF P LEASURE

Here are idle courtiers, desirous to become skilful in their owne mother tongue, and for private recreation to make now and then ditties of pleasure. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, ed. by G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 158

I

t is the evening of a great feast at Arthur’s court, a feast celebrating the triumph of the chivalric hero, Meliador.1 After supper, minstrels are brought in with bagpipes to play dances, and some of the knights and ladies present begin to sing ‘par bonne maniere’. But je, the narrator, is, he says, out of earshot at the back of the crowd and misses at least one of the songs before he finally worms his way to the front: Adont me traii plus avant, Et fis tant que, droit par devant Moy, estoit une damoiselle Qui une cançon bonne et belle Canta ... (ll. 29934–38) Then I made my way forward, and found myself right in front of a damsel who sang a fine, elegant song ...

1 I refer to Jean Froissart’s Meliador, ed. by Auguste Longnon, SATF, 3 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1895–99); references are to line numbers. On Froissart’s problematic je, see Didier Lechat’s excellent ‘Dire par Fiction’: métamorphoses du je chez Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart et Christine de Pizan, Etudes christiniennes, 7 (Paris: Champion, 2005), pp. 253–343.

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More and more songs are sung – so many that, says the narrator, Trop me faudroit encre et papier Se me voloie ensonniier De mettre tout en souvenance Les cançons, qui par ordenance Furent cantées la ce soir ... (ll. 29972–76) I’d need far too much ink and paper if I tried to make the effort to note down all the songs, in order, which were sung that evening ...

Even if he can manage to ‘register’ one ‘rondelet’, he says at another similar feast later in the romance (ll. 30650–51), a great many others will have passed him by because his memory is not capacious enough, or he has been unable to find informants: De ce ne me reprende nulz. Des cançons, je n’en retins plus Que cesti; il vous doit souffire. Encores di je: ‘Diex li mire!’ A celi qui le me donna. (ll. 30662–66) Let no one blame me if I managed to note down only this song; you will have to make do with it. And in fact I say ‘God reward him’ to the one who let me make a copy.

As readers, he says, we should simply be grateful that he has managed to note down quite so many of these rondelès moult biaus (l. 30648). Now, there is something very odd about this seemingly innocent little scene — odd enough that it might count as what the American critic Michael Riffaterre calls an ‘ungrammaticality’ or a ‘catachresis’,2 that is, a puzzle or unexpectedness which disconcerts the attentive reader, and serves as a signal that the surface text needs further investigation. The puzzle here stems from the intrusive presence of the je: ‘I’, he says, ‘made my way forward’; ‘I only managed to note down one of the chansons’. What is odd is that Froissart’s Meliador is not a first-person narrative — on the contrary, it is an Arthurian romance chronicling the chivalric and amorous adventures of the hero Meliador and his numerous companions, in which a very occasional, and conventional, firstperson narrator otherwise functions, and that only rarely, as a perfectly banal and

2 See his Semiotics of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1980), Chapter 1; idem, ‘L’intertexte inconnu’, Littérature, 41 (1981), 4–7; idem, ‘Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive’, in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 56–78.

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anodyne truth-guarantor who certainly never intervenes in action which purports to take place very largely in the geographically and historically remote Scotland of Arthur’s era. Except, that is, in this one, disconcerting circumstance: during the performance of lyric poems at the feasts and soirées which punctuate the romance. Here, suddenly, the narrator makes himself a direct eye-witness to, and a participant in, the action of the romance. I could suggest, I suppose, veristic explanations to do with the ‘performance’ of the romance (Froissart tells us that he read it aloud, evening after evening and to gratifying acclaim, in front of Gaston Phébus, Count of Foix)3 — in other words, that the memory of his own performative prominence in reading Meliador might have made for a sort of narrative slippage; or, alternatively, that it is to do with Froissart’s mediation between his own audience and the lyrics, which are, he says, composed not by himself but by his patron Wenceslas of Bohemia;4 but the explanations would, I think, be spurious. What I want to suggest is that the ‘ungrammaticality’ of the narrator’s interference derives from Froissart’s subconscious recognition that lyric is, essentially, a social and inclusive act: that fugitive pieces like the rondeaux performed at feasts and suppers are part of a currency of creative exchange in which individuals — professional, amateur — participate, and in which a poetobserver, a poet-‘stenographer’, is a vital presence mediating between fictional occasion and writerly inscription. The sudden, inexplicable intrusion of Froissart’s I-narrator — was its incongruity as jolting to his original readers as it is to my more rational reading?5 — points in other words to the connection between lyric verse and social relationships, not just in theme but also in the processes of transmission.

3

In his Dit du Florin: ‘Le quel il [Gaston] ooit volentiers / Et me dist: “C’est un beaus mestiers, / Beaus maistres, de faire telz choses”’: Dits et débats, ed. by Anthime Fourrier (Geneva: Droz, 1979), ll. 297–99. Froissart, always very conscious of his public, took Meliador with him to Orthez in 1388 as a passport to Gaston’s favour. 4 As he explains in his Chronique: ‘sont contenus ou dit livre, que s’appelle Meliader, toutes les chançons, balades, rondeaulx, virelaiz que le gentil duc [Wincelaus de Boesme] fist en son temps ...’. See Voyage en Béarn, ed. by A. H. Diverres (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), p. 66. 5 I draw attention to just this feature of the romance in ‘The Lyric Insertion: Towards a Functional Model’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. by Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), pp. 539–48. I know of no equivalent in medieval French literature.

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Now, to say that the medieval lyric is a social phenomenon is not, I admit, to say anything very new. Romances and histories, dits and chroniques, suggest how far it is indeed collective and interactive, how far social competencies were felt to include the gift of poetry. All the evidence suggests that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, anyone with the remotest pretensions to social standing — anyone, that is, who aspired to being thought of as joyeux, joly, and gracieux — was expected to be able to turn a neat rondeau or a witty ballade. The adjectives I have just used come from the account in his biography of Boucicaut’s social education: Boucicaut was, it says, trained in the art of composing balades, rondeaux, virelais, lais et complaintes d’amoureux sentement [ballades, rondeaux, virelais, lais and complaintes to do with love].6 Charles d’Orléans, on Saint Valentine’s day, could call his court to the composition of rymes en françoys ou latin, with every confidence that they could respond to the call;7 when the Duke of Suffolk was sick in Paris, the best remedy was said to be for his courtiers to compose diz amoureux for his delectation;8 Queen Margaret of Scotland spent long nights composing rondeaux9 — and a couple of bourgeois, having competed in one of the characteristically louche seductions in which the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles take such questionable pleasure: ‘mesmes firent de tres bons rondeaulx, et pluseurs chansonnettes, qu’ilz manderent et envoyerent l’un a l’autre, dont il est aujourd’uy bruit, servant au propos de leur matere dessus dicte ... [went as far as to compose some rather good rondeaux, and some little songs, which they sent

6

Le Livre des faits du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Boucicaut, ed. by MM. Michaud et Poujoulat, Nouvelle collection de mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France, 2 (Paris: chez l’Editeur du Commentaire analytique du code civil, 1836), p. 21. 7

Poésies, II, 432.

8

‘A son retour a Paris, en sa maladie [the Duke of Suffolk] estoit moult dolereux d’amours et se conplaignoit moult fort, en me disant que ung homme que je cognoissoye lui avoit fait tort de sa dame, sans rien nommer, et que une fois il lui rendroit, et se plaignoit moult de la dame, et en le reconfortant lui liroie de Garancieres et d’autrediz amoureux, tant que pour alegier son deuil, je lui fey venir Binchoiz qui, par son command, fist ce rondel: ainsi que a la foiz my souvient, etc. et ot ledit Binchois, pour ce, iic aunes d’escarlate que je lui delivray.’ Quoted by A. Desplanque, ‘Projet d’assassinat de Philippe le Bon par les Anglais (1424–26)’, Mémoires couronnés et mémoires des savants étrangers publiés par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts en Belgique, 33 (1965–67), 3–78 (p. 70). 9

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Histoire de Charles VII, ed. by G. de Beaucourt, 6 vols (Paris: Picard, 1881–91), IV , 309.

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each other: poems which deal with the matter above, and which are still remembered to this day ...]’.10 What is new, here, however, is the palpable excitement with which Froissart’s je pictures himself collecting the evening’s songs and preserving them for his readers — and this is all the more surprising to a modern reader in that the lyrics themselves seem so sadly unadventurous: amorous platitudes, a limited lexicon, recurring rhymes. To put it simply and brutally, we cannot easily think of a reading-practice which would make them enjoyable, let alone exciting. Is this simply because we are unable to read in the peculiar way that these lyrics demand? Is it that late medieval reading-practices were so alien to our own that readers really did relish each apparently banal and individual rondeau? Is it that the poems’ significance, quite simply, is lost outside the social circle that inspired them? These questions are important. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries specialized in the production of collections of verses and fixed-form lyrics, whose modern editors themselves, regretfully, risk finding them ‘boringly repetitive’.11 But this is surely mere equivocation. The medievalist, today, cannot settle for commonly-held and disappointing stereotypes which dismiss the fixed-form lyric as trite and dutiful. We need, as Christopher Page reminds us,12 to think much more imaginatively about the aesthetic properties of these disregarded lyrics, about the nature of the creativity that produced them, about their formal properties, their cultural meaning, or their cultural milieu — in short, about the aesthetic pleasure which the poets brought to their composition or the hearer/reader brought to their reception. In the present book, I want to argue for reading the late medieval lyric as a product of a complex network of people, materials, and events, and to suggest that this network can most usefully be grasped through the textual criticism which is usually thought of as at the service of the edition, but which can provide some of the most powerful interpretative tools for reading and analysis. I shall, 10

Nouvelle 33, in Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, ed. by Franklin P. Sweetser, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 240. 11 See The Montpellier Codex, ed. by Hans Tischler, S. Stakel, and J. C. Relihan, Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 5–8, 4 vols (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1978–85), IV , pp. xvi–xix. 12

See his clarion call in Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. xx: ‘The most exhilarating project for the medievalist is now to investigate the variety and complexity of the Middle Ages and to question the received generalizations that are habitually used to constitute the “medieval” period in our minds’.

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in other words, take up the challenge of some of the indigestible anthologies of the end of the Middle Ages: the ‘meaning’ of the editorial choices made by the anthologists or participants, the ‘meaning’ of poems constituted in different contexts, the dialectic between the poem’s point of origin and its point of reception, the play between ‘public’ and ‘private’ verse. It is only if we read the late medieval lyric in its sharply-defined codicological context that we can grasp its identity as a social act, and its place in the aesthetic domain in which it operated. I argue, therefore, that the social and cultural environment in which these anthologies are produced governs the writer and the act of writing, and that, as critics, we need to think, not just about the poem on the page, but about the entirety of the poetic event, and about the poem’s social particularity. This means that the rondeaux and ballades and other fixed-form lyrics recorded in the anthologies need to be read associatively, so that we can recognize, and salute, dense and complex networks of collective images and shared allusions, and tease out the relationship of poem to poem, rhetorically, metrically, schematically; it means that we need to identify the shared tradition out of which any individual poem emerges, and to be aware of how a collection sustains or challenges it. We need, in other words, to read these collections inclusively and cumulatively, rather than with our customary myopic attention to the discrete poem, in order to celebrate their exuberant variety in the exploration of the topical. In my first chapter, therefore, I explore precisely this social and manuscript context for the late medieval lyric. I open it with three accounts of the making of late medieval court poetry, two fictional and one purportedly non-fictional, all three devoted to poetic competitions. What they show is the importance attached to what might seem insignificant, frivolous parlour-games. Poetic and intellectual omni-competence, plainly, is a social accomplishment which consolidates a courtier’s or a poet’s identity and reputation, which affords a measure of prestige, and which it is therefore important to foster. I set poetic creation in the context of an understanding of the structures of court society. What is conveyed in these competitive verses, however rudimentarily, are strategic relationships whose dimensions go well beyond a specific social occasion. To participate in poetry is, it seems, a tool for social and cultural success — and I adduce examples precisely of this, for ‘professional’ poets like Jean Froissart and for ‘amateurs’ like Wenceslas of Bohemia. These rather problematic and anachronistic terms, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, will incidentally recur. The former is probably self-explanatory: by ‘amateurs’, I mean the aristocratic poets like Wenceslas who could turn a neat verse; by ‘professionals’, I mean the court poets who — as Manfred Tietz puts it — act

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as providers of all-round entertainment (Zeitvertreib), who need to impress not only by their poetic skills but also by their intellectual contribution to the court (Bildungsnachweis), and who are materially dependent on their expertise, their wit, or the breadth of their repertoire.13 Poets of both categories, of course, needed specific competences to succeed in poetry — competences which could be learned either through experience, or through a sort of training. I suggest that the cultural capital to be derived from acquiring the skills which produce a competent, clever rondeau or ballade makes these little poems complex products of a social occasion whose parameters we need to try to understand. What I sketch in this chapter is the range of social, intellectual, aesthetic, and even political positions which are available to the court poet, and the patron of poetry, in the later Middle Ages — because of course the patron too, it must be assumed, acquired cultural capital from the enrolling of the poet and the possession of the poetic manuscript. My argument here has to do with what one might call the sociology of creation: what is the social potential of the lyric in the late Middle Ages?; what rewards accrue to the poet from socially accredited expertise, or to the patron from enlisting a poet to one’s household, or from possessing his, or of course her, collected works? I attempt, in other words, to return the poem to its generative cultural and social circuit, to its role in a game of social relations, and to the material form in which it reaches us. The expression I use here, cultural capital, is borrowed from the French sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu, and I make use of his model of social relations in which the production and reception of intellectual and cultural artifacts is defined strategically, as a way in which individuals and social groups mark their distinction and consolidate their identities. What I suggest is that issues to do with the writer/poet him/herself as a commodity are essential: that just as the modern writer or poet is at the mercy of modes of production regulated and imposed by financial return and media success, so the court poet, or the courtierpoet, are competitors in a field where to operate efficiently as a poet, to possess what Bourdieu calls the habitus of the poet, is a passport to material gains and favour — which means, of course, that to acquire the habitus of the poet is an

13

Manfred Tietz, ‘Die französische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Die französische Lyrik, ed. by Dieter Janik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), pp. 109–77. Tietz is more positive about such poets than, for instance, Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980), pp. 124–27, who believes the professional poets to have been little valued.

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investment which a courtier in pursuit of cultural capital is well advised to make. I finish the chapter by considering the material investment made by the patron or the poet, that is, the codex into which these little lyrics are copied. I argue that the lyric collection designed, individually, specifically — and expensively — for a particular patron, constitutes another sort of cultural capital. I examine, briefly, single-author codices devised by Christine de Pizan; BnF fr. 840, the great manuscript of Eustache Deschamps’ complete works; and some of the less ‘worked’ of fifteenth-century manuscripts, like BnF fr. 1719, or an obscure little manuscript, MS 217, now in the Bibliothèque Intercommunale Epinal-Golbey. My second chapter addresses the best-known of all fifteenth-century French lyric codices: Charles d’Orléans’ personal manuscript, BnF fr. 25458. First of all, I sketch the history of the manuscript and the way in which, having been designed as one of the coherent single-author codices I shall describe in Chapter 1, it becomes ‘le journal lyrique de toute une cour’, home to a welter of rondeaux produced by Charles’ friends, his courtiers, his court servants, and visitors to his castle at Blois, and copied, in a hodge-podge of hands, onto the spare pages and additional quires which make up today’s codex. What I argue is that these quires and leaves, and the record they provide of copying and disposition, reveal much about the socioliterary dynamics of particular poems and about the status and role of poetry, and literature,14 at the end of the Middle Ages. They are, I suggest, evidence of distinct poetic practices and of the society in which they are embedded: the ephemera of public interchange and poetic performance made concrete in the repetitiveness of reading. What I contend is that the ways in which individual lyrics grow out of their manuscript context allow us the excitement of recovering social relationships; the responsiveness and malleability of the late medieval lyric can reflect them, not directly, of course — however fascinating it may be to find Charles’ doctor, or his écuyer trenchant, promoted to interlocutors — but at what I call a metacommunicative level, a term I derive from theories of communication put forward by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, for whom human verbal communication operates at very different levels of interaction, from the simply denotative, on the one hand, to what he calls the metacommunicative, generally implicit, level at which ‘the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers’. At this metacommunicative level, what is important is not what is said — not, that is, the message itself — but rather

14

‘Literature’ is a misleading term for a genre that was still predominantly spoken or performed; see, for instance Paul Zumthor, La Lettre et la voix: de la ‘littérature’ médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

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the signals and cues which define the social interactions between speakers. What I contend that we can recover from these lyrics is not whatever pretext it was that provoked them: rather, it is that these manuscripts are repositories of exchanges between participants in determinative groups, in which writers and readers leave implicit or explicit traces of their social interactions, as Villon’s status as an outsider is readable from his third-person gloss, as opposed to Charles’ and Fredet’s second-person dialogue. Properly evaluated and carefully analysed, these traces afford glimpses of the social dynamics of the poetic occasion, and help us to define the interchangeable relationship of poet and reader in a particular social milieu. My third chapter starts from a manuscript related to Charles’: Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 375, which was copied for his Duchess, Marie de Clèves, and which simply transcribes much of BnF fr. 25458. Much of it, that is, but with significant differences which make it a vessel for the participation by individuals in a common culture of literary exchange — communal, consensual, and inclusive. The chapter then moves on to a number of other collective manuscripts — BnF fr. 9223, BnF n.a.f. 15771, and Brussels Bibliothèque Royale 10572 (Marguerite of Austria’s ‘Album poétique’) — to suggest that they too, properly read, allow us invaluable glimpses of the social dynamics of textual production and textual circulation in the aristocratic and princely courts of the end of the Middle Ages: courts in which an anthology is a cultural commodity which offers a discriminating reader-poet the opportunity to recognize, and salute, stylistic expertise and control of form. These are ‘coterie’ manuscripts, a term I borrow from Arthur M. Marotti and which he uses to refer to sixteenthand seventeenth-century manuscripts which circulate poems, privately, across and between coteries like John Donne’s, among friends, clients, and family members. I do not suggest, once again, that these manuscripts allow us to reconstruct the actual social dynamics of any particular court. The original audiences were, naturally, better informed than a modern reader can be: they might have been aware of the specific context of any particular lyric, might have known how to gauge its wit or its pathos, might have known how to read sexual innuendo, or protestations of worldly ennui, or indignation, where we have no way of judging how far the fictional positions and identities merge with actual, historical identity. What I explore, especially with fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771, are manuscripts where our information is less extensive and where we have no evidence other than the textual — and what I suggest is that these ‘anonymous’ anthologies too are valuable socioliterary documents which, like Carpentras 375, allow us to see how social milieu determines the shared literary forms,

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conventions, lexica, and idioms via which, to quote Marotti, ‘authorship dissolves into group ownership of texts’. My focus, in other words, is the way in which poems work as self-advertisement or self-definition for a particular coterie, and the way in which that is reflected codicologically. My fourth and final chapter focuses on something rather different: Antoine Vérard’s Jardin de Plaisance, published in 1501, and which is, says a critic, ‘a summa of courtly verse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’ with well over six hundred fixed form lyrics. I argue that this collection embodies a new, professionalizing culture in which the producer ‘packages’ the lyric by providing an elaborate narrative-editorial context, and thus foregrounds precisely the sort of connection between lyric verse and social relationships that I examine in the previous chapters. Vérard or his compiler replicate, with remarkable ingenuity, the experience of verse-production and verse-reception at the end of the Middle Ages. The ‘package’, in this case, is mediated by an artful choice of paratextual features. The textual and iconographic apparatus is mobilized to supply a sense of direction and linearity, with a rudimentary story (the lovers in a garden of verse, the death of the lady, the despair of the lover). Vérard’s choice of texts, narrative, and lyric, supported by rubrics and iconography, creates fictions of intimacy, offers echo and answer poems, evinces a fondness for dialogue and debate, encourages the impression that it specializes in certain sorts of pleasurable wittiness. His anthology thus flatters its readers by assuming their familiarity with particular literary idioms which function as signs of cultural sophistication and rhetorical mastery, and it makes them free, for the price of a book, with the rich cultural resources and social milieu of late medieval poetry. I argue that the determination with which the publisher’s strategies maintain a creative tension between integration and fragmentation confirms what has been said in previous chapters about the lyric as connotative of the sort of élite sociability which I sketched in my first chapter and for which the miscellanies and anthologies I look at are evidence. The lyric still, for the commercially canny Vérard, is best ‘sold’ by evoking a vernacular high culture where verse has social and cultural value, and where it serves as a tool to consolidate a group identity. The princely courts of the fifteenth century and the early Renaissance see the first faltering intimations of what were later to be known as cabinets of curiosities, and then museums:15 what the manuscripts I deal with here evince is

15

See The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Europe, ed. by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. by Elizabeth

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that same pleasure in hoarding and perpetuating. They are, it seems, designed to preserve fugitive occasions primarily for internal consumption, far more than for external consumption — something that Antoine Vérard, who was sharply aware of commercial advantage, has studiously recreated. Roland Barthes, long ago, drew a distinction between the readerly (‘lisible’) text — that is, the text where the reader is a passive consumer — and the writerly (‘scriptible’) text, where the reader is invited to become an active participant in the making of meaning.16 We may, perhaps, need a new coinage — recorderly? — for a textreceptacle whose raison d’être is fulfilled once something has been written in it. The hints at sequence which these volumes suggest, their occasional continuities, their eclecticisms, their juxtapositions, invite our collaboration in the recreation of the lived experience of poetry: we need, perhaps, and as ever with the Middle Ages, to rethink the distinctions which we still tend to make between the ‘written’ and the ‘oral’.17

Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 16

In S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

17

Paul Zumthor points out how little we know about how the act of writing ‘happens’ in the Middle Ages; see his Parler du moyen âge (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980).

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C OURTIERS AND C RAFTS M EN : T HE S OCIAL AND M ANUSCRIPT C ONTEXT OF F IFTEENTH -C ENTURY L YRIC

A courtier needs to understand the making of poetry, ‘that being now lately become a courtier he shew not himself a crafts man, & merit to be disgraded, and with scorne sent back againe to the shop, or other place of his facultie and calling.’ George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, ed. by G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 158

O

n 6 January 1400, at a time when France was briefly at peace in the hurly-burly of the Hundred Years’ War, two of her greatest dignitaries, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and Louis, Duke of Bourbon, asked the permission of King Charles VI to institute a Cour amoureuse. It will, they say, act as a distraction: ‘en ceste desplaisant et contraire pestilence de epidimie presentement courant ... pour passer partie de temps plus gracieusement [so as to pass the time more pleasingly, in this horrible and pernicious epidemic which is currently plaguing us]’.1 What they envisage is an institution which will inculcate the virtues of humility and loyalty, and foster ‘l’honneur, loenge, recommandacion et service de toutes dames et damoiselles [the honour, praise, eulogy, and service of all ladies and damsels]’ (p. 36). To

1

La Cour amoureuse dite de Charles VI, ed. by Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau, 2 vols (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982–92), I, 36; references henceforward appear in the text.

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prosecute these laudable aims, they have appointed a certain Pierre de Hauteville,2 attached to the Burgundian court, as Prince du Bailliage d’Amours. Flattered but dutiful, he has applied himself to drawing up a Charter — a Charter which survives in just one manuscript,3 and which happens to crystallize a number of the issues which will preoccupy me in this chapter. Those who are to make up the membership of the Cour amoureuse are an interestingly hybrid bunch, arranged in rigid hierarchies, and with carefully prescribed titles and roles and duties. They are, on the one hand, members of the highest nobility: not just the Dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon, but among others the Counts of Hainaut and Saint-Pol, the sons of the Duke of Bavaria and the King of Navarre, Boucicaut, Marshal of France, and the lords of La Rochefoucauld, Wavrin, and Montmorency. On the other, there are also the bourgeois: some of the more notable intellectual humanists of the early 1400s, men like Jean de Montreuil and Pierre and Gontier Col, for instance;4 wellknown writers and poets like Eustache Deschamps and Antoine de La Salle; more surprisingly, perhaps, to us, a string of secretaires, civil servants as it were, from the royal and ducal chancelleries, most of whom are to hold administrative positions in the Cour amoureuse as Auditeurs, and Tresoriers, and Secretaires et concierges (p. 38).5 All of the participants are to commit themselves to a complex yearly timetable: there are to be great gatherings on the first Sunday of every month, as well as at some unspecified date in May, on Valentine’s Day, and on the Feasts of the Virgin Mary (Conception, Assumption etc). Each reunion will open with a Mass and close with a feast, and will be devoted to what Pierre de Hauteville calls a puy: the term which, in the north of France, in Rouen, Dieppe, Lille, Valenciennes, designates a gathering, though one less aristocratic than the Cour amoureuse, to celebrate poetry and performance in all its forms.6 Pierre specifies, carefully, the activities of each monthly puy: each in turn of the twenty-

2

Himself a poet, of La Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. by Rose M. Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1982). 3

See Arthur Piaget, ‘La Cour amoureuse, dite de Charles VI’, Romania, 20 (1891), 417–54, and more fully, La Cour amoureuse, ed. by Bozzolo and Loyau. 4 All three of whom participated in the debate around the Roman de la Rose; see Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1977). 5

By which latter term is meant something like ‘bodyguard’: a highly prestigious appointment (see Godefroy, II, 219). 6

On which see Gérard Gros, Le Poète, la Vierge et le prince du Puy. Etude sur les Puys marials de la France du Nord du XIV e siècle à la Renaissance (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992).

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four appointed ministres, who are all to possess ‘experte congnoisssance en la science de rethorique [an expert competence in the science of rhetoric]’ (p. 36), will ‘baillier ... refrain a sa plaisance [set a refrain according to his taste]’ (p. 36), and each member of the assembled company is to compose a ballade to that refrain. The ballades are to be performed publicly, before the cour, either by the poet or by his nominee (‘lire ou faire lire’; p. 40), and submitted to the ladies as adjudicators (it is important, therefore, to ensure that the latter are possessed of noble avis and bonne discrecion; p. 40); they, the ladies, will weigh the entries against each other, alert to ‘vice de fausse rime, reditte trop longue ou trop courte ligne [faults such as false rhyme, repetitive rhyme or hypometric lines]’ (p. 40), and award prizes whose value is scrupulously prescribed: a silver crown to the best of the poets, a silver chaplet to the runner-up — and both the winning poems will be ‘enregistrees en noz amoureux registres [noted down in our register of love]’ (p. 40).7 On other occasions, on the feasts of the Virgin, the participants are to compose ‘serventois de cinq coupples a la loenge et selon la feste d’icelle tres glorieuse Vierge [serventois made up of five stanzas, to the honour and on the feast of the glorious Virgin Mary]’ (p. 40) — some of them may well have been relieved to discover that if they could not manage such a thing, they might nevertheless present a chançon amoureuse previously composed and performed elsewhere. Once the serventois have been presented, the leaves of paper or parchment are to be slipped into an elegant and ‘large silken purse [une grande bourse de soye]’ (p. 40) to await adjudication — after which the winning entries are also to be carefully copied into the registres.8 Meticulous arrangements are to be put in place to preserve these records, which also include lists of members complete with their blazons: Sera cy aprés ordonné et avisé en quelle abbeye ou autre lieu de ce royaume seront mis en garde les registres des armes, les papiers des balades et autres fais de rethorique, sy tost que plains seront d’escripture, pour les monstrer en temps a venir, quant il plaira a ceulz qui le requerront et vaurront. (p. 38)

7

The salaries of the copyists are also carefully prescribed — ‘.I. blanc pour chascunne balade enregistrer’ (p. 36) — and the Cour is to supply the expensive stationery: ‘paierons et donrons du nostre tous les papiers appartenans et neccessaires pour icelles balades enregistrer’ (p. 37). 8

Participants were expected to compose verses in metres of all sorts: ‘dittiers, complaintes, rondeaux, virelays, lays ou autres quelconques façon et taille de rethorique, rimee ou en prose’ (p. 42), always provided, of course, that none of them dishonours the ladies.

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Chapter 1 Hereafter, there will be ordained and promulgated the name of the abbey or other place in the kingdom in which are to be stored the heraldic lists, the sheaves of ballades and other writings once they are covered with writings, so that they can be examined in future years by those who wish to do so.

For completeness, other diversions would be planned as part of these gatherings. There might, for instance, be jousting, or there might be debates, ‘amoureux procés pour differentes oppinions soustenir [amorous debates in which the participants uphold different opinions]’ (p. 41). Pierre de Hauteville clearly finds the latter prospect particularly alluring and makes detailed and lavish arrangements whereby the proposer will indict his motion in the registres in one colour, the opponent in another — they may not use black, but may choose ‘couleurs de vermeil, vert, bleu, sanguine, violet et pourpre [scarlet, green, blue, crimson, violet and purple]’ (p. 41).9 Pierre obviously fears that the debaters may be unbecomingly prolix, and takes careful precautions: the proposition and the opposition must each be sensibly brief, not more than ‘.XII. articles et en chascun article plus de .XII. lignes parmy raisonnable marge, et telles lignes que une fueille de papier porra conprendre du travers [twelve articles, each article consisting of no more than twelve lines with a sensible margin, the lines to fill no more than a single leaf ]’ (p. 41). The documents will be examined and judgement rendered on Valentine’s Day — and they too will be carefully preserved. This is a precise and comprehensive document, just what one might expect, perhaps, from what Pierre was, a senior administrator.10 It is also, however, a highly suggestive one, and on various fronts. In the first place, of course, it stresses the sociability of poetry in the fifteenth century. Our modern stereotype of the poet prefers to imagine a tortured and solitary soul wresting meaning from resistant words. This account of the Cour amoureuse sees poetry as essentially a convivial exercise, with poetry playing a useful part in the formation of an independent cultural identity for the princely court.11 Secondly, the document 9

This sort of attention to detail is not unconvincing: compare the copy of the Voir Dit in BnF fr. 9221, where lay-out, hand, and illustration are used to make the volume visually exciting (so, for instance, prose is copied in cursive, verse in a bâtarde hand: see Lawrence Earp, ‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France: The Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1983), pp. 120–29). 10

For his career, see La Cour amoureuse, ed. by Bozzolo and Loyau, p. 59, and the introduction to La Confession et testament, ed. by Bidler. 11

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See Green, Poets and Princepleasers, pp. 101–34.

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stresses the prestige that is attached to poetry as a diversion and hence as a skill which courtiers need to master. It is true that none of the registres has survived (if indeed they ever existed), nor is there any record of any of these elaborate meetings having taken place. But unless we are to think of the whole document as a pleasant fiction or an elaborate spoof,12 invented personally and privately by Pierre and his cronies, we must assume that the dukes and members of the highest aristocracy who lent their names to the charter were happy to envisage taking part, not only in soirées of this sort, but also in competitions in which they would, on the one hand, produce poems on which they would expect to be judged on their mastery of poetic form, metrical skill, and strophic discipline, and on the other, would consider themselves entirely capable of judging others’ poems on just these grounds. Thirdly, the document draws attention to the centrality of poetry simply as a diversion (it is, after all, to be the only activity for the Cour amoureuse); it sees nothing unbecoming in devoting whole days to the composition and performance and judging of poetry, nor in imagining quite considerable resources employed in rewarding excellence. Fourthly, it suggests an interesting collaboration between those highest in the social hierarchies on the one hand, and what one might call the administrative class, the civil service, on the other; indeed between what I called, in my Introduction, the professionals and the amateurs. And finally, it underlines the importance of the written word, the record.13 Pierre de Hauteville, and presumably his noble patrons, saw nothing incongruous in drawing up a document whose preparation — the hand is careful, the pages are spacious, the coats of arms neat and precise — must have 12

Which of course it may be: scholars are more or less doubtful as to its real, historical existence. For sceptical views, see Richard Firth Green who thinks it a purely literary fiction probably invented by Isabeau of Bavaria (‘The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 87–108), and see also Theodor Straub (‘Die Gründung des pariser Minnehofs’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 77 (1961), 1–14), who considers that the kernel of the Cour might have been a small-scale entertainment, later expanded considerably, in a complex fiction having very little relation to historical reality. From my point of view, the historicity of the Cour amoureuse is largely immaterial; what is striking is the apparent importance that is attached to it, and the effort that has gone into its elaboration. 13

See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie. La fréquentation des livres au XIV e siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), pp. 49–56, and cf. Monique Ornato, Hélène Loyau, and Carla Bozzolo, ‘Hommes de culture et homes de pouvoir parisiens à la Cour amoureuse’, in Pratiques de la culture écrite au XV e siècle, ed. by Monique Ornato and Nicole Pons (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération internationale des Instituts d’études médiévales français, 1995), pp. 245–78.

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been costly,14 and where their passionate concern for the poetic legacy they were leaving to posterity shows in the elaborate directives which cover copying, page layout, and preservation. This document, in other words, addresses poetry as a valuable, and valued, collective phenomenon; it suggests the sort of social and ideological frame for poetic composition and reception that I want to build on in what follows. Let me start with poetry as a collective phenomenon, and with a relatively unsophisticated instance which will, I hope, suggest how far issues of social positioning and prestige cannot but be inscribed in that phenomenon. ‘Venditions’ or ‘ventes d’amour’ are the product of one of those inconsequential little parlour-games that we imagine occupying an occasional courtly evening;15 there is a nice description of just such an evening’s entertainment in an incunable volume in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.16 A first-person narrator is one of a little company that has been invited to bring along ‘marchandise d’amour que avons a vendre, non pas pour argent mais a change l’une marchandise pour l’autre [amorous merchandise, not for sale but for exchange]’. After supper, the company arrives. La plus vielle disconcerts the narrator by offering him an item for sale; his awkwardness is palpable, since ‘je venoie pour vendre et je fus constrains d’acheter [I had come intending to sell, but was now obliged to buy]’, but he manages to stammer out a response. After which, ‘Tantost mes compaignons et pareillement les jones filles commencerent a desployer leurs marchandises et vendoient l’un a l’autre pelle mesle, qui en peust avoir si en eust [soon my companions and the young ladies too started to

14

Another manuscript, Geneva, Bibliothèque universitaire, MS 179 bis, gives the names of the Cour from one of the poems deriving from the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans merci; see Piaget, ‘La Cour amoureuse’, pp. 449–54. 15

On parlour-games in general, and the ‘venditions’ in particular, see Martijn Rus, ‘D’un lyrisme l’autre. A propos des venditions d’amour, de Christine de Pizan aux recueils anonymes de la fin du Moyen âge’, Cahiers de recherche médiévale, 9 (2002), 201–13; Rus doubts whether the venditions are in fact extemporized. See also Leonard W. Johnson, Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 88–93. On the importance of games in these closed societies, see Johann Huizinga, Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Paladin, 1970). I return in Chapter 2 to the game as ‘metacommunication’. 16 In BnF Rés. Y e 93; it is printed in Amorous Games: A Critical Edition of Les adevineaux amoureux, ed. by James Woodrow Hassell (Austin, TX : published for the American Folklore Society by the University of Texas Press, 1974), pp. 248–50. Hassell also prints a sequence of ventes, pp. 250–56.

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lay out their merchandise and sell to each other helter skelter, first come first served]’. And the narrator takes on the responsibility of recording ‘leurs joyeux dis et esbatemens [their merry songs and amusements]’. The rules are simple enough. One of a couple of players, L’Amant and L’Amye, opens the game by offering to ‘sell’ the partner an object, an idea, a concept: something like ‘Je vous vens l’aguille affilée [I sell you a threaded needle]’; the partner must improvize, briskly, the remaining three lines of a quatrain which, in line 2, takes the rhyme word and embroiders it, with as much grace and ingenuity as possible, and in lines 3–4 produces a witty couplet more or less relevant to the object proposed. So, following on from the line I have just quoted, De fil blanc parmy compassée. Dieu doint bon jour à mon amy, Car tousjours je pense en luy.17 Threaded with white thread. May God give my love a fine day, for he is always in my thoughts.

or, more relevantly if not very lyrically, Je vous vens l’odorant violette: C’est une fleur qui est indette; Elle croist bas, elle croist hault. Accolez-moy, le cueur me fault.18 I sell you the scented violet: it is a purple flower; it grows tall, it grows low. Embrace me, my heart fails me.

The little poems vary very much in quality. Some, like these, fall back on hackneyed rime pauvre (not to say cliché!); some are rather more nimble, as in the following, where the effect of the rime équivoque depends on a rather adept use of enjambement:

17

Quoted from Recueil de poésies françoises des XV e et XVIe siècles, ed. by Anatole de Montaiglon, Bibliothèque elzévirienne, 13 vols (Paris: Jannet, 1855–78), V , 211. Montaiglon prints his collection from ‘trois éditions gothiques’ which he does not identify. There are no fewer than 65 ventes d’amour here (pp. 204–23), and more in VII, 18–23. I return to the subject below, p. 77. See Madeleine Lazard, ‘Ventes et demandes d’amour’, in Les Jeux à la Renaissance: Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes, Tours, juillet 1980, ed. by Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 133–49, who points out the popularity of this little game to judge from the number of manuscripts and early printed books, and Bernard Ribémont, ‘Les jeux à vendre de Christine de Pizan et les Cent ballades d’amant et de dame’, Le Moyen français, 54 (2004), 75–85. 18

Recueil, ed. by Montaiglon, V , 211.

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Chapter 1 Je vous vens le cueur du lyon. Vostre cueur et le mien lion Ensemble, d’un commun accord, Sans departir jusqu’à la mort.19 I sell you a lion’s heart. Let us bind our hearts together, with one accord, and let nothing save death part us.

But these defter formal touches cannot disguise the fact that the versifiers are competent at best, and that most of the poems are pure poetic platitude; this is, as I said, a parlour-game. What may surprise modern readers, then, is to find that this parlour-game also preoccupies a true poet, a professional, like Christine de Pizan. Take, for instance, the magnificent, sumptuously illustrated manuscript, the Queen’s Manuscript, which Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France seems to have commissioned from Christine in 1410 or 1411,20 which contains Christine’s collected works and which James Laidlaw calls ‘the culmination of [her] career’.21 Included in it, apparently as worthy as the complex moralizations of the Epistre Othea or the convoluted allegories of the Mutacion de Fortune, is a string of seventy consecutive gieux a vendre,22 spaciously, neatly copied, with elegant

19

Ibid., V , 213 (my italics).

20

Or, of course, was presented with; to assume the Queen’s commission goes beyond the available evidence. 21

This is BL, Harley MS 4431, to which I return below (pp. 55–61, 199); Christine’s gieux a vendre appear on fols 34 v –37 v. I quote here from James C. Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan – An Author’s Progress’, Modern Language Review, 78 (1983), 532–50 (p. 532). On Christine’s publishing history, idem, ‘Christine de Pizan – A Publisher’s Progress’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 34–75. Sandra Hindman has done a detailed study of the Queen’s Manuscript: ‘The Composition of the Manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works in the British Library: A Reassessment’, British Library Journal, 9 (1983), 93–123, from which she concludes that Christine was indeed the copyist and designer; cf. Gilbert Ouy and Christine Reno, ‘Identifications des autographes de Christine de Pizan’, Scriptorium, 34 (1980), 221–38. The gieux a vendre also appear in Christine’s earlier presentation manuscripts, the Livre de Christine (see BnF 12779, fols 45v –48 v) and in the Duke’s Manuscript (BnF MS fr. 835, on fols 31r–34 r). 22

Her Jeux à vendre are edited by Maurice Roy in Œuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, SATF, 3 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1886–96), I, 187–205. On Christine’s gieux, see Réjean Bergeron, ‘Examen d’une œuvre vouée à l’oubli: les Jeux à vendre de Christine de Pizan’, in Préludes à la Renaissance: aspects de la vie intellectuelle en France au XV e siècle, ed. by Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1992), pp. 163–89, as well as Rus, ‘D’un lyrisme l’autre’, and Ribémont, ‘Les jeux à vendre’.

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capitals, along with her other much more flamboyantly elaborate lyrics — virelais, lais, ballades — and along with the poet’s most intellectually demanding works: works of philosophy, of ‘autobiography’, of politics. Christine’s gieux are, we shall not be surprised to find, of a rather different order to the trite little quatrains we glanced at above: Je vous vens le chappel de soie. – Cuidiez vous qu’a pourveoir soie D’ami plaisant, jeune et joly, Qui de bon cuer m’aime et je li? N’anil voir; se pert bien sa peine Qui de m’amour avoir se peine.23 I sell you a silken bonnet. Did you imagine that I needed to find a pleasant-mannered, young, cheerful lover, who’d love me sincerely as I would him? Certainly not; anyone who thinks to have my love is wasting his efforts.

As an exercise in the easy composition of verse, this is impressive. Here, as everywhere in her lyric poems, Christine is formally adventurous (note even in this playful context the consistent richness and ingenuity of her rhyming: soie/soie; joly/je li); she exploits the dialogic possibilities of male and female voice and the resources of prosody (note the dramatic enjambement soie D’ami, which punctures the pretensions of the lady’s would-be lover). Nothing, of course, can make the gieux more than a game — but they are, it seems, worthy of Christine’s quite earnest attention. At some level, it appears, adept gieux a vendre consolidate Christine’s identity and reputation as a social poet and must, presumably, afford her a measure of prestige. But of course Christine is among those of the late-medieval poets — Froissart, Machaut — who best understood their market, and we must therefore assume that she too saw nothing demeaning in including little snatches of parlour-game verse in her œuvres complètes. Variety is indeed something she makes one of the selling-points of her anthology. Her prologue, which was presumably designed to puff the merits of the collection, promises that she will ‘parler en maintes manieres Differens [speak in a variety of different modes]’ and provide Isabeau with the opportunity to ‘oÿr de diverses matieres, Unes pesans, aultres legieres [listen to all sorts of different topics, some serious, some lighthearted]’24 — and it might be that she was confident that her poetic reputation

23

Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, 193–94 (no. 24).

24

Ibid., I, p. xv.

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would be enhanced if she showed how ingeniously she could exploit even the most banal generative formula. But the attention she pays to what we cannot but think a frivolous game nevertheless seems surprising: poetic versatility, we realize, is an important social accomplishment, and it is therefore also, presumably, flattering to the potential patron to ‘possess’ not just a poet, but a resourceful one. Christine’s multiple ingenuities, over the widest possible spectrum from the most serious to the most frivolous, are evidence of a sort of poetic and intellectual omnicompetence which, it seems, must have made her a sociocultural asset. In the remainder of this chapter, I intend to explore some of these issues. A careful reading even of slight, repetitive poems like these allows us to set poetic creation in the context of an understanding of the structures of court society: what is conveyed in these verses, after all, and however rudimentarily, are competitive and strategic relationships. To participate, and to rise in the cultural hierarchy, required specific competencies — competencies which could be learned either through experience or through a sort of training — and the cultural capital to be derived from acquiring the skills which produce the competent, clever ventes d’amour makes these little poems complex products of a socially situated act of utterance whose parameters we need to try to understand. To possess particular word-skills is to be included — and a court is necessarily designed to reward (and hence to foster) certain particular intellectual and social habits which mark belonging, and to ensure that those who do not possess these habits are outsiders who cannot belong. What I propose to sketch here is the range of social, intellectual, aesthetic, and even political positions which are available to the court poet, and the patron of poetry, in the later Middle Ages — because the patron too, it must be assumed, acquired cultural capital from the enrolling of the poet or the possession of the poetic manuscript. My argument here will have to do with what one might call the sociology of creation: what are the structures of possibility attached to the lyric in the late Middle Ages, what rewards derive for the poet from socially accredited expertise,25 or for the patron from enlisting a poet to one’s household, or from possessing his, or of course her, collected works? I shall attempt, in other words,

25

I do not only mean monetary reward: like Green (Poets and Princepleasers, pp. 124–27), I doubt that much that was very concrete always derived from composing verses. Social advancement is, surely, another matter, as shown, perhaps, in the Renaissance by the highly successful careers of musicians: see Jeanice Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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in the wake of Daniel Poirion’s ground-breaking Le Poète et le prince,26 to return the poem to its generative cultural and social circuits, to its role in a game of social relations, and to the material form in which it reaches us; I shall want to celebrate the paradoxical importance of the insignificant. I should like, however, to start by thinking, quite banally, about the sort of social occasions that I have been taking for granted: how are we in fact to understand expressions like occasional courtly evening? There are, as I have said, no surviving records of any of the grand reunions of the Cour amoureuse, nor are there, to my knowledge, any accounts of authentic poetry-evenings at the courts of the late Middle Ages. Our best recourse, therefore, is fiction (in which, however, we must recognize the dangerous possibility of taking fiction for evidence of reality). I want to examine two fictions which make the lyric seem not just a simple, idiosyncratic pleasure, but a cultural weapon. The first, Le Pastoralet,27 is an oddity. It is, if not the first, then certainly one of the earliest, political romans à clef. The anonymous writer, who calls himself Bucarius,28 is a passionately committed Burgundian writing somewhere around 1422 — in the middle, that is, of the internecine struggles between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions — who tells us in his prologue (ll. 1–36) that what he is offering is a pastoral fictïon with a political message: his are flables couvertes [covert fables] designed for political purposes, which will enlist our admiration for the loiaux (the Burgundians) and our condemnation of the faulz desloiaux (the Armagnacs, or adherents of the house of Orléans). A number of the major political players of the time are to appear in the guise of Arcadian shepherds, under appropriate names: Charles VI himself is Florentin, his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, is Belligere; Louis, Duke of Orléans, appears as Tristifer, and Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, as Lëonet. The overall story is rather convoluted; what I want to focus on here is just one little episode towards the beginning of what ‘Bucarius’ calls his traittié, an episode in which the rather dilettante shepherds 26

Le Poète et le prince: L’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1978). 27 Originally edited by Kervyn de Lettenhove (in Chroniques relatives à l’histoire de la Belgique sous la domination des ducs de Bourgogne (Brussels: Hayez, 1873), pp. 573–852), and now replaced by Joël Blanchard’s Le Pastoralet, Publications de l’Université de Rouen (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983); references in the text, by line-number, are to this latter edition. See also Joël Blanchard, La Pastorale en France aux XIV e et XV e siècles. Recherches sur les structures de l’imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Champion, 1983), pp. 260–67. 28

On ‘Bucarius’s’ identity, see Le Pastoralet, ed. by Blanchard, pp. 24–25; he concludes merely that the writer was Picard, and probably from the circle of the Counts of Saint-Pol.

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gather to celebrate the feast of Venus (the author reassures us, hastily, that we are not to think that these are pagan shepherds; no, no, no, on the contrary, they are undoubtedly pastours crestïens, ‘Christian shepherds’ (l. 32), and the feast of Venus is merely local colour: ‘pour estrangier ma Muse [to make my muse more exotic]’ (l. 30)). The event, says the poet-narrator, is memorably gracïeux (l. 125) — a little light flirtation, dancing, singing; then, after a while, the revellers retire under a may-tree to rest, and Florentin proposes a light-hearted competition: a prize, a beautifully embroidered belt, will be awarded to whichever of the shepherds produces the most accomplished ‘rondel ou le plus loera S’amie’ (ll. 442–43). The shepherds withdraw for a while into poetic solitude, to concentrate, ‘pour miex faire et estre quois [so as to work better in peace and quiet]’ (l. 447), and then return to the company to recite their rondeaux in front of the judge, Belligere (Queen Isabeau of Bavaria), ‘qui fu sage De rime [who was well-versed in poetry]’ (l. 497). The first of the rondeaux is by Florentin himself, Charles VI: La tres belle beaulté m’amie Ne diroit pas uns aultres Tulles; Sens et valour n’abaissent mie La tres belle beaulté m’amie. Elle est de grant douchour garnie, Et sy n’est pas des plus entulles ... (ll. 507–12) Another Cicero could not describe the beautiful beauty of my lady; her wisdom and worth do not diminish the beautiful beauty of my lady. She is of the greatest graciousness, and yet she is not by any means among the coquettes ...

This is, of course, a rather pedestrian piece, with its lamely pleonastic belle beaulté and its unambitious rime pauvre amie/mie/garnie; it has just one saving orotund little touch, that single ingenious rime riche Tulles (M. Tullius Cicero)/entulles [‘coquettish’, ‘flirtatious’]; scarcely enough, one would have thought, to inspire applause (but the lacklustre poet is Charles VI and so he is applauded). A second shepherd, Lëonet, the Duke of Burgundy, is the next to produce an offering: M’amie est Hester et Helaine, Et Hero et Penelopé, Et de Vergy la Chastelaine; M’amie est Hestor et Helaine, Car humble est et belle et certaine Et chaste et celans son secré ... (ll. 527–32)

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My lady is Esther and Helen, Hero and Penelope, and the châtelaine de Vergy; my lady is Esther and Helen, for she is modest and lovely and true and chaste and discreet …

This time, the poet’s stock-in-trade is the string of proper names, which are all, of course, those of women who are bywords for beauty (Helen), or for their constancy (Esther, Hero, Penelope, the châtelaine de Vergy). The names are, however, a list, no more. Lëonet, the Duke, has made no attempt to embroider on them or to draw out any particularity which might make them especially appropriate comparators. And he is no stylist: his rhymes are poor (Penelopé/sacré) — unlike those of the next of the shepherd-poets, Pompal,29 whose knowledge of mythologies and skill with rhyme are clearly considerably more sophisticated: Pymalïon a m’amie entaillie Et Phebus l’a freschement coulouree; Zephirus lui a grant doulchour baillie. Pymalïon a m’amie entaillie, Paris d’amours l’a duite et consillie, Et Orpheüs a sa voix acordee ... (ll. 561–66) Pygmalion sculpted my lady, Phoebus lent her his fresh colouring, Zephyr gave her sweetness. Pygmalion sculpted my lady, Paris trained her and advised her in the ways of love, and Orpheus tuned her voice …

This third shepherd not only has the trick of richer rhyme (entaillie/baillie/consillie); he is also able to use classical references with a certain knowing deftness. He has created a conceit, not just a list, whereby he imagines that Pygmalion, Phoebus, Zephir, Paris, Orpheus have jointly created and moulded his amie: the sun, Phoebus, has coloured her cheeks; the soft breeze, Zephirus, has lent her his freshness; Pygmalion has sculpted her; Orpheus has given her the gift of music. His lady, gratified, is impressed enough to dance an approving little pirouette (‘ung saultet fist …’; ll. 557–71), while the fourth of the poets, Lupal, embarks on a rather different challenge: M’amie est belle, blanche et bloie, Courtoise et coulouree a point, Et doulce, debonaire et quoie. M’amie est belle, blanche et bloie

29

Pompal is Clignet de Bréban; Lupal (see below) is Bernard VII, comte d’Armagnac: both are prominent political players (Le Pastoralet, ed. by Blanchard, p. 270, and his La Pastorale en France, p. 151).

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Chapter 1 Et plaisans et plaine de joie. De biens deffault en ly n’a point … (ll. 577–82) My lady is pretty, pale and polished, courteous and coloured as she should be, and desirable and delicate and quiet. My lady is pretty, pale and polished, and merry and mirthful. There is in her no lack of anything good …

This time, the rondeau starts off with a rather dogged alphabet-game:30 adjectives beginning with bs in the first line, cs in the second, ds in the third, to ps in the fifth. Except, of course, that the sequence is imperfect, broken by the intrusive quoie in the third line and surely by the sixth line, where the poet seems to have fallen back, disheartened, on the clumsy syntactical inversion which makes the negative particle point into a rather inadequate rhyme-word. This brings us to the last of the shepherds, Tristifer, Louis d’Orléans — who, to the scandal of the poet-narrator, produces not the rondeau that the shepherds had been set, but a ballade: Plus plaisant bergiere n’a pas De Colette, de Rains a Roye. Son corps est tailliés a compas Miex que dire je ne porroie; Car el est parmy la corroie Gresle, par les rains large et plaine, Haulte a point, et s’a toujours joie: C’est des aultres la souveraine. Soubz son chainse de canevas Sa char plus que la noif blanchoie. Delis dois a et longs les bras, Dont miex en musette notoie. Doulz regard a la simple et coie; Cler chante comme une seraine. Bien scet houler en la saulchoie: C’est des aultres la souveraine. (ll. 599–614) There is no more charming a shepherdess than Colette, from Reims to Roye [in northern France]. Her figure is more gracefully shaped than I can describe: her waist is slim, her hips nicely rounded; she is just the right height, and always agreeable: she is the queen of all. Under her

30 Common enough in the period: see Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Le Queux de Saint-Hilaire and G. Raynaud, SATF, 11 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–1903), III, 220 (no. CCCCXVII), and cf. Paul Zumthor, Le Masque et la lumière: la poétique des Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 74–75.

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shift of coarse linen, her flesh is whiter than snow. She has slim fingers and long arms, the better to play the pipes. Her artless face has a welcoming gaze; she sings as sweetly as a mermaid. She knows just how to use her shepherd’s crook: she is the queen of all.

This is a far more accomplished — even flamboyant — piece. In the first place, Louis’ shepherdess, unlike the insubstantial figures of the previous pieces, is precisely imagined: narrow-waisted, broad-hipped, slim-fingered: studiedly seductive. In the second, formally speaking, Louis is not just a competent, but a rather impressive poet. Here are the deft alliterations (Plus/plaisant; Rains/Roye; delis dois; miex/musette); the pleasingly rich — but unforced — rhymes (pas/compas, seraine/souveraine); the rather ingenious use of enjambement (‘parmy la corroie Gresle’). He uses syntactic inversion emphatically rather than when rhyme fails him; he can marry a deft chiasmus to a neat alliteration (‘Delis dois a et longs les bras’) and, unlike the earlier poets, whose vocabulary is rather hackneyed, his is concrete and inventive (corroie, a compas, rains) — so much so, in fact, that one of his words, houler, ‘to use a (shepherd’s) crook’, appears nowhere else in French. Not surprisingly, it is his poem which wins the prize, as having, says the judge, mieudre saveur — although this is to our poet-narrator’s distinct annoyance, because whatever the merits of the poem-as-poem might be, it remains a ballade, and not a rondeau. The judge, Belligere, is, says the narrator, peevishly, ‘pervertie ... par amours et par sottie [perverted by love and sheer stupidity]’ (ll. 649–50); Isabeau of Bavaria was, according to gossip, thought to be Louis d’Orléans’ mistress. By this time, I am afraid, the reader may be wondering what can possibly justify spending so long on, and quoting so extensively from, a set of fixed-form lyrics none of which — with the possible exception of the last — could conceivably be called poetic jewels. But in fact it is the occasion itself that is interesting, and what it tells us about the practice of poetry in the fifteenth century. It has been something of a critical cliché to paint the late-medieval court as a place where courtiers simply, effortlessly, uncritically, produced strings of competent rondeaux and adequate ballades to order: where everyone could versify, at the drop of a hat, where the lyric was merely ornamental, and where no critical standards existed or were applied. The fiction of the Pastoralet, on the contrary, paints verse not as a saccharine, ornamental game, but rather as competitive and strategic, a way of expressing relationships in verse, a way of using verse, as I said earlier, to consolidate an identity, or to mark a distinction. Poetry, here, is a highly sophisticated product, what I called a socially situated act of utterance: it supposes participants who share cultural and intellectual

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habits, and readers who grasp collective meanings. Our poet-narrator, I suggest, is a highly conscious, culturally adept versifier, who understands and values strategic and complex verse-games. There are mechanisms and critical manipulations behind what might seem, on the surface, to be a rather mawkish little pastoral interlude. Before I explore this further, let me look at another fictional poetry evening. Jean de Le Mote, who flourished in the mid-fourteenth century, was very much the professional poet, it seems, at the court of the Counts of Hainaut — to the extent indeed that he was commissioned by Philippa of Hainaut, Edward III’s queen, to write an obituary eulogy for her father Guillaume III d’Avesnes, Count of Hainaut, in 1339.31 Jean seems to have frequented the puys of Northern France, but then, in 1340 or so, to have established himself in Paris, in the household of a patron, Simon de Lille, who was the royal goldsmith. It was for this patron, in the mid-fourteenth century, that he wrote an odd little romance called Le Parfait du Paon, which is attached to the Alexander the Great cycle.32 The story is too complicated to be summarized easily here33 — and in fact, what I want to concentrate on is a single episode where Alexander and his court are invited, by a quartet of elegant and aristocratic damoiselles, to parler et argüer, indulge in pleasant conversation, and, as in the Pastoralet, to take part in a poetic competition.34 Eight competitors, aristocratic amateurs, produce ballades — the 31

Li Regret Guillaume comte de Hainaut: poëme inédit du XIV e siècle, ed. by Auguste Scheler (Louvain: Lefever, 1882). 32

Edited under this title by Richard J. Carey, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 118 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); linereferences are henceforward in the text. Simon de Lille died in 1348; the romance must therefore have been composed in the 1340s. On Jean’s relations with Simon, see Le Parfait du Paon, ed. by Carey, pp. 11–12, and some interesting speculations in Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, ‘The Goldsmith and the Peacocks: Jean de la Mote in the Household of Simon de Lille, 1340’, Viator, 28 (1997), 283–303. 33

For a convenient summary of the place of this poem in the wider Alexander cycle, and more narrowly in the ‘peacock’ group (Les Voeux du Paon, Le Restor du Paon, Le Parfait du Paon), see A. Thomas, ‘Jacques de Longuyon et ses imitateurs’, in Histoire littéraire de la France, currently 43 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1866–), XXXVI, 1–86. 34

The episode occupies laisses 30–51 of the romance. Carey is relatively brief: there are longer discussions by Friedrich Gennrich, ‘Der Gesangswettstreit im Parfait du Paon’, Romanische Forschungen, 58/59 (1947), 208–32, and E. Hoepffner, ‘Die Balladen des Dichters Jehan de la Mote’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 35 (1911), 153–66. For a more recent, and excellent, analysis, see Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 255–56, to which I am indebted.

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four damoiselles, Alexander, and three of his close companions — and the point to which I want to draw attention is the seriousness, the professionalism, with which the whole occasion is treated. The rules of this game are precise, and this time carefully set out. The amateur poets are competing for a first prize consisting of a gold crown, or a second, of a vert capel de flours (l. 990). Before each of the competitors recites his or her poem, they have to swear, by Venus and Diana, that this is original work never previously performed (‘aillieurs autres fois ne fu dicte n’oÿe’; l. 1049). Each competitor is asked to compose, to copy out, and then to perform (sing) his or her ballade; one of them, Preamuse, protests that she has not had time to compose a musical setting (‘J’ai si grant haste au fere qu’elle n’est pas notee’; l. 1209). And when all eight ballades have been performed, the judges — the courtiers who have not themselves performed — retire to consider their verdict. Now, this is not a task which they take at all lightly. The poet reassures us that each individual ballade is read ‘plus de .x. fois et bien consideree [ten or more times, and carefully considered]’ (l. 1397), and tells us that the process of judgement was long and arduous — and contentious: ‘Moult grant descort i ot au jugier et meslee [there was considerable dissent among the judges]’ (l. 1398). But the jury finally pronounces on — and this is the point to which I want to draw attention because here too the echoes of Pierre de Hauteville’s charter are conspicuous — highly professional, technical grounds, after meticulous analysis. One of the ballades, Dan Clin’s, is competent enough, but there is a faus ronmant in the second vers (l. 1412): this seems to mean — Jean’s technical vocabulary, unfortunately, is idiosyncratic — that the first line of the second stanza is hypermetric, since Dan Clin seems to have counted audicïon (l. 1321) as four syllables, avision as three.35 Tholomer is repetitive (redicte de sens; l. 1414);36 Aymon’s ballade is marred by .i. genoul (l. 1415);37 Alexander himself has 35

I do not understand ronmant in this context: is it related to romant, ‘langage’, ‘discours’ (Godefroy, VII, 231)? Cf. Jehan Bodel, Chanson des Saisnes, ed. by Annette Brasseur (Geneva: Droz, 1989): ‘Sire, dits li quens Forques, entendez mon ronmans ...’, which the editor glosses ‘“paroles”? Or might it mean “a mistake” in French?’ 36

According to Pierre Fabri, Le grand et vrai Art de pleine rhétorique, de Pierre Fabri, ed. by M. Héron, 2 vols (Rouen: Imprimerie E. Cagniard, 1889–90), II, 121, les anciens faicteurs sanctioned redictes provided there was a change of grammatical function; presumably, a redicte de sens here is condemned because the meaning and function are unchanged. 37

Carey, in his edition of Le Parfait du Paon (p. 190) simply gives ‘une erreur (en poésie)’; I find no other example of this word used in a literary–critical sense; is it related to one of the meanings noted by FEW (IV , 115, for 1423): ‘bracket’? Kelly, Medieval Imagination, p. 255,

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produced a ballade which is technically unblemished, but whose lexicon is relatively ordinary (‘il ne reva point tres hautement parlant’; l. 1419). Of the damoiselles, Deromadaire, say the judges, ‘un poi va vantant’: does this refer to the message of the ballade, which is that, having formerly discouraged her lover, she now proposes, with serene confidence, to give herself to him? Saigremore, like Alexander, has produced mot ... pas haut, but they are pleasing enough (l. 1423); Preamuse’s balade feminine is, unfortunately, marred by .i. piler (l. 1425) (does this, as the editor of the romance suggests, mean a cheville?)38. The cream of the crop, they are agreed, is the ballade composed by Clarete au cuer sachant (l. 1428). Clarete’s balade coronnee is particularly interesting; I give it from Carey’s transcription, but with punctuation amended to underline Clarete’s semantic and syntactic sophistication:39 Tres gracïeuse sui des biens d’amer, S’en lo amours de cuer tres humlement, Qui m’a a bon et bel fait assener Par tel maniere et par itel couvent Que quiconques verroit no maintieng gent, Veïr porroit tout en une assamblee Amours, amé amant, amie amee. Amours y est qui nous doit gouverner Et s’est amez de moy oultreement Et s’est amans, ce doi je supposer; Amie sui aussi parfaitement Et sui amee – espoirs vrais le m’aprent. Dont par ces poins a il en no pensee Amours amé amant amie amee. C’est noble compaignie a regarder C’on s’i mantient si amoureusement

suggests ‘grammatical error’: the lines ‘Souffissance me donne pais Et bien fais Francement’ (ll. 1155–57) are, he says, syntactically ambiguous. 38 Again, I find no mention of this elsewhere, and can only assume that it is related, metaphorically, to piler, ‘prop’: see FEW, VIII, 475. 39

Carey, unfortunately, punctuates the refrain-line consistently as a simple word-string — ‘Amours, amé, amant, amie, amee’ — which nullifies the intended, subtle, effect. Of course, my punctuation does precisely the same, by disambiguating the refrain-line: see David Mus, ‘François Villon: le drame du texte’, in Villon at Oxford: The Drama of the Text, ed. by Michael Freeman and Jane H. M. Taylor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 1–34, for a discussion of the disadvantages of punctuation.

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Que cuers humains ne le saroit penser. Et dame y a, toute honneur plainement, Dont ja oster n’en voeil men douch talent, Ainchois seray et suivray a duree Amours amé, amant amie amee. (ll. 1349–69) I am most graciously endowed with the virtues of love, and I give thanks for it, humbly, to Love, for he has designed me for fair deeds, such that, by convention, anyone who saw our decorous behaviour could see, all together, at one time, Love, the beloved lover, and the beloved lady. Love inhabits him, and he is loved to excess by me, and indeed I must suppose that he loves me; I am therefore the perfect ladylove, and I am loved – all my hopes are realized. By which I must imagine that he has loved Love who loves his beloved love. Our love together is so noble and so loving that no human heart could imagine it. And there is a lady, of the highest honour, from whom I wish never to detach my wishes, and I shall be, and forever, having loved love, loving to a beloved lady.

This is a truly ambitious, even virtuoso, piece which capitalizes, with great syntactic and prosodic ingenuity, on the repetition which defines the ballade. Take, for instance, the poetic transforms of the refrain-line.40 In the first stanza, Clarete imagines an assamblee of three entities: Amours itself, the beloved, the amé ami, and herself, the amie amee (thus ‘Love, the beloved lover, and the beloved lady’); in the second, amant becomes a gerundive, the beloved lover loving the loved lady; in the third, it is the lover himself who promises to follow the beloved lady. Clarete’s lyric self-confidence here, her conscious and careful exploitation of the syntactic potential of cognates, supposes sophisticated and responsive listeners/readers: this is a jeu d’esprit only appropriate for a coterie audience with whom one might share an appreciation of wittily recreative verse. And of course, it is precisely to this that, by implication, the judging process draws attention. The judges’ response — Clarete is labelled ‘au cuer sachant [well-trained, well taught]’ — is itself the trained response of the connoisseur, manifesting, as does Clarete herself, an unexpectedly acute consciousness of language. This poem is, they say, la mix ouvree (l. 1408). Now, we must be careful here: Jean de Le Mote himself is a professional poet, and so has every interest in presenting poetry as something which is complex and demanding and difficult; indeed, as the little competition episode draws to a close he segues into a diatribe against the faiseurs, journeyman-poets, who think 40

Which resembles one of Eustache Deschamps’ ballades amoureuses: Œuvres complètes, III, 179 (no. DXXXIX ).

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that their ouvrage poissant, filthy verses, are rusez, witty,41 and as valuable as is his own plus soutil oevre (ll. 1444–50); thank goodness, he continues, with every appearance of no doubt self-interested sincerity, for his own patron, li boins Symons de Lille, who allows him ‘vivre, chambre et clerc escrisant Pour faire li biax dis [bed and board, and a scribe, so that I can compose fair poems]’ (ll. 1453–54). Nor can we at all assume that what Jean is giving us is a simple mirrorimage of an evening at the court of Hainaut, or at ‘Symon’s’ house in Paris: again, it is in a poet’s professional and material interest to lend poetry a disproportionately important role in cementing élite sociability. But it must also be in his interest, as it was in the interest of the anonymous author of Le Pastoralet, not to produce a scene so implausible as to defy his audience’s credulity42 — and if so, the portrait he paints for us is an intriguing one. In the first place, the poets are all presented as perfectly competent — in some cases more than competent. True, when the damoiselles initially propose a competition, Alexander and his followers respond with studied self-deprecation, like Edwardian gentlemen-sportsmen desperate to avoid the slightest appearance of professionalism: ‘je n’en sai une aguille escassee [a broken needle]’ (l. 982),43 says Alexander. But in fact all of them are perfectly capable of rhyme, more or less rich, of rhetorical flights, of what I earlier called strophic discipline. Secondly, in spite of their self-conscious and calculated casualness, all the poets recognize the effort that is involved in poetic success: as Alexander says, ‘ci faut grant estudie [this requires great expertise]’ (l. 1018). Poetry, then, is not effortless; on the contrary, even the most amateur of poets will benefit from instruction and practice — and this in turn, of course, suggests that value attaches to an expertise which sheer native wit cannot inculcate.44 Every stage of the poetic process as it is portrayed in these fictions — the inculcation of poetic techniques, the execution of the poems, the importance attached to presentation and

41

For this sense of rusé, see Godefroy, X , 603.

42

In a rather revealing throw-away comment, Christine de Pizan supports this image with a description of a courtly evening where ‘qui mieulz mieulx chascun devisoit, Ou d’amours qui s’en avisoit Ou de demandes gracieuses’: Dit de la Rose, ll. 276–78, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, II, 31. 43

A cliché; see Baudouin de Condé, Li Contes du Pellicam, in Dits et contes de Baudouin de Condé et de son fils Jean de Condé, ed. by Auguste Scheler, 3 vols (Brussels: Devaux, 1866–67), l. 333. 44

Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp, 175–77, shows poets complaining that ‘le travail de versification commence à peser comme un labeur imposé et un dur métier’.

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preservation — demonstrates just how far investment in the poetic market is felt to be worthwhile; the readiness to invest time, money, and forethought is an index of just what importance is attached to the cultural capital that competent lyric-making represents. Before I explore this further, let me return for a moment to the Pastoralet. What I drew attention to, in my analysis of those rather commonplace fixedform lyrics, was the range of poetic manoeuvres that the writer lent his poets. The first, I suggested, had only one trick up his sleeve: the single, rather histrionic rhyme Tulles/entulles. The second, apparently, had at his fingertips — because, by implication and convention, poets are said to extemporize — a convenient set of references: no need to do more than allude, perfunctorily, since the allusions are so familiar that readers can be relied on to supply their own frame of reference. The third poet did a bit better than this; he too specialized in allusion, but with, in his case, a degree of learning: he exploited the allusive commonplaces at the service of a quite elegant conceit. The fourth attempts a phonetic game — one not uncommon in the late Middle Ages — whereby the poet selects lexemes alphabetically. And the fifth, the eventual winner of the tournament, is knowing, agile: his poetic staples include deft use of sound and rhyme and rhythm, precise and even technical vocabulary, and a nice, selfdeprecatory wit. As I set it out like this, of course, what is obvious is the way in which the poets are, increasingly, endowed with sheer poetic proficiency: from Charles VI’s rather trite lack of poetic imagination to Louis d’Orléans’ flamboyancy — and what this in turn points to is the importance attached precisely to proficiency. Our poet-narrator — and it is difficult not to see this as a perfectly conscious act — has made his poets progressively more adept. He may disapprove, vehemently, of the fact that Isabeau of Bavaria gives the prize to a ballade rather than to a rondeau, but he has carefully endowed this last of his poets, Louis, with a lightness of touch, a gift with words and sounds which evince an intelligent grasp of the practice of poetry (a caveat, of course — one cannot but wonder, if such poetic proficiency is lent to the hated and despised Louis, just how far our poet-narrator approves of such expertise: are we being invited to see Louis as a bit flash, a touch meretricious?). It is obvious that, tacitly, the poet-narrator has graded the poems he invents for his characters, graded them according to skill and expertise. A careful reading of these apparently slight, repetitious poems, and of their formal, rhetorical, and aesthetic moves, in other words, allows us to think about the skills — the habitus — which informs them, about the stakes — the field — in which they are deployed.

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I have used, in these last few paragraphs, expressions — cultural capital, habitus, field — which I borrow from the French sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu, and which imply the sociocultural angle that I am proposing to use in approaching the late-medieval lyric. What I am intending to measure the latter against is Bourdieu’s model of social relations, in which the production and reception of intellectual and cultural artefacts is defined strategically, as a way in which individuals and social groups mark their distinction and consolidate their identities. For Bourdieu,45 culture in general and literary creation in particular need to be seen in the context of the whole structure of relationships in society: language, culture, and social relations are internally coherent and interdependent systems, to understand which all their elements require examination. Human beings in general, and poets in particular, are necessarily participants within a field, a structured site of essentially competitive relations which offers a range of social, intellectual, or aesthetic positions, structures of possibility which can be deployed strategically, competitively, for individual advantage. At stake in any particular field is ‘power’: a field is an espace de jeu46 or champ du pouvoir47 in which players manœuvre, more or less expertly, to acquire a reward, a symbolic capital, which may be to do with rank, or pecuniary advantage, or merely self-esteem and prestige. Those competing in any particular field, if they are to be successful, will have to possess the specific skills, the habitus, which will lend them competitive advantage — which will enable them, again in Bourdieu’s terms, to acquire symbolic capital. And by habitus is meant an internalized set of rules — not necessarily articulated — which govern practice in the field: not necessarily articulated because, according to Bourdieu,

45

Bourdieu is exceptionally prolific, and I do not pretend to have explored all his voluminous writings: I base myself, principally, on his ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, Les Temps modernes, 246 (1966), 865–905; ‘Champ de pouvoir, champ intellectuel et habitus de classe’, Scolies: Cahiers de recherche de l’Ecole normale supérieure, 1 (1971), 7–26; Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992); he first uses the term ‘cultural capital’, I believe, in his ‘Les trois états du capital culturel’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 30 (1979), 3–6. For the application of Bourdieu to the medieval field, see The Practice of Medieval Literature, ed. by Mark Chinca and others, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33/3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 46

For Bourdieu, the espace de jeu is a ‘field of objective relations between individuals or institutions who are competing for the same stake’: Sociology in Question, trans. by Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), p. 74. 47

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any field generates its own habitus in those who compete for field-specific symbolic capital. The habitus is a social heritage, acquired, progressively and often tacitly, from family, or school, or milieu. To possess or to acquire the relevant habitus is to accede to the cultural competence which permits cultural production on the one hand, in the present instance the writing of the poem, but also, on the other, cultural reception, the reading of the poem. Without that competence, without knowledge of the relevant codes, a poem is an empty sequence of words. What Bourdieu says is, of course, based on extensive, indeed encyclopaedic, analyses of present-day fields: publishing practices, the French education system, access to and preferences in museums and art-galleries and reading-matter, allocation of posts within the French cultural and intellectual hierarchies — and the sort of social and commercial pressures which are inescapable in the modern do not, of course, obtain tel quel within the medieval world. Bourdieu’s insistence, for example, on the text as a commodity mediated by publishing houses is not a model easily transferable to the medieval court.48 What I want to suggest here, however, is that within the very concrete field of such a court, issues to do with the writer/poet himself as a commodity are essential: that just as the modern writer or poet is at the mercy of modes of production regulated and imposed by financial return and media success, so the court poet, or the courtier-poet, is a competitor in a field where, to operate efficiently as a poet, to possess the habitus of the poet, is a passport to material gains and favour and, as a consequence, that to acquire the habitus of the poet is an investment which a courtier in pursuit of cultural capital might be well advised to make.49 Let me turn, then, to poetry as a passport, and return to a poet-historian who consistently incorporates verse-as-capital into his narratives and even into his

48

Even a limited Bourdieuian analysis of any field is immensely time-consuming, and such an analysis will not be possible in my field where we are dependent on records which are fragmentary and unsystematic. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to convince readers that the understanding of the functioning of medieval verse made possible by the Bourdieuian model, which is largely sociocultural, is preferable to other models so far suggested. For a mise en garde, however, see Toril Moi, ‘The Challenge of the Particular Case: Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture and Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Quarterly, 58 (1997), 497–508. To use Bourdieu, moreover, has the advantage of setting aside the questions that Green rightly raises in his Poets and Princepleasers (pp. 71–100) as to whether the prince-patrons were themselves lettered, by emphasizing the social rather than the intellectual value of the book. 49

This chapter is much indebted to Poirion’s encyclopaedic Le Poète et le prince and Cerquiglini-Toulet’s La Couleur de la mélancolie.

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autobiography, making poems, as it were, into a currency: Jean Froissart. We know him, of course, primarily as an historian — indeed, he himself took considerable pride in his privileged identity as what we might call a remembrancer50 — but when he needed to curry favour with a new court, or enlist a patron, it seems that he understood verse to be a better social passport than sober, factual prose. As we saw in the Introduction, when Froissart came to make his fact-finding journey to Gaston de Foix’s remote court in the Pyrenees in 1388, it was with a romance, the Roman de Meliador, that he prepared the ground — which may account for the fact that when, in 1395, Froissart visited England with every hope of favour at the court of Richard II, it was once again not history but a volume of poetry that he presented as his credentials. He describes it, lovingly, luxuriatingly, as a sumptuously bound, elegantly copied and illustrated volume bound in velvet studded with gold.51 The king graciously accepts it — and all the more so when he discovers the nature of the contents: Adont me demanda le roy de quoy il [sc. le livre] traittoit. Je luy dis: ‘D’amours.’ De ceste response fut-il tous resjouys, et regarda dedens le livre en plusieurs lieux et y lisy, car moult bien parloit et lisoit le franchois, et puis le fist prendre ... et porter en sa chambre de retraite, et me fist de plus en plus bonne chière.52 Then the king asked me what the book was about. I told him: ‘About love.’ He was delighted with this response, and leafed through the book and read a page or two, for he spoke and read French fluently, and then he had it taken into his private chamber, and was more and more welcoming to me.

Both these récits de publication,53 by a writer who was after all highly successful in accumulating cultural capital and competing in his own historicizing field, are dramatic examples of acts of creative expression designed culturally and materially for appropriate social milieux where they can confer value; they also,

50 As witness the prologue to his Chroniques, I, ed. by Siméon Luce (Paris: Mme V e. J. Renouard, 1869), variants, pp. 209–11. 51

Which may, perhaps, have been a manuscript now BnF fr. 831: see Peter Dembowski’s introduction to his edition of Le Paradis d’amour; L’Orloge amoureux (Geneva: Droz, 1986), pp. 8–9. On the manuscript as ‘status symbol’, see Brigitte Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society’, Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), 75–90. 52

Chroniques, ed. by Kervyn de Lettenhove, 25 vols in 26 (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1867–77), XV , 167. 53

The expression comes from Groupe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l’histoire de la littérature. De la publication entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. by Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala (Paris: Fayard, 2002), introduction.

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however, show the poet to be remarkably adept in understanding the nature of the field in which he competes, dexterous in meeting what he clearly hopes will be the trained sensibilities of potential new patrons, and therefore shrewd in judging the symbolic value of what he could offer.54 I labour this point — Froissart’s canny forethought in judging what, in his own society, will best accumulate what Bourdieu calls cultural capital55 — partly as a corrective to fictional accounts in medieval romances which, by convention, as we have seen, so often depict carefree, effortless lyric-making, and which suggest that to create a perfectly satisfactory ballade or rondeau needs no more than youthful high spirits and a bit of spare time. Froissart’s own Meliador is an offender here.56 Many of the fixed-form lyrics that he weaves into the romance are, the fiction pretends, thrown together by some knight riding towards Scotland: ‘Melyador fist ... Sus le chemin qu’il chevaucoit, Une balade [Meliador composed a ballade as he rode along]’ (ll. 15,667–69); or drinking at a spring: ‘Melyador se rafresci De l’aigue, car moult faisoit chaut, Et puis si commença en hault A chanter [Meliador drank some water, for it was very hot, and started to sing aloud]’ (ll. 23,213–16) — or are casually, breezily, inspired by some passing thought of the beloved: ‘Sentemens nouviaus li approce Et, encores en chevaucant, Mist la .i. rondelet avant .... [A new thought occurred to him, and as he rode he composed a rondeau ...]’ (ll. 4352–54). On the contrary: everything, in those disingenuous accounts of his using love-poetry to win the favour of a patron that I quoted earlier, suggests that Froissart knew precisely the symbolic value of these artistic artefacts; that he realized that to master the making of poetry is to access a dominant and potentially valuable culture, to manufacture

54

Froissart’s fictions, too, often play with the idea of verse as passport: in the Espinette amoureuse, ed. by Anthime Fourrier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), p. 140, for instance, the ‘I’ reads a virelai to win permission to leave England. Eustache Deschamps gives a fascinating account of presenting a copy of Machaut’s Voir Dit to Louis de Mâle, Count of Flanders: ‘Je lui baillié voz lettres en papier Et vo livre qu’il aime chierement; Lire m’y fist, present maint chevalier’: Œuvres complètes, I, 248–49 (no. CXXVII). 55 Cf. Christine de Pizan sending copies of her works to England to ensure that her son become a part of the household of Henry IV: ‘le roy Henri, qui encores est, qui s’atribua la couronne, vid desditz livres et dictiez que j’avoie ja plusieurs envoiez, comme desireuse de lui faire plaisir, audit conte [sc. earl of Salisbury]. Si lui vint a congnoissance tout ce qu’il en estoit. Adonc tres joieusement prist mon enfant vers lui et tint chierement et en tres bon estat’ (Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. by Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac, Etudes Christiniennes, 4 (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 112). 56

Again I quote from the edition by Longnon; line references in the text.

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one’s own inclusion; that the ability to compose an elegant dit, a clever rondeau or an accomplished ballade is a ready-made means, a strategy, to secure a position within the cultural field of the late-medieval court, and that an appearance of careless elegance is a valuable asset. Less guarded moments in his pseudo-autobiographies57 do indeed suggest that lyric-making is by no means as effortless as Meliador pretends. In his Espinette amoureuse, for instance, Froissart is eager to ensure that his pseudoautobiographical lady (and, presumably, his real audience) recognizes his virtuoso feat in managing one hundred different rhymes in her honour: ‘Dame, cent clauses desparelles, Pour vostre amour, — n’est pas mervelles, — Ai mis en rime [My lady, I have composed one hundered different rhymes in your honour: is not this a marvel?]’ (ll. 2340–42).58 So too is Guillaume de Machaut, no doubt Froissart’s inspiration, in his Fontaine amoureuse: ‘Cent rimes ay mis dedens ceste rime Qui bien les conte [I have used one hundred different rhyme-words in this poem: you can count them]’ — and all despareilles;59 so too is Christine de Pizan, puffing the fact that she has achieved the admittedly remarkable feat of writing some 3500 lines of the Livre du duc des vrais amans in demanding rimes léonines, and stressing the sheer effort and skill that this has demanded: Ainsi l'a voulu parfaire Pour monstrer son escïence; Car labour a, et scïence, De lonc procés demener Par tel rime.60 He wanted to complete this feat to show his expertise, for such rhyming demands work, and expertise, and time.

It is important to note that these are, though, what I called in my Introduction professional poets – and it may be that more aristocratic poets were

57

A term I borrow from Laurence de Looze: see his Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). 58

See the edition by Fourrier, p. 16.

59

Fontaine amoureuse, ed. by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Stock, 1993), ll. 1021–22,

1052. 60

Le Livre du duc des vrais amans, ed. by Thelma S. Fenster (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), p. 198.

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less impressed by feats of virtuoso prosody.61 Jean de Garencières, for instance, a minor poet-aristocrat whom we shall meet again in the next chapter, writing from his prison in Bordeaux to some of his poetic correspondents, dismisses their convoluted, difficult versifying: ‘Seigneurs, vous m’avez envoyé Ung escript de vostre partie Qui est si grandement rimé Que, par Dieu, je ne l’enten mye [Sirs, you have sent me a piece of yours which is so complicatedly rhymed that by God, I cannot make head or tail of it]’.62 But this in turn is, perhaps, belied by the implication of a number of fictional episodes which seem to suggest that even amateurs thought of verse as something arduous and demanding; not, in other words, an idle game for odd leisure moments. Witness Marthe, in the fifteenth-century Roman d’Ysaye le Triste, so absorbed in composing a canchonette that she is oblivious to what is going on around her: [Yrions] le [sc. Marthe] trouve faisant ung escrit. Lors le salue et elle ne dist mot, car sy grant entente avoit a ce qu’elle n’entendoit point a che qu’il disoit ... Yrions s’approche de ly, et quant elle le perchut, sy tressaly. ‘Belle nieche’, fait Yrions, ‘a quoy pensés vous sy fort?’ ‘Sire’, fait elle, ‘c’est a une canchonette que je faisoye; regardés s’elle est bien faitte’.63 Yrion finds Marthe writing. He greets her, but she makes no response; she was concentrating so hard that she hadn’t heard him … Yrion went over to her, and when she saw him, she jumped. ‘Fair niece’, he said, ‘what are you so intent on?’ ‘Sir’, she said, ‘it’s a song that I was composing: isn’t it good?’

Witness also Alain Chartier’s description of a poet withdrawing into his room to compose in peace and quiet, thinking and playing with words, composing and deleting: Et s’enfermë en chambre ou en retrait Pour escripre plus a l’aise et a trait De lettre close; Ung peu escript, puis songe et se repose,

61

As Poirion points out in Le Poète et le prince, p. 433, ‘dans un seul poème Machaut a utilisé plus de rimes que le prince [Charles d’Orléans] dans toutes ses ballades (soixante-douze rimes différentes)’. 62

Les poésies complètes du chevalier poète Jean de Garancières ..., ed. by Y. A. Neal (Paris: Fournier et Constans, 1953), ballade 25–B. 63

Roman d’Ysaye le Triste, ed. by André Giacchetti (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1989), p. 105.

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Witness finally Christine de Pizan congratulating the Duke of Bourbon, with flattering surprise, on his remarkable poetic proficiency, in ways which, even allowing for flattery, seem to mean that the Duke would be pleased to have his verses thought of as expert and polished: Qui vous en a tant appris, Noble duc des Bourbonnoiz, Des gracieux esbanoiz Qui sont en dicter compris ...65 Who is it who has taught you so well, my lord duke of Bourbon, how to write all the pleasant conceits that go to make up good verse? ...

The suggestion, here, is that it is worthwhile to play the game, to equip oneself with the habitus which allows one to know and recognize ‘the immanent laws of the game, the stakes and so on’,66 worthwhile to master and internalize the set of tacit rules which govern strategies and practice in the field, and worthwhile to expend time and effort on producing a poem able to shine. Creative competence, then, is a skill which it is profitable to acquire; the development of poetic techniques is thought sufficiently valuable to be worth pursuing at some material cost and with some time and effort. But how is this to be achieved? There is, at the end of the Middle Ages and especially in the fifteenth century, a remarkable proliferation of what their editor, Ernest 64

‘Le Debat des Deux Fortunés d’Amour’, ll. 322–27, in The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. by James Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 167. Machaut too insists on the need for quiet and concentration: see his Prologue, ll. 37–40: ‘quant je suis en ce penser, Je ne porroie a riens penser Fors que seulement au propos Dont faire dit ou chant propos’: Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres, ed. by Ernest Hoepffner, SATF, 3 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1908–21), I, 7. 65

Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, 277. See also the hero of Machaut’s Remede de Fortune who ‘qualifies’ himself for love with poetry: ‘Et pour ce que n’estoie mie Tousdis en un point, m’estudie Mis en faire chansons et lays, Baladez, rondeaus, virelays, Et chans, selonc mon sentement, Amoureus et non autrement’: Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. by James I. Wimsatt and W. W. Kibler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), ll. 401–06. 66

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Langlois, calls arts de seconde rhétorique. Langlois edits and examines no fewer than seven of these treatises,67 to which number we might add Eustache Deschamps’ Art de dictier of 1392,68 L’Instructif de seconde rhétorique, to which I return in Chapter 4, and perhaps Pierre Fabri’s Grand et vrai art de pleine rhetorique of c. 1521.69 Critics over the years have found them distinctly disappointing. Deschamps’ treatise does not, says Glending Olson repressively and rightly, give us ‘a complete view of literature’.70 True, the authors themselves mislead. The word ‘rhetoric’ may well have suggested something more ambitious than the actuality: this is, says treatise no. IV, a ‘moderne rhetorique laie [a modern rhetoric for the layman]’; a ‘rhetorique vulgaire [a rhetoric in the vernacular]’, says Molinet; a ‘rhetorique vulgaire et maternelle [a rhetoric in the vernacular, the mother-tongue]’, says treatise no. VII.71 But it is the adjectives to which we might pay attention, because they define the readership: a readership with no particular pretensions to learning (the meaning of laie and vulgaire), a readership which has to rely on its mother tongue (maternelle). The editor of the majority of these treatises, Ernest Langlois, and more recently Claude Thiry,72 see them as handbooks for professionals training for successful competition at the puys of northern France. Some do indeed suggest that such-and-such a

67

In his Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). The generic title derives from the remark that poetry ‘est dicte seconde rhethorique pour cause que la premiere est prosayque’ (pp. 11, 65). 68 Which has been ed. and trans. by Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), replacing the edition in Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, VII, 266–92. 69

Le grand et vrai Art de pleine rhétorique, ed. by Héron.

70

‘Deschamps’ Art de Dictier and Chaucer’s Literary Environment’, Speculum, 48 (1973), 714–23 (p. 721). For a more nuanced and positive view, see Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, chapter XII: ‘Les procédés de rhétorique et la valeur lyrique du langage’, pp. 457–80, and Claude Thiry’s excellent ‘Prospections et prospectives sur la Rhétorique seconde’, Le Moyen français, 46/47 (2000), 541–62, and ‘Rhétorique et genres littéraires au XV e siècle’, in Sémantique lexicale et sémantique grammaticale en moyen français: Actes du Colloque organisé par le Centre d’études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel (28–29 sept. 1978), ed. by Marc Wilmet (Brussels: V.U.B. Centrum voor Taal- en Literatuurwetenschap, 1980), pp. 23–50. I would agree with the last, that ‘il ne faut pas, comme on a parfois tendance à le faire, minimiser l’importance de ces premiers essais’ (p. 27). 71

Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, pp. 203, 216, 265, respectively.

72

As indeed does Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 147–48.

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bravado piece might be suitable for a puy,73 some give instructions for the writing of every conceivable variety of verse form, often so complex as surely to defy the amateur,74 and it does indeed seem unlikely that mere amateurs would have needed to know the suggested rhymes in fonde (an alarmingly unpromising list: parfonde, une fonde, garde qu’il ne fonde, morfonde, confonde, chastel que l’on fonde […], to which they can, a ung besoing, add ung grosse unde de mer, iave qui sourunde, blonde, faconde, une aronde ...).75 But it is important not to homogenize the treatises; they vary considerably in sophistication and technicality. Eustache Deschamps, for instance, defines his readership, by implication, when he declines to explain how to write a sirventois because ‘c’est ouvrage qui se porte aux puis d’Amours, et que nobles hommes n’ont pas acoustumé de ce faire [a genre which is presented at puys, but which is not normally composed by the nobility]’,76 and some of the treatises make claims which are unpretentious enough to suggest a readership of amateurs. One anonymous little treatise, for instance, existing in just one manuscript, claims merely to have been written for ung [s]ien ami, ‘pour aprendre a rimer’;77 Jean Molinet claims to have been asked to compose his treatise for his trés honnoré seigneur, to enable him to win over his ‘partie adverse et obtenir d’elle victore glorieuse [his dearest enemy, and to obtain glorious victory over her]’;78 and another, sympathetically, as if recognizing how daunting an amateur might find the whole prospect of versifying, concedes that ‘il gist grand advis a nombrer ses silabes et a congnoistre quant ses vers sont egaulx [it’s a difficult matter to count

73

Treatise no. II, for instance (see Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, p. 21), or Baudet Herenc, the writer of treatise no. III (ibid., pp. 179, 172, 175 etc). 74

See for instance treatise no. VII: ibid., pp. 265–426.

75

All from treatise no. III, Baudet Harenc’s Doctrinal de la seconde rhétorique: ibid., p. 128.

76

Deschamps, Art de dictier, p. 82; Eustache seems to have written his treatise for the Louis d’Orléans who was the poetic champion of Le Pastoralet; see Miren Lacassagne, ‘L’Art de dictier: Poetics of a “New” Time’, in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier-Poet: His Work and his World, ed. by Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 181–93. On the other hand, Eustache seems himself to have been an habitué of puys: cf. his remarks about musique naturelle at puys, in Art de dictier, pp. 64–66. 77

Treatise no. VI: Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, pp. 253–64, and his ballade CCCLV . 78

Treatise no. V : ibid., p. 214, and cf. treatise VI, the explicit: ‘Je n’ay fait ce traictiét se non Pour apprendre ung mien amy’ (ibid., p. 264).

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one’s syllables and recognize when one’s lines are accurate]’,79 before going on to explain, rather less than clearly, how to treat feminine e correctly. It is surely also suggestive that the writer whom Langlois calls the Anonyme lorrain (treatise IV) confines himself to the two fixed-forms which we have already seen and which, as we shall discover, are the staples of aristocratic courts, the rondeau and the ballade. Jacques Legrand would add to these only the relatively restrained verse-forms, the serventois and the lai that we find Froissart, for instance, using (and which the poets of the Cour amoureuse were thought capable of composing), and he deliberately ignores more flashy instances: ‘non obstant que les dites manieres de dicter soient bonnes et souffisantes, neantmoins pluseurs autres manieres on pourroit deviser .... [although the above poetic modes are quite sufficient, there are a number of others which we could describe ...]’.80 Combined, these remarks suggest that it is as unwise to go to all the treatises for training for the highly sophisticated puy as it is to go to them all for abstract, philosophically-oriented discussion of the nature of poetry. I take as my watchword a comment made in a recent, more sympathetic, study, by Eric Méchoulan, that the treatises are ‘des recettes pour composer différentes sortes de poèmes’.81 Most of them seem to have had a fairly limited circulation. Three exist in single manuscripts, and even the more widely-distributed are in only a handful: Jacques Legrand’s, which is a part of what was to have been a much more ambitious project,82 appears in only four,83 Jean Molinet’s Art de rhétorique in no

79

From treatise no. I, Jacques Legrand’s (ibid., p. 2), also published as Archiloge Sophie: Livre de bonnes meurs, ed. by Evencio Beltran (Paris: Champion, 1986), p. 141. One of Watriquet de Couvin’s dits, the ‘Dit de l’arbre royal’, suggests the anxieties of the amateur poet: ‘Si fis ma priere en latin A Dieus et à sa douce mere Que il me moustrassent matere, Par aucuns signes ou par letre, Que je peüsse en rime metre Et conter devant les haus hommes’: Dits, ed. by Scheler, ll. 8–13. 80

Archiloge Sophie, ed. by Beltran, p. 144.

81

‘Les arts de rhétorique du XV e siècle: la Théorie, masque de la theoria’, in Masques et déguisements dans la littérature médiévale, ed. by Marie-Louise Ollier (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1988), pp. 213–21 (p. 213); see also M.-R. Jung, ‘Poetria: Zur Dichtungstheorie des ausgehenden Mittelalters in Frankreich’, Vox Romanica, 30 (1971), 44–64, and cf. Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 457–65, and François Cornilliat, ‘Or ne mens’: couleurs de l’éloge et du blâme chez les ‘Grands Rhétoriqueurs’ (Paris: Champion, 1994), pp. 27–84. 82

Legrand’s original intention was for a much more ambitious treatise, on all seven liberal arts: see Serge Lusignan, ‘Jacques Legrand auteur du premier traité du Trivium en français’, in his Parler vulgairement: les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIV e siècles (Paris: Vrin;

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more than three.84 But to read with more attention is to understand that some of them at least may be designed to respond to quite practical and immediate demands, and to provide a panacea for precisely the sort of anxieties which even an amateur might express: a panacea which would ensure what I earlier called ‘creative competence’. Treatise no. VII, for instance, gives the broadest range of rhyme-words that the author can devise: ‘en quoy on pourra facillement arenger et coucher ses termes de ryme trés richement, et trouver, se besoing est, equivocques en composant [how rich rhymes can be devised and well-placed, and how it is possible to find witty word-play, if necessary]’;85 treatise no. II supplies a handlist of mythological figures, with explanations, so that a would-be poet can use them to find apt allusions and avoid making a fool of himself by getting the frame of reference wrong: ‘d’aucunes sont mises leurs figures ainsi qu’il s’enssuit, affin de ne mettre et atribuer leurs faits a aultres, et pour faire diz, lays ou ballades ou rommans [the attributes of various mythological figures are given hereafter, so that they may not be mistakenly attributed to the wrong person, and so that they can be incorporated in dits, lais, and ballades]’;86 treatise no. IV gives an elementary, and rather laborious, explanation of just what is meant by ‘rhyme’: ‘Rimer n’est autre chose que faire deux bastons [lines] finer par telle lettre ... Et que plus resambleront l’un l’autre en la fin, milleur sera la rime [rhyme consists quite simply of making two lines end on the same letter ... and the more one line resembles the next, the better is the rhyme]’;87 treatise no. II, oddly at first sight, gives handlists of words arranged alphabetically (‘ba, be, bi, bo, bu ..... baude, belle, bien, boute, bulle’), ‘pour aprendre a espelir toutes

Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986), pp. 173–84. 83

Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, pp. 1–10; Archiloge Sophie, ed. by Beltran, pp. 1–9; on the manuscript tradition, see the latter, pp. 16–19. 84

BnF fr. 2159; BnF, fr. 2375; Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 187; there were also eight printed editions as from 1493. 85

Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, p. 322.

86

Ibid., p. 39; this is from another anonymous treatise, probably Picard, no. II, Les règles de la seconde rhétorique, now a single manuscript. It gives a more extensive list, of noms de poetes, de dieux, de deesses, de philosophes, de patriarches et de magisciens (pp. 65–72): this too is a sort of crib-sheet: ‘Par Amphitrion est entendu bonnes meurs. Par Almena [Alcmena] est entendue pulchritude, laquelle vaut autant a dire que beauté’ (p. 65). 87

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paroles [in order to learn how to spell such words]’.88 The overall impression, here, is surely not of a set of treatises all designed for the professional who might want to put a final polish to his or her already considerable skills; the phrases that I have underlined are encouraging, just what an amateur slightly alarmed by the prospect of composing a rondeau or a ballade might have found reassuring.89 What I am suggesting, in other words, is that a number of these treatises may be best understood as designed not, or not only, for poets or for advanced thinkers on rhetoric, but as handbooks for the amateur, the court poet; his or her means to cultural capital and to success in the chosen field. It is perfectly possible to see these treatises precisely as the recipe-books that Méchoulan calls them.90 A reader thus armed with a rhyming dictionary, a handbook of classical mythology, and a few tidy templates for a correct rondeau or ballade, could turn him- or herself, without too great difficulty, into a competent, if unexciting, versifier. To return for a moment to one of the dits with which I began this chapter, the Pastoralet: this is surely something that is adumbrated in the depiction of the pastoral rondeau-competition. The amateur shepherd-poets, we remember, sedulously show-cased a range of different poetic skills. The first, Charles VI, produced a rondeau with one single selling-point: the rime riche Tulle/entulle — and there, conveniently listed in treatise no. VII under the rubric Feminins termes en ULLE,is indeed tulle (though not, disappointingly, entulles).91 The second and third poets, the Duke of Burgundy and ‘Lupal’, gave us strings of allusions — and there, providently supplied with the necessary details, are the lists from treatise no. II: Orpheus and Zephyrus, Pygmalion and Paris, and so on.92 The fourth of the poets, of course, made his pitch out of an alphabet game — and is it not conceivable that those rather odd lists of words, all beginning with the same vowel or consonant and by which their author says he intended to teach his readers how to spell, might have been a prompt to just such a game? I am not, of course, for a moment suggesting that the author or the poets of the Pastoralet read any one of the particular treatises published by Langlois — and indeed it

88

Ibid., p. 36. The treatise is confusingly written; the writer seems to have made notes randomly, with no thought for order. 89

I return later to the patrons to whom copies of these treatises were presented; it is, however, worth noting that it was Charles d’Orléans’ father, Louis, who commissioned Eustache Deschamps to write his Art de dictier. 90

See above, p. 43.

91

Treatise no. VII: Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, p. 357.

92

Ibid., pp. 39–48.

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would be speculation even to suggest that any of them might have depended on some lost treatise.93 What I do want to suggest is that the coincidence between the court poets competing over poetic devices of greater or lesser complexity, and the proliferation of treatises explaining in painstaking detail how to rhyme, or how to construct a simple ballade or rondeau, may be a demonstration of the social and cultural value attached to production of verse in a court environment. Here again, the treatises are valuable evidence as to the investment, in time and effort, that it might be proper to put into verse. Matters of correct versification are, says Jacques Legrand (in treatise no. I), much discussed: ‘opinion commune’, ‘dient aucuns’;94 there is, in other words, a discourse about poetry and how to write and perform it. It is, says the Anonyme Lorrain (in treatise no. IV), eminently worthwhile to frequent established poets to pick up the tricks of their trade: ‘pour sçavoir l’usaige de moderne retorique laie, je conseille a user et hanter les facteurs [de] ballades et rondel, car en cest art y falt mettre moult usaige [in order to get the latest in modern vernacular rhetorical practices, I recommend spending time with those who compose ballades and rondeaux, because it is something that needs considerable practice]’;95 a provident poet will, in other words, be prepared to invest, time-consumingly, in honing his talent (‘mettre moult usaige’). To acquire expertise in the manipulation of poetic form is therefore a strategy: one which can lead to social (or of course pecuniary) advancement, and therefore one for which it is eminently worth planning. Particular sorts of verbal dexterity and deftness are recognized as the specific skills — power-bids — with which a courtier-poet might acquire symbolic capital. It is, I think, interesting in this context to look at a second means of inculcating poetic technique which is oddly prevalent in the fictions of the late Middle Ages and which is more evidence of the seriousness of poetry. We might call it apprenticeship, and it is related to what the Anonyme Lorrain said, above, about the usefulness of frequenting les facteurs [de] ballades et rondel. Guillaume

93

Although, of course, the fact that so many survive in single manuscripts suggests that they were never designed for circulation beyond a single court or patron. 94

Archiloge Sophie, ed. by Beltran, pp. 141, 143. In the introduction to Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, it is assumed that Legrand is talking about written discussions, ‘des opinions qu’il aurait rencontrées au cours de ses lectures’ (p. v), but even if this is so, it suggests a remarkable proliferation of arts de rhétorique. 95

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de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit96 is the story of a highly literary courtship. The poet, ageing97 and dispirited, receives a message from an aristocratic young lady unknown to him but who is an ardent admirer of his lyrics. They begin a correspondence in which, along with protestations of his devotion, Guillaume sends her finished verses, often set to his own music, and in which she sends him, from time to time, lyrics of her own.98 My reason for mentioning this romance is the terms in which she sends him her own literary productions: Et sur ce je vous envoie un virelay lequel j’ay fait; et se yl y a aucune chose a amender, si le veuilliez faire, car j’ai trop petit engien pour bien faire une tele besongne. Et aussi ne eu je unques qui rien m’en aprist; pour quoy je vous pri, treschiers amis, qu’il vous plaise a moy envoier de vos livres et de vos dis, par quoy je puisse tenir de vous a faire de vos bons dis et de bonnes chansons, quar c’est le plus grant esbatement que je aie que de oÿr et de chanter bons dis et bonnes chansons, se je le savoie bien faire. Et quant il plaira a Dieu que je vous voie ..., s’il vous plaist, vous les m’apenrez a mieulz faire et dire; quar je en apenroie plus de vous en un jour que je ne feroie d’un autre en .I an.99 And in response I send you a virelai I have composed; and if there is anything that needs correcting, please do so, for I have too little wit myself to undertake something so major. After all, I have never been taught – for which reason I would ask you, dear friend, to have me sent some of your books and your dits, so that I can learn from your example how to compose fine dits and fine songs, for it would be my greatest pleasure to hear and sing fine dits and fine songs if only I knew how to do it. And when it please God that I see you … I beg you to teach me to write and recite better; for I would learn more from you in a single day than I would from anyone else in a whole year.

Of course, this is nicely self-serving: the elderly Machaut is presenting himself as a poet so expert, so admired, that a beautiful young woman of noble birth institutes a poetic correspondence with him largely in order to have him correct 96 The text has been ed. by Paul Imbs and others, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999). 97

‘Je sui petis, rudes et nyces et desapris’ (p. 150); Jacqueline Cerquiglini points out that this is a common stance for late medieval poets: see her ‘Le clerc et le louche: Sociology of an Esthetic’, Poetics Today, 5 (1984), 479–91. 98

The question as to whether Peronnette is ‘real’ is a knotty one: see most intriguingly the computer-generated comparison in Noël Musso, ‘Comparaison statistique des lettres de Guillaume de Machaut et de Peronne d’Armentière dans le Voir-Dit’, in Guillaume de Machaut, poète et compositeur. Actes du Colloque table-ronde organisé par l’Université de Reims (19–22 avril 1978) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1982), pp. 175–93. 99

Livre du Voir Dit, ed. by Imbs and others, pp. 94–96.

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her verses. And we should no doubt be wary of supposing that what is a piece of fiction has a necessary connection with historical reality.100 But I have quoted this passage at such length because it is so circumstantial, and because it brings out, with remarkable clarity, just what I meant by apprenticeship. Toute Belle, the lady in question, is noble, and self-deprecating: she lacks the skill (engien) to perfect a poem written in one of the more complex and more ambitious metres used by amateurs, a virelai.101 But this is because she is untutored: she has never had anyone to teach her. And so she begs Machaut to send her examples of his work — de vos livres et de vos dis — precisely so that she can use them as models. And she finishes by hoping that, when they meet, Machaut will consent (condescend?) to give her face-to-face tuition in the art of poetry. Over and over again, as the Voir Dit continues, Toute Belle makes similar requests, more or less specific. She sends Machaut a rondeau and begs him to make corrections to it — and to write a virelai on the same theme as a model (p. 72); Machaut is to complete her verses — she has been so discouraged (elles [sc: Machaut’s lyrics] m’esbahissent toute; see above, p. 29) by the excellence of his that she has managed no more than a single stanza — and amend them so that they can be sung to one of his melodies (p. 140). In return, Machaut promises that if he can spend a mere day with her, ‘je vous diroie et apenroie ce que je n’apris onques a creature, par quoy vous les feriés mieulz [I will teach you what I have never taught anyone else, so that you will do better]’ (p. 154). Again and again,102 we find the would-be poets of the end of the Middle Ages soliciting the advice of more experienced or more expert poets. There is a disingenuous little rondeau, for instance, in one of the manuscripts on which I shall expand in Chapter 3, BnF fr. 9223, from Antoine de Cuise to Blosseville,

100

Everyone who works on the Voir Dit agrees that distinguishing ‘truth’ from ‘fiction’ in the romance is an impossibility; see Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soubtil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIV e siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), and cf. my ‘Machaut's Livre du Voir Dit and the Poetics of the Title’, in ‘Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble’. Hommage à Jean Dufournet, ed. by Jean-Claude Aubailly, Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Francis Dubost, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1993), III, 1351–62. 101 102

On which see Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 343–48.

In Christine de Pizan’s so-called Queen’s Manuscript, London, BL Harley 4431 (see below), there is a set of verses labelled ‘Item, une assemblee de plusieurs rimes toutes leonnines en façon de lay a qui vouldroit apprendre a rimer leonninement’ (fol. 1v ).

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asking him to turn his fatraz into something neatly professional (‘ung tour de mestier’103): Blosseville, noble escuier, Tous ces fatraz je vous envoye, Ce non obstant que chacun voye Que ne sont pas de main d’ouvrier. D’amender ilz ont bien mestier […] Avant qu’ilz aillent aultre voye, Donnez leur ung tour de mestier, Blosseville, noble escuier.104 Blosseville, noble squire, I am sending you these trifles, although it’s perfectly obvious to everyone that they are not the work of a true craftsman. They have serious need of correction before they get into the public domain. Blosseville, noble squire, please be good enough to cast a craftsman’s eye over them.

All of which, by implication, suggests that the habitus of the would-be successful courtier can be enriched not just by following the prescriptions of poetical handbooks, not just by rigorous training and practice, but by the advice and patronage of the already expert. The individual habitus, in other words, benefits from social relations and their management.105 But of course what is required is also recognition. If poetic skill is to constitute poetic capital, then there has to be a cultivated, poetically astute audience and readership, and one which values successful poetic enterprise. We have already seen, in the case of both the Cour amoureuse and Le Parfait du Paon, that audiences were indeed responsive and not, it seems — and contrary to modern impressions — undiscriminating, and that judges may have been

103

An interesting expression: the amateur Blosseville is invited to provide a professional tour de mestier, an expression relating to manual trades — as indeed does main d’ouvrier. 104

Rondeaux et autres poésies du XV e siècle, ed. by Gaston Raynaud, SATF (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1889), no. CXXIII. Blosseville demurs, tactfully in no. CXXIV : ‘Je ne suis pas tant abusé Que de me vouloir entremestre De corriger les faiz du maistre Qui est du mestier tant rusé’. 105

Froissart also presents his pseudo-I as a mentor and patron to younger poets: in the Prison amoureuse (for which, true, the Voir Dit is a model) he claims to have been asked to check over his verses for Rose (that is, Froissart’s patron, the Duke of Brabant): ‘la ou mon petit consel vous pora aidier et valoir, je sui appareilliés dou faire. J’ai diliganment regardé et viseté vostres lettres ... Si vous di par maniere d’avis que vous voelliés perseverer selonc le commencement que vous avés, qui est grans et biaus’. See Prison amoureuse, ed. by Anthime Fourrier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), p. 73, ll. 6–14.

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perfectly capable of realizing when a poet had tried to slip in a cheville, or to hide an extra syllable. The point is widely made. Froissart, for instance, pictures himself, again in the Prison amoureuse, as operating in a court environment in which a quite finicky connoisseurship is to be expected. Before he releases one of his virelais into the public domain, he needs to check it over for any slightest error because it will, inevitably, be picked up by his fellow-poets: Ordonnai en bonne maniere Le virelay et escripsi. Quant je l’eus fait, je le lisi Pour amender et corrigier, Par quoi d’Adam ne de Rogier, Ne de tous chiaus qui d’aviser Se mellent et de deviser. Je n’en peuïsse ester repris.106 I wrote up a fair copy of my virelai. When I had done so, I read it through carefully to correct and amend it, so that I could not be reproached by Adam or Roger or anyone else who makes it his business to give opinions and comments.

Machaut claims, in the Voir Dit, to have been instantly impressed by a rondeau that ‘n’estoit pas rudes ne let, N’il n’estoit mie contrefais [was not rough nor clumsy, nor did it did break any of the rules of prosody]’ (ll. 184–85).107 Froissart and Machaut of course are professionals: what Cerquiglini-Toulet calls clercs-poètes,108 who naturally call upon a discriminating, perceptive, and demanding audience, one perfectly, painfully, aware of lyric conventions and grammatical and lexical rules.109 What is interesting is to recognize just how discriminating an amateur audience might also have been. Let me return, for a final time, to the little competition in the Parfait du Paon. Clarete’s ballade, we remember (see above, p. 31), was unanimously chosen as the winner, because it was la mix ouvree; this salute to linguistic and rhetorical sophistication suggests at least one of the criteria by which a poem’s excellence might be judged: worked-ness, syntactic and prosodic ingenuity — and, realistically or not, Jean

106

Ibid, ll. 1002–09.

107

Livre du Voir Dit, ed. by Imbs and others, p. 52.

108

La Couleur de la mélancolie; cf. Tietz’s distinction between amateur and professional poets, ‘Die französische Lyrik’. 109

As Robert Guiette argues in his D’une poésie formelle en France au Moyen Age (Paris: Nizet, 1972), pp. 61–68.

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de Le Mote thought it perfectly plausible that amateurs would have recognized such qualities as easily as the professional poets whose good opinions, as we saw, are canvassed by Machaut or Froissart. But it would be reductive to imply that prosodic and syntactic sophistication are the only strategies available to achieve social and cultural success. It is true that responses to particular poems are often dispiritingly bland. Froissart’s Meliador, to return to a text which is a repository of lyric, would seem to suggest lack of discrimination, since every ballade or rondeau is gente, or bel et joli, or friche, or belle et gracïeuse.110 But once again, reading with care, we find passing comments which suggest a certain artistic fastidiousness which has to do not just with the manipulation of words, but also with meaning and emotion. A major criterion — and this may come as a surprise to those who still subscribe to the belief that medieval fixed-form lyrics are so tediously repetitive and unoriginal that they can only be redeemed by being set to music111 — is what Pierre Fabri calls invention: ‘Combien que plusieurs conditions soient requises a ung facteur [poet], la principalle c’est inuention, car sans inuention subtille, plaisante et nouuelle, le facteur ne sçaura deduire sa matiere plaisante ou utille [Although there are a number of qualities demanded of the poet, the most important is invention, for without subtle, enjoyable and novel invention, the poet cannot make his verse either pleasing or useful]’.112 The three adjectives here — subtille, plaisante et nouuelle — seem colourless enough, but they are worth

110

See for instance ll. 14,007, 14,796, 15,672, 18,344. We must allow for flattery: Meliador recycles poems by a patron, Wenceslas of Bavaria, and Froissart has a vested interest, precisely in Bourdieuian terms, in singing his praises. 111 See, for example, C. S. Lewis, who talks of the medieval poet’s ‘abdication of originality’ in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 211. I agree with John E. Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), who maintains that the idea that music is what gives the barren, monotonous late-medieval lyric its point ‘rests on mistaken assumptions about the place of music in social life’ (p. 150). 112

Le grand et vrai Art, I, 18; my italics. On invention and its importance, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie, pp. 107–13; eadem, ‘Cadmus ou Carmenta. Réflexion sur le concept d’invention à la fin du Moyen Age’, in What is Literature? France 1100–1600, ed. by François Cornilliat, Ullrich Langer, and Douglas Kelly (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1993), pp. 211–30. Cf. Ernstpeter Ruhe, ‘Inventio devenue troevemens: la recherche de la matière au Moyen Age’, in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto 1983), ed. by G. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 289–97.

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examining,113 particularly the last which is, of course, familiar from what has already been said: one of the knights in Froissart’s Meliador was inspired by sentemens nouviaus; the I-narrator of Froissart’s Prison amoureuse had to ransom his purse of love-letters with la plus nouvelle canchon.114 Now, Froissart embroiders on this question of newness, novelty, elsewhere in the Prison amoureuse. The narrator tells us that love inspired him to faire et chanter a virelai.115 He is rather proud of the result — precisely, of its nouveleté: Nouveleté gaires ne gist Ne ne sejourne ne repose: Elle est tele que par tout s’ose Hardiement mettre ou embatre Pour gens couroucier ou esbatre, Car elle a tant de signourie, – En ce point l’avons nous nourie, – Que joie ou courous renouvelle.116 Novelty cannot rest or take its ease or take time out: it demands constant daring, to move its audience or amuse it, for it has such power – we’ve made such a fetish of it – that it can provoke joy or despair.

Nouveleté, here, seems to have to do with an emotional charge which provokes the poet into words and which, because it is new or provocative, will transmit itself to the reader or hearer. The implication is that a poet should be permanently open to new sensations (‘Nouveleté ... ne repose’),117 that poems are most successful if they are heartfelt, and that it is the unexpected which will most

113 To be plaisant is fundamental: to return to the Parfait du Paon, even though Saigremore’s vocabulary is not especially elevated (pas haut), her poem is bien plaisant (l. 1423). To be subtille is more complex; see Kelly, Medieval Imagination, pp. 2–12. 114

On ‘nouvelleté’ in late-medieval lyric, see especially Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 257–59, and Paul Zumthor, Le Masque et la lumière, pp. 17–22. On the lyrics of Froissart’s Meliador and their nouvelleté, see Kelly, Medieval Imagination, pp. 243–53. 115

As Fourrier points out on p. 32 of Prison amoureuse, the virelai, for Froissart, consists of two stanzas of an ‘extrême variété des schémas métriques’; cf. Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 326–33, 343–60, and Georges Lote, Histoire du vers français, première partie: Le Moyen Age, 3 vols (Paris: Boivin, 1949–55), II, 264–66. 116 117

Prison amoureuse, ed. by Fourrier, ll. 328–35.

On the anxiety of ‘nouvelleté’ see Watriquet de Couvin, Dit de l’arbre royal: ‘Si fis ma priere en latin A Dieus et à sa douce mere, Que il me moustrassent matere, Par aucuns signes ou par letre, Que je peüsse en rime metre Et conter devant les haus hommes’: Dits, ed. by Scheler, ll. 8–13.

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impress. Poets are, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet says,118 anxious as to where nouveleté is to come from: Martin le Franc, dispiritingly, thinks that all that is left is to gloss other people’s novelties: Item, on a fait tant de choses Qu’on ne scet mais a quoy muser. On a fait textes, or a gloses Composer fault le temps user.119 Again, we have been so busy that there is nothing new left to think about. We have written texts – and now, all that we can do is to spend our time glossing them.

A premium, therefore, attaches to the new, the exciting: ingenuity and invention, linguistic and creative competencies, are commodities in a refined, sophisticated court environment — commodities which will, it seems, be crowned with success for the amateur as well as for the professional. What then is to happen to those pieces which receive the acclamation of the court? Some of the best evidence, perhaps, of the prestige attached to poetry is an element which, we saw, was important to Pierre de Hauteville and the devisers of the Cour amoureuse, and to which I now propose to turn: the care and thought which is devoted to its presentation and preservation. Pierre, we remember, made specific provision for the preservation of the winning compositions. They were to be carefully copied into registres, which were in turn to be confided to the safekeeping of an abbeye. None of them survives, if indeed they ever existed, so that we cannot know if anyone ever took advantage of this provision — but the mere fact that those who devised the statutes felt that the material presentation and safekeeping of the registres was so important is revealing: a proper record of a poetic occasion demands a page that is carefully thought-out, ingenious, aesthetically pleasing. I am not, of course, the first to draw attention to the care with which poets in the late Middle Ages describe the shifts to which they are put — the mise en page, the planning, the sheer expense — to ensure that their verses are properly preserved and presented;120 as Froissart says, with considerable self118

In a chapter entitled ‘La tristesse du “déjà dit”’, in La Couleur de la mélancolie, pp. 57–88.

119

Le Champion des dames, ed. by Robert Deschaux, CFMA, 5 vols (Paris: Champion, 1999), ll. 16369–72. 120

See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Quand la voix s’est tue: la mise en recueil de la poésie lyrique aux XIV e et XV e siècles’, in La

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congratulation, of the volume which, as we saw, he offered to Richard II, it was ‘un très-beau livre et bien adourné, couvert de velours, garny et cloué de clous d’argent dorés d’or [a most elegant volume, beautifully decorated, bound in velvet decorated with gilt studs]’.121 His fictional volumes are luxury objects of just this sort. Rose’s volume of verse, in the Prison amoureuse, is a ‘bel et plaisant livre Envolepé de kamoukas [a fine, attractive volume, bound in silk]’122 — and the ‘I’ of the poem keeps the leaves on which he copies his poems ‘en une laiette Que j’avoie proprement fete De danemarce bien ounie [in a case that I had commissioned, covered in unblemished, flawless Danish leather]’.123 For Machaut, too, the preservation and presentation of poems is a priority: he returns to Toute Belle the laiette that she had lent him, with all the poems it contains now carefully ordered: ‘tout est mis par ordre dedens vostre livre [everything is in order in your book]’;124 he estimates, with careful, professional accuracy, the number of leaves his collected poems are likely to take: ‘.XII coiers de .XL. poins [twelve quires of forty pages apiece]’.125 Machaut is, in fact, the consummate professional, conscious of the parameters within which his work must be set in order to appeal to a patron or a sponsor. His collected work, his livre, is, he says on one occasion in the Voir Dit, still in twenty pieces, and still awaiting the musical notation before it can be completed.126 He, like other latemedieval French poets, was moreover concerned not just with the material

Présentation du livre. Actes du colloque de Paris X-Nanterre (4, 5, 6 décembre 1985), ed. by E. Baumgartner and N. Boulestreau (Nanterre: Centre de recherches du département de français de Paris X-Nanterre, 1987), pp. 313–27, and eadem, ‘Fullness and Emptiness: Shortages and Storehouses of Lyric Treasure in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Yale French Studies, special issue, 80 (1991), 224–39. 121

See above, pp. 36–37.

122

Prison amoureuse, ed. by Fourrier, ll. 2221–22.

123

Ibid., ll. 1248–50.

124

Livre du Voir Dit, ed. by Imbs and others, pp. 522–24 (letter XXXI).

125

Ibid., p. 770–22. On Machaut’s professionalism and care for presentation, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’, pp. 211–21, and Sarah Jane Williams, ‘An Author’s Role in Fourteenth-Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut’s “livre ou je met toutes mes choses”’, Romania, 90 (1969), 433–54 (but note Lawrence Earp’s timely warning, that we ought not to overstate the authority of this particular manuscript: see his ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of His Works’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 461–503). See also Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006). 126

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presentation of his lyrics, but also with their contextualization, that is, that they should be presented in ways which respected their sense and their sequence. His Voir Dit and his Remede de Fortune ensure this by weaving the fixed-form lyrics into the very fabric of fiction, and thus by anchoring them to a particular disposition; his initiative was followed by Christine de Pizan, for instance, with her Cent Ballades and Cent Ballades d’amant et de dame, and also arguably by François Villon in his Testament.127 These ‘professional’ poets all regard ease and fluency in the production and ‘performance’ of verse as a mark of success in cultural and social terms; this ease and fluency, this elegance, this habitus, must be preserved so as to be made visible beyond the bounds of some particular occasion, and fictions, conscious of this need, specialize in what, in my Introduction, I called récits de publication. What I want to examine now, however, in rather more detail, is how this preservation is manifested not in pleasing fictions but in sober reality, in four highly contrasting volumes. I begin with the more prestigious variety of codex: first, a manuscript I have referred to before in the context of Christine de Pizan’s gieux a vendre, her magnificent, costly presentation volume for Isabeau of Bavaria, now BL Harley 4431, and second, the huge volume of Eustache Deschamps’ collected works, now BnF fr. 840. What I shall want to argue is that these measured, imposing volumes underline the benefit that might accrue from the lyric collection not just, and most obviously, to the poet’s own selfpresentation and hence ambitions, but also, perhaps, to the patron, via the advantage, the cultural capital, that he or she might expect to derive from a lyric manuscript designed, individually, specifically for his or her purposes.128 Let me start, then, by returning to the superb Queen’s Manuscript that Christine designed for Isabeau of Bavaria.129 Christine, of course, is among the

127

See for instance Sylvia Huot, ‘From Life to Art: The Lyric Anthology of Villon’s Testament’, in The Ladder of High Design: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence, ed. by Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville, VI: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 26–40; Nancy Freeman Regalado, ‘Gathering the Works: The “Œuvres de Villon” and the Intergeneric Passage of the Medieval French Lyric into Single-Author Collections’, L’Esprit Créateur, 33 (1993), 87–100. 128

For a wonderfully rich account of artistic patronage in the courts of the late Middle Ages, and especially Burgundy, see Jacques Lemaire, Les visions de la vie de cour dans la littérature française à la fin du Moyen Age (Brussels: Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, 1990), pp. 158–237. 129

Christine was of course a consummate professional who insisted on regular presentation copies of her collected works. A notable example, somewhat earlier than the Queen’s

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most self-conscious of medieval poets, and certainly the most openly conscious of the need to ‘manage’ her own works. By ‘manage’, here, I mean especially their presentation;130 in Le Livre de l’advision Cristine, she explains that, having started by composing choses jolies and legieres [things that were amusing and light-hearted], she graduated to ‘plus grant soubtilleté et plus haulte matiere [greater subtleties and more demanding material]’, and, concomitantly, to ‘managing’ her ‘product’: depuis l’an mil .IIIc IIIIxx . et .XIX. que je commençay jusques a cestui IIIIc . et .V. ouquel encore je ne cesse, compillés en ce tendis .XV. volumes principaux sans les autres particuliers petis dictiez, lesquelz tout ensemble contiennent environ .LXX. quaiers de grant volume, comme l’experience en est manifeste.131 Since 1399, when I started out, until now in 1405, when I am still at work, I have compiled fifteen special works (as well as a number of other minor ones), the whole occupying about seventy large quires, as indeed I have found through experience.

This is surely the true voice of the professional:132 Christine’s expert, exquisite scriptorial sensibility is acutely aware of what is needed materially to secure and ensure her position in the literary hierarchy: a literary hierarchy in which, it seems, she regards her fixed-form lyrics as a valuable asset. Each of her collected manuscripts affords a large place precisely to the fixed-form lyrics: to miscellaneous works to which she gives simple, generic titles (‘Gieux a vendre’, as we saw; ‘Lais’; ‘Complaintes amoureuses’; ‘Rondeaux’; ‘Virelais’),133 and to groupings of lyrics to which she gives labels which impose a certain unity (‘Cent ballades’; ‘Cent ballades d’amant et de dame’). The Queen’s Manuscript is,

Manuscript, is the Duke’s Manuscript, BnF fr. 835, 606, 836, 605, and perhaps 607, copied for the duc de Berry between 1405 and 1409; for details, see Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan – A Publisher’s Progress’, pp. 52–59. 130 On this, see Sylvie Lefèvre, ‘Prologues de recueils et mise en œuvre des textes: Robert de Blois, Christine de Pizan et Antoine de La Sale’, in Seuils de l’œuvre dans le texte médiéval, ed. by Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner, 2 vols (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne-nouvelle, 2002), II, 89–114. 131

Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. by Reno and Dulac, p. 111.

132

Cf. Machaut’s casually expert remark in his Voir Dit, that a given work ‘tenra environ .XII. coiiers de .XL. poins’: Livre du Voir Dit, ed. by Imbs and others, p. 770 (and on which see Williams, ‘An Author’s Role’). 133

Which, of course, are nothing unusual: cf. Machaut manuscripts such as BnF fr. 22545–46, where the poet’s œuvre is carefully classified generically: first narratives, then ‘Complaintes’, ‘Lays’, ‘Balades notees’, ‘Rondeaulx’, and ‘Chançons baladees’.

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however, particularly revelatory from the point of view which primarily interests me here: in its paratextual emphasis on the importance of the book as material object studiously designed for its recipient. The manuscript opens134 (see Figure 1) with a double-column miniature showing Christine presenting a large, beautifully bound volume to a sumptuously gowned, furred, and bejewelled Isabeau of Bavaria.135 Isabeau is shown in the intimacy of a bedchamber hung with tapestries and embroidered hangings, sitting on a couch surrounded by her elegant ladies all wearing the very latest in elegant head-dresses. Every detail flatters the Queen’s status and wealth and taste.136 Christine, by contrast, is austerely and soberly dressed in a dark-blue gown and plain white head-dress — but, artistically and compositionally, she draws the observer’s eye, partly precisely because she is so unostentatiously dressed, partly because the use of scale and perspective renders her disproportionately large (larger, indeed, than the Queen), and partly because she kneels at the forefront of the little scene, at its central vertical axis, and so dominates it.137 By discreet implication, Christine is orchestrating this scene — as, she says, she has with equal care orchestrated the collected works which follow.138 134 As Hindman shows (‘The Composition’, p. 111), the leaf containing the miniature and the dedication-prologue occupy an inserted folio, ‘a feature which ... suggests its later addition’. 135

Reproduced, alas as here in black and white, in Hindman, ‘The Composition’, p. 94, and as a frontispiece in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, III. On the miniatures in the Queen’s Manuscript, see Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974). Hindman considers this miniature meshes so well with other evidence as to Isabeau’s looks and dress, and as to the setting, that it may represent historical reality: see ‘The Iconography of Queen Isabeau de Bavière [1410–1415]: An Essay in Method’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, série 6, 102 (1983), 102–10. 136

On the function of presentation miniatures, see Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘Courtly Presentation and Authorial Self-Fashioning: Frontispiece Miniatures in Late Medieval French and English Manuscripts’, Mediaevalia, 21 (1996), 97–160 (esp. pp. 108–13). 137

For an art-historical view of this manuscript, see Hindman, ‘The Composition’.

138

Deborah McGrady argues, more controversially, that the point of Harley MS 4431 is the glorification of Christine herself. As she — rightly — points out, the codex consists of works largely dedicated to or commissioned by patrons other than Isabeau; she cannot therefore ‘claim to be the inspiration, the subject, or the original recipient of the works found in the collection’. See her ‘What is a Patron? Benefactors and Authorship in Harley 4431, Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works’, in Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. by Marilynn Desmond (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 195–214 (p. 196). The argument is not entirely convincing: the codex as a material object — as important as its

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Figure 1. London, British Library, Harley MS 4431, frontispiece.

contents — remains under the authority of the Queen by virtue simply of the prologue and the frontispiece. And even if certain of the booklets later incorporated into the codex were already in existence before they were incorporated into Harley 4431 (on this see Hindman, ‘The Composition’), this is a commercially astute move which does not diminish the importance accorded to the Queen.

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This is, she says, however unworthy — the familiar modesty topos — her own unaided and individual work: nothing, here, but what emerges from her pensee pure, written: ou stile que je detiens Du seul sentement que retiens Des dons de Dieu et de nature...139 In the style that derives simply from my own sensibility, and from the gifts of God and nature.

Christine has, as we saw (above, p. 21), deliberately varied the fare she will offer the Queen (‘diverses matieres, Unes pesans, aultres legieres [a variety of things, some demanding, some light-hearted]’); more particularly, once the order was received, she has made a point of selecting and organizing (ordener) content she hopes the Queen will find attractive, and of supervising the volume itself:140 Si l’ay fait, ma dame, ordener Depuis que je sceus que assener Le devoye a vous, si qu’ay sceu Tout au mieulx et le parfiner D’escripre et bien enluminer, Dès que vo command en receu, Selons qu’en mon cuer j’ay conceu Qu’il faloit des choses finer Pour bien richement l’affiner, A fin que fust apperceü Que je mets pouoir, force et sceu Pour vo bon vueil enteriner.141 My lady, as soon as I knew the volume was intended for you, I had it put in good order to the best of my ability, and ensured that it was perfectly written and illuminated; as soon as I received your order, I put my best endeavours, my heart and soul, into devising it as richly as

139

‘Prologue’, ll. 20–22: Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, pp. xiv–xvii.

140

On this aspect of Christine’s prologue, see Lefèvre, ‘Prologues de recueils’; Sandra Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othéa’: Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), and Sylvia Huot, ‘Lyric Poetics and the Art of Compilatio in the Fourteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1982), pp. 218–19. 141

‘Prologue’, ll. 49–60: Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, pp. xiv–xvii. The implications of enteriner, ‘accomplir entièrement’ (Godefroy, III, 261–62) are interesting: precisely how explicit, then, were Isabeau’s instructions for the volume?

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Chapter 1 I could, so that it would be obvious that I had put all my skill, my resources and my experience into completing it to your satisfaction.

She has attended to the process of copying and illumination; she has ensured that the volume has been finished bien richement — and she has done this so meticulously because order, materials, and richness are an index of how obediently and entirely she has met (enteriner) the Queen’s wishes, her bon vueil. For Christine, in other words, the production and reception of an intellectual and cultural artefact is a strategy whereby she sustains her own distinction; but the advantage is mutual, since for Isabeau, Christine implies, to receive such, an artefact is to acquire visible evidence of her, Isabeau’s, authority and prestige. And certainly, what Christine presents to Isabeau is ordered and authoritative. There is, for instance, at the very beginning of the volume, a neat142 ‘Table des dictiez en general, balades, rondiaulx et autres particuliers livres qui sont contenus en ce present livre [index of the dits, ballades, rondeaux and other major items contained in the present volume]’ (fol. 1v). The volume proper opens (fol. 4r) with Christine’s Cent Balades, headed by one of those self-portraits for which Christine’s manuscripts are famous: a column-width portrait of Christine at her desk, meditatively — authoritatively? — writing in a neat hand in another capacious, and beautifully designed, manuscript. The vellum throughout the manuscript is of the highest quality; the hand is meticulously accurate and careful;143 the illustrations are lavish and designed specifically for this volume; there are neat running headings, to facilitate locating any particular text. Someone (Christine herself? More interestingly, Isabeau?) has, moreover, insisted on the contents being scrupulously up to date. As Sandra Hindman shows, provision has been made in the sixth quire of the volume, by allowing for the insertion of extra folios, for the addition of some items possibly not planned for in the original disposition of the volume: what the headings call ‘encore autres balades’,144 ballades with a particular topical cast, and it looks as if certain of the items in the manuscript, such as Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et de

142

Though not, admittedly, entirely useful: the contents are simply listed, without pagereferences. 143

Hindman, ‘The Composition’, p. 120, n. 4, confirms, with support from Gilbert Ouy, that the hand is Christine’s own, though with variations consequent on the ink used and the date of copying; cf. also Ouy and Reno, ‘Identification’. 144

‘The Composition’, pp. 108–09. Hindman’s careful detective work shows how here, as well as elsewhere in the volume, Christine ‘managed’ the presentation of her works; see her Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othea’.

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dame, were probably copied, initially, in separate booklets and incorporated later into the final codex.145 This is, then, an expensive, luxury object, carefully planned and meticulously executed. But at whose initiative? I have spoken of it as if it were incontrovertibly a commission, and phrases from the prologue, like ‘vo command en reçu’, would certainly suggest this, although we have no record of any specific payment. The question is worth asking, however, because Christine’s practice varied, and at least some of the manuscripts that she produced were done ‘on spec’, as it were, in the hopes of finding a buyer — or of acquiring advantage of some sort for herself: advantage which was not only pecuniary, since she seems to have used at least a few volumes as a sort of lever to persuade Philip of Burgundy to take her son into his service.146 If, however, the manuscripts did sell, the rewards were ample compensation for the commercial risk that she was taking.147 The inventory of his library done for the duc de Berry in 1413 shows just how lucrative the production of manuscripts could be. It seems that he bought what is probably the so-called Duke’s Manuscript for a positively princely sum: Un livre compilé de plusieurs balades et ditiés, fait et composé par damoiselle Cristine de Pisan, escript de lettre de court, bien historié et enluminé, lequel Monseigneur a acheté de la dite damoiselle 200 escus.148 A book compiled of ballades and ditiés composed by damoiselle Christine de Pizan, copied in a court hand, nicely decorated and illuminated, which Monseigneur bought from the said damoiselle for the sum of 200 écus.

Patrons, in other words, presumably saw some cultural advantage in the acquisition of a magnificent manuscript: an advantage beyond the simple pleasure of being able to read the work itself, an advantage which compensated for financial expenditure on this sort of scale. But I want to turn now to a rather less spectacular example. Eustache Deschamps is one of the most prolific poets of the late Middle Ages; his collected works, mostly consisting of fixed-form lyrics, run to eleven daunting volumes in

145

On the complex construction of this manuscript, see Hindman, ‘The Composition’.

146

Le livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. by Reno and Dulac, pp. 114–15. Christine also shows (ibid., p. 112) how she used her dictiez as a passport to win the favour of Richard II of England for her ‘assez abille et bien chantant’ son. 147

On this subject, see Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan – A Publisher’s Progress’.

148

Cited in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, p. vi. The manuscript in question is, of course, BnF MSS fr. 835, 836, 605 (and possibly 607), prepared in 1408–09 for the duc de Berry.

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their modern edition.149 They are to be found collected in one large unwieldy quarto manuscript, BnF fr. 840, which consists of nearly 600 closely-written leaves,150 and which seems to be the summa of the writer’s poetic career — so it includes even unfinished pieces like the poet’s Miroir de mariage and his Fiction du lyon. Everything suggests that Deschamps, who held salaried posts at the courts of Charles V, Charles VI, and Louis d’Orléans, was cavalier with the preservation of the lyrics which he tossed off for every conceivable occasion: political ballades, polemic ballades, derision, self-mockery, ballades written to command, celebratory ballades, condemnatory ballades; his poems include a couple of rather depressed pleas to readers to return examples of his poems of which he himself had failed to keep copies.151 And certainly, by the time of his death in 1404 or so,152 he seems to have left ballades and rondeaux and longer, unfinished works scribbled on loose sheets and in random, unbound quires in his study, as a note on fol. 431r in the manuscript written after his death suggests: Ci commencent pluseurs balades morales faictes par le dit Eustaces, lesquelles ont esté trouvees en pluseurs papiers et escrips depuis les precedens balades cy dessus escriptes.153 Here begin moral ballades, written by the said Eustache, which were found on loose sheets and that were written after the ballades copied above.

Français 840, then, is presumably an attempt to anchor Deschamps’ errant œuvre. What is unclear, however, is who was responsible for the enterprise: for the immense and thankless — and expensive — labour which must have gone into the copying process, for the not inconsiderable expense of the parchment.

149 Œuvres complètes. By far the most interesting study of this manuscript is Huot’s ‘Lyric Poetics’. 150

On which see Siméon Luce’s short note in Deschamps’ Œuvres complètes, II, pp. vi–xvi, and now, more fully, Marie-Hélène Tesnières, ‘Les manuscrits copiés par Raoul Tainguy: un aspect de la culture des grands officiers royaux au début du XV e siècle’, Romania, 107 (1986), 282–368, and Karin Becker, Eustache Deschamps: l’état actuel de la recherche (Orléans: Paradigme, 1996), pp. 22–31. Some lyrics are to be found in other manuscripts: see Becker, Eustache Deschamps, pp. 24–26. 151

In ballade XXIV , he regrets having lent so many, and in ballade CMLXXXIV , he laments the fact that someone has purloined one; he begs the culprit to return his choses principaulx, because his las cuer will never have the energy to rewrite them. 152

See the authoritative biography by I. S. Laurie: ‘Eustache Deschamps: 1340(?)–1404’, in Eustache Deschamps, French Courtier Poet: His Work and His World, ed. by Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 1–72. 153

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Eustache himself, as my last quotation shows, was certainly dead by the time the volume was complete: two longer treatises are unfinished, a fact for which the scribe apologizes by saying of the Fiction du Lyon: ‘Cy mourut l’auteur et pour ce demoura La Fiction cy dessus imparfaicte [At this point the author died, therefore leaving the above Fiction unfinished]’ (fol. 485r), and of the Miroir de mariage: ‘De la matere de ce livre ne traicta l’auteur plus avant pour maladie qui lui survint de laquele il mourut. Dieu lui pardoint a l’ame. Amen [the author got no further with the topic of this book, for he was overtaken by the illness of which he died. God rest his soul]’ (fol. 487v). There are, of course, two possibilities. The first would suggest that Eustache, before he died, had organized the process of copying as far as fol. 431r, the point at which some third party tells us, explicitly, as we saw, that the remainder of the volume consists of verses found in the poet’s study after his death. But even if he had indeed started to put his works in some sort of order, it seems unlikely that this huge but not especially elegant volume was planned as the equivalent of one of the magnificent presentation volumes which were executed by more ruthlessly self-promoting poets like Christine de Pizan and Guillaume de Machaut.154 Scholars generally agree that the volume was probably planned and executed by a slightly eccentric scribe, Raoul Tainguy, who personally copied 536 of its leaves, and who, as Marie-Hélène Tesnière says, ‘semble avoir préparé le travail des autres copistes’.155 Now it may be, of course, that Raoul was making a fair copy of poems that Deschamps had already set out and put in a semblance of order156 — but if so, what Raoul has produced is, in some ways, and contrary perhaps to

154

Deschamps was close to Machaut, and moved in the same circles: it is plausible therefore that if he himself had planned a presentation copy of his complete works, he might have modelled it on Machaut’s. One manuscript may have been planned and executed by Eustache himself: BnF fr. 20029, devised for Charles V, but still incomplete at the latter’s death in 1380 and subsequently presented to Charles VI in 1383: it is a presentation copy of the poet’s Lai de fragilité humaine, meticulously illustrated. 155 ‘Les manuscrits copiés par Raoul Tainguy’; I quote here from p. 341. I say ‘eccentric’ because Tainguy makes a habit of ‘signing’ his work with odd adverbs, catervaument (which seems to mean something like ‘drunkenly’: fol. 314 v) and tuffaument (‘mob-handed’, or ‘crazily’: fol. 578v) — as well, in the case of this particular manuscript, as with his own name, R. Tainguy (fol. 581v). 156

As all critics point out, ‘order’ is relative: the poems are certainly not copied in any way that corresponds to chronology, there are repetitions, groups of answer-poems are broken up: see Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, pp. 218–19.

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the impression often given,157 a careful, rather thoughtful volume. It opens with a meticulous Table,158 which classes all Eustache’s ballades, then rondeaux, then virelais and so on, alphabetically by refrain-line or by first line,159 and judging by its rubric, this certainly seems to have been completed after Eustache’s death: En ces presentes rubriches sont les refrains de toutes les balades et chançons roiaulx, et les premiers vers de tous les rondeaux et virelays estans en ce present livre, selon l’ordre de l’A B C ... dudit volumine fait par feu Eustace des Champs, dit Morel, escuier, huissier d’armes du Roy nostre sire, Chastelain de Fismes et son bailli de Senlis ....160 In this present index are to be found all the refrains of all the ballades and chansons royales, and the incipits of all the rondeaux and virelais, in alphabetical order, that were composed by Eustache des Champs, aka Morel, squire, herald to our lord the King, châtelain de Fimes and bailiff of Senlis …

There then follow, in order, all of the poet’s works arranged generically and also, in the case of the ballades, thematically:161 Balades de moralitez (fols 1–67); Lays (fols 67–102); Chançons royaulx (fols 102–140); Balades amoureuses (fols 141–172); Rondeaulx (fols 173–202). Some of the lyrics have titles, not just the occasional ‘Autre balade’, but commendations (‘Balade de Nostre Dame moult belle’; ballade CXXXIV, my italics), or brief synopses (‘Autre balade, des vins que on souloit anciennement presenter aux baillis et juges [Another ballade, treating of the wines that were formally donated to bailiffs and judges]’; ballade

157

Raynaud, for instance, is rather scathing: see Deschamps’ Œuvres complètes, XI, 104–05.

158

Prepared alphabetically, by first line. On late-medieval indexing, see Lloyd W. Daly, Contribution to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Brussels: Latomus, 1967), and Francis Witty, ‘Early Indexing Techniques: A Study of Several Book Indexes from the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, Library Quarterly, 35 (1965), 141–48. 159

Somewhat awkwardly, in that it simply groups together all first lines beginning, say, with p, but does not classify alphabetically within the p section. The intention, however, is laudable. On scribes’ increasing interest in rational, reader-friendly organization of codices, see, for example, Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, ‘La naissance des index’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, 4 vols (Paris: Promodis, 1983–86), I: Le livre conquérant: du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVII e siècle, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Promodis, 1983), pp. 77–85. 160 161

Œuvres complètes, I, 1.

This meticulous concern for order, very rare in, for instance, the chansonniers, is not unusual in the later Middle Ages: on the other hand the thirteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308 is one of the few chansonniers that classifies its lyrics by genre (see Paul Meyer, Documents manuscrits de l'ancienne littérature de la France conservés dans les bibliothèques de la Grande Bretagne, 1ère partie (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1871), p. 239).

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MCCLXXVII), or instructions to ensure that readers know how, politically, to read

(‘Balade faicte sur la division et cisme de l’Eglise qui est au jour d’ui moult troublee par la lune’ [Ballade on the papal schism which is today much troubled by the moon]’;162 ballade CMXLVIII). Raoul Tainguy’s hand is a neat, even bâtarde — as indeed are the hands of the subsidiary scribes whom Raoul directed. The pages are carefully ruled, with spacious upper and lower margins; initials are done in red or blue, and the first letters of each line are touched with yellow; there are pen-flourishes on ascenders and descenders; there is space left for an initial miniature which has never been completed. This is not, in other words, a perfunctory or penny-pinching volume. Someone, some patron, has felt it worthwhile to invest in the considerable material and manpower costs that its production has demanded. So who was it who thought Eustache’s collected works of such importance that a scribe needed to be commissioned to ensure their proper display and preservation? Raoul Tainguy, it turns out,163 is the scribe of at least thirteen surviving manuscripts — and was, as it were, the accredited scribe for an eminent household, that of Arnaud de Corbie, Chancellor of France from 1388 to 1398, and then from 1400 to 1405 and 1409 to 1415. For Arnaud, Raoul copied some magnificent manuscripts: certainly, among others, superbly illustrated copies of Froissart’s Chronicles,164 and probably of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia, translated by Simon de Hesdin; for Arnaud’s father-in-law, a translation of Livy. In organization, disposition, hand, mise en page, these manuscripts are all very comparable to what we have seen in the case of fr. 840: there is, in other words, a ‘house style’ which attaches to Tainguy’s manuscripts for Arnaud de Corbie, and which makes it more than probable that Deschamps’ complete œuvre was copied for the Chancellor. We know nothing which would explain why Arnaud might have made a particular point of acquiring a complete copy of Deschamps’ verse at such considerable effort and expense — although we might legitimately wonder if their acquaintance had something to do with geography. Deschamps was in the course of his career bailli de Valois and bailli de Senlis,165 and Arnaud was the owner of extensive estates in the Beauvaisis. We 162

‘Lune’ is, of course, Pope Benedict XIII, Pedro de Luna, elected to the Avignon papacy in 1394 and whose name invited puns. 163

Information teased out by Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits copiés par Raoul Tainguy’.

164

Arnaud — if all the manuscripts were copied for him — employed some of the best miniaturists; see the Notices in ibid., pp. 324–68. 165

See Laurie, ‘Eustache Deschamps’.

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do know that Arnaud, like Deschamps, was associated with the Cour amoureuse;166 we do know that, on at least one occasion, he produced a quite ingeniously-rhymed ballade;167 we can guess, from the contents of his library and those of his associates and contemporaries, that he was a man of some culture.168 We also know that Arnaud de Corbie was attached to Raoul Tainguy: as Tesnière shows, rather ingeniously, the Chancellor probably left his secretaire a quite substantial legacy in his will.169 And it does seem that the Chancellor was something of a Deschamps devotee, since each of two further manuscripts copied by Raoul, and in all probability for Arnaud de Corbie, contains the same run of seven ballades by Eustache: ‘balades morales faictes et compilées par noble homme et prudent Eustace Morel, n’a guières bailli de Senlis [moral ballades composed and collected by the most noble and thoughtful Eustache Morel, formerly bailiff of Senlis]’.170 Was it Deschamps’ protean lyrics — always something appropriate for any occasion — that made Arnaud give Raoul Tainguy the commission? Was that why the volume is copied in ways which are relatively sophisticated (compilatio), with the contents carefully categorized (ordinatio) and with a table for easy alphabetical reference?171 These are not questions to which there are easy answers, but the fact that such care was taken in the ordering and organization of this dense, dutiful manuscript suggests a seriousness of purpose which is evidence, once again, of the importance attached to the lyric, and of the ways in which patrons presumably felt that to possess

166

La Cour amoureuse, ed. by Bozzolo and Loyau, I, 78.

167

Œuvres complètes, pp. 272–73 (no. CXLVI).

168

See Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits copiés par Raoul Tainguy’, pp. 321–23.

169

Ibid., p. 298.

170

Quoted from the Toulouse MS by Raynaud in Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, III, p. xvii, and XI, 108. The two manuscripts are Turin, Bibl. già Reale, Saluzzo 188, largely devoted to Vegetius’ De Re militari, and Toulouse, BM MS 822, principally containing Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae and a translation of the Disticha Catonis; the ballades are nos CCXLVIII, CCCCIII, CCCCVII, CCCCXXVIII, MCLXV , MCLXVII, MCCCXCIV . 171

As with Christine’s Cent ballades and Cent ballades d’amant et de dame; see Alastair Minnis, ‘Late-Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Role of the Compilator’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 101 (1979), 385–421, and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. by J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 115–41.

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such a manuscript was, in Bourdieuian terms, to heighten their sense of cultural worth.172 But now for some very different manuscripts: manuscripts, this time, which seem not to be oriented towards a patron’s particular individual taste, but which seem — again in Bourdieu’s terms — rather to express, and perhaps even to shape, social interaction within a particular group. Christine’s and Eustache’s are, of course, ‘display’ manuscripts, designed for readers, carefully arranged, and professionally transcribed, Christine’s as a showcase for the variety of her talents, Eustache’s, it seems, composed as an œuvre de piété after his death.173 They are both, in other words, planned, post hoc productions, made either to commission or in the hope that they might appeal to the taste of a known reader/patron, and because of this, they give a rather misleadingly rosy picture of the poetico-lyric manuscript at the end of the Middle Ages. For contrast, let me turn to a couple of much less elegant manuscripts which, because they seem to be collections of the miscellaneous poetry copied, enjoyed, often perhaps even composed, within distinct social groups, give a rather different view of the dynamics and social history of verse in an expanding literate audience. The first is a somewhat unkempt miscellany, BnF fr. 1719, the second a distinctly undistinguished manuscript from what is now the Bibliothèque Intercommunale Epinal-Golbey, MS 217.174 I shall want to argue, here, that in the case of manuscripts like these latter ones we need to rethink our relationship to the written word. Whereas Christine’s and Eustache’s manuscripts are produced for readers — readers who will appreciate the fineness of the hand, the beauty of the illustrations — these are manuscripts for which the notion of ‘reading’ cannot adequately account, and for which the circumstances of actual enunciation and collection may need consideration: they are recorderly manuscripts, to return to the coinage I invented in my Introduction. I want, in other words, and here I am drawing on Roger Chartier, to think about these manuscripts not as text ‘monument’ but as text

172

For an interesting viewpoint on this variety of author-centred manuscript, see Sylvia Huot, ‘The Writer’s Mirror: Watriquet de Couvin and the Development of the AuthorCentred Book’, in Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce, ed. by Bill Bell, Philip Bennett and Jonquil Bevan (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 2000), pp. 29–46. 173

It is interesting that, according to Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 134–35, the planned, often decorated or illuminated, manuscripts of lyric verse found in France do not exist in England. 174

Previously Epinal, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 189, subsequently MS 59; I am grateful to Mlle Florence Bouvenet, at the Bibliothèque Intercommunale, for this information.

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‘event’: that is, and I revert to my adjective recorderly, that the manuscripts are not designed primarily prospectively, for new readers, but rather retrospectively, as ways of celebrating a particular moment. Their mise en page, in other words, has to do with the circumstances of production and the ways in which the poems they contain were appropriated into writing.175 Chartier explains the distinction by saying that certain texts allow us ‘to reconstruct something of the[ir] oral circulation […] and to comprehend the relationship with texts that this particular form of communication and reception of works implies’ (p. 14). The inverted commas I have used around ‘monument’ and ‘event’ draw attention to the fact that, like Chartier, I do not pretend that one can reconstruct the actual circumstances of recording;176 rather, the word ‘event’ here draws attention to these manuscript as reflections of the social circumstances of production and preservation, by contrast, say, with Christine’s manuscript or Deschamps’, or Machaut’s, which as ‘monuments’ to their authors invite admiration, and attentive reading, of the finished product. The two ‘event’ manuscripts I refer to are, unlike Christine’s and even Eustache’s, distinctly unattractive. The first, BnF fr. 1719, is in fact positively chaotic.177 Where the hands that have copied both the former, for instance, are careful and in Christine’s case decidedly graceful, where the pages are good quality vellum, where there is a distinct sense of order, where Christine’s decoration at least is lavish, fr. 1719 is untidy: it has no trace of decoration, it has been copied onto poor quality paper by a number of hands — there are several 175

‘Orality Lost: Text and Voice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Across Boundaries, ed. by Bell and others, pp. 1–28. Chartier deals explicitly with the Renaissance and after, but what he says is perfectly relevant to the fifteenth-century manuscript. He acknowledges that he takes the distinction from the theatre-historian Florence Dupont’s L’Invention de la littérature. De l’ivresse grecque au livre latin (Paris: La Découverte, 1994). 176

Chartier does not make the point, but as Judson Allen says in The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 263, the fact that we cannot locate particular events and incidents to which to fix poems does not mean that they did not exist — and of course, more particularly, it does not mean that their readerships could not identify, or infer, them. 177

Not least because some of the folios have been damaged — it is unclear how — and restored, and because the binding is also damaged. Françoise Fery-Hue provides an excellent study, and partial edition, in ‘Au grey d’amours ...’ (Pièces inédites du manuscrit Paris, Bibl. nat., fr. 1719): étude et édition, Le Moyen français, 27–28 (Montreal: CERES, 1990–91): partial, because she edits only poems not previously published elsewhere, principally by Marcel Schwob, Le Parnasse satyrique du quinzième siècle: anthologie de pièces libres (Paris: Welter, 1905); I use Fery-Hue’s overall numberings for clarity.

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on the two pages in Figure 2, and the latest editor of the manuscript, Françoise Fery-Hue, identifies no fewer than eighteen, from a neat, small, bâtarde to an untidy near-cursive, many distinctly clumsy and careless — the poems are copied and recopied, pell-mell and higgledy-piggledy, on the page.178 The inks differ, many of the lyrics appear twice or even three times, there are few if any attempts at titles (at most, some of the copyists mark rondeau at the head of some particular lyric). It is a manuscript that gives every appearance of carelessness. It is not one, in other words, that would seem to support the suggestion that the lyric was something that a patron, or a household, might have valued. True, some of this impression of inattention has to do with the make-up of the manuscript as it is at present constituted: fr. 1719 is, indisputably, a composite. We can, to a degree, recreate the process whereby it was put together. It falls into two, perfectly distinct parts. The first, the scrappiest — and the one on which I intend to concentrate — is relatively short: a mere twenty leaves, in three booklets all incomplete and consisting, on watermark evidence, of a mix of five different papers, which seem to have been copied — here, I can only agree with Françoise Fery-Hue — by no fewer than fourteen different hands. FeryHue suggests,179 more than plausibly, that the three booklets were left lying loose and that into them poems were copied, as occasions or models presented themselves, by members of some household and their friends and acquaintances, or perhaps even by professional clerks or scribes employed by the household;180 that the booklets were then, in some form, gathered together,181 maybe, she

178

One copyist, for instance (fol. 11r ), starts to copy a rondeau to the left of the page, realizes that it would be better on the right, scribbles out the lines he has already copied, draws a line down the middle of the page, and starts again on the right – an inexplicable manœuvre, since these are four-syllable lines: did he feel they would be seen to better advantage so? 179

‘Au grey d’amours’, p. 10.

180

A clear case of what Ralph Hanna calls ‘happenstance acquisition...’: ‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 37–51 (p. 47). 181

The mechanisms whereby lyrics circulated in late medieval France have not been sufficiently studied. For Middle English, see Pamela Robinson, ‘The “Booklet”: A SelfContained Unit in Composite Manuscripts’, Codicologica, 3 (1980), 46–69; Ralph Hanna, ‘Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations’, Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 100–11; Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 279–315; A.

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suggests, by the reviser who has gone over the texts of the fifty or so poems which appear in this first part, corrected odd spellings and expressions (as in Figure 2) and completed occasional lyrics where lines were missing.182 There is nothing to show who was the patron or whose the household,183 or even where this group of fourteen copyists could have been taking their material from. Although much of the content of this first section is shared with other lyric collections, no surviving single exemplar can be said to be a source, and everything suggests a process of opportunist transcription, as any particular poem was heard or came to hand in an existing copy.184 The second, and much longer segment of the manuscript, the remaining 162 folios (fols 20–182), containing some 456 lyrics, seems to have been conceived rather differently, from its inception, as a single unit, although one without pretensions to elegance. The poems are copied in large measure by only two hands, from what were probably a number of existing exemplars, again unidentifiable, but which contained wellknown poems by poets like Deschamps and Christine, Villon and Charles d’Orléans,185 alongside anonymous pieces, some of which appear in no other surviving anthology. At some stage, at the very end of the fifteenth century,186 the first little sheaf of loose sheets and the second major group were bound together — at which point a second reviser went over both sections, but especially over

S. G. Edwards, ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B.24: A “Transitional” Collection’, in The Whole Book, ed. by Nichols and Wenzel, pp. 53–67; Richard C. Newton, ‘Making Books from Leaves: Poets Become Editors’, in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. by Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark, DW: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 246–64. 182

His work, as it happens, is meticulous, and interesting technically: as fig. 2 shows, he, or of course she, has corrected a mistake in rondeau no. 4 at the foot of fol. 1v , corrected the mise en page of rondeau no. 5 at the head of fol. 2r, struck through a mistaken copying at the foot of fol. 2r, and supplied the missing stanza. 183

Even the watermark evidence is inconclusive, all papers using a unicorn of various styles; see Fery-Hue, ‘Au grey d’amours’, p. 10, n. 5, p. 13. 184

As Fery-Hue’s edition shows, with admirable thoroughness, the vast majority of the poems in fr. 1719, and many of those in the first segment that I concentrate on here, are shared with other lyric collections of the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance — including Charles’ manuscript, two of the manuscripts which are the subject of Chapter 3 (BnF fr. 9223 and BnF n.a.f. 15771), and no fewer than 73 pieces shared with the subject of my Chapter 4, Vérard’s Jardin de Plaisance.

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185

See Schwob, Le Parnasse satyrique, pp. 3–7.

186

See Fery-Hue, ‘Au grey d’amours’, p. 13.

Figure 2. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1719, fols 1 v –2 r.

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the second section: This second reviser too has made corrections to many of the lyrics, crossed out some of the pieces copied more than once (as well as cancelling a set of useful aphrodisiac recipes in the first section),187 noted in the margin the first letter of the first word of each poem (as on Figure 2), and begun to compose a table of contents on rather the same lines as that in Deschamps’ complete works.188 All this, of course, militates against there being any sense of that continuity and design which seemed to me to spell value not just in Christine’s magnificently-conceived codex, but even in the rather feverishly complete manuscript that preserves Eustache Deschamps’ works — and if design is difficult to detect even in the second section of the manuscript, where there is some evidence at least of intent and some sign of through-copying, then it is even more cruelly absent in those first twenty miscellaneous leaves, with their fourteen hands and their motley collection of unconnected, anonymous little verses.189 And yet, even though we can scarcely speak of design, even though the verses on those latter leaves are so unsystematically and randomly copied, it must surely be the case that we have to assume some input of taste: someone, after all, thought these often negligible little poems worth transcribing; if not that, then someone valued their contents enough to gather up the loose leaves and bind them, along with the much more programmed second part, into a single volume; someone, however cursorily, thought it was worthwhile to go back over the manuscript and tidy it up. And even though the meagre little anthology in the first part cannot be called coherent or homogeneous, it does give us an idea of something like a ‘typological personality’ for whatever individual or household collected the lyrics and preserved them on loose sheets of paper and odd, incomplete quires.190 That household, or that patron, seems to have enjoyed

187

Simply (fols 19 r–v) by putting a thick cross through them. The recipes are edited Schwob, Le Parnasse satyrique, pp. 63–65. 188

Of which some rudimentary traces appear on fol. 182v .

189

The question of anonymity and named-ness will preoccupy me in Chapter 3, where I argue that the emblematization of the name is characteristic of manuscripts which are selfadvertisements or self-definitions for a particular coterie. 190 The expression is used by the editors of The Whole Book (p. 2): ‘the possibility that a given manuscript, having been organized along certain principles, may well present its text(s) according to its own agenda, as worked out by the person who planned and supervised the production’.

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courtly commonplace, true, but to have had a particular predilection for more or less refined bawdry.191 Take, for instance, the poems copied by the very first hand onto the recto and verso of the first loose leaf of the existing manuscript (Fery-Hue’s nos 1–4; for nos 3 and 4, see Figure 2). The first is a (studiously metaphorical) lament for the impotence of old age: the writer’s courtault, ‘broken-down old nag’, which used to be so vif à ung assault (and expert at cloquer culz), is now a douloureux marpault, ‘shrunken little beast’.192 Poem no. 2, a rondeau, is a bit of a lament: the writer has spent his life trying to satisfy whores, and it’s killing him: A l’appetit d’une putain Fault-il que je mette dehors Ce qui me doibt nourrir le corps Pour ung trou qui n’est jamais plain?193 Am I obliged to expend all that would keep body and soul together on satisfying the appetites of a whore: she’s a hole you can never fill.

The third poem,194 still in the same hand, is based on a convoluted conceit whereby the poet figures himself as a hawk trained by his lady, the falconer: the hawk is determined to keep its distance, but ‘si plus elle luy monstre la chair .... [if she shows him the lure ...]’! And the fourth, by Jean Marot,195 is a cheerfully amoral little rondeau celebrating the dangerous art of keeping two women happy (‘... bien subtille y seroit la science D’avoir seurté en secret et recoy A toutes deux [... you’d have to be pretty clever to keep the two of them apart]’).196 These are not, obviously, homogeneous poems. They share, however, a certain prurient

191

A taste shared, exuberantly, in the second part of the manuscript: it is no coincidence that it was from fr. 1719 that Marcel Schwob transcribed some 67 of the 135 pièces libres that he published in his Parnasse satyrique. Interestingly, Arthur Marotti also finds obscenity to constitute a ‘serious percentage of circulating verse’ in what he calls ‘coterie manuscripts’, because of the ‘private, closed world’ which produced it: see his John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 44–82. 192

This has been edited by Schwob in Le Parnasse satyrique, p. 53. The impotence of old age is a poetic cliché in late-medieval verse: see Johnson, Poets as Players, pp. 253–59. 193

See Schwob’s edition in Le Parnasse satyrique, p. 54.

194

As edited by Fery-Hue in ‘Au grey d’amours’, p. 149.

195

Poèmes de transition (XV e–XVIe siècles): rondeaux du ms. 402 de Lille, ed. by Marcel Françon, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Paris: Droz, 1938), p. 136. 196

Les deux receuils Jehan Marot de Caen ..., ed. by Gérard Defaux and Thierry Mantovani (Geneva: Droz, 1999), p. 204.

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good humour and while it would be too much, perhaps, to talk of textual organization, or even of a sequence, there is nevertheless a sense in which this single folio suggests that, regardless of the mode of circulation of these verses, regardless of their provenance,197 what might at first seem like gratuitous and random choices may have been made in accord with readerly predilections. As indeed, it may be supposed, is much of the content of this section of the manuscript. It is important not to homogenize — but consider the third booklet, fols 14–19.198 Onto its first, outer leaf, have been copied the first two stanzas of a vituperative ballade, or sotte ballade: ‘Vous avez couleur morisque, visage tartarin, Nez de singesse, grant menton barbarin ... [you’re as black as a Moor, you’ve a face like a Chinaman, you’ve got a monkey’s nose, a fat barbarous-looking chin ...]’.199 Only death, says the poet, can be worse than getting tied to something so hideous. Does this poem set the tone for the remainder of the booklet? Fols 14v, 15, and 16r are blank — why? There is nothing to explain it200 — but on fol. 16v,201 we find yet another faintly misogynistic little verse,202 where the poet’s desperate state can only be compared to being in prison, ‘incensé du membre capital, Acompaigné d’une femme noiseuse, Estre impotent ... [having an erection, being with a spiteful woman, being impotent …]’. This is followed on fols 17r–18v by a couple of longer poems all in the same hand: by a ballade otherwise unknown on women’s deceptiveness,

197

Might at least some of them have been not just copied, but composed, within the social circle that generated the manuscript? Poems numbered by Fery-Hue 1 and 2 appear nowhere else; 3 was later to reach the Jardin de Plaisance to which I return in the final chapter; only 4, by Jean Marot, seems to have circulated at all widely. The question is unanswerable — but it does allow for the possibility that the manuscript is both receptive and productive, like those I concentrate on in Chapters 2 and 3. 198

Consisting of only six leaves, two having disappeared. Again, Fery-Hue is hugely informative. 199

As edited by Schwob in Le Parnasse satyrique, pp. 61–62. On these genres, see S. V. Spilsbury, ‘The Imprecatory Ballade: A Fifteenth-Century Poetic Genre’, French Studies, 33 (1979), 385–96, and on the sotte ballade, my ‘Grosse Margot and Sotte Chanson: François Villon’s Art of Adaptation’, in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. by Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 139–54. 200

Although it is surely additional evidence that the copying process for this first section of the manuscript is distinctly adventitious. 201

The hand is Fery-Hue’s hand V , which copied a disillusioned little rondeau, ‘Fortune, tu me es trop perverse ...’, onto the second page of the first booklet. 202

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by the epitaph which Georges Chastelain wrote for his Oultré d’amour, a hero who died for love,203 and finally by a set of four ‘recipes’ for love. Now, again, it would be forcing the evidence to talk of coherence, but it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the reading forced by the compilation, as each poem contaminates the next, is designed far less for readers — why, if so, the blank pages, the scrappy presentation? — than for the enjoyment and satisfaction of those who produced the pages. This manuscript, in other words, seems to me to invite focus on the event which occasioned its production; that is, on the ways in which the contents were appropriated by copyists at the service of the sort of active cultural preference that held sway in whichever circle was responsible for its production, and which for Bourdieu constitutes taste.204 It is, I would argue, the product of contemporary conventions as to the devising and ownership and sponsorship of poetic volumes, rather than a product actively planned for the greater amusement of a reader. My point here is that this scruffy manuscript, which cannot but seem codicologically random and poetically mediocre (not to say uninteresting), may acquire a real depth of meaning when it is discussed in terms of production — far more meaning certainly than it can possibly have if it is discussed in terms of ‘art’.205 Rather than thinking of how this manuscript was read, it is more interesting to consider the stubbornly individual impulses which pervade the circle in which it was generated, and the particular patterns of choice and taste which, to revert once again to Bourdieu, define a place for that circle in the social order.206

203

Œuvres de Georges Chastelain, ed. by Kervyn de Lettenhove, 8 vols (Brussels: Heussner, 1863–66), VI, 67–128 (pp. 77–80); the reviser has scribbled the word Epytaffe in the right margin. 204

An interesting phenomenon: two of the hands, hand II (Fery-Hue’s nos 4, 5, 7; for 4 and 5, see fig. 2) and VIII (Fery-Hue’s nos 34, 37, 38, 39, 47), have clearly copied the first lines of their poems at an earlier stage, in a paler ink, something Fery-Hue suggests was done in order to ‘réserver la place’ (‘Au grey d’amours’, p. 10, n. 7). If this is so, it is another element that suggests principles of planning and active choice which tend to escape us as modern readers. For Bourdieu on taste, see La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979). 205

Cf. Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, p. 15: ‘l’analyse scientifique des conditions sociales de la production et de la réception de l’œuvre d’art, loin de la réduire ou de la détruire, intensifie l’expérience littéraire’. 206

I am not, of course, the first to make a point of this sort: see for instance, on the Occitan chansonniers, Stephen G. Nichols, ‘“Art” and “Nature”: Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan Chansonnier N (Morgan 819)’, in The Whole Book, ed. by

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Let me pursue this point into the other manuscript I mentioned: what looks like another ‘household’ or ‘circle’ manuscript, a not particularly distinguished and in fact rather perfunctory little volume from Epinal, MS 217, which emanated originally from the household of the comtes d’Esch (Esch-sur-Sûre, Luxembourg).207 Now, this manuscript is of a very different order from anything we have looked at so far. It is a bit of a hybrid: some thirteen quires, visibly copied at different times on different papers and with different intentions, consisting, largely, of nicely serious pieces of different dates and provenances — moralizing texts, histories of crusading, prayers, a Débat de Jésus-Christ et de l’Ame, a diary of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, manuals of tree-diseases and viticulture, and so on.208 The more serious texts are, in general, carefully transcribed in neat, even, professional hands which date from the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth centuries. In some of the quires, and in many of the spaces left blank, however, not particularly tidily, and very inaccurately, other hands, from time to time, have transcribed a miscellany of verses.209 The hands are not those of professional scribes, and the spelling is often more or less phonetic, as

Nichols and Wenzel, pp. 83–121. 207

See F. Bonnardot, ‘Notice du manuscrit 189 de la Bibliothèque d’Epinal contenant des mélanges latins et français en prose et en vers’, Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français, 2–4 (1876), 64–132. For a fuller study of the manuscript, and an edition of the lyric contents, see Charles Bruneau, ‘La poésie aristocratique à Metz, d’après un manuscrit de la famille d’Esch’, Annuaire de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de la Lorraine (1927), 167–222. It was Bonnardot who proposed that the manuscript originated with the household of the comtes d’Esch, on the basis of scattered sketches of a guimbarde, their badge; he suggests a date of c. 1465–77. I could, of course, be accused of being highly selective here: there are plenty of manuscripts which are a record of social interaction at a particular court (see for instance on the ‘debate’ between the courts of Burgundy and Bourbon, M.-R. Jung, ‘Les “Douze Dames de Rhétorique”’, in Du mot au texte: Actes du IIIèm e Colloque international sur le moyen français, Düsseldorf, 17–19 septembre 1980, ed. by Peter Wunderli (Tübingen: Narr, 1982), pp. 230–40); I choose the Esch manuscript because its mish-mash of hands and its miscellaneous quires suggest it is a ‘household’ manuscript of the sort I discuss in the following chapters. 208

Dating is a problem, largely because the volume is hybrid: the final quires are dated 1395–96, and on fol. 89r is the date 1428. The hands suggest dates of that order, but the present binding, which replaces the original, is nineteenth-century, and has brought together texts of various dates: it is the pilgrimage diary, for instance, that relates to 1395–96. There are no watermarks. 209

Which Bruneau (‘La poésie aristocratique’, p. 168), describes as ‘bribes de sermons, dits d’Aristote, charades, mots croisés, extraits d’œuvres didactiques ou littéraires de tout genre’.

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if the copyists were amateurs, and completely untrained;210 indeed, the little poems often look as if they might have been copied from memory. They are a real mixture: there is a sprinkling of ballades, very inaccurately and clumsily transcribed, a few by known poets like Eustache Deschamps and Machaut along with others that may have been composed specifically in this circle. Particularly interesting for my argument here, however, is a particular quire, quire no. 7,211 whose contents are brief lyric poems which fall into various categories: saluts d’amour [poems of courtly greeting],212 demandes d’amour (that is, questions relating to amorous etiquette and behaviour; I return to this genre in Chapter 4), and daiements: that is, what Christine de Pizan called jeux à vendre.213 They are particularly interesting because, like Christine’s jeux, these exercises in particular modes seem to me to be evidence of the multiple life of the poem as communal property, of the status of verse as a kind of social currency or social leaven, circulating from household to household and serving to create precisely the ‘event’ that I have been referring to. Take, for instance, the little group of thirty-three daiements, ‘ventes d’amour’ (fols 77r–80v). We saw, earlier in this chapter, that these little poems were a sort of parlour-game, a game which seems to have appealed not just to the amateur, courtly poet, but even to a poet of the calibre of Christine de Pizan. The present collection bears every resemblance to the groups I mentioned earlier. Indeed, a number of the Esch ventes d’amour are plainly versions of those that were anthologized in the early printed volumes whose contents Montaiglon published in the 1850s,214 and it looks very much as if one of the copyists of the Esch

210 A line like ‘Tout teille gens on dobveroit Chessier tout hoirs dé bonne gens’, for instance: ‘de telles gens devroient être chassés bien loin des bonnes gens’ (ibid., no. XV ). 211

Quire 7 occupies fols 77–81. There are other equally miscellaneous quires here: quire 6, for instance (fols 65–76) has a selection of dits d’amours, a collection of proverbs, some remedes, a list of mirabilia, and a few odd stanzas from what look like ballades. 212

The terminology, which is Bruneau’s, is misleading. Paul Meyer published a string of what he calls saluts d’amour in ‘Le salut d’amour dans les littératures provençale et française’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 28 (1867), 124–70 — but his are épîtres which are far longer and more elaborate, and have nothing in common with the little Esch verses. 213

‘Daiement’ is inscribed at top right on fol. 77r. This is, as far as I know, the only manuscript occasion on which the term is used. Bruneau relates it to the Lorrain dailler, meaning, it seems, ‘to run away’, and sees it as stressing the quickness necessary for success. There are, he says, still (in 1927) dailleurs in Lorraine (‘La poésie aristocratique’, p. 191). 214

‘Versions’ because what must presumably have been a complex process of transmission, often oral, has meant that there are many major variants; nevertheless, the similarities suggest

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manuscript simply transcribed a pre-existing collection; after no. XXXI, indeed, he has inscribed an emphatic Explixit (fol. 80v). But then, almost immediately, a different hand transcribes another vente, a self-consciously derivative little piece in which the writer borrows the poetic identity of his (or her) models: Je vous ven la flour de la vanche; Sacqiez que le papier et l’enche Font escrire maint mesaige, Qui font rogier maint visaige. I sell you the periwinkle flower. Let me tell you that paper and ink serve to convey many a message that puts a blush on many a cheek.

Now, this is distinctly amateurish. The versifier fails to make any link between the catch-line on flour de la vanche215 and enche ‘ink’216 — or, more seriously, to defer to the ‘courtly’ function of the ventes d’amour — and the repetition of maint in the third and fourth lines is clumsy. But however amateurish it may be, this additional little poem looks distinctly like the trace of the participation of an ordinary member of the Esch circle in the system of amateur versifying and manuscript transmission of which the manuscript as a whole is evidence. It is as if the unknown copyist had decided to note down a useful compendium of vente d’amour, no doubt for future reference, and as if some other reader/participant had been unable to resist the temptation to join in: to make himself part, in other words, of the ‘event’ as Chartier defines it.217 Interestingly, very much the same phenonemon is visible with a couple of what Bruneau calls saluts d’amour, which he also thinks may have been jeux de salon composed in the Esch family circle (see Figure 3). Take the second of them: [Demande] Damoiselle blanche, Vostre amis vous mande

that ventes d’amour circulated quite extensively. The modes of transmission are too complex to be explored in any detail here. 215

‘Periwinkle’: see Godefroy, VIII, 166.

216

The form enche, enke, ‘ink’, is standard: ibid., IX , 455–56.

217

A loose leaf containing another vente, which was still slipped into the manuscript in 1876 when Bonnardot examined it (see ‘Notice du manuscrit 189*, pp. 130–32), had disappeared by 1927. Bonnardot had transcribed it, but its lack is disappointing because it means that the hand cannot be examined; Bonnardot does say, however, that its hand is the same as that of the ventes here. It read, in Bonnardot’s transcription: ‘Je vous van ceu qu’on ne puelt avoir: Ameis tousjours sen decepvoir, Et sy preneis par cortoisie D’amour la graice et seignorie’.

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.V. salut et .L. et .V. sallut: Que mandeis à lui? [Responce] Je mande à mon Amy Qu’i soit prou et herdy, Et de son amour bien saisie, Et que ma pert ne let il mie, Et, quel pert qu’il soit, Boins soirs ait ilz! Pale lady, your lover sends you fifty greetings, fifty-five greetings. What do you send him? I send my lover the command that he should be valiant and courageous, and committed to his love, and determined not to lose me, and however things may seem, may he have a good night!218

No one, of course, would contend that this is a little poem of any distinction at all. The metre is shaky (did the damoiselle of the responce really intend to slip from hexasyllables to octosyllables?), as is the grammar (saisie should surely read saisi — but this would be detrimental to the rhyme), and the lexicon and the sentiments are lamentably conventional. But what they do tend to show, I believe, and in a concrete way, is how far the reception and the production of the fixed-form lyric at the end of the Middle Ages remains involved with its social context, and how far a collection of this sort derives from what Chartier calls the ‘event’: is a cultural practice, not a static repository of texts.219 Even these

218

The translation here is approximate; I assume pert derives from paroir — but I am not confident of this. 219

On a smaller scale, in other words, the Esch manuscript is a layman’s commonplace book, of the sort represented in English by manuscripts like Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, or British Library, MS Harley 2253, which can be traced to individual households — on which see Marilyn Corrie, ‘Harley 2253, Digby 86, and the Circulation of Literature in Pre-Chaucerian England’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: published for TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000), pp. 427–43. Digby 86, which dates from the end of the thirteenth century, was originally, it seems, attached to the household of the Grimhill family (see Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, with intro. by Judith Tschann and M. B. Parkes, EETS, supplementary series, 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. lvi–lx), and Harley 2253 to the Ludlow family of Stokesay (see Carter Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, in Facsimile, pp. 21–109). Volumes of such sorts became more common in the Tudor period, for instance the Harington MS in Arundel Castle (The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. by Ruth Hughey (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1960).

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mediocre and barely adequate little verses suggest how far a modicum of cultural competence is prized: how important it seemed to become culturally adept and able to participate in the game of verse, and how important it may have been to register the product of the game on the page. This insignificant manuscript, like fr. 1719, seems to put us in direct contact with the making of its content, with the‘event’.220 By enshrining the collective memory on the page, a particular circle

Figure 3. Epinal, Bibliothèque Intercommunale EpinalGolbey MS 217, fol. 82 r .

220

See also Ardis Butterfield’s remark (Poetry and Music in Medieval France, from Jean Renart to Guillaume Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15) that ‘we might ask whether the text does not in fact contain some sense of the work’s character in performance, whether performance is not in some way inscribed within the text rather than irrevocably absent from it?’. A similar point is made, in Bourdieuian terms, by Louis Pinto, Pierre Bourdieu et la théorie du monde social (Paris: Michel, 1999), p. 100: ‘La sociologie de la littérature [...] n’ignore donc pas les textes, mais elle invite à les considérer autrement, non pas comme des choses déjà faites (opus operatum), des œuvres demandant à être déchiffrées dans leur vérité ultime, mais plutôt comme les traces objectivées de gestes (modus operandi) qui en sont relativement distincts et qui, n’étant pas transparents, sont à réactiver par le détour d’un ensemble systématique d’interrogations et d’hypothèses’.

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has defined its lyrics as social products. If this is so, however, if indeed these two manuscripts induct the reader, imaginatively, into the sort of exclusive society that we met with the Cour amoureuse, with Le Pastoralet, and with Le Parfait du Paon, then they do so only rudimentarily. In the chapter that follows, I propose to turn to a much more elaborate and interesting manuscript which is more identifiably the record of a particular sort of cultural transaction: one where much more is known about the ‘event’, the social circumstances of its production, and where that ‘event’ has given birth to poems of a very different order; one where poetry is recognizably a collective phenomenon, where the ‘poets’ who participate in the social field of poetry construct themselves, as Bourdieu would have it, relationally, and where the dynamism of their relationship underpins the word on the page. I turn, in other words, to one of the most famous French manuscripts of the fifteenth century, Charles d’Orléans’ personal manuscript, BnF fr. 25458.

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P RESERVED AS IN A V IOLL: C HARLES D ’O RLÉANS’ C IRCLE AND HIS P ERSONAL M ANUSCRIPT

[Books] preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them ... A good book is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. John Milton, Areopagitica, ed. by Edward Arber (London: English Reprints, n.d.), p. 35.

T 1

o leaf through BnF fonds français 25458, the personal manuscript of Charles d’Orléans, one of the greatest poets of the fifteenth century, is to be presented with a paradox.1 On the frontispiece (Figure 4),

That this was indeed Charles’ personal manuscript (sometimes, misleadingly, called ‘autograph manuscript’) has long been accepted. Pierre Champion, Charles’ most distinguished editor, realized that Charles had emended and corrected it, and had added a number of poems in his own hand (see his Le Manuscrit autographe des poésies de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Champion, 1907; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1975); cf. also his La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans avec un album de facsimiles (Paris: Champion, 1910); the album is a portfolio of reproductions, largely of Charles’ autograph poems and annotations). I quote, throughout this book, from Champion’s classic edition of Charles’ Poésies, by poem- and page-number; it has the great advantage of publishing all the poems from fr. 25458, with the disadvantage that they are reordered according to with Champion’s now rather disputed hypotheses about the order of composition. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler’s excellent recent edition, Charles d’Orléans: Ballades et rondeaux; Edition du manuscrit 25458 du fonds français de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992), scrupulously observes the order of the lyrics in the manuscript — but transcribes, of course, only those poems which may plausibly be thought to be Charles’. A new, complete, critical edition in extenso of fr. 25458 is

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everything, reassuringly, promises order. Although this is not a showcase manuscript (like Christine’s, say), it is equally not, it seems, to be one of those unruly, amateurish miscellanies that I looked at in the previous chapter, like français 1719 or the Epinal manuscript, that are a welter of different poets and hands. Rather, this, it seems, is a single-author manuscript, set out with care by a guiding intelligence, meticulously copied on good quality parchment, in a neat, pleasantly legible bâtarde hand, with an elegantly restrained programme of decoration. That opening folio, for instance (Figure 4), although very much worn and rubbed, still presents a narrow, full, foliate border, with touches of blue and red and, appropriately for a volume made for a scion of the royal house of France, traces of gold fleurs de lys; one can just make out Charles’ own coat of arms in the upper left, a sketchy cherub in the upper right, and a standing figure, faintly, in the right margin: a studiously self-effacing author portrait? The succeeding pages, moreover, look stamped with very much the same sense of discreet order.2 The first quire, the quire that opens with the frontispiece, is entirely devoted to a long poem in ten-line decasyllabic stanzas; modern anthologies of Charles’ verse call it ‘La Retenue d’Amours’. It too is carefully copied: major initials are done in gold or blue or red, with nice penflourishes; lesser initials are delicately touched in saffron yellow; the ascenders on initial consonants in the first line of each page are marked with bold, confident strokes. The copying is spacious: there are no more than thirty lines of verse to each page, with ample margins; the final page of the quire contains no more than eight lines of verse, so that there is none of that sense of huddled page-filling that is so characteristic of more frugal manuscripts, again like the Esch manuscript or fr. 1719. That first quire is followed by a further seven, each of eight leaves.

urgently needed; renewed impetus should come with the eagerly awaited new study by MaryJo Arn, The Order of Composition in Charles d’Orléans’ Personal Manuscript (Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS fr. 25458) (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 2

See Gérard Gros, ‘L’écriture du prince: étude sur le souci graphique de Charles d’Orléans dans son manuscrit personnel (Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 25458)’, in L’Hostellerie de pensée: Etudes sur l’art littéraire au moyen âge offertes à Daniel Poirion par ses anciens élèves, ed. by Michel Zink and others, Cultures et Civilisations médiévales, 12 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1995), pp. 194–204.

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Figure 4. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 1.

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On each page, copied, like the ‘Retenue’, capaciously and carefully,3 is a ballade often so titled, in the same clear, legible hand, and with the same scrupulous attention to decorative detail: flourished initials in gold with sprays and foliate motifs in blue or red, initial letters to each stanza done in blue or red or gold. Someone — the patron? the scribe? — has planned the mise en page with generosity: where a ballade does not fill the space available on the page, there seems to be no pressure to crowd it with more text. And indeed there were blank leaves left at the end of the section containing the ballades: scribal generosity of spirit, or, of course, the owner’s recognition that there might be other ballades to come that would need to be properly, generically, added to the original collection. The same ‘someone’ who set the style for the ballades has moreover planned an entire volume: planned it, like Christine’s or Eustache’s as we saw in Chapter 1, on meticulously generic grounds so that the reader has an impression of controlled diversity. The eight quires of ballades are followed by four of chansons (pp. 235–98 in fr. 25458). The same careful, legible bâtarde hand has copied each of eighty-nine chansons systematically, and puzzlingly, onto the lower half of the page; ‘puzzlingly’, because no convincing explanation has yet been offered for this particular layout. It used to be said, with comfortable certainty, that the upper part of the page had been left blank for music to be copied or composed, subsequently, to accompany the chansons; alternatively, that the space might have been left for illustration.4 Neither explanation stands. As Nigel Wilkins points

3

Not quite consistently — although the intention seems to have been that each page should indeed contain a single ballade. By contrast, the volume (BL MS Harley 682) into which Charles had his English ballades copied is rather more rigorous and spacious, so that each poem is copied individually onto a single page; for illustrations, see Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind: Charles d’Orléans and the Production of Manuscripts in Two Languages (Paris, BN MS fr. 25458 and London, BL MS Harley 682)’, in Charles d’Orléans in England (1415–1440), ed. by eadem (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 61–78, and her introduction to her Fortune’s Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), esp. pp. 101–29; cf. also Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics, pp. 9–11. 4

For instance, by Champion, Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 36–38, and Mühlethaler, in the introduction to his edition, p. 21. The blanks have not yet been adequately explained. One possibility canvassed is that they were intended for miniatures: Champion dismisses this (Le Manuscrit autographe, p. 36), on the grounds that illustration is precluded by the rulings, but as Arn shows (Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 108), this is not necessarily so; Nancy Freeman Regalado, in an excellent article ‘En ce saint livre: mise en page et identité lyrique dans les poèmes autographes de Villon dans l’album de Blois (Bibl. Nat. ms. fr. 25458)’, in L’Hostellerie de

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out forcefully, the fact that the scribal rulings cover the upper and not just the lower part of the page would militate against either suggestion, since they prevent a new ruling for staves and preclude illustration — and in any case, such a mise en page would be entirely exceptional in fifteenth-century musicological convention.5 Irrespective of this particular conundrum, however, the sense of order and design in this section of the manuscript remains patent. Each page is labelled Chançon — the initial C nicely decorated in gold or red or blue, the initial letter of the chanson itself in gold on blue or red, and embellished with sprays of trefoils and ‘pine-cones’ and fleurs-de-lys. Finally, in the manuscript as apparently planned, still in the same hand and with the same pleasant flourishes, come two intercalated bifolia which contain three complaintes, a new quire blank except for three caroles on the first two leaves, all so labelled in the upper margin and bound rather later into the existing manuscript (MS, pp. 203–22), another set of ballades labelled, in Charles’ hand, Balades de plusieurs propos:6 as I suggest later, the label makes it clear that the Duke distinguishes these from the original sequence of ballades, and shows how concerned he was, as he planned and ordered his manuscript, with tidy considerations of genre. But I am, of course, being disingenuous here — because however systematic the initial process of copying, however carefully the disposition of the page may originally have been planned, whatever the thought that went into legibility and pleasing decoration, what français 25458 now evinces is remnants of order almost overwhelmed by a wild variety of hands and styles of decoration: the neat original hand is an island of order in a sea of poetic chaos. I have insisted, several pensée, ed. by Zink and others, pp. 355–72 (p. 17), sees the blanks as another examples of Charles’ mise en page élégante et généreuse — but that would make it all the odder that the rondeaux would be so systematically copied at the foot of the page. 5

‘Charles d’Orléans: avec musique ou non?’, Romania, 112 (1991), 268–72. Wilkins wonders if Charles might have left the upper spaces ‘pour le cas où lui ou d’autres membres de son cercle composeraient d’autres rondels, sur les mêmes refrains que ceux déjà inscrits en bas de page’ (p. 272). The same disposition is found in Charles’ English manuscript: see Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 106–09, arguing against music and, in all probability, illustrations. 6

Poésies, I, 126–47. Champion prints the contents of fr. 25458 in conformity with his own hypotheses as to the order of composition of Charles’ poems. Briefly (Le Manuscrit autographe), for the ballades, he sees a fonds primitif (pp. 1–119 in the manuscript, and which includes the longer poems, ‘La Retenue’ etc., which I discuss below), copied in England; a second group, pp. 122–73, composed at different times and copied at Blois into pages left blank and new quires; a third group (pp. 191–95), also part of the fonds primitif; a group (pp. 203–24), labelled Ballades de plusieurs propos, and also part of the fonds primitif copied in England; a final little group of ballades (pp. 225–34) probably composed at Blois and copied there.

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times, on the spaciousness of the copying: the fact that the ballades are not huddled on the page, the fact that the copyists have left pages at the ends of quires blank in order to ensure that they are not generically hybrid, the fact that the upper half of each page devoted to a chanson is left generously untouched. That agreeable generosity has clearly extended an irresistible invitation to other hands. Take, for instance, those first nine quires, largely devoted to the ballades composed in England. What I called the original hand governs the layout and decoration of the quires as far only as what is now p. 121 of the manuscript: as far, that is to say, as to copy into the final, ninth quire a couple of longer allegorical poems, the ‘Songe en complainte’ and ‘La Requeste’, which are followed by a sequence of ten ballades collectively entitled ‘La Departie d’amours en balades’. These have the same embellishments — pen-flourishes, initials, sprays and trefoils — which make the original layout so pleasing. Thereafter, however — in accordance with the extravagant spacing we have seen before — the final leaves of the quire had been left blank. And that, it seems, has been a lure, to Charles himself, and to other poets in other hands. On p. 122 of the manuscript, someone whom Champion identifies with Charles himself has copied, in a smaller, spikier hand and with a rather graceless attempt at the original scheme of decoration, another ballade — and onto the remaining leaves of that quire, and into more quires presumably added subsequently to the original corpus, have been copied, in an unruly mixture of hands, yet more ballades and one completely extraneous longer poem (unlabelled, but in fact François Villon’s ‘Dit de la naissance Marie’; I return to this later). Some, it seems, were added by Charles himself; some, judging by superscriptions, by other poets, known and unknown. Similarly, and later in the volume, in a quire largely following the original style, the nicely legible bâtarde hand copies what were labelled, as we saw, Balades de plusieurs propos; opposite the last of them on p. 224 of the manuscript, which is a ballade (no. XCIII) addressed to the Duke of Burgundy, someone has copied another ballade (MS, pp. 225–26), also addressed to the Duke and embroidering on the first, in a quite different hand, in a paler ink (I revert to these two ballades below, p. 129). Here again, whoever did the copying has made a valiant attempt to imitate the elegant decoration of the ballades that precede — but his work is crude and awkward. His attempt merely shows how much someone, be it a patron or a designer, hoped to mask the transformation of the original, neat manuscript by perpetuating a carefully chosen style. A similar doomed but dogged attempt at consistency marks a few further ballades, in yet further hands, on pp. 227–29 of the manuscript— but the attempt is abandoned, no doubt as hopeless, in a

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string of ballades on pp. 231–34. Just as inviting, it seems, have been those blank spaces above the sequence of chansons: as from p. 247 of the manuscript, different hands, some clear and legible, some clumsy or cramped, some in paler inks, some even with further attempts at the original scheme of decoration (MS, p. 286), have crammed each page, in defiance of the original strict generic ordering, with a string of rondeaux on a variety of themes. In the same way, the eight blank pages (MS, pp. 306–13) that follow the complaintes have been employed, by another rather cramped hand, first for another complainte couched as a dialogue between L’Amant and Amours, and then for seven poems in English. And similarly again, as from p. 318 of the manuscript, the pages are copied with a flood of rondeaux in a riot of hands and styles: sometimes with an imitation of the original decorative scheme for the poems in the lower register of the page (rarely for a complete opening, as on pp. 320–21 of the MS), more usually with what looks like opportunistic copying where no serious attempt at pattern or scheme can be discerned (see for instance MS, pp. 352–53). At the most casual glance, in other words, this manuscript speaks of a pull between intended order and decorative discipline on the one hand, and poetic indulgence, hence disorder, on the other. Indeed, one might say that it bespeaks a no doubt unintended hybridity. And this hybridity, this duality of order and disorder, makes the manuscript a perfect testbed. This, I shall suggest later in this chapter, is a manuscript that dramatizes the two polarities of anthologization in the later Middle Ages, which we have already seen in the previous chapter: design and happenstance. It happens that everything we know or can deduce about the history of the manuscript, and about its principal poet and patron, Charles d’Orléans, seems to accord with what we see on those parchment pages. The ‘orderly’ poems, it seems, the generically organized ballades and chansons and complaintes, were composed in England and copied there — at the same time as Charles carefully collected, and had a fair copy made of, the poems that he had composed in English.7 Charles was taken prisoner at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and he 7

There was, for many years, a tendency to argue that the English poems under his name were not his own, but translations of them by some unknown translator. Current opinion seems to be, on the contrary, that they are indeed his: for a summary of the question, see Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 29–37, and eadem, ‘Charles of Orleans and the Poems of BL MS Harley 682’, English Studies, 74 (1993), 222–35; for the contrary view, boisterously argued, see William Calin, ‘Will the Real Charles of Orleans Please Stand! Or, Who Wrote the English Poems in Harley 682?’, in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. by Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 69–86.

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was to remain a prisoner in England for some twenty-five long years, until 1440. His captivity, like most princely captivities in the Middle Ages, was not arduous — and he occupied himself, we know from various sources,8 in the writing of poems, in French and in English. Sometime in 1439 or 1440, as negotiations for his release appeared finally about to succeed, he seems to have put together a bound volume of his collected works in English, ingeniously arranged as if they were the record of a coherent love-narrative.9 We know, on the other hand, again from inventories, that he also put together and had bound a second volume, now probably lost, consisting presumably very largely of his French poems, and described as ‘le livre des Balades de M[on] S[eigneur] à ung fermouer [‘clasp’] à ses armes [the book of my lord’s ballades, with a clasp stamped with his arms]’.10 It used to be argued — by Champion among others11 — that it was this volume which was the ordered core of français 25458, but it seems very unlikely that Charles would have brought back an expensively bound volume — a cheaper, scrappy volume would not have had a fermouer — which he would then have had unbound in order to add extra leaves for a welter of further poems.12 We can, on the other hand, be sure that fr. 25458 was indeed copied in England: Patricia Stirnemann and François Avril are adamant, on codicological grounds — hand, style of decoration — that the core of fr. 25458, its fonds

8

René d’Anjou, for instance, Charles’ cousin and a poet in his own right, assures us that Charles ‘aprins le langaige’ of England (see his Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris [The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart], ed. by Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and Kathryn Karczewska (New York: Routledge, 2001); Champion points out in his ‘A propos de Charles d’Orléans’, Romania, 49 (1923), 580–87 (p. 583), that the reference to ‘Charles Quint’ must be amended to ‘Charles d’Orléans’. Martin le Franc talks of ‘le livre qu’il [sc. Charles] fit en Inglant’: Le Champion des Dames, ed. by Deschaux, l. 11914; see Gérard Gros, ‘Le livre du prince et le clerc: édition, diffusion et réception d’une œuvre (Martin le Franc lecteur de Charles d’Orléans)’, Travaux de littérature, 14 (2001), 43–58. 9

BL MS Harley 682, on which see, notably, Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 50–55, and her ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind’. 10

Which appears among ‘Autres livres apportés d’Angleterre’: see Comte de Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne: Etudes sur les lettres, les arts et l’industrie pendant le XV e siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Plon frères, 1849–52), III, 322 (item 6545), and cf. Champion, La Librairie, p. 12. 11

Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 83–84: this volume, he says, is ‘la première partie du ms. fr. 25458’. 12

A point made by Gérard Gros, ‘Ecrire et lire au Livre de Pensée. Etude sur le manuscrit personnel des poésies de Charles d’Orléans (Paris, B.N.F., FR. 25458)’, Travaux de littérature, 11 (1998), 55–74.

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primitif, is ‘indiscutablement d’origine anglaise’.13 What seems plausible, therefore, is that Charles had at least two fair copies of the French works he had written in England made before his departure for France: the lost bound volume that I mentioned, but also another set, perhaps on loose quires, which was to become the basis for fr. 25458.14 Some trace of the existence of the latter may well be recorded in an inventory of Charles’ English possessions drawn up at SaintOmer in 1440. He brought back to France, we are told, in his sizeable personal library,15 several bundles of loose quires and leaves containing poems and verses: deux quayers containing plusieurs balades,16 and four leaves (presumably a bifolium) containing plusieurs chansons notees;17 less identifiably, there were also ‘plusieurs Kaieres de parchemin, nouvellement escripts et enluminez, apportez d’Angleterre qui ne sont point reliez [a number of quires of parchment, freshly copied and illuminated, which were brought from England and have not been bound]’.18 Whether or not any of these is indeed the core of fr. 25458, it is certain that the English scribe with the carefully legible bâtarde hand and the nice line

13

Manuscrits enluminés d’origine insulaire, VII e–XX e siècles (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987), p. 181, and cf. Ursula Baurmeister and Marie-Pierre Laffitte, Des livres et des rois: la bibliothèque royale de Blois (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1992), pp. 47–48. I am also much struck by Arn’s argument, from the often identical layout of français 25458 as compared with that of BL MS Harley 682, the major manuscript of Charles’ English poems (for instance, in the way that the chansons and rondeaux are copied in BL MS Harley 682 also only into the lower half of the page), that there must have been some cooperation between the concepteurs of the two manuscripts: see her ‘Two Manuscripts, One Mind’. Arn’s study The Order of Composition will revise some of Champion’s conclusions. 14 It may be that a volume of this sort circulated separately from the manuscript I discuss here: BnF MS fr. 19129 , which transcribes the core collection — but which seems not to have been copied in England — is, says a liminal note, ‘le livre que Monseigneur Charles le duc d’Orleans a faict estant prisonnier en Angleterre’. 15 See Champion, La Librairie, p. 12, and especially G. Ouy, ‘Recherches sur la librairie de Charles d’Orléans et de Jean d’Angoulême pendant leur captivité en Angleterre, et étude de deux manuscrits autographes de Charles d’Orléans’, Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1955), 237–87. 16

See Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 323 (item 6559).

17

Ibid. Also now lost — and tempting though it would be to imagine that these might have included some of Charles’ own verse set to music, nothing so specific is suggested. Indeed, very few of Charles’ poems seem to have been set: see David Fallows, ‘Two More Dufay Songs Reconstructed’, Early Music, 3 (1975), 358–60. 18

Quoted from the catalogue of Charles’ possessions made in 1440 at Saint-Omer; see Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 324 (item 6564), and Champion, La Librairie, p. xxix.

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in pen-flourishes was commissioned, before Charles’ departure, to make a fair, generously spaced copy of his œuvre so far; hence, in the core of fr. 25458, we find that provisional air of order and system. What then — historically — accounts for the wild miscellany of hands that fill out today’s manuscript? I return to this question repeatedly in what follows — but we do know, this time from the evidence of Charles’ accounts, that there existed a particular, and identifiable, volume or set of quires which his book keepers call ‘le livre des Ballades de M[on] S[eigneur]’ — because at least twice over the years that he spent at his court in Blois after his return to France, Charles ordered the purchase of more parchment to add to it. In 1455 the accounts record an outlay for vellum ‘pour adjouster et mettre ou livre des Ballades de MS [to add to my lord’s book of ballades]’,19 and in February 1456, again, Michau Boudet of Blois sold the court fourteen ‘peaulx de veslin ... pour adjouster et mettre ou livre des Ballades de MS [fourteen vellum skins to add to my lord’s book of ballades]’.20 What this implies is that Charles made the loose quires and sheets he brought back from England into the core of a sort of poetic journal de bord: not a commonplace-book in the accepted sense of the word,21 but rather a sort of running album of his work, no longer copied wholesale in some pre-imposed order, but rather kept up-to-date piecemeal on yet more vellum. And not only with his own work: the amorphous volume came also to be a repository for the members of his court and for visitors official and personal — and it is their work, and their poetic conversations with Charles’ own lyrics, that will be the main focus of this chapter. What I want to explore here, in other words, is the way in which what was intended as a self-conscious harnessing of the poet-anthologizer’s own identity has been hijacked by other poets so that its organization shows a growing sense of the poetic and dialogic potential of miscellaneous identities.22 First, however, I propose to analyse in a little more detail the ‘order’ which I suggested governed the early, core sections of the manuscript which were copied and decorated in England, to suggest that the impression of order given codicologically corresponds, interestingly and artfully, to a similar sense of order 19

Champion, La Librairie, p. lxi.

20

See Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 359 (item 6765).

21

For definitions, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 22

I acknowledge, of course, the debt that I, and anyone who works on Charles, owe to Poirion’s remarkable Le Poète et le prince.

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in the organization of its contents, and which owes much to the sort of singleauthor albums that I talked about in the previous chapter. Let me start with the very first poem copied into fr. 25458, and one of the longer poems: ‘La Retenue d’Amours’ (Poésies, I, 1–16), which has suffered, over the years, from a very poor press. It is, say most commentators, lamentably derivative,23 and Champion, for one, wonders if it might have been composed as a sort of apprentice piece, in Charles’ extreme youth, even before he was taken prisoner at Agincourt, and have slipped into the Duke’s collection out of a dull sense of completeness. The poem is admittedly not especially exciting, but its presence at this point in the manuscript is not, I suggest, adventitious: on the contrary, it represents a bow towards the sort of lyrical structuring which, as we saw in the previous chapter, marks certain ballade and lyric collections. For that purpose, of course, the fact that it is not innovative is a positive advantage: readers will recognize its dramatis personae, the rather hackneyed abstractions of the Roman de la Rose — Dangier, Malebouche — and its scenario, a young man’s giving allegiance to the God of Love and his commandments, which is one that we meet over and over again in the dits amoureux of the end of the Middle Ages.24 What makes the poem interesting, therefore, is not so much its intrinsic poetic value and certainly not its originality; rather, what is interesting is the codicological strategy which seems to point to the way in which it creates an illusion of authorial presence, and ensures, thematically and even pictorially (Figure 4), that the collection as a whole is mediated by an identifiable ‘I’. The ‘Retenue’ is purportedly autobiography, allegorical certainly, but with a strongly realized je at its centre: the poetic ‘I’ — a faintly comic self-projection as a literary hero, who names himself, twice, within the confines of the poem, ‘le duc d’Orlians Nommé Charles ...’ (‘Retenue’, ll. 405–06; see also l. 114).25 He had, he says, first been

23

Le Poète et le prince, pp. 284–87; cf. John Fox, The Lyric Poetry of Charles d’Orléans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 33: ‘stilted artificialities’. An exception is Ann Tukey Harrison, Charles d’Orléans and the Allegorical Mode (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1975), pp. 76–95; another is Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, in a typically subtle essay: ‘Récrire le Roman de la Rose au XV e siècle: les commandements d’amour chez Charles d’Orléans et ses lecteurs’, in ‘Riens ne m’est seur que la chose incertaine’: études … offertes à Eric Hicks, ed. by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler and Denis Billotte (Geneva: Slatkine, 2001), pp. 105–20. 24

See for instance William Allen Neilson, ‘The Statutes of Love’, Chapter 4 of his The Origins and Sources of the ‘Court of Love’ (New York: Ginn, 1899), pp. 168–212. 25

Interestingly, a hand which could be Charles’ own has underlined the phrase in the manuscript (p. 4).

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entrusted by Nature — another echo of the Roman de la Rose26 — to the care of Enfance; later, a messenger, Aage,27 had come to transfer him to the guardianship of Jeunesse, and Jeunesse, in turn, had presented him to the God of Love. The boy had engaged himself to Love’s service, and sworn to a group of ten ‘commandements’28 — to be loyal, to serve a single lady, to be secret, and so on — and had bound himself to a document drawn up by Bonne Foy, Love’s chief secretaire (l. 387). A tissue of reminiscences: this wry manipulation of the loverpersona is representative of conventional attitudes. What makes it interesting is the fact that it acts as a frame device to set a narrative for a collection of lyrics, just as had Christine’s Cent Ballades d’amant et de dame, or Machaut’s Voir Dit, which we saw in the previous chapter. In that context, what is striking are the touches of irony. When, for instance, the God of Love is made to say that he had known Charles’ father (Louis d’Orléans) well, and that Louis had ‘maintes foiz esté en [s]on [sc. Love’s] servage [been often captivated by Love]’ (‘Retenue’, l. 174), readers cannot, knowing Louis’s considerable reputation as a womanizer,29 but have been titillated; when Charles himself is made to say that ‘Estrangier suy venu en vostre [sc. the God’s hostel]’ (l. 188), it is difficult not to guess at a neatly ironic little touch from someone who was writing in the England where he had been an estrangier for so long. When in particular the God of Love imposes as a condition of his service that il sera diligent escolier, En aprenant tous les gracieux tours, A son povair [sic], qui servent en amours: C’est assavoir a chanter et dansser,

26

See the edition by Félix Lecoy, CFMA, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1965–70).

27

Aage is not necessarily ‘Old Age’ — although, as we shall see later, in the ‘Songe en complainte’, he is indeed represented as an old man. Here, however, he need only be seen as ‘appropriate age’, perhaps ‘maturity’; see John A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183: Aage is, he says, ‘Aetas rather than Senectus’. 28 The source very largely of the ‘commandments’ of the God of Love is Andreas Capellanus’ de Amore, ed. and trans. by P. G. Walsh in Andreas Capellanus on Love (London: Duckworth, 1982); on the proliferation of this theme, see A. Karnein, ‘La réception du De amore d’André le Chapelain au XIIIe siècle’, Romania, 102 (1981), 501–42. For the later Middle Ages, the reference point is the Roman de la Rose, ll. 2074–566. 29

See Pierre Champion, Vie de Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465) (Paris: Champion, 1911), pp. 5–10. For Louis, see E. Jarry, La Vie politique de Louis de France, duc d’Orléans, 1372–1407 (Paris: Picard, 1889; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1976).

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Faire chançons et balades rimer ...’ (ll. 372–76; my italics) He will be a diligent scholar, and make every effort to learn all the graceful skills that are useful to the lover: singing, dancing, composing songs and ballades ...

we are clearly invited to identify Charles himself, the empirical poet,30 with this ironically distanced persona, and the persona, in turn, with the author and composer of the balades which are to follow in the remainder of the manuscript — not least because an unmistakable, and unmistakably deliberate, echo, syntactic, semantic and prosodic, links one particular line of the Retenue, ‘Jeune, gente, nompareille Princesse’, addressed to Beauté (‘Retenue’, l. 280) with the first line of the very first of the lyric poems which follow: ‘Belle, bonne, nompareille, plaisant, Je vous suppli ...’ (ballade I, l. 1–2), addressed to an unknown and unnamed lady. Charles, in other words, has embedded his verse, self-consciously, in the literary and codicological culture of the later fifteenth century: the poetic ‘I’ enacts an authorial identity and ‘registers’ the anthology we are to read as self-representing. It is, as I have implied, impossible to believe that it is by sheer accident that this tissue of self-conscious artifices provides the initiating context for Charles’ anthology of chançons et balades. Charles, with early signs of his later ironic wit, is constructing a teasing autobiographical matrix for the lyrics that will follow, and which will penetrate each poem as we read.31 It becomes entirely impossible to believe in accident rather than design when we realize that the whole sequence of ballades, as planned in the core manuscript, concludes with another longer poem, the ‘Songe en complainte’, which includes, among other things, ‘La Requeste’, and, most particularly, ‘La Departie d’amours en ballades’;32 these are a deliberate coda allowing Charles to advertize himself as the subject of a poetic pseudo-autobiography. The new poem carefully picks up motifs from the 30

I borrow the expression from L. Friedman, ‘Note on the Poetic and Empirical “I” in the Middle Ages’, Traditio, 4 (1946), 415–22; see also Paul Zumthor, ‘Le “je” de la chanson et le moi du poète’, in his Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 181-96. 31 See Daniel Poirion, ‘Création poétique et composition romanesque dans les premiers poèmes de Charles d’Orléans’, Revue des sciences humaines, n.s. 90 (1958), 185–211. 32

These occupy pp. 100–21 of the manuscript, pp. 99–121 in Poésies, I. As Champion edits it, the ‘Songe en complainte’ consists of a suite of quasi-interdependent poems: ll. 1–176: a narrative section first in twenty-two decasyllabic eight-line stanzas; ll. 177–274: ‘La Requeste’; ll. 275–370: ‘La Departie d’Amours en ballades’; ll. 371–414: ‘Copie de la quittance dessus dicte’; ll. 415–486: a further three ballades; ll. 487–550: a final farewell to love, in 61 decasyllables. Linereferences are to the umbrella title, the ‘Songe en complainte’.

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‘Retenue’ and thus completes the pretendedly autobiographical frame for the ballades copied into the personal manuscript. Briefly, the ‘Songe’ represents a farewell to the absurdities of love. The poetic ‘I’ has fallen asleep when he dreams, in a highly self-conscious reprise of the ‘Retenue d’Amours’, that a vieil homme, whom, shamefully, he only half recognizes, comes to him in a vision: the vieil homme is of course Aage, the messenger of the ‘Retenue’, and he has come to announce that Vieillesse will soon free the poet from the travails of love which are so profoundly unbecoming in the old: Et tout ainsi qu’assés est avenant A jeunes gens en l’amoureuse voye De temps passer, c’est aussi mal seant Quant en amours un vieil homme folloye; Chascun s’en rit ... (‘Songe’, ll. 41–45) And just as it is most becoming in the young to spend time in the ways of love, so it is most unbecoming when an old man makes a fool of himself in love; everyone laughs at him.

Charles is tapping into a medieval commonplace which has it that the persistence of the amatory or sexual instinct in the old is something infantile and demeaning.33 Charles, at his advanced age (43!), can honourably (‘A vostre honneur’, l. 49) abandon the pursuit of love, and reasonably ask the God of Love, to whose service he had so gladly committed himself in the ‘Retenue d’Amours’, to revoke the oath of fealty (‘Qu’il lui plaise de reprandre l’ommage Que lui feistes’, ll. 58–59). When the ‘I’ awakes, he is mortified by his dream: surely he need not yet renounce Love? But finally, recognizing that indeed ‘Vieillesse veult emprendre querelle Encontre moy [Old Age is picking a fight with me]’ (ll. 108–09), he accepts that the time has come to renounce ‘tous amoureux fais’ (l. 123) and to write his congié.34 He begs the God, in the

33

See Brunetto Latini’s comment: ‘Tulles dist, luxure est laide en toute aage, mais trop est laide en viellece; et se desatemprance est avec, c’est double maus, car viellece reçoit la honte, et la desatemprance dou viellart fet le joene estre mains sage.’ Quoted by Hélène Charpentier, ‘Le Livre du tresor de Brunetto Latini: mythe du rajeunissement ou idéal d’expérience?’, in Vieillesse et vieillissement au moyen âge, Senefiance 19 (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, CUERMA, 1987), pp. 41–54 (p. 51), and cf. also my The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context, Cambridge Studies in French, 68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 88–90. 34

On the congé d’amour, see Jay W. Gossner, ‘The Farewell in Medieval French Poetry’, Symposium, 7 (1953), 71–91, 333–48, and Virginie Minet-Mahy, ‘Récupération lyrique et courtoise d’un genre: observations sur quelques “congés d’amour” en moyen français’, Lettres

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‘Requeste’, to return his povre cueur (l. 229) and rescind his fealty (‘En lui quittant son serment’, l. 230). And then, in a final flurry of ballades, ‘La Departie d’Amours en ballades’, Charles continues the pseudo-autobiography: his visit to Love’s Parlement to present his request, Love’s initial refusal, his, Charles’, firm resolve to have nothing further to do with Love (‘Je suis bien loings de ce pourpos [nothing could be further from my thoughts]’, l. 306), Love’s acceptance, Charles’ formal, ceremonial congié, the official ‘Quittance’ accorded to ‘Charles, le duc d’Orlians’ (l. 375) ‘le jour de la Feste des Mors, L’an mil quatre cent trente et sept [All Souls day, 1437]’ (ll. 412–13), his regretful but resigned departure from the court of Love. The poetic ‘I’ will henceforth take up residence in a house called Nonchaloir, whose gouverneur is called Passe Temps (ll. 446, 463–64).35 And here, of course, he will formally renounce his poetic ambitions: ‘Balades, chançons et complaintes Sont pour moy mises en oubly ... [ballades, songs and complaints are now forgotten ...]’ (ballade LXXII, ll. 1–2). His language, the language of love, is rusty; he is now so rassoty [maudlin, foolish], that he can no longer find ‘parolles paintes Et langage frois et joly [painted words, and fresh, joyous language]’ (ibid., ll. 23–24). Fortunately, l’emplastre de Nonchaloir [Nonchaloir’s poultice] (ballade LXXIII, l. 1) is so potent a remedy that l’amoureuse maladie [love’s illness] (ballade LXXIII, refrain) is no more than a memory, and now — he says in the very last poem of the ballade-sequence copied in England — something that ‘je tiens pour grant folie’ (ibid., ll. 24–25). I linger on this sequence of more substantial poems and ballades not so much because of their intrinsic worth — though they are far more interesting than one might imagine from the grudging attention that has usually been paid to them — but because their framing function is so very manifest, and because this says so much about Charles’ design for the core collection of poems as originally planned. Like his predecessors, it seems, like Christine de Pizan or Guillaume de Machaut or the authors of the Cent Ballades,36 Charles arranged his collection to constitute a pseudo-autobiography in which the discrete ballades play to a

romanes, 55 (2001), 19–37. 35

On the passetemps, see Tania Van Hemelryck, ‘Le vieil homme et la mort: observations sur le Passe temps de Michault Taillevent’, Lettres Romanes, 51 (1997), 19–34. 36

Charles had had a manuscript of the Cent Ballades in England: the 1440 inventory mentions ‘ung autre livre de Balades, en papier, commensant Nagueres chevauchant pensoie, appellé les Cent Ballades’ (see Champion, La Librairie, p. 30). Charles possessed a number of manuscripts of Christine’s work (see ibid., pp. 31–32), but not, apparently, a lyric anthology; he seems not to have possessed a Machaut manuscript.

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narrative, sketchy, admittedly, but nevertheless coherent.37 Very roughly, and allowing for distractions and digressions, the earlier ballades (nos I–LXI) are poems wooing his unknown lady: her eyes inspire him with love (II–V), her beauty is beyond praise (IX), he fears her unkindness (XVI–XIX) ... happiness is finally his when the ‘I’ celebrates the Joyeuse Nouvelle that his lady has called herself his amye (XLVII). But his happiness is to be short-lived: soon, Doloreuse Nouvelle dissipates his joy, and the lady is said to be sick, and even dying (LV). There is a moment of hope: perhaps she has been cured (LVI). But hope is also short-lived: soon, she is dead (LVII), and all that is left is mourning so profound that even a May morning can bring no happiness (LVIII–LXI).38 There are, it is true, distractions and digressions — by no means all of these early ballades can be crammed tidily into this pseudo-autobiographical framework39 — but it seems plain that Charles had organized his ballades into what was a means of exploring emotions, from jubilation to despair. He did, it seems, wish his French manuscript, like his English one, to be seen as a coherent, complete summa of his lyric works, in which enterprise, of course, the comic, self-deprecating persona40 that he creates to frame his lyrics, and which, from the ardent young lover of the introductory ‘Retenue’ morphs into the tired, elderly cynic of the ‘Songe’ bidding a rather embittered farewell to love, is surely designed as a way of attending explicitly to the reception of his anthology: in 1440, Charles had designed closure, firmly, into what he clearly intended as his French œuvre. Which of course makes the fate of the manuscript, its appearance as we now have it, all the more intriguing — and I turn now to what I intend as the major focus of this chapter, the riotous ballades and rondeaux, copied energetically onto any spare stretch of parchment and into the new quires incorporated into

37

As with his English ballades: see Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 3–9, and compare my remarks, above, pp. 93–97, on narrative sequences. 38

Even Champion (Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 18–19), who sees the ballades as a simple collection, is prepared to concede that ballade no. LXIX (Poésies, I, 95–96) initiates a narrative sequence which will ultimately lead to the ‘Songe’ and ‘Requeste’. 39 As Arn (Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 3), points out, this is only a ‘whiff of narratorial sequence’: we do not know what was the unkindness of which Charles accuses his lady (XVI– XIX ), we do not know what it is that causes him such distress (XXIII, XXVI, XXVII), and so on. Arn rightly goes on, in the same section of her introduction, to trace the pseudo-autobiography also across ballades LXXII– LXXVII, and then through what are, in the French versions, chansons I– LII (in the English versions, they are roundels 1–52). 40

sort.

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the manuscript which was to become fr. 25458. I need to start, however, by attempting to trace the ways in which Charles seems to have used his own personal manuscript after he had brought what were almost certainly loose quires back with him to a newly-reconstituted court at Blois. For it is clear that very soon after the manuscript had been neatly and systematically copied, Charles himself became if not dissatisfied, at least concerned, with its organization. In 1907, Charles’ first scholarly editor, Pierre Champion, was intrigued by the way in which the carefully copied pages that we have been looking at so far had been retouched, throughout, by the same hand.41 Careful comparisons with documents of known provenance and penmanship convinced Champion that he could identify that hand precisely as Charles’ own — which had carefully scrutinized the ballades copied and corrected omissions and miscopyings;42 Charles may even have occasionally have had second thoughts about a rhyme or a phrase. He had carefully numbered the ballades — had he come to feel, in a world in which numbering ballades had become fashionable (as in Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades, or Christine’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame) that it would be an attractive proposition to make his own anthology follow suit? These discreet touches were, however, as nothing compared to the way in which Charles’ hand had, Champion considered — and there have so far been no serious challenges to his identification — been responsible thereafter for much more wholesale emendations and additions, as well as for the copying of a considerable number of the rondeaux which appear in the less orderly, less disciplined sections of the manuscript. The sort of additions which Charles, it seems, had thought it important to make to his methodical manuscript hint at a very considerable change of mind as to the purpose and function of what had initially been intended as an ordered fair copy. Beyond the neat collection of ballades carefully incorporated into the narrative that I have already sketched, Charles brought back to France another carefully-copied quire containing a further nineteen ballades, all still in the

41 He published his findings, in detail, in Le Manuscrit autographe. They are, it must be admitted, subject to caution: it may often be with the eye of faith that Champion identifies Charles’ hand in, say, the numbering of the core group of ballades. More light will be shed on this in Arn, The Order of Composition. 42 In the ‘Retenue’, for instance, Charles’ hand has added a missing tout in the margin against l. 154, and a missing vous to l. 184; it has corrected l. 304 by adding par above the line; it has scraped away the second hemistich of l. 337 (either to correct it or to emend it), and substituted souvent les mesdisans; etc.

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calligraphic and decorative style of the original manuscript of 1440.43 Here, Charles’ interventions are more wholesale, and more interesting. It looks as if, for instance, he was uneasy about this rather disparate section of the manuscript and about the way in which the ballades it offered could not be contained within the narrative bounded by the ‘Retenue’ and the ‘Songe’, and wanted to make their identity explicit. In his not particularly tidy hand, cramped above the first of the ballades, he labels this particular quire ‘Balades de plusieurs propos’,44 a title which seems to mark his own scrupulous sense that the ballades of the new quire are to be distinguished from that first, coherent, narrativized collection. Take, for instance, the first two poems of this little collection (nos LXXVII and LXXVIIa in Champion’s edition). Both of them had originally been copied, blandly, exactly as were Charles’ own English-copied poems I described above, and with nothing to indicate that they were anything other than Charles’ own. But, again in his own hand, Charles has insisted on anchoring them both, firmly, to circumstance (MS, pp. 224–25): the first ballade is labelled Orlians contre Garencieres, the second, Response de Garencieres. Charles’ poem, mockserious, purports to be spoken by the Dieu des amoureux, outraged by the recent behaviour of aucuns, including ‘Garencieres’ — Jean de Garancières — who claim to suffer all the pangs of love when they are in fact perfectly healthy and perfectly cheerful. Garancières’ deadpan response is in his own voice, and addressed to Cupid: the God should, he says, chastize un homme de mauvaise vie, un enfant malicieux [a hardened sinner, an unprincipled young man] — no doubt, with irony, Charles himself — who has dared to usurp Love’s authority, and to take issue with him, Garancières, in spite of having disgracefully, and at his young age, deceived two ladies in the kingdom of France. The exchange is interesting for a number of reasons, and in the first place because of the identity of ‘Garencieres’: twenty or so years Charles’ elder (he was born in around 1371 whereas the Duke was born in 1394), Jean de Garancières had been chambellan to Charles’ father, Louis, and then had been Charles’ close associate and ally in the Armagnac–Bourguignon struggles between 1410 and 1414; Jean was also, and independently, a poet.45 We know very little of their

43

These are ballades

LXXVII– XCII,

in Poésies, I, 126–47.

44

MS, p. 203. One is reminded of Christine de Pizan’s use of similar titles: ‘Balades d’estrange façon’, for instance, or simply ‘Encore aultres balades’; see her Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Roy, I, 119, 271. 45

See Les poésies completes, ed. by Neal, pp. 52–53. On Jean, see Arthur Piaget, ‘Jean de Garancières’, Romania, 22 (1910), 422–82, and Y. A. Neal, Recherches sur la vie du chevalier poète

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poetic relationship other than through this single exchange, although it is possible that Charles made himself responsible for collecting the mass of Jean’s verse in a single manuscript, BnF fr. 19139, which also contains quantities of lyrics by Charles himself (and by Alain Chartier).46 Secondly, the exchange serves to show the scope of Charles’ core collection: Jean de Garancières had died some time in May or June 1415, possibly at Agincourt, proof therefore that Charles had incorporated into his English-copied collection poems which dated from across the whole spectrum of his poetic life to 1440. But most important, from the point of view of the argument I want to develop here, is the fact that Charles at this point, and subsequent to his return to France in 1440, had wished to ensure that the poems of his own, ‘official’, collection were understood as occasionally social pieces, whose full comprehension and enjoyment would be enhanced if the reader understood that they were dialogues with third parties, and were able to identify the interlocutors. The point is important because this is the first sign, codicologically, and perhaps chronologically, speaking, that the emphasis of Charles’ collection is shifting, and that what was presumably intended as an anthology, in the sense that I defined it in the previous chapter (see above, pp. 77–78), was about to turn into a miscellany.47 For Charles himself to make a dialogue explicit here, in two of the ballades copied in England and which had originally, it seems, been copied with no hint that two voices were involved, is for him to change the dynamic of the collection. And sure enough, within the same quire and into the first pages of the next, and copied in the original ‘English’ hand and with the original English scheme of decoration, there appears a series of five ballades in dialogue with each other, incorporated into the section Charles had titled ‘balades de plusieurs propos’: this time, a poetic dialogue with Charles’ cousin,

Jean de Garancières et son cercle littéraire (fin du XIV e siècle et début du XV e siècle) (Paris: Tournier et Constans, 1953). 46

See Sergio Cigada and Françoise Fery-Hue, in their entry on Jean in the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: le Moyen Age, ed. by Robert Bossuat and others, revised by Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1964), p. 778; see also Les poésies complètes, ed. by Neal, pp. viii–xi. No other manuscript has more than a single poem by Garancières; a few appear in collections like Le Jardin de Plaisance (see Chapter 4) and La Chasse et depart d’amours, in ibid., pp. xii–xiv. 47 Champion, Le Manuscrit autographe, is adamant that the way the manuscript is laid out and the poems copied can be mapped with some exactitude onto Charles’ biography; others are, rightly in my opinion, more sceptical (see for instance Arn, Fortune’s Stabilnes, pp. 37–38, n. 97).

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the Duke of Burgundy (MS, pp. 215–20, nos LXXXVII–LXXXIX, in Poésies, I, 138–44). The first poem, Charles’ own, is datable: ‘Puis que je suis vostre voisin En ce païs presentement [since I am now, briefly, your neighbour in this country]’ (LXXXVII, ll. 1–2) can only refer to a fleeting visit Charles made to Calais in 1439, shortly before his final release.48 It purports to be a ‘letter’ to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, and betrays an understandable longing for peace. War, says Charles, ‘Je la hé, pour dire le voir [in all truth, I detest it]’ (LXXXVII, l. 22), and by his ballade he tenders his greetings to the cousin who was, by now, working towards his, Charles’, release. Burgundy (LXXXVIIa) is bracing: if Philip could, he would long ago have ensured Charles’ ransom, and now he will tout engagier [use every possible means] to ensure his freedom. Charles is touched (LXXXVIII); he is eternally grateful to Philip and his Duchess, and engages himself loyally to them henceforth (‘Et vostre party loyaument Tendray, sans faire changement [I will take your part, loyally and permanently]’, ll. 30–31). Philip (LXXXVIIIa) expresses his heartfelt gratitude: however, he sees no source of the funds for a ransom other than from Charles’ own resources, since the court of France, alas, ‘se maintient piteusement’ (l. 13). And in a final ballade (LXXXIX), Charles throws himself on Philip’s mercy: only he, Philip, can offer him any real diplomatic or financial help (‘En vous ay fiance entiere, Que m’ayderez a finer En bons termes ma matiere [I have every confidence in your ability to bring my affairs to a satisfactory conclusion]’, ll. 22–24). Now, these are not poems of any lyric sophistication — on the contrary, they are diplomatic and political poems designed, pragmatically, to placate. A line or two (‘vostre party tendray… [I will take your part ...]’ ) must, however, have provoked a wry smile or two, given that before Agincourt, Charles’ faction and Philip’s, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, had been at daggers drawn, not to mention that Philip’s father had had Charles’ father murdered, and that if the court of France was in so parlous a condition, it was in large measure the result of the machinations of the Burgundians. Indeed, Philip had, not so long before and indeed during a good part of Charles’ captivity, been the ally of the court of England.49 My point, however, has to do with the copying of this sequence of ballades among the ‘Balades de plusieurs propos’. As with the little exchange with Jean de Garancières, here too the ballades seem originally to have been copied simply 48 49

See Champion, Vie, pp. 313–16.

See Ann Tukey Harrison, ‘Orléans and Burgundy: The Literary Relationship’, Stanford French Review, 4 (1980), 475–84.

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and sequentially with no hint as to circumstance; here too, in his own rather untidy hand, above each of the ballades and disrupting their elegant copying, Charles has suggested the circumstance: ‘Orlians a Bourgogne’, ‘Response de Bourgogne a Orlians’. What is happening, here, is that a text which had been univocal — Charles’ unadulterated complete works — is made plurivocal: embracing and celebrating the fact that his poems are in dialogue with those of other poets. And as I suggested earlier, Charles’ careful manuscript is indeed about to become the locus of poetic dialogue, and on a major, apparently undisciplined, scale. I turn now to these plurivocal, multifarious sections of Charles’ manuscript, the riotous sequences of ballades and rondeaux, in hands of all sorts, by all sorts of poets and poetasters, to argue that these quires and leaves, and the record they provide of copying and mise en page, reveal much about the socioliterary dynamics of particular poems and about the status and role of poetry at the end of the Middle Ages. They are evidence of distinct poetic practices and of the society in which they are embedded: the ephemera of public interchange and poetic performance made concrete in the repetitiveness of reading. But let me start not with a poetaster, but with an indisputable poet: a visitor, in Blois presumably with Charles’ permission if not at his invitation, but a bit of an outsider at the cultured, glittering court. As scholars over the years — particularly and most recently Nancy Freeman Regalado — have suggested,50 François Villon’s visit to Blois can be tracked, intriguingly and concretely, across Charles’ manuscript: no fewer than three of his poems — very various poems — figure there. All three are copied in the same small, neat, regular hand (Figure 5);51 one of them is topical — it celebrates the birth of Charles’ daughter Marie, and therefore locates Villon’s visit to Blois to the year 1457.52 This poem is copied at the very end of one of those miscellaneous quires, otherwise occupied by a series of ballades in different hands: a quire therefore which is not part of the original, ordered group that I have so far been concentrating on. The quire contains, otherwise, a couple of ballades which focus on the theme ‘La forest de

50

See Regalado, ‘En ce saint livre’, and also Gert Pinkernell, François Villon et Charles d’Orléans (1457–61), Studia Romanica, 79 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1992). 51

Sergio Cigada first argued, convincingly, that this is Villon’s own hand: see ‘Studi su Charles d’Orléans e François Villon relativi al ms. B.N. fr. 25458’, Studi Francesi, 4 (1960), 201–19; cf. most recently Regalado, ‘En ce saint livre’. 52

Cigada (‘Studi’) points out that although it might have been composed to mark Marie’s joyeuse entrée to Orléans in July 1460, it more plausibly celebrates her birth.

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longue attente’53 — to which I return in Chapter 3; a quartet of ballades of which the first purports to be in Fortune’s voice, the second an answer to it, the third a response, the fourth, the first stanza of an unfinished ballade, concluding the dialogue;54 and one of those anaphoric display pieces in which late-medieval poets, especially the Burgundians, revel, in which each line begins ‘Plus ...’ (‘Plus ne voy riens qui recomfort me donne, Plus dure ung jour que ne me souloit cent [No longer do I see anything to comfort me, longer a day lasts now than did one hundred]’55). This is, in other words, a thoroughly miscellaneous quire in

Figure 5. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 164.

53

The first on the first leaf of the quire (MS, p. 131; Poésies, I, 165, no. CV ); the second by ‘Jacques bastart de la Tremoille’, on MS, p. 136 (Poésies, I, 170–71, no. CX ). 54

The first two poems are in an identical hand, the third and fourth in another, less regular one: see MS, pp. 140–43; Poésies, I, 174–78 (nos CXIII– CXVI). 55

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See MS, pp. 151–52; Poésies, I, 185–86. The poem is attributed to Meschinot.

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which the only link between poems is formal: Charles himself, and the new poets here, by writing ballades, are conforming if to nothing else then to the generic pattern of the core collection. Which makes it all the more remarkable, of course, that François Villon, the visitor, the outsider, was permitted56 to copy into its final leaves a poem in a quite different and quite complex mode, a 132-line dit57 largely in eight-line octosyllabic stanzas, but which also incorporates a double ballade. Villon’s is a bit of a bravura piece. The rhymes are studiously rich and the frame of reference is studiedly learned, with a Latin epigraph taken from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and with some neatly incorporated quotations from the same poem, a snatch from ‘Caton d’escripture’ (ll. 107–08), the Disticha Catonis, another from Psalm 91, as well as a whole set of carefully flattering Biblical and classical echoes. There is, in other words, a self-serving subtext here: Virgil’s fourth Eclogue was popularly supposed to have predicted the coming of Christ,58 and it is difficult to imagine a better entrée to a court at which one hopes to make one’s fortune than to write a somewhat fawning poem which conflates the birth of the patron’s child with the birth of the Saviour, and which celebrates the child’s name, Marie — ‘nom tres gracïeulx’ (l. 5) — by analogy with that of the Virgin Mary. Was this Villon’s entrée to Charles’ cultured, refined court? The suggestion is perfectly plausible — and clearly, to some degree at least, Villon came to insinuate himself into that circle. We next find him (fr. 25458, p. 163) copying a ballade, in the same neat hand, into the following quire which is exclusively devoted to a series of ballades all on the same theme (the set opening line is ‘Je meurs de soif auprés de la fontaine ...’), and by a series of poets who are often Charles’ intimates (Berthault de Villebresme the prévôt de Blois, Jehan Caillau Charles’ doctor, Gilles des Ormes his écuyer tranchant, etc.), and visitors who are highly placed and even highly regarded as poets (such as Robertet and

56

Or of course abrogated permission: we cannot know precisely how much control Charles exerted, day to day, over the livre des Balades de MS. 57

The poem is on MS, pp. 154–58; Poésies, I, 187–91, and ed. by Jean Rychner and Albert Henry, Le Lais Villon et les poèmes variés and Commentaire, TLF, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1977), I, no. I, and cf. II, 58–65. 58 On the fourth Eclogue, see D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. by E. F. M. Benecke (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), and Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Montbeton, visitors from the Bourbon court).59 I have discussed elsewhere, and in some detail, this sequence of poems and what they might seem to tell us about the socioliterary relations operating across the group of poets60 — and I propose therefore to leave these aside. Instead, I turn to a third little poem of Villon’s, not especially highly regarded, but which seems to me helpful in suggesting ways in which poetic dialogues may reflect the complex stresses of the sort of competitive court society which I sketched, in Bourdieuian terms, in the previous chapter, and with a recondite wit which seems to suppose — and I shall define and refine this term more fully in the next chapter — an audience of intimates, a coterie audience. Villon, it seems — and here I am echoing Regalado61 — had had the opportunity and the time to leaf through the existing loose quires that recorded the poems written, day by day, by the Duke and his circle; this in itself suggests that they were left on a table somewhere at hand, easy of access, and indeed the outer leaves of a number of the earlier quires are grubby and very much rubbed, as if a lot of readers had flipped through them with careless, sweaty fingers (Figure 6a–b). Villon, presumably leafing through the quires, had chanced on a couple of dialogue-ballades, one by the Duke himself, one by one of his intimates, a certain Fredet;62 his own ‘Je meurs de soif ...’ ballade overruns p. 163 of the manuscript — he uses a ten-line stanza rather than the eight-line one favoured by his companions or competitors, and the envoi has had to be copied over-page — and, one rather imagines, somewhat daring, in his own neat, small hand, and cramped below that five-line envoi (Figure 5) he copies an astute and rather waggish response.63 The very placing of this new ballade is interesting: Charles, it may be supposed, had allowed this particular quire, quire no. 10 of the manuscript, to be devoted solely to the eleven ballades on the theme ‘Je meurs de soif ...’; was it a competition, as used to be thought, or simply the result of an evening’s entertainment? Regardless — and surprisingly — François Villon has been permitted, or has dared, to intrude on this sequence by copying

59

Sequence: Poésies, I, 196–203; Villon’s ballade: Poésies, I, 194–95, and ed. by Rychner and Henry, Le Lais Villon, pp. 46–47 (Commentaire, pp. 70–74). 60

See my Poetry of François Villon, pp. 58–68.

61

‘En ce saint livre’.

62

Not too difficult: the two poems occupy the recto and verso of the last leaf of their quire, so would, indeed, have been very accessible. 63

Regalado’s excellent article, ‘En ce saint livre’, to which I am much indebted here, examines these same poems.

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into it a poem, untitled but usually known as the ‘Ballade franco-latine’, which thus elbows its way into a pleasurably playful little dialogue between Charles himself and a poetic intimate, the unidentifiable Fredet (Figure 6a–b).64 This is one of those crisp exchanges in which the Duke and his friends and courtiers specialized, and in a macaronic, French/Latin mode which shows to particular advantage the ingenuities of the participants.65 Fredet, it seems, is neuf en mariage — and the Duke, the author of the first ballade, professes a kindly concern for his health and well-being: his newly-married ardour, Charles fears, is leading Fredet into excess, and Charles offers him a ‘Bon regime sanitatis’ (Figure 6a–b), in an acrobatic mixture of French and Latin very appropriate, in the Middle Ages, for what purports to be a medical regimen.66 Fredet, with exquisite politeness, thanks Charles for his kind advice, but declines it (Figure 6a–b). I give the two poems in full here:67 CIV

CIV

a

Par le duc d’Orliens Bon regime sanitatis Pro vobis, neuf en mariage; Ne de vouloirs effrenatis Abusez nimis en mesnage; Sagaciter menez l’ouvrage, Ainsi fait homo sapiens, Testibus les phisiciens.

[Fradet] Du regime quod dedistis Congnoscens que tressagement Me, Monseigneur, docuistis, Je vous remercie humblement; Mais d’ainsi faire seurement Nunquam uxor concordabit: Hoc mains debas generabit.

Premierement, caveatis

Je ne scay si bien novistis

64

Ballades nos CIV and CIV a in MS, pp. 233–34; Poésies, I, 163–64. Oddly, given that Fredet was such a favoured poetic ally of Charles’ and that most of the other intimates are comfortably documented, it has proved impossible to identify Fredet; see Champion, Vie, and more recently Barbara L. S. Inglis’ introduction to Une nouvelle collection de poésies lyriques et courtoises du XV e siècle: le manuscrit B.N. nouv. acq. fr. 15771, Bibliothèque du XV e siècle, 48 (Paris: Champion, 1985), pp. 37–39. 65

A device much in vogue: Pierre Fabri, in c. 1521, is rather taken with it: ‘il est vng barbare plaisant qui est latin et vulgaire entremeslé ... et est beau, quant il est appenseement faict’ (Le grand et vrai art, II, 117); cf. Paul Zumthor, Langue et techniques poétiques à l’époque romane (XIe–XIIIe siècles) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), pp. 90–93. 66

There is an echo, here, of the well-known medieval medical treatise, the Tacuinum sanitatis; Charles owned a copy (see Champion, La Librairie, pp. 104–05). 67 They appear in fr. 25458, pp. 233–34; Poésies, I, 163–64, which scholars all agree, following Champion (Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 33–34), are copied early in the evolution of the manuscript and of course before Villon’s visit to Blois, in c. 1459. For consistency, I quote from Poésies.

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Figure 6a. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 233.

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De coitu trop a oultrage; Car, se souvent hoc agatis, Conjunx le vouldra par usage Chalenger, velud heritaige, Aut erit quasi hors du sens, Testibus les phisiciens.

L’infinie peine et torment In quibus me posuistis, Se je croy vostre enseignement. Car tant congnoys s’aucunement Fais du sourt quando temptabit, Hoc mains debas generabit.

Oultre plus, non faciatis Ut Philomena ou boucaige, Se voz amours habeatis, Qui siffle carens de courage Cantendi, mais monstrés visage Joyeux et sitis paciens, Testibus les phisiciens.

Je voy trop bien quod dixistis Se qu’on doit dire bonnement Et qu’aussi me avertistis De ma santé entierement; Mais, quant je feray autrement, Le fait d’autres recordabit: Hoc mains debas generabit.

Prince, miscui en potage Latinum et françois langage, Docens loiaulx advisemens, Testibus les phisiciens.

Prince, selon mon sentement, Il fault s’acquiter leaument, Quia qui non labourabit Hoc mains debas generabit.

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Figure 6b. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 234. Charles: Here is a good health regime for you who are newly-weds: do not indulge your wilder desires too enthusiastically; be cautious in your acts. That is what the wise man does, as all the doctors bear witness. And first of all, avoid too much coitus! For, if you make it too frequent, your wife will take it to be a habit, and ask for it as of right, or otherwise she’ll be driven mad, as all the doctors bear witness. Moreover, do not act like Philomela in the bushes, who sang with no song in her heart; rather let your face be cheerful and welcoming, as all the doctors bear witness. Prince, I have concocted a mixture of Latin and French to hand on my trusty advice, as all the doctors bear witness. ‘Fradet’: For the regime that you have given me, recognizing its wisdom, I thank you most humbly; but it is perfectly clear that no wife could possibly give her consent to it: it would provoke endless rows. I don’t know if you realize the depths of despair and torture that I would fall into if I followed your advice. For I am very aware that if I suppressed desire when I felt it, it would provoke endless rows. Of course I can see that what you say makes perfect sense, and that you have only my good health at heart; but if I followed it, what has happened to others makes it plain that it

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Chapter 2 would provoke endless rows. Prince, as I see it, we must do our marital duty; if we don’t make the effort, it would provoke endless rows.

All physicians agree (‘Testibus les phisicïens’), says the Duke, with a neat double entendre on the Latin testis,68 that a wise husband, sagaciter, should avoid ‘coitu trop a oultrage’ — and should certainly avoid behaving like Ovid’s Philomela, and making a public scandal of his (sexual) activities.69 Charles has, he says obligingly, prepared a concoction (a potage) of French and Latin (‘Latinum et françois langage’) as a specific against just such excess. Fredet, mock-serious, offers heartfelt thanks, but declines the lesson: has Charles any idea what debas, what infinie peine et torment would be provoked if Fredet was unwise enough to listen to the Duke’s advice? When you’re married, it’s vital to do your duty (laborare: another obvious sexual pun70) in order to avoid generating (generabit: again, all puns surely intentional) mains debas; no wife could possibly agree (‘Nunquam uxor concordabit’) to the sort of abstinence Charles seems to be advising! This is, in other words, the sort of jeu d’esprit that suggests intimacy, private jokes: it hints at a relationship within which the two poets share enjoyably recreative verse.71 Villon’s response to this little exchange (MS, p. 164; Figure 5) is also comic, and pointedly — even sharply — witty: Parfont conseil, eximium, En ce saint livre exortatur, Que l’omme, in matrimonium, Folement non abutatur; Raison? le sens hebetatur De omni viro, quel qui soit: Fol non credit tant qui reçoit. Et constat, par ceste leccon, Pour conserver vim et robur, Prestat ne faire mot ne son,

68

A similar pun in Villon’s own Testament: see Tony Hunt, ‘Villon’s Last Erection (Testament, vv. 1996–2023)’, in Villon at Oxford, ed. by Freeman and Taylor, pp. 150–58. 69

Metamorphoses, VI, xii. Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus, insisted on proclaiming the fact — and had her tongue cut out by Tereus for her pains; she was turned into a nightingale. By implication, Fredet is showing himself unbecomingly uxorious. 70

Cf. for instance Villon’s Testament, ll. 1398–1400, and cf. Le Roman de la Rose, ll. 19671–74. 71

The subject of Fredet’s marriage is also wittily addressed by Charles and Fredet in rondeaux CXXXV – CXXXVII.

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Souffrir et escouter murmur, Si cunjunx clamat ad ce mur; Fingat que pas ne le conçoit: Fol non credit tant qui reçoit. Fortior multo que Sanson En cest assault convincitur; Contra de Venus l’escusson Le plus fort bourdon plicatur ............................................. Sed quisquis pas ne le conçoit? Fol non credit tant qui reçoit. Prince tressaige, legitur Quod astucior si deçoit, Le mieulx nagent y mergitur: Fol non credit tant qui reçoit.72 In this sacred book, a most profound and excellent piece of advice: that no-one should exploit marriage too far. The reason? Any man’s brains will be addled: a fool will only believe something once he’s hit by it. And he can see, thanks to this advice, that in order to conserve his strength and his vigour, he should keep quiet, listen and put up with complaints. If the wife shouts: ‘To me!’ he should turn a deaf ear: a fool will only believe something once he’s hit by it. Even a man as strong as Samson is the loser in this particular battle; the strongest lance bends when it meets Venus’s shield ….. But everyone doesn’t understand this: a fool will only believe something once he’s hit by it. Wise prince, we read that the most astute can go wrong: the best swimmer can drown; a fool will only believe something once he’s hit by it.

This is a bravura piece: the Latin vocabulary is much more recondite and spectacular than that of either Charles or Fredet (abutatur, hebetatur ...), the rhymes are considerably richer (quel qui soit/tant qui reçoit). More usefully, no doubt, from Villon’s point of view, it is also a piece of adroit flattery. Charles’ advice is, Villon says, parfont conseil; Charles’ manuscript is a saint livre — and Villon also picks up the key adverbs sagaciter in Charles’ poem and tressagement in Fredet’s, not to mention the adjective sapiens in Charles’, and builds them, with delicate flattery, into the envoi by making Charles himself the prince to whom, by convention, any ballade is addressed, and saluting him as Prince tressaige — a complicated conceit designed to draw attention, yet again, to

72

For consistency, I quote Villon’s ballade from Poésies, I, 196. For fuller information, however, see Rychner and Henry, Le Lais Villon, I, 70–74, and II, 70–74.

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Villon’s attentive reading of the Duke’s own ballade (legitur). Villon has also amused himself and, he must have hoped, Charles, with a series of little witticisms: the disappointed termagent wife, conjunx, who shouts a cry of help, ad ce mur,73 a new and ingenious, and neatly near-explicit, sexual double entendre, on the words bourdon and escusson [de] Venus.74 Villon’s is, in other words, a resourceful, meticulously worked little piece — not just the product of an odd moment and a quick glance at a couple of existing ballades; he has had time to read the two source-poems attentively, to write a considered response, and to copy it, neatly if perhaps illicitly,75 into Charles’ manuscript. If I spend so much time on these three ballades, however, it is not for the sake of the poems themselves, interesting though they are; it is because the little exchange crystallizes some of the matters that preoccupy me here. First, I want to draw attention to the social role here, of Charles’ manuscript: that is, to its identity as a place of record and, more important, a source of inspiration for collaborators — poets, readers, scribes, compilers, what the English critic Harold Love calls a ‘scribal community’76 — who thereby acquire a group identity in which certain poetic idioms come to act as signs of cultural sophistication and rhetorical mastery. The manuscript, in other words, shapes the artistic, thematic, intellectual, and social coordinates of the poets themselves, so that the collaborators become knowing and responsive readers on the one hand (as Villon was of Charles’ and Fredet’s ballades), and on the other co-creators in what amounts to a collaborative artistic and social production (as Charles and Fredet seem to have been). They are responsive, in other words, to the manuscript as a means of communication and dialogue.

73

For details of which see Rychner and Henry, Le Lais Villon, II, 70.

74

Bourdon, ‘staff’, is used transparently in the Roman de la Rose, l. 21558, to mean penis, and Villon uses the image of the shield (Testament, ll. 917, 1594) with the same erotic implication; see my Poetry of François Villon, p. 78. . 75

‘Illicitly’ because, as I suggested earlier, Villon is transgressing the material bounds of the manuscript by cramming an extra poem into what is otherwise a uniformly single-theme sequence; see Regalado, ‘En ce saint livre’. 76

‘Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9 (1987), 130–54. A number of scholars explore similar phenomena: ‘interpretive communities’ for Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); ‘collaborative communities’ for Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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The second point to which I shall return in what follows is the way in which the little exchange between Charles and Fredet on the one hand, and Villon on the other, lets us understand something about social relationships at Charles’ court at Blois. The two initial ballades are, of course, a dialogue: Charles is addressing his friend in the second person (pro vobis),77 against a specific pretext (neuf en mariage) when little jokes about sexual continence might be a legitimate amusement; Fredet is responding, equally in the second person, with a cheerfully knowing poetic wink to his patron, and a nicely-judged, deferential familiarity: ‘Je ne scay si bien novistis L’infinie peine et torment In quibus me posuistis, Se je croy vostre enseignement ...’). Charles and Fredet, in other words, are confederates, in a poetic process which cements what I earlier called an élite sociability. Villon, however, and again I echo Regalado, is not an intimate (Figure 5): he is commenting on, certainly not partaking in, the dialogue between Charles and Fredet; the tinge of flattery for Charles and the virtuoso display of acrobatic dog-Latin are necessities for an outsider who has his way to make at the court, and the slightly risky reference to Fredet — is the latter the fol of ‘Fol non credit tant qui reçoit’? — shows Villon to be a poet perfectly aware of power-relations, perfectly aware of where a barbed comment may be pleasing. I am returning, here, to the distinction I drew in my first chapter, between the text ‘event’ and the text ‘monument’. I do not want to suggest — on the contrary — that a reading of the poetic exchanges across Charles’ manuscript can recover whatever specific social occasion may have provoked them; I remain to be convinced that Villon’s little squib is a direct and deliberate attack on Fredet, or that the suite of poems on the line ‘Je meurs de soif auprés de la fontaine’ arose from anything as concrete as a concours, still less from the occasion of repairs to the well at Blois.78 What I want to argue, rather — and I return to Roger Chartier — is that this manuscript, and the others I shall deal

77

The point is made excellently in Regalado’s ‘En ce saint livre’.

78

As argued by Gert Pinkernell in ‘La ballade franco-latine Parfont conseil eximium: une satire peu connue de Villon contre Fredet, favori de Charles d’Orléans’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 103 (1987), 300–18, and also in ‘La Ballade du concours de Blois de François Villon, ou les affres d’un courtisan marginal’, Le Moyen français, 17 (1987), 48–72, on the basis of an item in Charles’ accounts referring to repairs (Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 382 (item 6974)). I remain sceptical of the argument that this latter ballade can be located to a particular occasion: as Champion pointed out as early as 1907, what we know of the dates at which some of the poets of this series made their way to Blois makes it impossible that all of them can have coincided there: see Champion, Le Manuscrit autographe, p. 25, n. 5: ‘A vrai dire, il n’y a jamais eu un concours, mais seulement un thème à développer’.

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with in Chapter 3, are best understood as challenges to the way in which, as modern readers, we may think about ‘the book’: as something that produces, for a reader, a fixed, stable text. These manuscripts, on the contrary, are governed by the forms of sociability; they are sites of inscription, not sites of reading.79 Precisely because of this, however, and for us as modern readers, the ways in which individual lyrics grow out of their manuscript context allow rich crossreadings which can permit the recovery of social relationships; I shall argue that the responsiveness and malleability of the late-medieval lyric can reflect them, not directly, of course — however fascinating it may be to find Charles’ doctor, or his écuyer trenchant, promoted to interlocutors — but at a metacommunicative level. Let me be clear here, and define, briefly, what I mean by ‘metacommunicative’, a term which I employ in what follows. I use it in the sense attributed to it by the anthropologist Geoffrey Bateson, in essays originally published in the 1950s and ‘60s.80 Bateson is concerned with the fact that human verbal communication operates at very different levels of abstraction. Any utterance can be, of course, simply denotative, that is, designed simply to convey information, or to report an event. But utterances also act, very frequently, implicitly or explicitly, as what he calls ‘mood-signs’: those where the subject of discourse is not the information conveyed but ‘the relationship between the communicators’.81 Implicitly, from what may seem to be ‘normal’ communicative statements or propositions can be derived ‘interpersonal inferences’:82 that is, signs that the speakers are cooperative, or playful, or competitive, or even hostile.83 Thus for Bateson, games are a token of 79

As Chartier says (‘Orality Lost’, p. 9), ‘the book’ marks the switch ‘from the singularity of the speech act to its inscription in writing, from the ephemeral of the poetic performance to the repetitiveness of reading’. 80 Notably ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Granada, 1973), pp. 150–66, and two papers, ‘Information and Codification: A Philosophical Approach’, and ‘Conventions of Communication’, in Geoffrey Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1951), pp. 168–211, 212–27. I acknowledge that I was introduced to Bateson by Marotti’s John Donne. 81

‘Information and Codification’, p. 209.

82

Ibid., p. 210.

83

Bateson’s ‘metacommunication’ thus develops one of Roman Jakobson’s functions of language, ‘phatic communication’. See Jakobson’s ‘Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement’, in Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York: John Wiley, 1960), pp. 350–77.

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communication, and when they play or compete, players ‘affirm the fact of shared value premises’.84 By examining utterances not for their explicit content but for their implicit message, analysts can determine such things as the relative role or status of the speakers — and it is this sort of message that Bateson calls metacommunicative, one that is not informative, but ‘focused on the fact of communication with another human being’.85 Here, of course, the connection with Charles and his manuscript is clearer: as we shall see, while the denotative content of the poems which Charles’ courtiers exchange is nugatory, the metacommunicative content is far more interesting, and revelatory of the complex stresses of a sophisticated and no doubt competitive society. I want to use the term ‘metacommunicative’, therefore, to mark precisely the distinction that I made a moment ago, between the irrecoverable social occasion and the recoverable trace of social relationships, between the denotative — usually almost impossible to recover — and what such exchanges can tell us about levels of intimacy, or social preoccupations, or poetry as public interchange, or indeed the performativeness of the medieval lyric manuscript. What we can recover from these lyrics, therefore, is not whatever pretext it was that provoked them. These manuscripts are repositories of exchanges between participants in such determinative coteries, in which the poets leave implicit or explicit traces of their social interactions: traces, for instance, like Villon’s ‘outsider’ status, readable from his third-person gloss, as opposed to Charles’ and Fredet’s second-person dialogue. And these traces, properly evaluated, afford glimpses of the social dynamics of the poetic occasion, and help us to define the interchangeable relationship of poet and reader in a particular social milieu. What we have in the bound version of those loose leaves that lay on the table at Blois, open to readers and poets there, and which François Villon delightedly found, is no longer the neat, well-managed anthology which Charles had brought from England, but a by now rather unruly manuscript which had become, to borrow an expression from Gérard Gros, ‘l’album d’une conversation courtoise’;86 what I hope to do is to reconstruct a part of that conversation.87

84

‘Conventions’, p. 213.

85

Ibid.

86

Gros, ‘Ecrire et lire au Livre de Pensée’.

87

In another interesting article, Roger Chartier shows how, in the Renaissance, the book became the site of what I have called ‘élite sociability’, where reading aloud can be ‘the center of a literate social gathering’: see ‘Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald Weissman

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So how do poets and readers, copyists and scribes, operate as co-creators? What are the social transactions that are, I suggested, discernible across the rather chaotic pages of the manuscript? I want to start with a group of pieces inscribed, in a variety of hands, on pp. 439–41 of the manuscript (Figure 7) — that is, on one of the new quires added after Charles’ return to France, and when, therefore, his poetic court at Blois was well established: four poems which all turn around the theme ‘a remedy for love’. The sequence is triggered, it seems,88 by yet another of Fredet’s poems (rondeau CXV; Figure 7), opening with the line ‘Le truchement de ma pensee’, ‘the interpreter’, or here more exactly ‘ambassador of [his] thoughts’. With one of those pseudo-autobiographical precisions in

Figure 7. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 439.

(Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 103–20. 88

Poésies, II, 356–59. I shall revert again and again to the way in which Charles and his courtiers and acolytes use incipits as the cue for sequences of rondeaux: for an interesting discussion, in a light rather different from mine, see Claudio Galderisi, ‘Les incipits des poèmes de concours auréliens: du refrain aux marges locutionnelles’, in ‘Pour acquerir honneur et pris’: Mélanges … Giuseppe di Stefano, ed. by Maria Colombo Timelli and Claudio Galderisi (Montréal: CERES, 2004), pp. 527–38.

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which courtly poetry specializes, Fredet claims to have sent his ambassador to Amours to complain of the grans dolours he suffers for the sake of his beloved. Playing with the conceit of the embassy, he begs that his sentence, his peine, might be commuted, alegee, otherwise he fears that his life will soon be over. Nothing very remarkable here — although the central conceit, the embassy to Amours, is nicely dramatized: Et quant sa [sc. the truchement’s] raison eut contee, Lui [sc. Amours] dist: ‘Ta requeste m’agree, Car trop leal l’ay [sc. Fredet] veu tousjours.’ Lors fut commandé mon secours ...’ (CXV ) And when he [the ambassador] had given his message, Love told him: ‘Your request meets with my approval, for I have always found Fredet entirely loyal.’ And at that my request was granted.

Nothing here, of course, is anything but banal — and there is certainly nothing sufficiently explicit to tell us anything about what it was that Fredet was suffering from. But what is interesting is the fact that, as we examine the manuscript, we can trace the ways in which the insistent courtly lexicon of loss and grief (dolours, peine ...), hackneyed though it may have been, has triggered a suite of responses from a coterie of poets including Charles; it is on the mutual responsiveness of this suite of poems that I want to concentrate. The first response (rondeau CXVI; Figure 7) to Fredet’s little lament is by one of the stalwarts of Charles’ circle, Simonnet Caillau, who seems to have been a member of a family of minor nobility, and to have acted as an écuyer.89 Simonnet wilfully interprets dolours and peine as deriving from the medical lexicon, and therefore calling for therapeutic help — so that to maulx will respond guerir: Pour bref tels maulx d’Amours guerir, Esgrun de Dueil te fault fuyr, Les poix au veau te sont contraires, Quant les fleurs de plaisans viaires, Sont dedans mises au boillir. D’oubliete te peut servir, Et l’erbe de Non souvenir, A faire bons electuaires, Pour bref [tels maulx d’Amours guerir.]

89

See Champion, Vie, pp. 606–07. Simonnet Caillau is the author of a ballade in the ‘Je meurs de soif’ series (CXXXIIIM ; Poésies, I, 203), and of rondeaux CXVI, CCLXXVII, CCCLXXXIV .

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Chapter 2 Du triacle de Repentir, Pour tes accez faire faillir, Prendras sur les appoticaires; Avecques siropz necessaires, Faiz en sucrez de Deppartir, Pour bref [tels maulx d’Amours guerir.] (rondeau

CXVI)

To recover quickly from the pains of Love, you must avoid bitter herbs, and poix de veaux are wrong for you, when pretty flowers are boiled up. You can use oubliete, and the herb of forgetfulness, in order to make up electuaries, to recover quickly from the pains of Love. To control your bouts of coughing, you will need to get theriacs of Repentance, with all the necessary syrups made from sugar of Parting, to recover quickly from the pains of Love.

That this is a response specifically to Fredet’s lachrymose lyric is shown by the first line: ‘Pour bref tels maulx d’Amours guerir’, where tels, pragmatically, requires an antecedent which can only be the poem that precedes — in other words, Fredet’s — and where maulx has, as I suggested, been taken as concrete rather than metaphorical (as Fredet certainly intended). And the key to Simonnet’s poem is the final noun in that first line, guerir; the rhyme-word institutes an acrobatic lexicon — a conceptual field90 — of medecines. What Fredet needs are potions and tinctures, syrups and draughts: electuaires, ‘electuaries’, triacle, ‘theriacs’ (that is, syrups which are antidotes to poison), siropz and sucrez. The metaphor prompts a whole range of other lexemes derived from the apothecary’s art: Fredet is to avoid esgrun, ‘concoction of bitter herbs’, and poix au veau, which it is not possible to identify absolutely but which are clearly thought of as a food for the despicable.91 Equally, to control his accez, his paroxysms, he should pursue erbe de Non souvenir and Repentir and Deppartir: the rhyme in –ir saturates the rondeau, and the density of phonetic repetition means that the rhyme itself, instituted by guerir, resumes the poem. This is, in other words, a poem where sustained rhyme reinforces sustained metaphor, métaphore filée: where the keyword, guerir, of the refrain, semantically highly charged by virtue simply of repetition, comes to govern the conceptual field of the rondeau as a whole.

90

French critics might use the term isotopie; see François Rastier, ‘Systématique des isotopies’, in Essais de sémiotique poétique ..., ed. by A. J. Greimas (Paris: Larousse, 1972), pp. 80–105. 91

FEW (VIII, 605) quotes a phrase implying that gens à menger des pois au veau are ‘sans courage’.

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That this is indeed a powerful and productive metaphor is demonstrated by three of the poems that follow in the manuscript. One of them (CXVIII; Figure 8) is Charles’ own; it takes the embryonic medical metaphor introduced by Jean de Lorraine (deriving from the keyword maulx), and develops it with a concrete, mock-technical lexicon which imposes an ironic distance between the ostensible subject and the mode of expression: Les malades cueurs amoureux Qui ont perdu leurs appetis, Et leurs estomacs refroidis Par soussis et maulx douloureux, Diete gardent sobrement, Sans faire exces de Trop Douloir; Chaulx electuaires souvent Usent de Conforté Vouloir; Sucres de Penser Savoureux, Pour renforcer leurs esperiz; Ainsi peuent estre gueriz, Et hors de Danger langoureux, Les malades cueurs amoureux. Lovers who are sick at heart and whose stomachs are chilled by cares and despairs, should take to a sober regime with no dismays. They should make frequent use of warm and comforting electuaries, and candies made from sweet thoughts, to encourage themselves. Thus lovers who are sick at heart can be cured and saved from despondency.

It juggles lexemes and concepts deriving from the therapeutic repertoire of fifteenth-century France, and particularly the need for a humoral balance: neither heat nor cold, sobriety rather than excess. But I want to concentrate particularly on two poems which I give in parallel because they are so obviously related (Figure 8):92

92

As edited by Champion, whose use of capital letters has been rightly criticized; see Armand Strubel, ‘En la forest de longue actente: Réflexions sur le style allégorique de Charles d’Orléans’, in Styles et valeurs: pour une histoire de l’art littéraire au moyen âge, ed. by Daniel Poirion (Paris: SEDES, 1990), pp. 167–86, and by Mühlethaler (see pp. 775–76 of his Charles d’Orléans).

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Chapter 2 CXVII De Jehan Monseigneur de Lorraine

CXIX Recepte93

Pour brief du mal d’amer guerir, Esloingner l’air de Souvenir Couvient, sans grant merencolie, Aprés tous mes, mengier l’oublie Pres du couchier, pour mieulx dormir.

Pour tous voz maulx d’amours guerir, Prenez la fleur de Souvenir Avec le just d’une ancollie, Et n’obliés pas la soussie, Et meslez tout en Desplaisir.

De Non Chaloir, pour adoulcir La medecine de Desir,

L’erbe de Loing de son desir, Poire d’Angoisse pour refreschir,

Prendre fault la plus grant partie, Pour brief [du mal d’amer guerir.]

Vous envoye Dieu, de vostre amye, [Pour tous voz maulx d’amour guerir.]

Puis ung beau regime, a l’issir De vostre assex, pourrez choisir, D’une Leaulté my partie, Affin que ne rencheez mye, Faictes Reffuz d’Amour banir, Pour brief [du mal d’amer guerir.]

Pouldre de Plains pour adoucir, Feille d’Aultre que vous choisir, Et racine de Jalousie, Et de tretout la plus partie Mectés au cuer, avant dormir, Pour tous [voz maulx d’amours guerir.]

Jean de Lorraine: To recover quickly from the pains of Love, you should avoid the pains of Memory, and all trace of melancholy; after every meal, you should eat an oublie, just before bed, in order to sleep well. You must take a large dose of Non Chaloir, to sweeten the medecine of Desire, to recover quickly from the pains of Love. Then, as you emerge from your illness, you can choose a nice regime half made up of Loyalty, and so that you don’t fall back into illness, dismiss Refusal of Love, to recover quickly from the pains of Love. ‘Recipe’ [Charles]: To recover quickly from the pains of Love, take forgetme-not, the juice of columbine, and don’t forget marigold, and mix well with displeasure. May God send you, on your lady’s behalf, herbe de loin and pear. Before you sleep, take hemp for sweetness, feuille d’Autre, and carnation, and place them against your heart before you go to sleep, to recover quickly from the pains of Love.

93

Here anonymous; Champion, on handwriting grounds, assumes it is by Charles. In BnF MS n.a.f. 15771, however — to which I return in Chapter 3 — this poem is entitled ‘Recepte de la raine’ (see A. Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil de poésies françaises du XV e siècle, le manuscrit B.N. nouv. acq. fr. 15771’, Romania, 95 (1974), 1–53 (pp. 3–4): ‘Faut-il désormais l’attribuer à la reine Marie d’Anjou, fille du roi René, à laquelle Charles d’Orléans fit présent d’un des livres qui figurent dans l’inventaire de sa librairie?’; see also Champion, La Librairie, p. 39). Note that a poem not connected to the present series by the generative formula ‘Pour tous voz maulx …’, opposite Charles’ on p. 440 of fr. 25458, is also labelled Recepte; it opens ‘Des malades cueurs amoureux’ (Poésies, II, 358, no. CXVIII).

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The first poem here is by another member of Charles’ court, Jean de Lorraine, probably better known as Jean de Calabre, son of René d’Anjou, who seems to have enjoyed, as we shall see in the next chapter, particular favour not only with Charles, but with his duchess Marie de Clèves, and who produced a string of rondeaux for both their anthologies.94 Jean de Lorraine, clearly, builds on

Figure 8. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, pp. 440–41.

94

On Jean, see Jacques Bénet, Jean d’Anjou, duc de Calabre et de Lorraine (1426–1470) (Nancy: Société Thierry Alix, 1997), and, more briefly, Noël Coulet and others, Le Roi René: le prince, le mécène, l’écrivain, le mythe (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1982), pp. 212–16. Champion, Vie, pp. 624–25, suggests from archive evidence that it was around 1455 that Jean was a visitor to the court at Blois. I return to him more fully in the next chapter.

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Simonnet’s rondeau: the repetition of the word assex, which must surely be an orthographic variant on Simonnet’s accez, at the same accentual point in the same line, is surely indication enough.95 But now the game becomes selfgenerating — there is no longer, of course, that tell-tale, pragmatically revealing, tels. Where Simonnet had played with the therapeutic and thus the physiological lexicon, Jean shifts ground to the psychological: the ills to be avoided are memory, melancholy, desire, and his tools are the characteristic reifications of courtly love: Non Chaloir, Leaulté, Reffuz d’Amour. Only one piquant and more concrete detail surfaces: the oublie which Fredet is to eat pres du couchier, is still current and means, conveniently, a little sugary cake. Charles’ poem, printed in parallel above and labelled, firmly, Recepte (Figure 8),96 is patently in dialogue with Jean de Lorraine’s as a number of features show. In the first place, of course, the rhyme-scheme, and a number of the rhyme-words themselves, are identical and even identically placed: Souvenir, choisir. More particularly, the rhyme-words pun energetically with Jean’s: Charles substitutes for Jean’s courtly merencolie, and at the same accentual point, the word ancollie, ‘columbine’. Which brings us to what is most striking in Charles’ version of this poem: the series of arresting metaphors which play with the lexicon of the pharmacopoeia. This is an ingenious, densely figural poem: not only ancollie,97 but also soussie,98 ‘marigold’, fleur de Souvenir, ‘forget-menot’,99 poire d’angoisse, ‘pear from the village of Angoisse, in the Dordogne’

95

I cannot quite understand why Champion’s glossaire, usually so ingenious, marks assex with a ?; Godefroy, VIII, 20, offers assex as a variant spelling for acces, ‘bout’ or ‘attack’ [of coughing]. 96

Note that this is the only one of the poems in this manuscript that is labelled with anything other than the name of the poet or the addressee, or, at most, a generic label (such as rondel: I, XXVII, XCVIII, CIV , etc, or responce: XIV . XVIII. XX . XXII, etc.). Charles, it seems, is drawing delighted attention to his own inventiveness. Note also that this was one of the more popular of Charles’ rondeaux: it appears in BnF n.a.f. 15771 (no. 65), as well as in a number of early printed anthologies and in the Rohan chansonnier: now Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett 78. B. 17; Liederhandschrift des Cardinals de Rohan (XV. Jahrh.) nach der berliner Ms. Hamilton 674, ed. by Martin Löpelmann, Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur, 44 (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur, 1923). 97

On which see Alice Planche, ‘Le temps des Ancolies’, Romania, 95 (1974), 235–55.

98

Feminine, of course, as here, in the Middle Ages: see Alice Planche, Charles d’Orléans, ou la recherche d’un langage (Paris: Champion, 1975), p. 582. 99

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(which Villon also found a useful pun100), racine de Jalousie, ‘carnation’,101 and even, possibly, pouldre de plains, ‘hemp’.102 This is, in other words, a complex, even recondite wit that supposes an audience all comfortably versed in botanical reference, and as appreciative of punning, paranomasia, as one might expect a fifteenth-century poet versed in rhetoric to be.103 But it is also a wit that shows Charles as a highly responsive reader, who picks up resonances and echoes them thematically in ways which demand intense scrutiny not just of any individual poem, but of its sociopoetic context. For what I think we have, in this little group of not especially adventurous poems, is a particularly vivid instance of the social and incremental dynamic of poetry at Charles’ court — in other words, of what I called poetic metacommunication. Rondeau CXV, as we have seen, crystallizes the theme of dolours and peine, via a metaphor building on the metaphor truchement. In rondeau CXVI, Simonnet Caillau responds, with the friendly offer of a cure: he blocks in a new metaphor, with a few sketchy circumstantial details and, crucially, the keyword, guerir. Rondeau CXVII, by Jean de Lorraine, though it makes very little of the pharmaceutical metaphor, nevertheless includes the word merencolie, at the rhyme, which in turn provokes Charles’ ancollie: and it is from the combination of the key rhyme guerir, and the chance appearance of the noun merencolie that Charles derives the dramatic potential, the metaphorical drive, for his own poem. It seems, in other words, as if the dynamics of quotation and cross-reference foster Charles’ creative process — and what I propose now is to trace this process of incremental growth, to attempt to understand the ways in which individual lyrics grow out of the contingencies of a social, coterie context.104

100

Its punning potential was irresistible: see Jean Rychner and Albert Henry, Le Testament Villon: Commentaire (Geneva: Droz, 1974), p. 111. Charles uses the same wordplay elsewhere: see his Complainte, II, in Poésies, I, 262: Charles’ coeur is in prison and ‘il n’a que poires d’angoisse Au matin, pour se desjeuner’ (my italics). 101

See FEW, XIV , 659.

102

Godefroy, VI, 188, finds a single reference to plain, ‘hemp’ — which had a variety of therapeutic uses in the Middle Ages. Is herbe de loin a variant spelling for lin, which figures largely in the pharmacopia? Feuille d’Aultre cannot be traced in dictionaries, or in medieval medical textbooks and treatises. 103

See particularly Cornilliat, ‘Or ne mens’ .

104

The most obvious group, of course, is the one taking part in what is usually referred to as the ‘concours de Blois’; see my Poetry of François Villon, pp. 58–68.

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Let me pursue this point, then, with another set of cross-readings and crosswritings which, I suggest, show the same incremental process with the participants (co-creators) as readers responsive to the dynamic of the manuscript within which they operate. If Champion is right about the order in which the rondeaux were copied,105 then Fredet’s opening line in rondeau CXV was to have an afterlife. At some indeterminate date later, Charles himself picks up Fredet’s opening refrain-line, ‘Le trucheman de ma pensee’, which had sparked the previous exchange, and in emulation, two further rondeaux, each with the same opening line, are copied consecutively (rondeaux CCX, CCXI and CCXII, pp. 398–401 in the manuscript; Poésies, II, 410–12) onto the blank spaces which, as we saw, were left above the Duke’s chansons. Two are titled only Rondel (and are therefore assumed to be by Charles himself ), the third, more informatively, is identified as Rondel du conte de Clermont. With the first two, we can trace another process characteristic of Charles’ use of allegory and personification across successive lyrics: a progressive amplification and reification of the governing metaphor. The first of Charles’ rondeaux (fr. 25458, p. 398), having adopted one of those refrains which he so much favoured (concrete noun + de + abstract noun: compare, for instance, ‘la forest de longue attente’, or ‘le livre de pensee …’), begins to play with the specifics of the chosen metaphor: Le trucheman de ma pensee Qui est venu devers mon cueur, De par Reconfort, son seigneur, Lui a une lectre aportee. Puis a sa creance contee, En langaige plain de doulceur, Le trucheman [de ma pensee Qui est venu devers mon cueur]. Responce ne lui est donnee, Pour le present, c’est le meilleur;

105

Briefly, this time for the rondeaux (see above, p. 87, n. 6) Champion argues (Le Manuscrit autographe) that we should see five distinct phases (‘groupes’) in the recording of rondeaux in Blois: Groupe A: pp. 318–428, a sequence of chansons copied, in England, on the lower half of each leaf; Groupe B: pp. 429–82, rondeaux copied sequentially, on leaves added to the MS in Blois, and covering all of each leaf; Groupe C: pp. 318–428, new rondeaux copied this time in the upper part of the leaf left blank at phase 1; Groupe D: pp. 247–98, rondeaux copied on the upper part of leaves of which the lower part was devoted to chansons; Groupe E: pp. 483–537, more rondeaux copied sequentially across every leaf. The sequence I have just analysed belongs to Groupe B; the sequence I am about to address belongs to Groupe 3.

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Il aura, par conseil greigneur, Son ambassade despeschee, Le trucheman [de ma pensee]. (CCX ) The ambassador of my thoughts, who has come to my heart on behalf of his lord, Comfort, has brought my heart a letter. Then he has presented his credentials in the sweetest of language: the ambassador of my thoughts, who has come to my heart. No response is given to him at present, as is best; his embassy will be dealt with swiftly, by the best advice, the ambassador of my thoughts.

The ambassador (‘trucheman’) is figured, as was Fredet’s in the rondeau (CXV) we looked at above, as an envoy from the seigneur Reconfort to the poet’s heart; he brings letters of credence (‘sa creance’), he is expert in the langaige of courtly dalliance (‘plain de doulceur ...’). Charles plays, intriguingly, with syntax — the careful use of the passive voice in the third stanza, as if the speaker were merely reporting a due diplomatic event — and projects into the future another reception, where the ambassador, after fuller consultation, will be able to complete (despechier) his embassy. With his usual high degree of inventiveness, Charles has added the notions of ‘embassy’ and ‘emissary’ to his repertoire of courtly commonplace — something no doubt particularly suitable for a prince for whom embassies are so much second nature.106 In the second of this series of rondeaux, in other words, with his second poem on the theme, he will exploit the malleability of the image and its dramatic possibilities to play with perspective, and gloss his own creation. Charles’ second poem on the refrain ‘Le truchement de ma pensee’ builds dynamically, even metacommunicatively, on the first, and raises with particular acuteness the vexed and complicated question of the relationship between lived experience and its representation in text. It cannot but provoke hypotheses — unverifiable — as to circumstance: Le trucheman de ma pensee, Qui parle maint divers langaige, M’a rapporté chose sauvaige Que je n’ay point acoustumee. En françoys la m’a translatee, Comme tressouffisant et saige, Le trucheman [de ma pensee,

106

He uses truchement in its more common sense of ‘interpreter’ elsewhere: see his rondeau no. CLXIII (Poésies, II, 384): ‘Et qui n’a pas langaige en lui Pour parler selon son desir, Ung truchement lui fault querir ...’.

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Chapter 2 Qui parle maint divers langaige]. Quant mon cueur l’a bien escoutee, Il lui a dit: Vous faittes raige, Oncques mais n’ouy tel messaige; Venez vous d’estrange contree, Le trucheman [de ma pensee?] (CCXI) The interpreter of my thoughts, who speaks many an alien language, has reported something coarse which I am unused to. He has translated it into French, being competent and wise, the interpreter of my thoughts, who speaks many an alien language. When my heart had listened to him carefully, it said to him: ‘You must be mad! I’ve never heard such a message! Are you from some foreign country, interpreter of my thoughts?’

What is remarkable, here, is the lyric self-confidence with which Charles juggles an image that had seemed glancing, even off-hand, in the first rondeau (CCX). The new rondeau, in its fuller, developed version, sets out another of those enticing little dramas. The noun truchement, which in the first poem had seemed to mean no more than ‘envoy’, is now quite specifically ‘interpreter’ — and themes of language and its interpretation become isotopically and metrically insistent. The message that the interpreter has brought is, we are told with a nice ambivalence, sauvaige: ambivalence, because the adjective’s range of meanings includes ‘foreign’ and ‘alien’, ‘extraordinary’, and ‘boorish’.107 Fortunately, the interpreter speaks divers langaige: another studied ambiguity, since the semantic range of the adjective divers includes not just ‘diverse’, but also ‘strange’, ‘barbaric’, or even ‘malign’.108 The interpreter may be saige, but what he has to transmit is raige, ‘madness’ — and our attention is drawn by this intriguingly divided self: what is it that Charles’ pensee has dared to suggest to her/its rather prissy moi? Ought we to be thinking of something doubtfully erotic? Nothing gives us any clue — but the specifics conveyed at the rhyme display and play with anecdote and fictionality, making and breaking the fictional illusion. It is tempting to look for an anecdote: tempting, but pointless, since any private knowledge or autobiographical self-referentiality that may have underlain either of these two rondeaux is, of course, long lost, however much it may have added piquancy to the experience of hearing the poems at first hand and on first

107

The adjective is not used elsewhere in Charles’ verse; I take the range of meanings from Godefroy, X , 621. 108

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composition. Rather, what I want to draw attention to is the way in which the anthology itself, the act of inclusion in it, seems at some level to have fed the process of personal inspiration and creation, rather as the metacommunicative process seems to have fed it in the group of poems I analysed first, the group of macaronic ballades by Charles himself, Fredet, and Villon. Charles’ first rondeau, rondeau CCX, roughs out the metaphor, with a few sketchy circumstantial details and, crucially, the keyword, langaige. His second, rondeau CCXI, promotes that keyword to the rhyme, and the rondeau is organized as an ironic short narrative with that rhyme-word as the key: it becomes a tantalizing little drama, a dialogue of scandalized incomprehension. And it is to this last point that I would like to draw attention: to the way in which what Fredet had used as a relatively trite introit to his rondeau becomes, in Charles’ second rondeau, but only, as it were, in continuing dialogue with it, the key to a completely renewed inspiration. What underlines this even further is rondeau no. CCXII, the third in the sequence of rondeaux beginning Le trucheman de ma pensee, this time by the conte de Clermont, the future Jean II, Duke of Bourbon, another of the regular contributors to Charles’ manuscript, and a scion of a family which itself held an energetic poetico-literary court not unlike Charles’.109 What the Count does is to pick up the Charles’ (feigned) outrage, in the last stanza of rondeau CCXI: his is a dialogue with Charles’ scandalized vous: Le trucheman de ma pensee Qui de long temps est commancee, Va devers vous, pour exposer Ce que de bouche proposer N’oze, craingnant d’estre tancee. Combien que chose n’a pensee, Dont deust estre desavancee, Comme au long vous pourra gloser ... (CCXII) The interpreter of my thoughts, who has been in my service for a long time, is going to visit you to explain something that I dare not say faceto-face, fearing to be scolded. Although no thought has crossed his mind for which he need be dismissed, as he will explain to you in detail…

109

See David Cowling’s remarks in George Chastelain and others, Les douze dames de rhétorique, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 2002), introduction.

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Here, we can detect another of those metacommunicative cues that help to define the relationship of writer and reader in this particular social milieu but which is only apprehensible if it is read in the context of the two rondeaux by Charles himself that precede it — in other words, if it is read as part of a group, a sequence. The rondeau plays, rather inventively, with gender. ‘I’, the speaker of Charles’ second ballade, says, we remember, that he had been presented by the interpreter of his pensee with a proposition so outrageous that his cueur had been scandalized. Clermont plays with just this conceit: he invents a female speaker, unnamed, who has sent her trucheman to make precisely that proposition, which she has not dared to make face-to-face for fear of being tancee, ‘severely reprimanded’. The unidentified vous here is presumably Charles himself — so that in the Count’s rondeau we no longer have the closed circuit of Charles’, where ma pensee sends an ambassador to moi. But this poem can only be read and understood in dialogue with Charles’, metacommunicatively: as a mockresponse to Charles’ mock-fierce response to the message conveyed by the truchement in rondeau CCXI — who, otherwise, pragmatically, is the severe and probably indignant vous of this third rondeau of the Count’s? The truchement here in rondeaux CCXII becomes not just an interpreter — that is, one capable of transposing language — but an exegete, able to gloser the chose sauvaige which, in Charles’ second and more developed scenario, had so shocked the speaker. What we see here, in other words, is an engagement of poem with poem which manifests an acute consciousness of language — but which means in turn that the three poems should be read concurrently. If they are disengaged from their manuscript context, they lose the social coordinates which make them exciting, and become no more than conventional. If on the contrary they are read in association, they become, conjointly, distinctive utterances forged in response to each other from culturally familiar material. Poetic engagement, and specifically poetic dialogue, within Charles’ manuscript, thus seem to me crucial components in poetic creation. The manuscript is, I have suggested, animated and controlled by dialogue: it thrives on the encounter of multiple voices, none of which, at least in the context of the manuscript, is obviously privileged over the other. What drives the creative process here is a sort of dialogism between intersecting consciousnesses and mutually responsive poets — Charles himself and his coterie. I choose the word dialogism deliberately here, conscious of its Bakhtinian overtones: these are what Todorov, discussing Bakhtinian polyphony, calls ‘the dialogics of successive

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authorship’.110 The poets, including Charles, seem to thrive collectively rather than individually, on what Bakhtin calls ‘the mutual illumination of languages’:111 on the intersection and collision of form and theme and metaphor. This is a prime example of what I have elsewhere called a ‘polyphonic codex’:112 one which sees, to quote Bakhtin again, a ‘plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’.113 In a sense, by inviting his courtiers and his visitors to become contributors to his poetic enterprise, Charles becomes the principal interlocutor in his own great dialogue. The other major point, therefore, that I wish to make about this and other similar manuscripts is that in them, writers and readers leave implicit or explicit traces, at a metacommunicative level, of their social interactions — the ‘interpersonal inferences’ which Bateson considers can be derived, implicitly, from utterance. I shall offer one further analysis, of a final rondeau sequence, in support of that contention. Before I do so, however, let me clarify what I mean by ‘social interactions’. In the first place, I do not mean to refer exclusively to those poems where the rhetoric of the poems is at the service of a particular message — although they are, of course, valuable evidence of the occasional referentiality of late medieval lyric. I do not, in other words, mean the sort of dialogue-poem where Charles — as we saw (p. 124 above) with ballades LXXXIII, LXXXIV, LXXXV, LXXXVII, LXXXVIIA — negotiates social and political advantage with powerful interlocutors like the Dukes of Bourbon and Burgundy. Nor do I mean poems which directly celebrate identifiable historical or biographical events, like the victory of his illegitimate half-brother, Jean, better known as Dunois, at Caen, and the restitution of Normandy to the French crown, which he greets with understandable relish in ballade CI:114 Comment voy je ses Anglois esbays! Resjoys toy, franc royaume de France. On apparçoit que de Dieu sont hays, Puis qu’ilz n’ont plus couraige ne puissance.

110

Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. by Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 111

Quoted in Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 51. 112

The Poetry of François Villon, p. 27.

113

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 6. 114

Poésies, I, 157–58.

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Chapter 2 How dismayed I see the English! Rejoice, noble kingdom of France! We can see that they are despised by God, for they have neither valour nor strength.

The pointed rhyme esbays/hays, the metrical stress on the key adjective franc, are ample evidence of political preoccupations — as is the malign enthusiasm with which Charles alludes to the natural treachery of the English, and to Henry VI’s discomfiture: N’ont pas Anglois souvent leurs rois trays? Certes ouyl, tous en ont congnoissance. Et encore le roy de leur pays Est maintenant en doubteuse balance … (ballade

CI,

ll. 23–26)

Have not the English often betrayed their kings? Yes indeed, and everyone knows it. And their present king’s status is now doubtful.

with its heavy stress on the discourse marker certes. Nor — ungratefully — am I particularly concerned with what might seem another obvious candidate for analysis of this sort: the regular suites of poems which mark the annual round of the court at Blois — the May-Day poems, for instance, or the Valentine’s Day poems.115 They do, it is true, make poetry the centre of preoccupation at Charles’ court, and would seem, at first sight at least, to offer particularly fruitful ground for analysis of Charles’ own state of mind — something which critics since Champion have found dangerously tempting.116 It is certainly true that a little sequence of Valentine’s Day rondeaux, like nos III, V, and VI, can tell us something about the social conventions: ‘Cecile’, for instance, René d’Anjou, who exchanged regular visits with Charles and who was a considerable poet in his own right,117 produces in rondeau V a poem whose lexicon and phraseologies are patently customary: to his ‘doulce Valentine gente’

115

Rondeaux and ballades on these themes are, of course, entirely conventional in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), Chapter 9, and cf. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 55–64. On Valentine’s Day in particular, see Henry A. Kelly, Chaucer and the Cult of Saint Valentine (Leiden: Brill, 1986). 116

See, for instance, in Champion’s Vie, the chapters entitled ‘La vie à Blois’ and ‘Les loisirs’, and cf. Arn, Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 57, n. 155. 117 See Champion, Vie, pp. 611–12, and cf. Coulet and others, Le Roi René, pp. 143–216. René’s accounts record visits of Charles to René’s court in 1447, René to Blois in 1449 and 1457. Champion points out (‘A propos de Charles d’Orléans’) that one manuscript of René’s major poetic work, Le Livre du coeur d’amours espris, contains an éloge of Charles.

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René offers his service for a year (‘Je vous serviray ceste annee’); she cannot but be contente, given that she will be si forte amee [so passionately loved]; he is ready to do her volenté doulce et plaisante [sweet and agreeable bidding]. There is, it is true, a sly little caveat: he will do all this ‘Aprez une seule exceptee ... [with just one exception ...]’ — a phrase which makes clear how far his ardent promises are indeed conventional rather than heartfelt, and which chimes with Charles’ own, carefully desultory maying. Charles had, he says in a rondeau (III) that initiates this little conversation, been tempted to choisir son per [seek out his lady] when he awoke that morning — in fact he was determined to do so. But Nonchaloir, his doctor, felt his pulse and prescribed rest, and the Duke had gone back to sleep, ‘rendormir sur mon coussin [dozed off again on his pillow]’. In any case, Charles is no longer a poursuivant of Love (rondeau IV); now he is simply Love’s herault, and will sit in the stands, act as an arbitrator, distribute prizes, or brickbats to the lours, the clumsy, and ineffectual. He is, he says (rondeau VI), tired of love, tanné, ‘dispirited’:118 Car pour moy fustes trop tost nee, Et moy pour vous fus trop tart né. For you were born too soon for me, and I too late for you.

These ‘occasion-poems’ do not, in other words, seem to me to tell us much other than what we already know about the patterns of the year at Blois. What I am concerned with are the admittedly rather more nebulous but, I consider, more fruitful sequences of poems which testify to the status of poetry as a sort of social currency and which, at the metacommunicative level I described earlier, allow us to detect traces of the relations between the poets of the court at Blois. Take, for instance, leaving aside social occasion, the way in which this same sequence of rondeaux develops, as René d’Anjou pursues the conversation with Charles which started precisely with the Valentine’s Day exchange. What we have here is something that amounts to just such an instance of metacommunication. Charles produces the first rondeau in the series (no. IX): his heart has served Amour, for no reward, so long that now, ‘plus ne lui sera asservy [will no longer be his servant]’. In his response, however, ‘Sesile’ (René, self-styled King of Sicily), is tart, and bracing (no. X): there is no reason to suppose that love will not, in the end, do him good, ‘tel bien que perdrez voz

118

The word means, literally, the colour tan, ‘brown’: Mühlethaler (Charles d’Orléans, p. 433), refers to the Blason des couleurs, which considers tanné obscur to be the colour of melancholy. Charles uses the same metaphor in rondeau no. XXXIX .

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dolours [will be so beneficial that you will forget your dismays]’ — and in any case, Charles is in no position to complain (rondeau XI): Se vous estiez comme moy, Las! vous vous devriez bien plaindre ... Car si tresdolant me voy, Que plus la mort ne vueil craindre. If you were like me, alas! you’d have every reason to complain … for I find myself so miserable that I am scarcely afraid to die.

Charles continues (rondeau XII) with a slightly sour aphorism: ‘Chascune vielle son dueil plaint [Every viol laments its grief ]’; ‘Le torment que [s]on cuer enlasse [The torment that envelops [his] heart]’ is no pretense, and he finishes with a nicely metaphorical flurry, ‘Je sens ou mon pourpoint m’estraint’ — to translate roughly, ‘I know where the shoe pinches’.119 René acknowledges (XIII) that Charles’ response is effective, taking as his first line another, well-known metaphor, drawn this time from fencing, ‘Bien deffendu, bien assailly [nice parry, nice attack]’,120 and Charles opens the final rondeau (XIV) of the sequence on just the same aphorism-with-a-difference: ‘Bien assailly, bien deffendu’; both he and René have shown themselves to advantage, and for his part, he has done good service with his ‘billart’:121 Tresfort vous avez combatu, Et j’ay mon billart bien tenu; C’est beau debat que de deux bons. You’ve defended yourself very capably, and I’ve made good use of my billart; when adversaries are equally matched, it makes for a good debate.

Charles and René, in other words, can congratulate themselves on a beau debat: on their forensic skills and their ease of expression. They can also — precisely because they are deux bons, debating from a position of equality — tease each other, gently, in ways which are clearly more difficult when the relationship and

119

The expression is standard: see G. di Stefano and Rose M. Bidler, Toutes les herbes de la Saint-Jean: les locutions en moyen français (Montréal: CERES, 1992), pp. 491–92. 120

Giuseppe di Stefano quotes analogues from Eustache Deschamps, Chartier, Chastelain and Pierre de Nesson: Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français (Montréal: CERES, 1991). 121

Billart is, as Paul Lacroix points out in Manners, Custom and Dress during the Middle Ages, and during the Renaissance Period (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), p. 71, closer to croquet mallet than to what we would call a billiard cue.

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the respective roles of the interlocutors are less well-balanced, and which are unparalleled in fr. 25458 other than for poets of equal or near equal rank. René, for instance, can issue instructions to Charles (‘Ayez fiance en lui [sc. Amour] tousjours ... [Always have faith in him]’, X, l. 9); can chide him for making a fuss about his distress (‘Car de tous mes maulx le meindre Est plus grant que vostre ennoy [Even the least of my woes is greater than your chagrins]’, XI, ll. 3–4); intimate, even, that Charles may be behaving like ‘un homme lache et failly [a man who is timorous and a failure]’ (XIII, l. 11). Their dense and complex network of shared allusion creates the common humour of friends and equals. These are, of course, coded games: Charles and René respond to each other with a literary language that they share, and which seals the social (and artistic) bond between them. We should not, in other words, imagine that this is necessarily a genuine debate, or a ‘real’ discussion: rather it is a social transaction produced to be experienced metacommunicatively, creating a fiction of intimacy via shared attitudes and a joint fondness for dialogue and debate, via their mutual enjoyment of certain sorts of complexity. The two Dukes are mobilizing certain literary and behavioural idioms as signs of cultural sophistication and rhetorical mastery — and personal affection and respect. And I turn, for my final example in this chapter, to another sequence of poems which, like these, present themselves as artless and unpremeditated: a highly-complex sequence which appears towards the end of Charles’ manuscript, among the last of the poems to find their way onto its pages, and the first group of which turns around another of those ‘set’ first lines, ‘Jaulier des prisons de Pensee’.122 What I want to explore here and make explicit — and I have tried, in Table 1, to map the complex processes at which I shall be looking — is something which I have already suggested: the generative capacity of the refrainline (in this case the ‘prison’ metaphor), and its rhyme-word (with any inflected lexemes indicated by asterisks: prison, prisonnier, and so on). We need to read these rondeaux comparatively, alert to the hints of common significance which pass between poet and poet, and to the comparisons and contrasts which emerge dynamically from them. Read so, read with and against each other, the poems enrich each other by semantic echoes, shared metaphors, and phonetic links; to read so, moreover, is to perceive the fluctuations of the creative circle of Blois, and to become aware of a performative unity in this collection which is as active as is the narrative unity imposed on their collected works by Christine de Pizan, or Froissart, or Guillaume de Machaut. 122

These are rondeaux

Page 149

CCCLXXXIII– CCCXC

in Poésies, II, 512–17; MS, pp. 502–18.

Page 150

SC

Th

GO

CO

BD

HV

CO

CO

CO

HV

CO

384

385

386

387

388

389

390

391

392

393

394

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

(plur)

(sing)

KW C uer

KW

C uer

KW

X

X

X

X

X

topic

Je as

KW

X

X

observer

Je as

KW

X

X

X

X

X

X

Soussy

KW

X

X

X

Aum osne*

KW

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Prison*

KW

X

X

Reconfort

KW

X

X

X

Vieil*

KW

X

Larron

CO = Charles d’Orléans; SC = Simon Caillau; Th = Thignonville; GO = Gilles des Ormes; BD = Benoît Damien; HV = Hugues Le Voye

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

CO

383

KW

Jaulier

Poet

no.

Poésies

Table 1. Distribution of ‘Jaulier’ keywords KW

X

X

descriee

M onnoye

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This particular sequence of rondeaux123 is by a rather mixed bunch of poets: in particular, a coterie in which none of Charles’ interlocutors is of a rank anywhere approaching his, though they are all part of his permanent court — if that is a term we can legitimately use.124 The major participant, and the one who sets the thematic and phonetic tone, seems once again to be Charles himself. It may be unwise to read design into priority in the manuscript, and it is perfectly possible that the order in which any of a sequence of poems is copied is simply adventitious, but it is noticeable how often Charles’ rondeaux are copied first in any sequence, as if their priority would enrich and explain the experience of reading a particular group.125 Here, it is one of his rondeaux, no. CCCLXXXIII, which seems first to employ the opening line: [J]aulier des prisons de Pensee, Soussy, laissez mon cueur yssir; Pasmé l’ay veu esvanouir En la fosse desconfortee. [M]ais que seurté vous soit donnee De tenir foy et revenir, Jaulier [des prisons de Pensee, Soussy, laissez mon cueur yssir]. [S’]il mouroit en prison fermee, Honneur n’y povez acquerir; Vueillez au moins tant l’eslargir Qu’ait sa finance pourchassee, Jaulier [des prisons de Pensee!] Anguish, gaoler of Pensee’s prison, release my heart! I have seen it faint and swoon, lying miserable in the dungeon. Always provided that it can offer a surety that it will return, Anguish, gaoler of Pensee’s prison, release my heart! If it were to die in a cell, you would gain no honour from it; do at least let it out until it has organised its ransom, Anguish, gaoler of Pensee’s prison!

123

MS, pp. 502–07; also explored, but from a different perspective, by Harrison, Charles d’Orléans and the Allegorical Mode, pp. 112–13, and, in the context of discussion of the prison motif, in David Fein, Charles d’Orléans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), pp. 129–32. 124

I mean by this that they are poets who are identifiable from the Blois archives, and whose names recur frequently in fr. 25458. 125 In the existing editions, it can be difficult to grasp the social sequence underpinning the composition of a particular group; cf. the poems copied by Georges Chastelain, Olivier de la Marche and Vaillant, to which I return below, pp. 187–201. Metacommunicatively, to take up one of Charles’ themes was presumably a discreet mark of flattery.

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Now, it is difficult to believe that this is not to a degree politically, autobiographically, coded: surely Charles cannot refer to prisons, or ransoms, without a knowing nod at his own life history?126 Does that explain the signal success of this new theme, and the way in which successive poets, all Charles’ courtiers and intimates, play with it? Certainly, the poem — as is Charles’ way — is very precise on legal and practical terminologies: to allow a prisoner held for ransom to die is indeed felt to be dishonourable, and to hold such a prisoner in a cell, ‘prison fermee’, would indeed be deprecated; to allow him provisional liberty (‘Qu’ait sa finance pourchassee’), against a seurté, was customary.127 Is Charles deliberately playing on his own miserably acquired expertise? Teasingly constructing an anecdotal self which blurs the relationship between lived experience and its representation in text? It is impossible to say, of course — but his listeners, surely, all of them no doubt painfully aware of Charles’ own experience as a prisoner, must, at the metacommunicative level, have relished the intimacy which a shared perception of irony provides. What Charles as so often is setting, then, is not just the phonetic framework — the master-rhyme — of the rondeau, but a latent metaphoric narrative scheme, with its own isotopically insistent lexicon. We are to imagine his cueur, so often a surrogate self, immured by the gaoler Soussy in the cell of a prison belonging to Pensee. All of these are, of course, potent abstractions in Charles’ metaphorical universe:128 a universe in which, typically, Soussy is a cruel taskmaster (‘Dez verges de Soussy batu [beaten by Anguish’s scourges]’, ballade CXVII, rondeau CCCXCVII) who confines his victims, for instance, in his Purgatory (rondeau CCCLII), and who schemes to get them in his clutches (‘Soussy vous vouldroit avoir sien [Anguish would like you to be his]’, rondeau CCXXXIII). The densely figural initial quatrain dramatizes Cueur’s suffering, via, in particular, the carefully pleonastic third line, ‘Pasmé l’ay veu esvanouir’, and the keyword fosse in the fourth, redolent of an incarceration a lot more severe

126

I do not, of course, suggest that this poem is autobiographical, or that it allegorizes Charles’ own life — but it must have been impossible for any reader or hearer of this poem to ignore the referentiality which gives it a peculiar piquancy. 127

On these technicalities as to prisoners and their ransoms, see John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976), esp. Chapter 3. 128

See Planche, Charles d’Orléans: cueur is explored on pp. 628–41, which point out its ubiquity: it appears nearly 400 times in Charles’ lyric corpus. For soussy see ibid., pp. 581–92, for Pensée pp. 641–55.

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than Charles’ imprisonment in England had ever been.129 We are also, as we have seen, to imagine Cueur’s representative, the ‘je’ of the rondeau, exploiting all legal means to liberate him: this is, stricto sensu, an appeal on legal grounds. Three of Charles’ courtiers, it seems, choose to pick up the challenge of Charles’ ingenious metaphoric proto-narrative by concentrating on one in particular of the semantic series I have described here. The first (CCCLXXXIV), in terms of appearance in the manuscript, is by Simonnet Caillau,130 who was, we remember, also one of the participants in the Pour brief du mal d’Amer series (rondeau CXVI), and who was one of the Duke’s écuyers. He adopts a stance which might be that of cueur’s lawyer. Has cueur, he enquires, been condemned to prison par sentence ordonnee: a verdict pronounced according to due process?131 Has he initiated an appeal, a cause, and is it properly conducted? Is his imprisonment legal, or is the Jaulier holding him a grant tort? The second (CCCLXXXV) is Thignonville,132 who was écuyer panetier, grand butler perhaps, to Marie de Clèves, Charles’ Duchess, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, a contributor to her particular album. His questions are to do with Soussy’s own status in Pensee’s prison: what exactly is his, Soussy’s, authority, and from whence does it derive? [V]ous est la puissance donnee De par Soussy, ou autrement? Are you Anguish’s plenipotentiary, or not?

He also presents himself as knowledgeable about prison conditions: Soussy has no right to maltreat prisoners, even if they are kept in close confinement (en fosse fermee). And the third (CCCLXXXVI), and the poet who most elaborately develops the metaphor, is Gilles des Ormes who made his career entirely at the court of Blois, who was Charles’ écuyer tranchant (best translated, perhaps, as ‘equerry’) and later the captain of his guard, and with whom Charles seems to have enjoyed

129

See Louis Thuasne’s commentary on Villon’s ‘Epistre a ses amis’: François Villon. Œuvres. Edition critique avec notices et glossaire, 3 vols (Paris: Picard, 1923), III, 583–87, and Rychner and Henry’s Commentaire on Villon’s Lais, p. 111; cf. also FEW, III, 739 b, and T.-L., III, 35, 2168. 130

Champion, Vie, pp. 606–07; Simonnet was later (by 1470) to become prévôt-chanoine of one of the larger churches in Blois. 131

Godefroy, V , 623, and cf. Jacqueline Picoche, ‘Etude sur le vocabulaire abstrait de Froissart: ordonnance’, Romania, 67 (1942–43), 145–216. 132

Champion, Vie, p. 607; see also below, pp. 150–54.

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playing chess.133 He too is versed in the vocabulary of law, the conduct of prisons — and the usefulness of funds: [J]aulier des prisons de Pensee, Qui tenez tant de gens de bien, Ouvrez leur, il paieront bien Le droit de l’yssue et l’entree. [I]l m’ont commission baillee D’appointer: dictez moy combien, Jaulier [des prisons de Pensee, Qui tenez tant de gens de bien?] [C]ar j’ay cy finance apportee Assez, que du leur, que du mien ... Gaoler of Pensee’s prison who holds so many worthy men, open the doors to allow them in and out, they’ll pay you well. They have commissioned me to negotiate with you; tell me how much you want, gaoler of Pensee’s prison who holds so many worthy men. For I’ve brought the necessary funds, some of them theirs, some mine …

The speaker of the poem, who is unidentified, reminds the Jaulier that he is holding gens de bien who are perfectly able to pay the necessary, and considerable, fees to negotiate their freedom, and who have commissioned him to do so (‘il m’ont commission baillee D’appointer’),134 and he has come with more than adequate funds (‘j’ay cy finance apportee Assez’). The enjambements here, which draw attention away from line-end stress and from rhyme, accentuate the dry legal terminologies: metrically, Gilles contrives to make the rondeau read as if it were prose. This is, then, a mutually illuminating cluster in which the unity of any single poem, driven thematically and phonetically by the refrain, merges into the unity of the sequence. But I suggested earlier that reading these groups of poems allowed us to perceive the fluctuations of the creative circle of Blois — and rondeau CCCLXXXVI is followed by another (Figure 9) which disrupts the initial

133

Ibid., and cf. Pierre Champion, Charles d’Orléans, joueur d’échecs (Paris: Champion,

1908). 134 See Bronislaw Geremek, Les marginaux parisiens aux XIV e et XV e siècles, trans. by David Beauvois (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), pp. 76–77: ‘Pour obtenir une lettre de rémission, il fallait payer, et payer cher, car à côté des taxes officielles s’ajoutaient les frais indispensables pour gagner la sympathie de la chancellerie.’

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sequence and seems to introduce a new phase of activity. The author, again, is Charles himself:135 [D]onnez l’aumosne aux prisonniers, Reconfort et Espoir aussy; Tant feray au jaulier Soussy Qu’il leur portera voulentiers. [I]ls n’ont ne vivres, ne deniers, Crians de fain: il est ainsy. [D]onnez [M]eschans ont esté mesnagiers Tenuz pour debte jusques cy: Faictes les euvres de mercy, Comme vous estes coustumiers: [D]onnez Give the prisoners alms, and comfort and hope; I shall work on the gaoler Anguish to have him willingly take it to them. They have neither victuals or money to pay for them, they are moaning with hunger: that is how it is. Give … Because of their debts, the poor things have been kept on short commons until now. Be charitable, as you always are: Give …

Charles, here, is enlarging the network of allusion and proto-narrative by introducing a new, and nicely scriptural, theme. The addressee, in the four poems we have so far examined, has always been the jaulier himself, Soussy; now, Charles addresses an unspecified and plural vous, on whom he enjoins the duty incumbent on all Christians, the duty to give help and succour to prisoners.136 The image he paints of the prisoners is a pitiable one — something that Charles stresses by playing with metre so that the word ‘crians de fain’ falls, dramatically,

135

This rondeau, as printed by Champion in Poésies, II, 515, raises sharply the problem of the refrain. Here, as is usual, whoever copied the poem gives only the first word of the refrainline, Donnez; is the complete refrain, then, simply the first line (‘Donnez l’aumosne aux prisonniers’), or, as Champion prints it, the first two lines? This is has been debated with some passion; see Nigel Wilkins, ‘The Structure of Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais in Froissart and in Christine de Pizan’, French Studies, 23 (1960), 337–48, and P. E. Bennett, ‘Le rondeau: forme fixe, forme courte, forme brève’, La Licorne, 21 (1991), 21–30. For my present purposes, the matter is largely irrelevant; simply, with this and rondeaux CCCLXXXVIII and CCCXC , I have chosen not to expand the refrain beyond the catchwords of the manuscript. 136

Enjoined on the faithful, of course, in Matthew 25. 36: ‘in carcere eram et venistis ad

me’.

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at a heavy medial pause, and by the use in the second hemistich137 of the odd, emphatic il est ainsy, ‘so it is’. These are no longer prisoners awaiting release against the payment of an expensive letter of remission: they are destitute and therefore, since subsistence in prison was the prisoner’s responsibility, reduced to penury and starvation; if Charles can only inspire sufficient people to give alms, he will suborn the jaulier Soussy into taking them to the prisoners, who are

Figure 9. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 504.

137

To talk of ‘hemistich’ in relation to an octosyllabic line is dubious: cf. Roger Pensom, ‘La magie de la métrique dans le Testament de Villon’, Romania, 114 (1996), 182–202.

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languishing, meschans mesnagiers,138 in miserable conditions unbefitting someone of their social standing. Another of Charles’ courtiers, Benoist Damien, who was a member of a distinguished Italian family from Asti, an intimate of the court, and the Duke’s échanson, ‘cup-bearer’,139 picks up this same charitable theme, gracefully — and no doubt ingratiatingly — playing on some of Charles’ own cues, and making the Biblical echo even more explicit (rondeau CCCLXXXVIII): [N]’oubliez pas les prisonniers, Bonnes gens: aiez en mercy! Il sont en la tour de Soucy Et n’ont ne mailles ne deniers [L]arrons ne sont point ne murtriés, Par Envie on les tient aincy: N’oubliez [F]aictes comme bons aumosniers, Pour la grant pitié que vees cy: Et pour vous priront Dieu aucy De tresbon cueur et voulentiers. N’oubliez Do not forget the prisoners, good folk: have mercy on them! They are imprisoned in Anguish’s tower, and they have not a penny or a farthing to their name. They are not thieves, nor murderers; they are the victims of Envy. Do not forget … Behave like the true philanthropists you are, moved by the pitiful sight that you see; they in return will pray God for you, willingly and heartily. Do not forget …

He embroiders the theme of alms for prisoners by having recourse to what Geremek calls ‘le caractère marchand de la doctrine charitable — “donnez-leur,

138

This couplet is particularly awkward: Mühlethaler in his edition translates ‘pour cause de dette les malheureux ont été tenus avec économie’ (Charles d’Orléans, p. 711) — but it is difficult to disentangle the syntax. Claudio Galderisi, Le Lexique de Charles d’Orléans dans les rondeaux (Geneva: Droz, 1993), p. 220, translates meschans as ‘de basse classe’ and mesnagiers as ‘ouvriers’; neither seems especially helpful. Meschans does, of course, reliably mean ‘pitiful’; mesnagiers seems more probably to mean something like ‘destitute’ (see note on maingnagiers collocated with maleureux in Bulletin de la Société des Anciens Textes Français, 2 (1876), 105. 139

Champion, Vie, pp. 602–03. Benoist was the recipient of valuable gifts from Charles: a fine horse in 1457, 200 ducats in 1460; he is the author of rondeaux CCL, CCLII, CCLIII, CCLXXIX , CCCLXXI, CCCCXXI, and CCCCXXX .

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et Dieu vous donnera”’:140 your charity, in exchange for their prayers. And he amuses himself by making Soucy the name of the tower itself, in the same way as towers of medieval fortresses might be named.141 Benoist is followed in rondeau CCCLXXXIX by another of Charles’ intimates and courtiers, his secretary Hugues le Voy,142 who, in his rondeau, particularizes the prisoner: he is Reconfort (who is, of course, a semantic recurrence, for he already figures in Charles’ rondeau CCCLXXXVI). Hugues reverts to addressing the Jaulier (‘Jaulier des prisons de Pensee, Ouvrez a Reconfort la porte’), so that the connection of rondeau with rondeau is pursued — but the reader senses that the play of echoes is becoming tired: his rhymes (journee/pensee/finee, like Benoist’s (mercy/aincy/vees cy), are poor, and rather than being inspired by their conversation, the poets are becoming repetitious. Reading these sequences requires sensitivity not merely to connection but to disconnection — and Charles’ next rondeau, CCCXC, manufactures a dramatic contrast: [B]anissons Soussy, ce ribault, Batu de verges par la ville; C’est un crocheteur trop habille Pour embler Joye qui tant vault. [C]opper une oreille lui fault: Il est fort larron, entre mille. Banissons Soussy [S]e plus ne revient, ne m’en chault: Laissez le aller sans croix ne pille, Le Deable l’ait ou trou Sebille! Point n’en saille, pour frait ne chault: Banissons Soussy. Let’s get rid of the rogue Anguish, and have him flogged across the town; he’s a skilful thief who has stolen the worthy Joy. He should have his ear cut off: he’s among the top thousand thieves; let’s get rid of Anguish. If he never comes back, it’s good riddance: send him away penniless! Let him go to the Devil — or to the mouth of Hell itself! And may he never come out, hot or cold: let’s get rid of Anguish.

140

Bronislaw Geremek, Inutiles au monde: truands et misérables dans l’Europe moderne (1350–1600) (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 115. 141

See Planche, Charles d’Orléans, pp. 584–85.

142

Poésies, II, 622; Champion, Vie, p. 636.

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This is a new lexicon playing, deliciously, with the language of criminality: Soussy is a ribault [ne’er-do-well], a larron, ‘thief’, a crocheteur, ‘lockbreaker’, who is fit only to be beaten, to have his ears cut off — not an unusual punishment for thieving143 — to be sent off penniless, sans croix ne pille,144 to the Devil or to the trou Sebille, by which also is meant Hell.145 Soussy, in other words, has shifted ground: he is no longer a figure of authority, but a figure of fun — and Charles shows his usual high degree of inventiveness in the use and adaptation of commonplace, in exploiting the malleability of a metaphor, and in exploring the versatilities of rhythm with paroxytonic feminine rhymes (ville/habille/mille/pille/Sebille), and a string of antitheses (Soussy v. Joye, frait ne chault). By contrast with the rather lachrymose rondeaux that precede, this is a poem which is reactive to its own manuscript environment, which relishes the ingenuity with which it imposes a change of thematic direction on what risks becoming a repetitious metaphor. I shall be briefer on the three poems that follow, the first two (CCCXCI and CCCXCII) Charles’ own, the third (CCCXCIII) another effort by Hugues le Voy. In the first, Charles redirects the dialogue by reinstating himself, the poetic ‘I’, at the centre of the metaphor. He is, he says, one of Love’s defferres, literally its cast-off horseshoe: Mon vieulx temps couvient qu’ait son cours, Qui en tutelle me tient sy Du jaullier appellé Soussy, Que rendu me tiens, pour tousjours, [D]es vieilles [defferres d’Amours!] I’m so old, I have to give in to age — although the gaoler called Anguish still keeps me in such thrall that I have to declare myself, for ever, one of Love’s cast-offs.

The core of the poem, in other words, remains the image that Charles and his courtiers have pursued across a whole constellation146 of rondeaux: the image of

143

See Geremek, Les marginaux, pp. 69, 129.

144

The expression is common: see Rychner and Henry, Le Testament Villon: Commentaire, l. 98, and cf. di Stefano, Dictionnaire des locutions, p. 218. 145

Antoine de La Salle claims to have explored the trou Sebille, the Sybil’s grotto, during a visit to Italy in 1440 or so: see his Le Paradis de la reine Sibylle, trans. by Francine MoraLebrun (Paris: Stock, 1983). 146

I borrow the expression from Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 420–28.

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the jaulier Soussy. But where the ‘I’ of rondeau CCCLXXXIII presented itself as appealing to Soussy on behalf of its cueur, here Charles introduces a new emotional dynamic, familiar from much of the rest of his poetic production: the sad resignation to Vieillesse. Charles’ perspective, in other words, has changed. He is now himself, and directly, the victim of Soussy, and indirectly the victim of old age. This is a stance that he develops further in the rondeau that follows, CCCXCII, with a metaphor: here, he is monnoye descriee, ‘obsolete currency’.147 The link here, between poem and poem, is the lexeme Vieillesse which, it seems, has taken over from Soussy as the Duke’s enemy (‘Car vieillesse m’est delivree Comme monnoye descriee! [Old Age makes me obsolete, like currency!]’), and which leaves Charles with nothing but silence (‘Desormais me fault tenir coy [henceforward I must be silent]’). And the link with the final poem in this particular sequence (CCCXCIII), pursued by Hugues le Voy, is Charles’ new simile: Hugues contends that Loyaulté is now a monnoye descriee, rendered obsolescent by Faulceté: Faulceté from whom one cannot escape ‘en maison de duc, ne de conte [in the house of a duke, or a count]’ — a palpable little private joke within what is, after all, a Duke’s household. What I am trying to map here is the compositional self-consciousness which marks not just this particular sequence but the manuscript as a whole: the ways in which an observant reading can detect groupings and evolutionary traces across the poems, which may — we must be cautious — correspond to phases of activity, dialogues, at the court itself. Charles and his intimates feed off each other — as Table 1 tries to show. We should not be misled by the ironic carelessness with which the Duke, and his intimates, treat their own lyrics: the scribbled hands, the apparent miscellaneity of the copying process. On the contrary: these are highly-worked rondeaux which studiously promote relationships between adjacent lyrics and create inter-reflective patterns, and which suggest that we are insufficiently adept at grasping the fact that the essence of a rondeau may lie in the merest shift of a metaphor, or in the movement of rhyme. I do not, of course, deny that to read any individual lyric is rewarding — but the dynamics of this collection, the patterns which govern it, can only be detected from a close reading of particular sequences.148 The varying perspectives

147

Like Villon in his so-called ‘Ballade de la vieille Heaulmiere aux filles de joye’: see my Poetry of François Villon, pp. 89–92. 148

What this means, of course, is that no individual lyric can be representative — which is the danger, I would contend, in anthologies of meilleures pages, and even in editions which single out Charles’ poems only.

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and juxtapositions inherent in this collection suggest a sophisticated tissue of poetical and verbal relationships, consisting of scenes and incidents resonating with each other in so complex a network of cross-references, of echoes so finely interconnected, that it is difficult to imagine that the lyrics were simply a chancy, haphazard collection disinterred from a fifteenth-century glove compartment. Charles’ ducal court is, of course, one on which we are gratifyingly wellinformed — and because of that, and because of what seem to be gestures of autobiographical self-reference, it has been tempting to merge the Duke’s fictional, lyric identity with his actual historical identity. We must not be under any illusion: unlike ourselves, the original audiences no doubt understood the precise personal and social context in which any particular lyric was composed, and knew, therefore, just how circumstances might inform it with ironic wit, or genuine pathos; they might, in other words, have known just how to interpret Charles’ and Fredet’s vigorous sexual innuendo, or Charles’ protestations of soussy. These are, however, things we cannot know with any certainty, and it is for this reason that I have insisted that our interpretative base must remain metacommunicative. We cannot know precisely what were the relations between Charles and his visitors; we can, however, see how Charles expects his interlocutors to share his own intellectual and aesthetic sophistication, his own facility in manipulating courtly convention or social circumstance — and we can also judge, from the layout of the manuscript, how much Charles valued the cultural conversation which he orchestrated and in which he participated. In the next chapter, I want to turn to some other manuscripts which seem to record just such conversations, but about the inscription of which we are, at least in two cases, completely ignorant; I shall hope to show that these too, like Charles’, can be read on a metacommunicative level as cultural commodities which record the social experience of verse-writing.

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S UNDRIE O CCASIONS, S UNDRIE G ENTLEMEN : T HE C OTERIE M ANUSCRIPT

Divers discourses & verses, invented uppon sundrie occasions, by sundrie gentlemen (in my opinion) right commendable for their capacitie ... George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. by C. Prouty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1942), preface, p. 49.

M

arie de Clèves, Charles d’Orléans’ Duchess, is a shadowy, rather insubstantial figure.1 Her uncle, Philip the Good of Burgundy, arranged her a politic marriage to Charles in 1440: politic, because it was designed to cement Charles’ links with the house of Burgundy after Philip had been instrumental in the negotiations which led to Charles’ release from imprisonment in England. The marriage appears to have been happy enough; Marie’s son, of course, was later to become Louis XII. What is interesting from our point of view, however, is that Marie had, we are told, considerable literary

1

On whom see R. de Maulde-la-Clavière, ‘La mère de Louis XII. Marie de Clèves’, Revue historique, 36 (1888), 81–112; G. Lecocq, Etude historique sur Marie de Clèves (Saint-Quentin: Poette, 1875), and Champion, Vie, pp. 317–26, 523–33. A recent article by Gert Pinkernell, ‘La femme aux côtés de Charles d’Orléans: Marie de Clèves (1426–1487), poète virtuel de talent’, in Italica et Romanica: Festschrift für Max Pfister, ed. by Gunter Holtus and others, 3 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), III, 313–21, unfortunately treats Marie’s poetry as largely autobiographical; better is Catherine M. Müller, ‘Marie de Clèves, poétesse et mécène du XV e siècle’, Le Moyen français, 48 (2001), 57–76.

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tastes. She was something of a patron in her own right,2 two of her own poems figure in Charles’ own manuscript, fr. 25458,3 and she possessed a large and quite eclectic personal library consisting not just of the standard pieties, but also of romances and poetry (Cleriadus et Meliadice, Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, Ovid, Alain Chartier among them).4 She also possessed — and it is with this that I want to begin this chapter — a personal copy of Charles’ verse, now MS 375 in the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine in Carpentras.5 Carpentras 375 is a handsome manuscript, through-copied for the most part, that is, for fifty-two of its seventy-eight folios, in two columns in a small, neat, elegant hand. The layout is spacious; the major initial of each ballade is carefully decorated in red or blue or gold, and the minor initials to each stanza are also picked out and coloured. I map the contents of the manuscript roughly in Table 2: Table 2. Contents and copying history of Carpentras 375 Fols 1–52

Poems through-copied in same hand, directly, page by page, from fr. 25458 as at c. 1456

Fols 53–63

Poems copied c. 1456–58, in first hand, from fr. 25458, but no longer page by page and no longer in same order. Includes (fol. 56 v ) rondeau by Thignonville unknown in fr. 25458 (see Figure 10)

2

So in 1470 she gave two livres tournois to the poets Regnault le Queux and Robert du Herlin, ‘en faveur de ce qu’ils ont donné à la dicte dame certains livres par eulz faiz de balades et rondeaulx’: see A. Lecoy de la Marche, Extraits des comptes et mémoriaux du roi René, pour servir à l’histoire des arts au XV e siècle (Paris: Picard, 1873), p. 336; cf. Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 403, no. 7060. 3

Rondeaux nos CXXIX and

4

See Champion, La Librairie, Appendix 1, pp. 115–17.

5

CCXXVI,

in Poésies, II, 364 and 419.

See Poésies, I, pp. xvi–xviii. In her inventory, it is cited as ‘le livre des ballades’ (Champion, La Librairie, p. 116).

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Table 2 (cont.)

Fols 64–75

Fols 76–77

Poems also copied c. 1455–58, but in a miscellany of hands. Includes (fol. 65 v ) rondeau by Thignonville unknown in fr. 25458 Poems unknown to Charles’ manuscript

Briefly, the scribe responsible for those first fifty-two folios has visibly been instructed to make a complete and accurate copy of Charles’ manuscript, as he then had it, irrespective of changes of hand, and with no attention to the order in which the poems might have been copied6 — and he has fulfilled the commission with such earnest precision that he occasionally copies the peculiarities and even the mistakes of the original.7 As from fol. 53, however, that rigid control slips, and the order of this manuscript is no longer that of Charles’. First comes a series of rondeaux and ballades which derive from Charles’ manuscript but which are not copied in the order of the latter, and nor, even more unexpectedly, copied generically as Charles’ always are (the ballades and rondeaux are, in other words, intermingled). Then, suddenly, as from fol. 64, the hands become miscellaneous, with rondeaux and ballades taken pell-mell from Charles’ manuscript and again in an order quite different (Champion suggests, plausibly, that scribes or poets in this section are updating Marie de Clèves’ manuscript by picking up, in no particular order, new poems freshly composed after 1456 or so, and there are, as we shall see, a couple of poems which appear

6

‘As he then had it’, because the major part of it, as far as fol. 52, seems to have been copied before 1456, before, that is, certain sequences had been recorded — so that, for instance, the pieces normally referred to as the Concours de Blois (the poems on the theme ‘Je meurs de soif’: fr. 25458, pp. 160–73; Poésies, II, 196–203) and which include Villon’s pieces are not found here, and nor are certain other later emendations. This is a slavish copy, in other words, of the manuscript as it existed at the time of initial copying in c. 1456. Subsequently, other scribes seem to have been commissioned to update the manuscript (fols 63–76), and seem to have been working on just that in 1457 (when a certain Bertrand Richard was paid xiii s. ix d. for having ‘escript, ou livre de madame la duchesse, aucunes des ballades du livre de MdS’: Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne, III, 382, item 6971); finally, the poems on fols 76–77 on which I concentrate here, and which were in all probability copied au jour le jour. 7

Discussed in Poésies, I, p. xvi.

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nowhere in Charles’).8 Then, finally, on the last couple of leaves (fols 76–77), comes a little collection of poems which are quite specific to Marie’s own manuscript, and which do not appear in Charles’. It is on these final few poems — which make this little section of the manuscript into what I have called a text ‘event’ — that I want particularly to focus.9 But first, let us turn to the two poems that, as I said, appear nowhere in Charles’ personal manuscript — and what I want to stress here is how dramatically they show that Marie’s personal copy of Charles’ manuscript seems to have been available to her particular group of courtiers, just as, it seems, Charles’ was available to Villon. On fol. 56v of Carpentras 375 (Figure 10), on a page otherwise occupied by poems copied in neat, small hands, is a rondeau headed by the name ‘Thignonville’, copied in a larger, rather sprawling hand, over a section of the manuscript which has been scraped clean. It takes up one of those thematic first lines in which Charles’ court specialized: ‘En la forest de longue attente …’.10 A few folios later in Marie’s manuscript, much the same pattern is to be found: at the foot of fol. 65v , also headed by the name ‘Thignonville’, is another rondeau scrawled untidily at the foot of column b: this too takes up a first line, ‘Pour parvenir a vostre grace …’, which had shaped just one rondeau, no. CCLIII, by a certain ‘Damien’, from Charles’ fr. 25458.11 Now, Thignonville’s is an interesting case — because we gather, from another and particularly striking source, that he was a close member of Marie’s little court.12 Pierre Champion, in 1910, reported on a rather fine manuscript, BnF fr. 20026, which had formerly, it seems, been part of Marie’s library.13 It mainly

8

Poésies, I, p. xvii.

9

Fols 76r –77v , transcribed in Poésies, II, 562–63 (ballades), 587, 596–602 (rondeaux).

10

In fr. 25458, the rondeaux are copied, largely, on pp. 415–17, 447–50 (Poésies, II, 419–21, 365–69), and are by many of the stalwarts of Charles’ court, including, as we shall see, Marie herself. 11

Copied onto p. 459 in fr. 25458.

12

For details, see Pierre Champion, ‘Un liber amicorum du XV e siècle. Notice d’un manuscript d’Alain Chartier ayant appartenu à Marie de Clèves, femme de Charles d’Orléans (Bibl. Nat., MS français, 20026)’, Revue des bibliothèques (1910), 320–36. Thignonville produces two rondeaux for Charles’ manuscript: a Saint Valentine’s poem (no. CCLV ), and one of the rondeaux I discussed in the previous chapter, on the theme ‘Jaulier des prisons de Pensee’ (no. CCCLXXXV ). 13

Champion’s conclusions are based on the opening pages which are decorated with her coat of arms and motto.

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Figure 10. Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 375, fol. 56 v .

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contains poems by Alain Chartier, with a sprinkling of the poems inspired by his ‘Belle dame sans merci’, but what Champion found especially intriguing was the fact that on the fly-leaves are scribbled, in a welter of different hands, a whole series of signatures with associated mottoes: he sees it as a cross between an autograph album and a visitors’ book, hence liber amicorum.14 Now, these signatures, it turns out, are those specifically of members of Marie’s court, her demoiselles, for instance, and of members of Charles’ court who seem to have been particularly attached to her. Guiot Pot, for example, was known to have played board games with her as well as with Charles himself.15 Among the signatures is Thignonville’s, with the motto ‘Fors vous seulle’: the person concerned is Guillaume de Thignonville, who was Marie’s écuyer pannetier16 and who, as Champion points out, was well rewarded by Charles’ treasury with gifts of money and a robe.17 Now, as I said, Thignonville is the poet of the two scribbled rondeaux in Marie’s manuscript that I mentioned above, and the second of these, the one on fol. 65v (Poésies, II, 587) is especially interesting: Thignonville Pour parvenir a vostre grace Ma volunté est et sera: Si je puis mon cuer n’aimera Ailleurs jamais quoy que je face. Fors vous seulle tendrez la place; Du seurplus on se passera Pour parvenir [a vostre grace]. Rien ne m’est plus voyant la face De vous a moy il se fera, Autrement non, qui mieulx pourra, Petit a petit desir chace Pour parvenir [a vostre grace]. To acquire your blessing, my intention is and will be to ensure that my

14

All four fly-leaves are illustrated in his ‘Un liber amicorum’ — much more legibly than on the BnF’s microfilm. 15

See Champion, Charles d’Orléans, joueur d’échecs.

16

‘Pantler’, or perhaps ‘comptroller’ of the household; see Elizabeth Gonzalez, Un prince en son hotel: les serviteurs des ducs d’Orléans au XV e siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), pp. 134–35. 17

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heart will never love elsewhere, whatever I do. You alone will hold place in it; there will be no other preoccupation, to acquire your blessing. Nothing is more important to me than seeing you; otherwise not, despite what anyone can do. Little by little it will dismiss desire, to acquire your blessing.

Not perhaps, at first sight, a masterpiece — and partly because of the awkward syntax, and the way in which there seems to be no clear overall sense. But that awkwardness results, in fact, precisely from what makes the rondeau interesting: it is a patchwork of the mottoes of other signatories on the flyleaves of fr. 20026:18 ‘Si je puis’ is the motto of Philippe de Hédouville, who was Marie’s maître d’hôtel, ‘Ailleurs jamais’ of François Faret who was her écuyer échanson, ‘Du seurplus’ of Benoist Damien who was her échanson, ‘De vous a moy’ of Georges de Montasié her panetier, ‘Autrement non’ of Guiot Pot, and finally, and most importantly, ‘Rien ne m’est plus’ of Marie herself. Thignonville’s little rondeau, in other words, is an adroit poetic game, and an earnest of the games played in Marie’s court. It is, moreover, a rather graceful tribute to Marie as patroness and inspiration, and a gesture, comprehensible by the inner circle and marking its belonging, embracing all Marie’s own poets. And not just that: I pointed out that Thignonville was not the only poet at Blois to have made use of the opening line ‘Pour parvenir a vostre grace’; the alert reader will have realized that the ‘Damien’ who had produced the other rondeau in the series must be the ‘Benoist Damien’ whose motto appears in the series borrowed by Thignonville for his own little poem.19 The poem is thus also a dialogue with ‘Damien’. In Marie’s manuscript, Benoist Damien’s rondeau ‘Pour parvenir a vostre grace’ appear on fol. 61r, on which page also appears the first lines of a poem by Thignonville celebrating Valentine’s Day,20 both of them copied in the same neat hand. Is this some indication, perhaps, of how poetic composition functioned at Marie’s court? Did Thignonville compose his Valentine’s Day

18

As discussed, in a wonderfully complex reading, by Müller, ‘Marie de Clèves’, pp. 61–63. I derive the details as to the signatories from Champion’s ‘Un liber amicorum’. Note that the puns make my translation even clumsier than usual … and probably inaccurate. 19

For Benoist Damien, see Champion, ‘Un liber amicorum’, pp. 332–34: he was a member of a family originally from Asti, with whom Charles had excellent relations. Champion stresses the favour he enjoyed at Charles’ court, with regular and valuable gifts; he produced a string of rondeaux for fr. 25458: nos CCL, CCLII, CCLIII, CCLXXIX , CCCLXXI (this one partly in Piedmontese dialect), CCCLXXXVIII (this one in the ‘Jaulier’ series; see above, pp. 133–38), CCCCXXIX and CCCCXXX . 20

In fr. 25458, Damien’s rondeau is copied on p. 459, Thignonville’s on p. 460.

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poem, see it copied into Carpentras 375, note Benoist Damien’s ‘Pour parvenir a vostre grace’, and remember the line four folios later (on fol. 65v) and use it as the cue for his own ingenious little game with the mottoes? Once again, no specific occasion can be reconstructed — but examined metacommunicatively, this shared, private joke is surely a piece of deft calculation: a weapon in a social and cultural competition, a transaction, as it were, with a select coterie to which Thignonville is thereby claiming membership. Once again, in other words, as with Charles’ fr. 25458, the manuscript is not just a way of recording the poet’s participation in amateur versifying; more interestingly, it is a means of confirming social bonds and creating something which — because it seems at least to connote the ‘event’ which provoked it — we might call a fiction of intimacy. Let me pursue this point further with the final group of poems which are entirely new to Marie’s manuscript and which are to be found on fols 76–77. The group is not particularly extensive. It consists of just ten rondeaux and a couple of ballades, along with one of those alliterative acrostic-poems which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are such convenient instruments of flattery.21 Eight of the poems follow the pattern of Charles’ manuscript in being headed with the names of their authors; five are by ‘Jehan Monseigneur de Lorraine’, one each by ‘Monseigneur de Harcourt’, ‘Berthault de Villebresme’, and Pierre Chevalier.22 I want to examine two of them in detail, one of Jean de Lorraine’s and one anonymous (Figure 11). Neither of them is particularly remarkable but both retain some sense of the social environment, the ‘event’, in which they must have been produced. Both, like Thignonville’s, show verse as a preferred channel of relatedness and, from our point of view, both provide first a means of exploring the ways in which relations between individual, group, and culture are inscribed in the manuscript, and second, just as interestingly, the ways in which the manuscript itself — that is, the copy of Charles’ that Marie had had made — acts as a seed-bed for further lyric. In pursuit of this latter point, let me start with one of the anonymous rondeaux (fol. 76v; Poésies, II, 600; Figure 11):

21

This one spells out Marie’s name: ‘Mame angelique, mer d’honneur meliflue, Arbre de vie apportant le doulx bame ...’; for an excellent analysis, see Müller, ‘Marie de Clèves’, pp. 59–61. 22

Jean de Lorraine is also one of the signatories in fr. 20026, with the device ‘Ce mieulx ne puis’: see Champion, ‘Un liber amicorum’, pp. 330–31.

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155

Qu’a mon cueur qui s’est esveillié A faire chançon ou ballade? Dieu mercy! il n’est plus malade Tant a par eaue travaillié. D’Orleans s’est appareillé Aler a Blois mengier salade; Qu’a mon [cueur qui s’est esveillé?] Son harnois fourbira rouillé, Quelque foiz aussi sa salade: Mais qu’il ait joieuse ambassade Tout se trouvera retaillé! Qu’a mon [cueur qui s’est esveillé?] What ails my heart to make it wake up and compose songs or ballades? Thanks be to God, it is no longer sick, now that it has spent so much time on the water. It has made its way from Orléans to Blois to eat salad; what ails my heart to make it wake up? It will polish up its rusty armour, and indeed its sallet [helmet]: provided it meets a happy reception, it will soon be quite recovered! What ails my heart to make it wake up?

This unassuming little rondeau is, in fact, distinctly odd — odd because, pragmatically, it is difficult for a modern reader, or perhaps for any reader outside the circle in which it was produced, to make sense of it. If indeed the cueur is malade, why should a journey by water revive it? Why go to Blois to mengier salade? What is the connection between that and the rusty armour? Once again, we are tempted to imagine that this is simply some sort of in-joke — that it reflects a particular occasion irrecoverable for the modern reader. In fact, however, what seems to have produced the rondeau is not just some perplexing and irrecuperable occasion, but a process more complex, and from our point of view, a lot more interesting. This is, it turns out, a self-consciously derivative piece, and one which assumes responsive and knowledgeable readers able to pick up resonances and semantic echoes from across Charles’ own manuscript and the Duchess’s copy of it: the pleasure it gives depends on the audience’s enjoyment of certain sorts of complexity, on their fondness for crossreference, and on an appeal to shared attitudes and a shared lexicon. The slight poem is interwoven, thematically and semantically, with two quite specific rondeaux included in what Marie d’Orléans has had copied from Charles’ manuscript.23 The first of them, on fol. 50v in Carpentras 375, is rondeau no.

23

And on p. 413 of fr. 25458; see Poésies, II, 600.

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Figure 11. Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 375, fol. 76 v .

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in Charles’ manuscript;24 because it is anonymous it is usually attributed to Charles himself, and is another of those minor pieces of his which seem to invite, insistently, a biographical reading. It begins:

LXXIX

Pour ce qu’on joue a la quintaine A Orleans, je tire a Blois; Je me sens foulé du harnois, Et veulx reprendre mon alaine. Because they are busy jousting at the quintain in Orléans, I shall take myself off to Blois; my armour is getting damaged, and I need time to recover my breath.

There are obvious cross-references here between Charles’ rondeau and the anonymous one from Carpentras 375: the pretence that the journey from Orléans to Blois is healing and rejuvenating,25 that Blois is a good spot to refurbish one’s harnois, ‘armour’. But it is not this rondeau alone that explains the significance of the anonymous rondeau in Carpentras 375. For that we need to turn to a second, and in some ways more direct, manuscriptural frame of reference that is supplied by another of Charles’ own rondeaux (CCCXLVII; copied on fol. 68v in the Carpentras MS), a rondeau which is much more accomplished, and which looks like a celebration of a pleasantly sybaritic, aristocratic lifestyle: Souper ou baing et disner ou bateau, En ce monde n’a telle compaignie, L’un parle ou dort, et l’autre chante ou crie, Les autres font balades ou rondeau. Et y boit on du viel et du nouveau, On l’appelle le desduit de la pie. Souper ou baing [et disner ou bateau, En ce monde n’a telle compaignie]. Il ne me chault ne de chien ne d’oyseau; Quant tout est fait, il fault passer sa vie Le plus aise qu’on peut, en chiere lie. A mon advis, c’est mestier bon et beau, [Souper ou baing et disner ou bateau].26

24

Poésies, II, 334–35.

25

A pretence not unique to this poem: see Charles’ ballade ‘En tirant d’Orleans a Blois’, in ibid., I, 154, no. XCVIII. 26

It appears on fol. 68v of Carpentras 375, p. 477, or fr. 25458; Poésies, II, 490. The poem is one of those copied into the Carpentras MS in miscellaneous hands, cramped, rather

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Chapter 3 Dine in the baths and lunch on the boat, there is no better company on this earth; some chat or sleep, others sing or shout, some compose ballades or rondeaux. We drink old wine and new: it’s called drowning one’s sorrows. Dine in the baths and lunch on the boat, there is no better company on this earth. What the hell …! In the end, it’s a question of passing time as comfortably as possible, enjoying ourselves. I believe that that’s a perfectly good occupation. Dine in the baths and lunch on the boat.

What can be better, Charles seems to say, than a lazy day spent dining on a boat floating along the Loire, after souper at the baing, the bath-house, with plenty of old wine and new — properly savoured27 — and the leisurely, sociable composition of a ballade or two, or a few rondeaux? An invitation, on the surface, to indolent hedonism. And, at first sight, Marie’s anonymous poet seems simply, innocuously, to be playing with cross-reference: Blois and Orleans, his mengier echoing Charles’ souper and disner, his chançon ou ballade picking up on Charles’ balades ou rondeau. But actually, what the anonymous rondeau from Marie’s collection does is to rewrite Charles’ two poems, explicitly, in terms of the refined bawdry which, we realize, has probably been implicit in the originals properly understood, and in a way which is mutually illuminating: that is, the parody itself illuminates the meaning of Charles’ rondeau. The anonymous poet of Marie’s anthology is cheerfully dismissive of Charles’ nicely Arcadian vision. If you drift down the river for souper ou baing, then what you are after is not salade in the more usual sense, and certainly not ballades and chansons; all the associations of the baing are, inescapably, with the brothel and the prostitute.28 A visit to the baing might indeed polish your salade, your helmet (English sallet) — but only if salade is understood in one of its common metaphorical acceptations, as meaning the

untidily, on the page. 27 Which is what is meant by le desduit de la pie: Mühlethaler, Charles d’Orléans, p. 673, translates ‘le plaisir de boire’; cf. di Stefano and Bidler, Toutes les herbes de la Saint-Jean, p. 461 (‘pie’). 28

On the bath-house as brothel, see Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane, Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 5–8, and Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc, Women in Culture and Society Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 97–99.

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penis.29 To burnish your harnois, here, is emphatically not an innocent chivalric act: the expression ‘fourbir son harnois’ is a common euphemism for the sexual act.30 The sexual connotations of joie31 insist on joieuse ambassade as something erotic — and retaillé also has erotic connotations,32 to do with reinvigorating an erection. The apparently unexciting rondeau of Carpentras 375 needs, in fact, to revert to a phrase I used earlier, to be read metacommunicatively, as the record of a complex cultural conversation between two distinct social groupings, one centring on Charles, one presumably orchestrated, or at least licensed, by Marie. Did she enjoy the sexual pun, or, more particularly, enjoy the way that her own poet juggles her husband’s tongue-in-cheek image of the baing as a sort of leisured poetry centre? Understanding the poem thus depends on a close and textual knowledge of the existing corpus copied from fr. 25458, but it insists on a poetic identity for the Carpentras manuscript dependent on but distinct from that of Charles’ fr. 25458 — to do which it seems to rely on a social circle (presided over presumably by Marie?) able to detect the associative, verbal and phrasal, links which betray the genesis of the new poem. It may also say something about Marie de Clèves herself: she is always painted, by those few and largely nineteenth-century historians who have talked of her, simply as dévote and sentimental (douce). This rondeau is something of a corrective. If, as it seems she did here, she relished licentious verse and mildly scabrous puns, then her court needs re-imagining as much more playful, and more independent of her husband’s, than her conventional image would seem to suggest.33 The dialogic character of the pieces — even if the ‘exchange’ was never more than fictional — points, in other words, metacommunicatively, to the connection between lyric

29

See Rose M. Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique: ancien français, moyen français, Renaissance (Montréal: CERES, 2002), p. 347. 30

For métaphores filées based on a similar double entendre on military equipment, see Deschamps’ De la demande d’une vielle a un vieillart par maniere de moquereie et la response sur ce (no. MCCXXV ), in Œuvres complètes, VI, 224–25; cf. Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique, pp. 345–47, and P. Guiraud, Dictionnaire historique, stylistique, rhétorique, étymologique de la littérature érotique (Paris: Payot, 1978), p. 331. 31

Cf., for instance, Moshé Lazar, Amour courtois et ‘fin’amors’ dans la littérature du XIIe siècle, Bibliothèque française et romane, C8 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1964), pp. 112–15. 32

Godefroy, VII, 137.

33

For an interesting and wide-ranging discussion of this point, see Johnson, Poets as Players, pp. 231–87, and cf. Zumthor, Le Masque et la lumière, pp. 278–81.

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verse and social relatedness, and makes the manuscript itself the vehicle for that connection. I shall return to this point in a moment, but first I should like to pursue it via a second of the poems exclusive to Carpentras 375: a rondeau by Jehan Monseigneur de Lorraine, Jean de Calabre, who was, we remember,34 one of the stalwarts of Charles’ court. He has a considerable literary pedigree, and, as we saw in Chapter 2, the poems of his that figure in Charles’ manuscript have the lightness and sureness of touch which characterize the wittiest of Charles’ circle. He joins with Charles and the rest of the court in some of the poetic games of which Charles’ manuscript is a repository, and excels not least because of the cheerfully amoral, devil-may-care, cynical persona that he adopts. Witness an instance in fr. 25458, in which he and Marie both take part in a poetic game which sets the proverb ‘L’abit le moine ne fait pas [Wearing a habit doesn’t make you a monk]’ as a first line.35 Marie uses the proverb straight: she has put a brave face on sorrow; she will smile and dance, although ‘mon cuer pres en dueil trespace [my heart is almost breaking with despair]’; she will conceal her tears, but those who watch her must understand that ‘L’abit le moine ne fait pas [lit. ‘the habit is not what makes the monk’; perhaps ‘fine feathers don’t make fine birds’]’.36 Jean, by contrast, is typically sardonic: no need to bother with sincerity; instead use every artifice, tears, sighs, to seduce — after all, ‘je diz bas: “L’abit le moine ne fait pas”’. Now critics suggest that it is no coincidence that Jean and Marie should thus be linked, poetically, in this way in fr. 25458: Champion says they were très lié[s], Coville talks, on what basis it is not clear, of relations sentimentales37 — and certainly Jean gave Marie a diamond ring engraved with her device,38 and he certainly inscribed his name, as we saw, in her liber amicorum.39

34

See above, pp. 119–24.

35

Jean’s is rondeau CXXV in fr. 25456, Marie’s is CXXIX ; see Poésies, II, 362, 364. Marie’s rondeau here is interestingly analysed in Müller, ‘Marie de Clèves’, pp. 69–70. 36

Charles too writes a rondeau (no. CXXVI) on the same theme (Poésies, II, 362–63).

37

Ibid., II, 623; Alfred A. Coville, La Vie intellectuelle dans les domaines d’Anjou-Provence de 1380 à 1435 (Paris: Droz, 1941; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), p. 170. 38

Quoted by Champion, ‘Un liber amicorum’, p. 331, n. 2: Jean gave the Duchess an ‘aneau d’or taillé et esmaillé a la devise de Madame la duchesse, ouquel est assise une pointe de dyamant’. 39

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Irrespective of the relationship between them, however, the persona he presents in the little group of poems in Marie’s manuscript is quite different from that which he adopts in fr. 25458, but nevertheless quite consistent — and what this shows, I suggest, is how important manuscript context is for the exploration of ambivalent and shifting personae, and hence for understanding the social context of verse in court societies of the end of the Middle Ages. The rondeau on which I concentrate here (Figure 11) is much in line with the proliferating anti-curial literature of the later Middle Ages:40 Je Je Je Je Je

voy voy voy voy voy

mal faire et mal parler, meschez renouveller, loyaulté du tout morte, traïson aspre et forte, par tout tout mal aler.

Je voy hayneurs entre acoler, Verité voy dissimuller: Grans et petis sont d’une sorte. Je voy mal faire et mal etc. Je voy vertus au piez fouler, Je voy amictié desseler, Raison voy muser a la porte, Par mehain voy justice torte Quant honneur veult voile caller: Je voy mal faire etc. I see evil deeds and evil words, I see malice renewed, I see loyalty dead, I see treason flourishing and embittered, I see everything going from bad to worse. I see enemies embrace each other, I see truth concealed: there is no difference between great men and small: I see evil deeds and evil words. I see virtue trodden under foot, I see friendships severed, I see Reason left at the door, I see justice twisted by malevolence when honour takes flight. I see evil deeds and evil words.

Here, the elegance and economy with which Jean de Lorraine had presented his witty, amoral persona in Charles’ anthology is turned to world-weariness and contempt for contemporary society. Jean has an agile eye for an apt metaphor: ‘Raison voy muser a la porte’, ‘honneur veult voile caller [… to strike its sails]’; he uses alliteration with discretion (mal, mal, meschez, morte ...); he uses the

40

On fol. 76r, transcribed in Poésies, II, 601. On anti-curial poems, see the excellent article by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, ‘“Gardez vous bien de ce fauveau!”: Co-textualisation et symbolique animale dans un rondeau de Pierre d’Anché’, Reinardus, 11 (1998), 131–48.

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leaden rhythm of juxtaposed stressed syllables to drive home the universality of his despair (Je vóy par tóut tóut mál alér). So much can be read from the poem in isolation — but this piece needs reading in its manuscript context, and if we do so, we shall discover that it is closely associated with another anti-curial poem, by a ‘Monseigneur de Harcourt’, one of those who, in 1440, had subscribed to Charles’ ransom,41 and who was therefore presumably close to Charles himself and his court. Bouche close, l’oreille ouverte Convient pour le jour d’ui avoir: Qui vieult jouer au plus savoir De l’eschac42 a la descouverte. Car gens de cours sont de tel sorte Qu’il n’est riens plus vray mensongier ...43 Keep your mouth closed and your ears open: that’s the watchword for today, if you want to play the game from opening to checkmate. For courtiers can be defined as the most accomplished liars …

Although these are not response-poems — indeed they are on consecutive pages, in very different hands, rather than written one after the other — both poems nevertheless enter into an exchange of themes, admittedly perfectly conventional (the shiftiness of the courtier, the need for disguise),44 but which are mutually illuminating — though once again we have no clue as to the particular occasion which might have provoked them: they merely borrow a common, culturespecific language (traïson, cautelle), and mark the social and textual affiliations of the two poets. And indeed, in all the poems that Jean contributes to Marie’s anthology, his self-portrait is very different from that of Charles’ manuscript where he is, as we saw, witty and devil-may-care. In Carpentras 375 — was it this persona that Marie preferred? — he is not just the cynic but also the sorrowful and storm-tossed lover (‘Vent a plain tref en la mer de Fortune, Sans gouvernail, en tempeste inportune, Suis la route d’ennuyeux desconfort ... [I am sailing full sail on the sea of Fortune, without a rudder, in a terrifying storm, on the way to discomfiture and misery]’);45 the rejected suitor (‘De qui vous plaignez vous mon

41

See Poésies, II, 621.

42

Eschac, here, appears to be a chess term (‘in check’?). My translation is very approximate.

43

Carpentras MS, fol. 76 r; Poésies, II, 596.

44

See for instance Mühlethaler’s ‘‘‘Gardez vous bien de ce fauveau!”’.

45

Carpentras MS, fol. 76 r; Poésies, II, 597.

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cueur? — De qui? — Voire, de ma mestresse [Of whom are you complaining, my heart? Of whom? Of my mistress, of course]’),46 fighting back the tears (‘N’ay ge pas droit de joyeulx devenir? N’ay ge cause de mon annuy banir? [Am I not entitled to be happy? Haven’t I reason to forget my sorrows?]’).47 What Jean is developing here, regardless, once again, of any possible actual circumstance, is an expedient self quite different from the cheerfully throw-away one that he had inscribed in Charles’ own manuscript48 — a self, however, which has a consistency and solidity which mark the textual affiliations operating in Marie’s little court as opposed, it seems, to Charles’. This is, in other words, a self presumably contingent on its social context, but metacommunicatively readable to modern readers, as were Charles’ selves, from the manuscriptural dialogue with the other poets. What I am going to suggest, in this chapter, is that this manuscript shares with a number of others characteristics which make them vessels for the participation by individuals in a common culture of literary exchange — communal and inclusive — and that, properly read, they allow us invaluable glimpses of the social dynamics of textual production and textual circulation in the aristocratic and princely courts of the end of the Middle Ages: courts in which an anthology is a cultural commodity (to return to Bourdieu’s model of social relations) which offers a discriminating reader-poet the opportunity to register, and to recognize, stylistic expertise and control of form. These are manuscripts which derive from what scholars have variously called ‘scribal communities’ or ‘textual communities.49 The description ‘coterie’ manuscripts is however particularly apt, and I borrow this term from Arthur M. Marotti who, as I said in the Introduction, uses it to refer to sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury manuscripts which circulate poems, privately among friends, clients and

46

Carpentras MS, fol. 77 r; Poésies, II, 600.

47

Carpentras MS, fol. 76 v; Poésies, II, 598.

48

Underlined by the fact that the last of his rondeaux to appear in Carpentras 375, ‘Je ris sans joie a ma pensee’ (Poésies, II, 601) harks back to the so-called ‘Concours de Blois’ group, of which two are copied into Marie’s manuscript: Charles’ own ‘Je meurs de soif en couste la fontaine’ (Carpentras MS, fol. 20 v ), and Jehan Caillau’s (fol. 69 v). Note that the major group of ‘Concours’ ballades (Poésies, I, 191–203) does not appear in Carpentras 375; the implication is that its copying precedes the event proper. 49

See above, Chapter 2, p. 112, n. 76.

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family members.50 Let me be clear: again, as with Charles’ personal manuscript fr. 25458, I am not suggesting that the medieval manuscripts on which I focus allow us to reconstruct the actual social dynamics of, or any actual happening at, any particular court; the fact that I have chosen so far to concentrate first on Charles’ and Marie’s courts may be misleading, in that so much is known about their respective courts and the identity and standing of their visitors. Even so, of course, the actual dynamics of their respective courts are an unknown. We may guess that, unlike us, original readers might have been knowledgeable, able to understand the precise personal and social contexts in which any particular lyric was produced and thus to gauge whether circumstances would have informed such-and-such a lyric with irony, or humour, or genuine despair; they might, perhaps, have known how to relate the sly insinuations of our first, anonymous poet, the poet of the ‘journey’ to Blois, to the Duke’s or the Duchess’ court, they would have known how to weigh Jean de Lorraine’s protestations of worldly ennui, or indignation, against his public and familiar self, where we have no way of judging how far the fictional Jean merges with the actual, historical one. What I want to explore now, however, are manuscripts where our information is less extensive and where we have no evidence other than the manuscriptural — and what I want to suggest is that these ‘anonymous’ anthologies are valuable socioliterary documents which, like Carpentras 375, allow us to see how social milieu determines the shared, coterie-centred literary forms, conventions, lexica, and idioms via which, to quote Marotti, ‘authorship dissolves into group ownership of texts’.51 I propose to focus on three particular manuscripts which can be seen as coterie manuscripts in Marotti’s terms, each occupied largely by the relentless rondeaux of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance: two manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.a.f. 15771 and fr. 9223, and a third now in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels, MS 10572. I shall concentrate on the one hand on the textual vicissitudes of the body of poems that circulates from anthology to anthology, on the other on the way in which new poems work as self-advertisement or self-definition for a particular coterie. Let me start with the first two of these manuscripts, BnF fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771, which are indisputably related, which are often described as if their contents were largely interchangeable, and which are both linked — via poets in 50

In his John Donne, and his Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 51

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common — to Charles’ court at Blois.52 Their status is, it is important to note, rather different to that of Charles’ and Marie’s manuscripts which, I have argued, are rather more visibly coterie manuscripts: the changing hands make them identifiably a storehouse for the lyric treasure53 that came from encounters and games within a particular court. Both fr. 92232 and n.a.f. 15771 are copies of what may have been manuscripts of that kind — indeed, I shall argue that that was, in all probability, the case. If so, however, the shared core selection preexisted their creation: these two manuscripts are indisputably derived from the same exemplar, though probably with some intermediate sources. They have a number of mistakes in common.54 Both, for instance, fail to recognize the poet Robertet, and give us Robert Tait; both, misleadingly, call Antoine de Cuise Antoine de Guise;55 both misread certain lines (for instance, in one of Blosseville’s rondeaux, no. LV, a line that should clearly read ‘Que je vous choysy comme dame’ becomes ‘... conte dame’ in n.a.f. 15771, fol. 29r (no. LV), and ‘... toute dame’ in fr. 9223, fol. 37r (no. LXIX); the line must presumably have been faulty in the exemplar). Neither manuscript can be dated with confidence — simply, they appear to date from the end of the fifteenth century — and nor can the exemplar(s) from which they were copied — the shared core collection must have been composed in the mid-1450s.56 All scholars agree, therefore, that the two manuscripts are interrelated — but my main interest, here, is on the ways in which the two collections differ, and on what this tells us about the collective enterprises that may have brought them into being.

52

BnF fr. 9223 is edited by Gaston Raynaud in Rondeaux et autres poésies du XV e siècle; n.a.f. 15771 by Inglis in Une nouvelle collection. 53

I borrow the phrase from Cerquiglini-Toulet’s article ‘Fullness and Emptiness’.

54

See Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, pp. 5–6, and Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 17–18. 55

Robert Tait for Robertet: see n.a.f. 15771, fol. 23v and fr. 9223, fol. 34 r etc.; Antoine de Guise for Antoine de Cuise: see n.a.f. 15771, fol. 9 r etc., and fr. 9223, fol. 8 v etc. Note that Charles’ own manuscript, BnF fr. 25458, gives the two names de Cuise correctly. The misspelling de Guise misled Raynaud (Rondeaux, p. xviii) into identifying what seemed to be Antoine de Guise; see Pierre Champion, ‘Remarques sur un recueil de poésies du milieu du XV e siècle (B.N. fr. 9223)’, Romania, 48 (1922), 106–14. 56

See Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, p. 5, Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 63–64, Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud, pp. iv–v. N.a.f. 15771 dates to 1453–56; fr. 9223 to the latter half of the fifteenth century.

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First, then, BnF fr. 9223, edited in 1889 by the tireless Gaston Raynaud, almost in its entirety, for the Société des Anciens Textes Français, but largely ignored ever since.57 It is a small (octavo), rather handsome, vellum volume, written in an elegant and legible hand (Figure 12). There is usually no more than one lyric per page, with a gilt or coloured initial letter surrounded with red or blue pen-flourishing, and with gilt or coloured letters opening each stanza. As

Figure 12. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9223, fol. 12 r .

57

For reasons to do with his title (Rondeaux et autres poésies), Raynaud did not publish the anonymous Debat de la vie et de la mort (fols 1–6) which may be by Blosseville (now ed. by Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 365–72). Very soon after Raynaud published his edition, the even more indefatigable Champion (‘Remarques’) corrected some of his proposed identifications (cf. also Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 19–62). Otherwise, until now with Dara, ‘Recueils’, fr. 9223 has figured largely as a footnote to work on other manuscripts.

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with Charles’ manuscript, fr. 25458, as with Marie’s, and as with the other anthology, n.a.f. 15771, with which I am concerned here, almost every poem has its poet’s name neatly inscribed above it. The hand and the decoration throughout are identical, but the manuscript nevertheless divides into two distinct sections — on which Table 3 is illuminating.58 The first five quires — as far, that is, as Raynaud’s poem no. CXXXII on fol. 69r — include a sizeable block of nineteen poems derived from Charles’ personal manuscript or a copy of it. The principal contents are, however, poems by poets who are very familiar from Charles’ manuscript and from the records of Blois (Monseigneur d’Orléans, Busnois, Fredet, Blosseville, Vaillant, Meschinot) but which have not derived from fr. 25458. There is a very considerable overlap with the contents of n.a.f. 15771; in some cases, where information as to dating can be discovered, it is clear that some of the content very much predates the remainder.59 Everything suggests, in other words, that this first part of the manuscript is collected from miscellaneous, but already existing, sources. However, those shared poems occupy only the earlier part of the manuscript. The last few folios of the fifth quire (fols 69v–72v) are blank, and the two final quires (fols 73r–104v), although the hand and the decoration remain identical, contain some sixty-three poems (nos CXXXII–CXCV) which are by poets who are otherwise unfamiliar, who are shared neither with Charles’ manuscript nor with n.a.f. 15771, and who seem largely to be particular to fr. 9223.60 58

The manuscript does not, however, appear to be a composite: the layout and decoration remain identical. The most plausible suggestion (see below, and cf. Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, p. 33, n. 105) is that the earlier part is an anthology intended for Jacques de Luxembourg whom Inglis sees as the patron, the second part being attached to the first under Jacques’ direction. 59

As Raynaud points out (Rondeaux, p. iv), five poems (nos L , LX , CLXXVI, CLXXIX , and are attributed to Jean de Lorraine or de Calabre, who received the title only in 1453; by contrast, one of Blosseville’s pieces (no. LXXVI) mentions Valentina Visconti, Charles d’Orléans’ mother, who died in 1408. Note that some of Raynaud’s information as to dating (for instance, that based on his identifications of Blosseville and ‘de Guise’ — more properly ‘de Cuise’ — is subject to caution: see Champion, ‘Remarques’ and Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis. CLXXXI)

60

It is important to note, moreover, that the second scribe seems not to be familiar with the poems copied by the first: a rondeau, ‘Mort trescruelle et maudite’ (no. LXXXV ) which appears in the first section (fol. 45d ) attributed to ‘Regné d’Orenge’ reappears in the second part as no. CLXXII, under the name Foullée. The copyist has not realized that René d’Orenge and ‘Foullée’ are the same person; see Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, pp. 18–19, and Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 50–52.

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Table 3. Contents of fr. 9223 compared with fr. 25458 and n.a.f. 15771 fr. 9223 (Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud) 1–3

Poet’s name

fr. 25458 (page in MS; rondeau in Poésies)

n.a.f. 15771 (Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis)

Blosseville

80, 86, 94

4

Tannegui du Chastel

50

5

Fredet

6

Mons. de Cleremont

7

Anthoine de Guise

59

Vaillant

8, 35

8–9 10 11–19

20 21–22

Mons. d’Orléans Vaillant

p. 385;

L

–, 88, 77, –, –, 81, –, 39, 54

Anthoine de Guise Vaillant

24, –

23

Anthoine de Guise

85

24

Mons. D’Orvilier

25

Blosseville

26

Mons. De Torcy

27

Fredet

28

AN O N Y M O U S

45

64

29–30

Blosseville

36, 37

31–32

Messinot

–, 52

33

Blosseville

33

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fr. 9223

Poet’s name

fr. 25458

n.a.f. 15771

34

Fredet

35

Gilles

p. 448;

CXXXIV

42

36

Fredet

p. 416;

CCVII

60

37

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 417; CCVIII

61

Fredet

p. 432; CII p. 421; CCXXXII

40

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 421;

LXXXVII

41

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 411;

LXXVII

42

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 410;

CCXXII

43

Fredet

p. 439;

CXV

44

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 424; CCXXXVI

45

Fredet

p. 419;

CCXXX

7

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 419; p. 414;

LXXXV

–, 62

38–39

46–47

CCXXV

48

Madame d’Orléans

p. 415;

CCVI

49

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 399;

CCXI

50

Jehan, mons. de Lorraine

p. 440;

CXVII

51

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 397;

CCIX

52

Mons de Bridoré

p. 437;

CXI

2

53

Mons. d’Orléans

p. 437;

LIII

3

54

Vaillant

55

Tannegui du Chastell

46

Blosseville

–, 82

56–57

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fr. 9223

Poet’s name

fr. 25458

n.a.f. 15771

58

Maistre Martin le Franc

57

59

Anthoine de Guise

38

60

Jehan, mons. de Lorraine

9

61

Response de Blosseville

10

62

Blosseville

47

63

Robertet

44

64

Anthoine de Guise

51

65

Monbeton

91

66

Mons. de Tais

21

67

Jammette de Nesson

75

68

Tannegui du Chastel

76

69–70

Blosseville

55, –

71

Monbeton

31

72

Blosseville

49

73

Monbeton

58

74

Blosseville

75

Anthoine de Guise

68

Blosseville

–, 53, 90, 95, –, 32, 40, 41, 43

85

Regné d’Orange

16

86

Monbeton

69

87

Jehanne Filleul

73

76–84

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fr. 9223 88 89–90 91

Poet’s name

22

Jeucourt

25, 26

R. le Seneschal

27

Anthoine de Guise

94–98

Blosset Anthoine de Guise

100–113

Blosset or Blosseville

114–120

Le Rousselet

121–123

Anthoine de Guise

124

AN O N Y M O U S

125

Meschinot

126–127

Blosseville

128–130

R. le Seneschal

131

Mademoiselle de Beau Chastel

132

Mons. Jaques

133–135

Anthoine

136–137

Itasse de Lespinay

138–139

Mons. Jaques

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n.a.f. 15771

Mons. De Torcy

92–93

99

fr. 25458

Although no. 109 does not appear, 3 others on the same theme are: pp. 370–71; nos CXXXIX – CXLI

–, –, –, –, –, –, 98, –, –, –, –, 90

99, 96

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fr. 9223 140 141–144

Anthoine Mons. Jaques

145

Anthoine

146

Copin de Senlis

147

Galoys de Crequy

148

Messire Ernoul de Crequy

149

Jehan de Loyon

150

André Giron

151

Istace de Lespinay

152

Pierre de la Jaille

153

Colas de la Tour

154

AN O N Y M O U S

155

Mons. Jaques

156

Anthoine

157

Itasse de Lespinay

158–159

Huet de Vigne

160

Itasse de Lespinay

161

Anthoine

162–163

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Poet’s name

Itasse de Lespinay

164

Anthoine

165

Itasse de Lespinay

166

Anthoine

fr. 25458

n.a.f. 15771

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fr. 9223

Poet’s name

167

Itasse de Lespinay

168

Huet de Vigne

169

Anthoine

170

Jehan de Loyon

171–172

Foullée

173–174

Anthoine

175

Thomas de Loraille

176

Jehan, mons. de Lorraine

177–178

n.a.f. 15771

Anthoine

179

Jehan, mons. de Lorraine

180

Anthoine

181

Jehan, mons. de Lorraine

182

Busnois

183–195

fr. 25458

Mons. Jaques

Various hypotheses as to who might have commissioned this collection have been advanced. Its editor, Gaston Raynaud, tentatively suggested that ‘Monsr Jaques’, the author of twenty-one of the pieces and especially the large, final group of thirteen rondeaux (CLXXXIII–CXCV), might plausibly have been the originator; he identifies him as Jacques, bâtard de la Trémoïlle, seigneur de Saint-Civran, who was one of the visitors to Charles’ court at Blois and who might therefore have brought away poetic habits and ambitions.61 Champion is characteristically brisk (‘cette identification est inadmissible’): he is happy to

61

Jacques is the poet of two independent poems copied in Charles’ album: a ballade (Poésies, I, 170, no. CIX a) and a rondeau (Poésies, II, 369, no. CXXXVIII); cf. Champion, ‘Remarques’.

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accept that ‘Monsr Jaques’ had commissioned or owned the manuscript, but he identifies him with Jacques de Savoie, comte de Romont, who was an habitué of Charles’ court at Blois, who was close to Charles’ Duchess Marie de Clèves, and who presented Charles with a livre de ballades in 1457.62 More recent critical opinion63 rejects both suggestions in favour of another ‘Monsr Jaques’, Jacques de Luxembourg, who, they have suggested, might have commissioned the volume.64 What may seem to clinch the argument is something we shall look at in more detail later (see below, pp. 204–12): that a ‘Monsr Jacques’, Jacques de Luxembourg, as well as a number of the poets in this second section of the manuscript (‘Itasse de Lespinay’, André Giron, Jehan de Loyon, Collas de la Court, Pierre de la Jaille), can be placed in a specific environment, that of the Bretons attached to the entourage of Arthur III de Richemont. Plausible, then, is a process whereby Monsr Jacques, Jacques de Luxembourg, an habitué of Arthur de Richemont’s court, acquired access to the more ‘public’, generally circulating poems emanating from Blois and elsewhere in the fifteenth century, and that these were copied into the first section of the original, core collection (nos I–XCIX) from which fr. 9223 was carefully copied — but that he or another patron presided over a small group within the court which itself developed literary pretensions and whose rondeaux and other fixed-form lyrics were then transcribed into the latter part of that original manuscript, to be copied from there, ultimately, into fr. 9223 (as nos C–CXCV).65 Fr 9223, then, would be copied from a manuscript which was a hybrid: the first part evidence of a collecting effort made, in the first instance at any rate, after the time of original composition — and so a text ‘monument’ — the second having operated perhaps, as does Charles’ manuscript, as a place to record poems as they were composed and put into circulation, and thus as a place of what Chartier calls the text ‘event’.

62

See Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, p. 189.

63

Notably Inglis in her edition, Une nouvelle collection, Appendix A, pp. 213–14, and Dara, ‘Recueils’. 64

See Raynaud, Rondeaux, pp. xix–xx. The faint signature of Jacques’ great-great niece, Marie de Luxembourg (fol. 104v ) might confirm the affiliation. 65

Arthur de Richemont seems to have appreciated poetry: he rewarded Jean Meschinot for a rondeau with the sum of five écus (see Dom Hyacinthe Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire de Bretagne ..., 3 vols (Paris: Osmont, 1742–44), II, col. 1723: ‘A Jehan Meschinot Poëte, pour un rondeau 5. escus’). This is a handsome reward: six escus was enough to pay a troop of actors who performed for a whole evening (see ibid., II, col. 1724).

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Before I turn more directly to the contents of this manuscript, let me look at the other with which it is frequently paired: the second manuscript I spoke of earlier, n.a.f. 15771, which was acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1965 from the Bibliotheca Derschau in Nuremburg.66 It too is a pleasurable, elegant little octavo manuscript, in good quality vellum (Figure 13). By far the larger part of the volume, as far as fol. 49, is, like fr. 9223, spaciously laid out, with just one rondeau or bergerette67 per page, in a pleasant hand; each poem has the name of the author inscribed above it in gold, and each stanza has its initial letter picked out in gold, with blue pen-flourishing; acrostic pieces, helpfully, even have the initial letters of every line written in gold. It is true that on the

Figure 13. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 15771, fol. 19 v .

66

See Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, andUne nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 15–18.

67

The bergerette resembles the rondau in stanza structure, but the rhymes change for the second stanza; for a definition, see Henri Châtelain, Recherches sur la structure et l’origine des vers romans (Geneva: Droz, 1957), pp. 196–97.

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final few leaves, from fol. 49v, for the last few lyrics and a longer poem, by Blosseville, Le Debat de veil et du josne,68 the style of decoration changes (Figure 14); the hands are different and much less regular, and the gold lettering disappears. But the quire structure makes it clear that this is not a matter of two different manuscript cahiers having been bound together; the new poems may have been copied by a different hand, but the copyist of the latter, like the copyists of the group of poems on the final pages of Carpentras 375, seems actually to have exploited blank pages to copy a little selection of poems,

Figure 14. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 15771, fol. 51 r . 68

Which is extant in only one other manuscript, BnF fr. 1661; edited by Inglis in Une nouvelle collection, pp. 174–86, and by Montaiglon in Recueil, IX , 221–35.

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probably no longer from his exemplar;69 he has also, it seems, done some minor retouching to the pages in the ‘standard’ hand, a correction or two, a convenient instruction on fol. 6r (‘Tournez a la response’) telling readers that the rondeau on that page (IX) has a riposte (X) on fol. 6V. The hundred or so lyrics which n.a.f. 15771 contains (see Table 4) are, like the contents of Charles’ fr. 25458, like those of fr. 9223, by a miscellany of writers. By far the majority are rondeaux, with a scattering of bergerettes and just two ballades. The poets, all of whom, as with fr. 9223 and to a large measure fr. 25458, are meticulously named, are just as miscellaneous, and, as with fr. 9223, what we know about their names, identities, and affiliations, affords interesting suggestions about the role of poetry in literary coteries of the fifteenth century. Table 4. N.a.f. 15771 compared with fr. 9223 and fr. 25458 n.a.f. 15771

fr. 9223

I Madame dOrléans

Orléans circle?

fr. 25458

X

415

II Bouciquaut

28 v

X

437

III Monseigneur dOrléans

29 r

X

437

X

IV Vaillant V Monseigneur le Mareschal de Lohéac

X

VI Vaillant VII Fredet

25 r

X

VIII Vaillant

9r

X

IX Jehan, Monseigneur de Lorayne

33 r

X

69

419

The penultimate quire consists of fols 48–55, the last — because of a misplaced folio — fols 47 and 56–61. The ‘standard’ hand copies poems onto fols 48–49; the ‘new’ hands take over as from the lower half of 49r; Blosseville’s ‘Debat’ occupies fols 52 v –61v .

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n.a.f. 15771

X Blosseville

fr. 9223

Orléans circle?

32 v

X

XI Vaillant

X

XII Le Cadet dAlbret

X

XIII Fredet

19 v

X

XIV Fredet

X

XV Anthoinne de [C]uise

X

XVI Regné dOrenge

fr. 25458

45 r

XVII Monseigneur de [R]ays XVIII Monseigneur dOrléans

24 v

XIX Vaillant

X

424

X

434

XX Monseignieur de [R]ays XXI Monseigneur de [R]ays

36 r

XXII Monseignieur de Torcy

46 v

X

XXIV Vaillant

13 v

X

XXV Jeucourt

47 r

XXVI Jeucourt

47 v

XXVII Robinet le Senescal

48 r

XXIII Monseignieur de [R]o[h]an

XXVIII Robinet le Senescal XXIX Vaillant

X

XXX Blosseville

X

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n.a.f. 15771

fr. 9223

Orléans circle?

XXXI Monbeton

38 v

X

XXXII Blosseville

43 r

X

XXXIII Blosseville

19 r

X

XXXIV M onseignieur dOrléans

9v

X

XXXV Vaillant

9r

X

XXXXVI Blosseville

17 r

X

XXXVII Blosseville

17 v

X

XXXVIII Anthoinne de [C]uise

32 r

X

XXXIX Vaillant

12 r

X

XL Blosseville

43 v

X

XLI Blosseville

44 r

X

XLII Gylle des Ourmes

20 r

X

XLIII Blosseville

44 v

X

XLIV Robert[et]

34 r

X

XLV Blosseville

15 r

X

XLVI Taneguy du Chatel

30 r

XLVII Blosseville

33 v

X

XLVIII Blosseville XLIX Blosseville

39 r

L Tanegui du Chastel

7v

LI Anthoinne de [C]uise

34 v

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X

X

fr. 25458

384

448

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n.a.f. 15771

fr. 9223

Orléans circle?

LII Meschynot

18 v

X

LIII Blosseville

41v

X

LIV Vaillant

12 v

X

LV Blosseville

37 r

X

fr. 25458

X

LVI Blosseville LVII Maistre Martin le Franc

31v

LVIII Monbeton

39 v

X

LIX Anthoinne de [C]uise

8v

X

LX Fredet

20 v

X

416

LXI Monseignieur dOrléans

21r

X

417

X

414

LXII Monseignieur dOrléans LXIII Monseignieur de [R]ays LXIV Fredet

16 r

X

LXV ‘Recepte de la Raine’

X

LXVI Fredet

X

LXVII Le Cadet dAlebret

X

LXVIII Anthoinne de [C]uise

40 v

X

LXIX Mombeton

45 v

X

LXX Anthoinne de [C]uise

X

LXXI Anthoinne de [C]uise

X

LXXII Tanegui du Chatel

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n.a.f. 15771

LXXIII Jehanne Fillieul

fr. 9223

Orléans circle?

46 r X

LXXIV Le Roy de Sesylle LXXV denesson a ja [Jammette de Nesson]

36 v

LXXVI Taneguy du Chatel

37 v

LXXVII Vaillant

10 r

X

LXXVIII Le Cadet dAlebret

X

LXXIX M onbeton

X

LXXX Blosseville

6v

X

LXXXI Vaillant

11 r

X

LXXXII Blosseville

31 r

X

LXXXIII Meschinot

X

LXXXIV Blosseville

X

LXXXV Anthoinne de [C]uise

14 r

X

LXXXVI Blosseville

7r

X X

LXXXVII Anthoinne de [C]uise LXXXVIII Vaillant

10 r

X

LXXXIX Blosseville

59 r

X

XC Blosseville

42 r

X

XCI Monbeton

35 v

X

XCII Monseigneur de Torcy

X

XCIII Monseigneur de Torcy

X

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XCIV Blosseville

fr. 9223

Orléans circle?

7r

X X

XCV Blosseville XCVI Blosseville

fr. 25458

66 v

X X

XCVII Monbeton XCVIII Blosseville

55 v

X

XCIX Blosseville

65 v

X

Le Débat du veil et du josne

As with fr. 9223, and as Table 4 attempts to demonstrate, in n.a.f. 15771 too the vast majority of the poets are remarkably familiar: they are those who figure throughout Charles’ manuscript, fr. 25458 — indeed, n.a.f. 15771 contains five of Charles’ own rondeaux, as well as poems by poets whom we have met already like Marie de Clèves, Jean de Lorraine, Fredet, and by poets like Gilles des Ormes or Monbeton or Jehan Meschinot whom I have not so far mentioned but all of whom figure in Charles’ own album — a fact which has led critics to suggest that the whole anthology consists of poems written while at Blois, and that what we have is a sort of supplement to Charles’ fr. 25458.70 But in fact, as Table 4 shows, n.a.f. 15771 contains a mere thirteen poems which have actually figured in Charles’ own manuscript, and the remainder of the poems, while they are indeed written by many of those known to have visited Blois at one time or another, are new to this anthology; a few are also unfamiliar to fr. 9223. These seem, in other words, to be new and otherwise unknown poems by poets known to Blois (but not necessarily composed there), and presumably circulating in courtly circles. N.a.f. 15771 could, in other words, be seen as a sort of supplement to Charles’ album — but if so, it is obviously done for a different patron, and seems to be evidence of a different collecting pattern. It is now generally

70

See for instance Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, p. 1: ‘un nouveau et précieux témoignage sur l’activité poétique de la cour de Blois ...’

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accepted71 that n.a.f. 15771 was put together by, or for, one particular poet, a certain ‘Blosseville’, the author of twenty-seven of the poems, by far the largest number in the collection, and which include a couple of ballades (nos CXXVI, CXXVII) and a few rondeaux unrecorded in fr. 9223 (nos XXX, XLVIII, LVI, LXXXIV, XCVI), including the Debat du veil et du jeune,72 which is copied into the final folios (52v–61v) and which names him as the poet.73 Perhaps, incidentally, there is another little scrap of evidence which might make it plausible that this otherwise derivative manuscript has affiliations with Blosseville or his entourage: the upper part of fol. 49r is occupied by a poem (no. XCIV) by Blosseville, set out, like the earlier part of the manuscript, with the poet’s name in gold lettering, with a triumphant gold pen-flourish. The lower part of the page, however — and in a manuscript where, otherwise, each poem has a single page — has a poem copied in a different and rather larger hand, with a scheme of decoration which is not identical or by the original hand, but carefully similar. Blosseville’s name, here, is written in ink, in yet a third hand, and cramped between the two poems. Then, on fols 50–61, the new, larger hand has copied a sequence of Blosseville’s poems in conversation with others, including the much longer Debat du veil et du josne.74 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Blosseville himself — if the original collection was indeed his — or a later scribe, has used the remaining leaves of the existing quire 6, and added a new quire, no. 7, largely to 71

By Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, by Inglis in Une nouvelle collection, pp. 19–24, and by Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, p. 189. 72

Which looks very like a pendant to the Debat de la Vie et de la Mort which figured at the beginning of fr. 9223 (see above, p. 166, n. 57); opinion differs as to whether this Debat too is by Blosseville: in Rondeaux, p. x, Raynaud is struck by similarities of composition and style, but it is difficult to see anything in the debat which would lend itself to any such specific identification. 73

See l. 364, and the explicit (‘fait par Blosseville’). Interestingly, the Debat nominates two judges to mediate between the opposing points of view: the seigneur de Torcy (who is the poet of three of the poems in n.a.f. 15771: nos XXI, XXI, XCIII; see details in Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, pp. 20–21, and Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 58–60), and Pierre de Brézé, with whom, it seems, Blosseville visited Charles’ court in around 1458 (Poésies, II, 498–500, nos CCCLX (Pierre), CCCLXI (Charles), CCCLXII (Blosseville)). 74

The presence of this longer poem, and of the anonymous Debat de la Vie et de la Mort (not published by Raynaud in Rondeaux: see p. lxi) in fr. 9223, raises interesting questions: there is nothing similar in the other principal lyric anthologies of the later Middle Ages like the Rohan chansonnier, or fr. 1719, or Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 402. Is the parallel another argument for the interrelatedness of n.a.f. 15771 and fr. 9223? If so, then why the different poems?

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accommodate Blosseville’s verse: the manuscript, in other words, has been transformed into a celebration of Blosseville’s œuvre. Blosseville remains difficult to identify, largely because of a proliferation of Blossevilles and Blossets — but it now seems probable, thanks particularly to the meticulous investigations of Angremy and Inglis, that the family to whom the poet belongs is that of the Blossets of Blosseville, landowners in Normandy and on the upper Loire near Nevers; Inglis would argue that our poet and anthologist is a certain Jean Blosset, ‘seigneur de Plessis-Pâté et de la Mote’, and if not ‘secrétaire du roi Charles VII’, then probably with connections at the royal court.75 ‘Blosseville’ certainly paid at least one visit to Charles’ own court, since a single rondeau of his — which does not, oddly enough, appear in n.a.f. 15771 — figures in fr. 25458, in a little sequence centring on the notion of confession, confiteor:76 was it that visit that inspired Blosseville with the idea of creating an anthology of pieces written by friends and acquaintances? Was it then that he acquired copies of some at least of the thirteen rondeaux and bergerettes that n.a.f. 15771 shares with fr. 25458,77 as well, perhaps, as those, not collected in fr. 25458, of some of the other poets who also figure among Charles’ own coterie? Both questions are unanswerable, not least because this elegant little copy, like fr. 9223, is not, as we saw, the original: it and fr. 9223 are probably copied, at least in part, from an already defective exemplar. However, Blosseville, if he was the compiler/patron, certainly managed to accumulate a small selection of lyrics which figure in fr. 25458, as Table 4 shows — and he seems also to have collected lyrics (or invited contributions?) from those who were Charles’ familiars, and from a small number of other, miscellaneous poets. As Inglis and Angremy show, the poets derive from a variety of milieux, some of them intimates of the literarypoetic circle of Blois (like Gilles des Ormes, or Fredet), some (like Jeucourt, or Tanegui du Chastel, or Jammette de Nesson) having nothing identifiable to do with it, some intimately connected with Blois, some only peripherally so, some 75

Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, pp. 7–11, does not offer a specific identification, although she points to the same family; in Une nouvelle collection, pp. 22–23, Inglis is more categoric. She argues the case largely on the grounds that our ‘Blosseville’ asks ‘Torcy’ to be judge in the Debat du veil et du josne of n.a.f. 15771 (ll. 321–22, 336–39) — Torcy being one of the poets of n.a.f. 15771 and Jean Blosset being married to Torcy’s niece. 76

Poésies, II, 497–98, nos CCCLIX – CCCLXII. The other participants are Charles, and Pierre de Brézé, from Anjou. 77

Note that Blosseville need not have taken the ‘Blois’ poems direct from fr. 25458; all the poems which n.a.f. 15771 shares with the latter have also circulated widely (see the notes to Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis).

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represented in fr. 25458 but here by new poems — and all of these categories suggesting that it was not only at Charles’ court in Blois that there took place what Poirion calls a cristallisation poétique.78 The interesting category is, for my purposes, the poets who have nothing identifiably to do with Blois. There is, for instance, as Inglis shows,79 a little group of poets who are all linked by their presence at the royal court, like Tanegui du Chastel (who was close to Charles VII), Jehanne Fillieul (who was lady-in-waiting to Margaret of Scotland, wife of the Dauphin), Jammette de Nesson (daughter of Pierre de Nesson, and also attached to the royal court);80 there is another little group (Tanegui du Chastel again, but also René d’Orenge81 and others), whose affiliations seem to be Breton. I have tried to tabulate the result in Table 4, which attempts to show the way in which this collection is interwoven with, but also determinedly independent of, Charles’, as if, here again, what was sought was an anthology stamped with a particular and individual identity: as if the manuscript were, as I suggested of late-medieval courtly-lyric manuscripts in Chapter I, a celebration of the cultural wealth of the circle which produced it. If so, then, what specifically do these two anthologies celebrate? Let me start with a caveat: that we must be very careful before talking too glibly of ‘design’, before assuming that some authority — the owner, the compiler, the copyist — necessarily intended to manage the minutiae of any particular manuscript. It is important, in other words, not to ‘rationalize’ and ‘narrativize’ the process, not to suppose that every placement of every poem is motivated by a desire to mean. Everything suggests that the circulation of poetry in fifteenth-century France was chancy and patchy. Manuscripts in their entirety, and individual poems, must have circulated adventitiously, certainly in volumes borrowed from library to library,82 and in all probability also in single leaves, or with a particular poet, or

78

Le Poète et le prince, p. 188.

79

Une nouvelle collection, introduction.

80

For details on all of these, see Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, and Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis. 81

Identified by Inglis in Une nouvelle collection, pp. 50–52, as a Breton with interesting connections to the Breton circle. I discuss this below in relation to fr. 9223. 82 Items in Charles’ library, for instance, are described as ‘a recouvrer’ (that is, ‘to be retrieved’), or as having been lent or borrowed; see also Champion, La Librairie, pp. xxiv–v, for a list kept of manuscripts lent to Charles. We remember Deschamps’ annoyance at the loss of some of his works (see above, p. 62).

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in what English scholars call booklets,83 or even carried from court to court by the poet himself. To take an example from the present collection: although fr. 9223 contains, as Table 3 shows, a little block (nos XXXV–LIII) of rondeaux deriving ultimately from Charles’ fr. 25458, these appear not to have been copied directly from the source but rather from some selection circulating independently. For instance, Gilles’ rondeau in fr. 9223, no. XXV, l. 8, reads ‘Que j’ay grant paour qu’il le forvoye’, as against fr. 25458, rondeau CXXXIV, which reads ‘Que j’ay paour qu’il ne le forvoye’; Charles’ rondeau, fr. 9223, no. XXXVII, l. 14, reads ‘Qui les larrons soubstient et hente’, against fr. 25458, rondeau no. CCXXVIII, which reads ‘Qui les brigans soustient et hente’. This haphazard circulation of poems must have meant that the anthologizers and copyists of coterie manuscripts like fr. 9223 or n.a.f. 15771 would seize on whatever exemplars came their way: they might have had in mind a preplanned core selection, but they would also have wanted to make the fullest possible use of the chance surfacing of any particular manuscript. Ralph Hanna says of Middle English manuscript books that ‘a combination of happenstance acquisition and variously motivated selection is quite typical’84 — and we must surely assume something very similar for the courtly lyrics of the end of the French Middle Ages, so that anthologization can never have been seen as producing static repositories of texts. It is a cultural practice governed largely by contingencies, not a process of motivated selection from existing materials. Nevertheless, these two manuscripts can, I think, be treated as evidence of the malleability of the late-medieval lyric, and they suggest ways in which the late-medieval poetic miscellany is responsive to new or personal recombinations and reinterpretations. I want to look at three particular phenomena which seem to me to be illustrated, with special acuity, by these two anthologies, and which were, to a greater or lesser degree, also characteristic of Charles’ personal manuscript: first, that just as the name of an individual poet attaches authority and weight to the poem, and just as a multiplicity of named poets seems to add lustre to a court, so authorship itself is something which lends cultural capital to a collection; second, the ways in which lyrics use the generative formulae characteristic of latemedieval coterie verse in order to allow the discriminating reader the opportunity to recognize stylistic expertise and control of form; third and finally, the ways in which these coterie transactions find their expression in the creation of fictions 83

See Robinson, ‘The “Booklet”’; Hanna, ‘Booklets’; Edwards, ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch.Selden B. 24’ (details in Chapter 2, p. 69). 84

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of intimacy. These will, I believe, illuminate not only the two anthologies I am considering here, but also, retrospectively, Charles’ and Marie’s manuscripts, and, later, the manuscript emanating from Marguerite of Austria’s little court on which I shall finish this chapter. First, then, the question of authorship — that is, of ‘the poet’, as a weapon in cultural competition — and I want to focus, here, on a poet of no great distinction, ‘Vaillant’, about whom very little is known,85 but whose poems feature, in interesting ways, in fr. 9223, n.a.f. 15771, and fr. 25458. What I want to argue is that the way in which Vaillant’s fixed-form lyrics are copied across these different manuscripts and across another, fr. 2230, which preserves the most complete collection of his works, shows that the existing anthologies interlock, but are not interdependent, and that this in turn suggests a transient population of poets and poetasters moving from court to cultured court, nurtured and patronized by princes, more or less close to their patrons, and with their presence presumably conferring a certain cultural cachet.86 The manuscripts and their shifting contents underline the fact that we need to understand the making of poetry in the late Middle Ages positionally — that is, by thinking about the relationships, and thus the cultural advantages, that fluent versifying may have created, and by gauging the ways in which cultural competence is a passport to what I have been calling élite sociability. I said we knew very little of Vaillant; in fact, even the very little that we do know leaves him distinctly shadowy. He seems, certainly, to have been linked in unspecified capacities to some of the most refined courts of the fifteenth century: certainly to the Angevin court since he makes René d’Anjou the arbiter of his debate-poem, the Debat des deux soeurs;87 possibly to the court of Foix, since he may have been the Jehan Vaillant escuier du comte de Foix who received from René’s treasurer ‘quarante et une livres cinq sols pour consideration d’un petit traité d’amours [forty-one livres five sous in recognition of a little treatise on

85

Piaget argued, on the basis of a signature, that ‘Vaillant’ was identifiable with ‘Pierre Chastelain’ (see ‘Pierre Chastelain, dit Vaillant’, Romania, 23 (1894), 257–59). The two are now distinguished: see Les œuvres de Pierre Chastellain et de Vaillant, poètes du XV e siècle, ed. by R. Deschaux, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1982). On Vaillant, see also Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 195–210. 86

Or, of course, a process of manuscript transmission; as we shall see, however, the little we know of Vaillant suggests that he was indeed one of this shifting population of poets. 87

Les œuvres, ed. by Deschaux, pp. 113–57, ll. 921–28.

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love]’;88 briefly to Charles’ court in Blois, if only on one occasion, since as we shall see, one of his ballades and two rondeaux figure in fr. 25458;89 possibly to the court of Jean d’Angoulême, Charles d’Orléans’ brother, since the most complete copy of his works, BnF fr. 2230, was made for Jean’s wife Marguerite;90 possibly to the household of the financier Jacques Coeur, since he addresses a ballade to him.91 Other than that, our knowledge of him is confined to his poetry: a couple of longer poems (Le Debat des deux soeurs and La Cornerie des anges de paradis), a scattering of letters in prose and verse, and some forty-three lyrics, rondeaux, ballades and bergerettes. Deschaux has gathered the lyrics from a range of manuscripts that often contain no more than a single rondeau — but I concentrate here on the manuscripts I mentioned, tabulated, for clarity, as Table 5. What this table shows, I hope, is that, although there is some overlap between the manuscripts, each contains some poems which do not exist in any other, and that by the same token none of them, even Marguerite d’Angoulême’s fr. 2230, contains what could be seen as Vaillant’s complete works — and I want to explore what this shifting content may tell us about verse-making, and anthologization, as a catalyst in the creation of relationships in the fifteenthcentury courts of Touraine.

88

Also known as ‘L’embûche Vaillant’; see ibid., p. 13, Angremy, ‘Un nouveau recueil’, pp. 21–22, Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, p. 62, and Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, p. 159. There is perhaps a coded reference to the comte de Foix in the ‘Debat des deux soeurs’, l. 947. 89

Poésies, I, 162–63, ballade

CIII; II,

351–52, rondeaux

CVII

and

CVIII.

90

Jean was, like Charles, taken prisoner at Agincourt, and like him spent some years in England. Marguerite was the daughter of Alain IX de Rohan, and thus the sister of Arthur III of Brittany, comte de Richemont (whom we meet below). Fr. 2230 is otherwise largely devoted to the works of Alain Chartier and the ‘Belle Dame sans merci’ cycle. On fol. 233r, however, and in a distinctly different hand, is a miscellany of poems by Vaillant — which suggests a particular interest in Vaillant’s work. Interestingly, fr. 2230 serves, like Marie de Clèves’ BnF, fr. 20026, as a liber amicorum; on the fly-leaves is a muddle of signatures often duplicating Marie’s (Thignonville, Blosset, Yzabeau d’Albret, Pierre de Bourbon and so on). 91

Les œuvres, ed. by Deschaux, pp. 215–14, no. XXXV . This ballade must predate 1450, when Jacques fell from favour.

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Table 5. Complete works of Vaillant fr. 9223 (poem no. in Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud)

Vaillant’s fixed-form lyrics, first line (‘Poèmes divers’ in Les œuvres, ed. by Deschaux)

8

Avant que l’en vous sceust louer

9

Sot œil, trop estes voluntaire Ha! Povre perdu, que fais tu? J’ay veu le debat de vos yeux Vostre grief mal si est le mien Se vous pensés que je vous ame Quelque chose que je vous die U lac de lermes tresparfont Or maudit soit il qui en ment Bonnes gens, j’ay perdu ma dame M’amour, ellas, veuilliés amer Je le voy bien selon les vers Mieulx vauldroit servir les pourceaulx Mon gentil compaignon Arnault

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 21 22 54

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n.a.f. 15771 (fol. no.; poem no. in Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis)

fr. 25458 (page in MS; poem no. in Poésies)

fr. 2230

Poem no. in Les œuvres, ed. by Deschaux

5 v ; no. 8

244 v

5

19 r ; no. 35

237 r

37 14

45 v ; no. 88

242 r

40 r ; no. 77

16 43 36 34

42 r; no. 81

236 r

41 28

21 r; no. 39

7

28 v ; no. 54

23

13 v ; no. 24

17 242 r

25 26

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Chapter 3 Vaillant’s fixed-form lyrics

n.a.f. 15771

fr. 25458

Des amoureux de l’observance Quant a moy, je crains le filé ‘Obligation de Vaillant’ A ce mur, hau, estes vous sourd? Esperant d’avoir quelque bien Gardés vous ent de l’euil d’Artuse A, je vous tieng pour fricatis A Dieu vous dy la lerme a l’ueil Au povre d’Amours A vous louer tant que cueur rompe C’est mon vaillant et ma richesse De moy n’est plus; las, je ressamble Ellas, ma dame, qui saroit Incontinant, ma souveraine Laissez d’Amours toust la frontiere Le plus des plus qui soit en vie Las, est ce bien fait Les yeulx ouvers je n’y voy goute

11 r ; no. 19

p. 434;

fr. 2230

Poem no. in Les œuvres 10

RCVII

p. 435;

32

RCVIII

p. 127;

31

BCIII

3 v ; no. 4

1

4 v ; no. 6

12

16 r; no. 29

13

7 r; no. 11

3 241r

2

242 v 239 v

4 6

233 r

8

237 r

9

244 r

11

241 v

15

243 v

18

243 v

19

243 r 240 r

20 21

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SUNDRIE OCCASIONS, SUNDRIE GENTLEMEN fr. 9223

Vaillant’s fixed-form lyrics

n.a.f. 15771

Maistresse lealle ay d’amours Merciez Dieu, aussi fort une Mort, vien vers moy bien tost batant Par Dieu, ma mignonne, m’amie Pour Dieu, m’amye, aymez moy bien Quelque semblant, las, que je face Que vous n’aiez vaillant en sens Tant de mal, las, par vous j’endure Trestout le tresor de Venise U beau chemin esgaré suis

fr. 25458

240 v

Poem no. in Les œuvres 22

248 v

24

236 v

27

237 r

29

244 r

30

236 r

33

248 r

35

243 r

38

242 v

39

241v

40

fr. 2230

I turn first, once again, to Charles’ 25458 and to a little set of three of Vaillant’s poems that figure there. What fr. 25458 seems to show is that Vaillant took part with Charles and others in two interrelated games during what was, in all probability, a single visit.92 The first game is enshrined in a dialogue between Charles, Jehan Caillau, and Vaillant: a little sequence of four ballades on pp. 126–30 of fr. 25458, all copied in the same hand, and just beyond the point where the core collection of ballades as originally planned and copied in the original uniform hand is complete, and where new miscellaneous hands begin to fill the blank pages. Charles opens the sequence with a ballade (no. CII; p. 126 in the manuscript) which picks up the theme of renunciation of love that he had explored in the ‘Departie d’amours’, and which invents a ‘monastic order’, les

92

Which Champion, Vie, pp. 625–26, dates to 1453.

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amoureux de l’observance; the amoureux are, says the envoi, infinitely preferable to the bigotz: Des bigotz ne quiers l’acointance, Ne loue leur oppinion, Mais me tiens, par affection, Des amoureux de l’observance! (ballade

CII,

pp. 158–59)

I have no wish to frequent bigots; I have no respect for their opinions. Rather, all my affections go the lovers of the Observance.

Now, the Franciscans of the Observance preached a strict observance of the Rule of St Francis; they were especially prominent in the fifteenth century, having been expressly recognized by the Council of Constance in 1415, and having as their spiritual leader one of the more charismatic of preachers, Bernardino of Siena. They were particularly known for the austerity with which they enforced a return to the rule of their founder, with their adherents embracing the mendicant way of life. There is, then, a peculiar piquancy in conjoining their asceticism with the breezily hedonistic doctrines of courtliness93 — and Charles’ ballade CII, inventive as ever, is a textbook example of the clash between two competing conceptual domains, the worship of God and the worship of the beloved. Charles plays with his paradox: the amoureux are, like the Observantists, a contemplative order, raviz en transe, their way of life, conversacion, consists of arduous austerities — chault, froit, soif et fain d’esperance; they depend on alms; their bissacs, ‘scrips’, need nothing but a simple provision: Souvenance. Charles uses elements pertaining to the semantic field of monastic severity to amplify the dominant, ironic metaphor and to ‘narrativize’ love; the hearer is obviously expected to be sufficiently sophisticated to understand, and to react to, the ironic inappropriateness of the image. The initial hearers it seems, at Charles’ court, were Vaillant, whose ballade is the first to follow the Duke’s lead in playing with the idea of amorous renunciation, and Charles’ doctor, Jehan Caillau, who was an intimate of Charles’ and a regular participant in poetic games at Blois.94 The three of them collaborate in constructing a parody of legal practice by building on Charles’ rejection of the bigotz in ballade CII. First, and initiating the conceit, comes 93

Not least in that, as Planche points out (Charles d’Orléans, pp. 288–90), the phrase is nicely ambiguous: it can mean those who, as amoureux, are affiliated to ‘l’observance’, or those who are lovers of l’observance. 94

He participated in the so-called ‘concours de Blois’ (ballade CXXIIIK ), and is responsible for four further rondeaux (XXVII, CCXVI, CCCL , CCCLIII) in fr. 25458.

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Vaillant’s ballade, entitled Obligation de Vaillant (Poésies, I, 159–60, no. CIII; p. 127 in fr. 25458; Figure 15). Vaillant is, he says, submitting himself absolutely, without reservation, in the presence of le notaire d’Amours and in all due legal form, to a certain unidentified vous; henceforth he will, he says, be at ‘vous’s’ entire disposal: ‘a execucion Soubz le seel de vostre vouloir [subject to punishment under your seal, as you wish]’. Charles responds, and specifically to Vaillant, with a Vidimus de la dite obligation par le duc dorlians (Poésies, I, 160–62,

Figure 15. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25458, p. 122.

no. CIIIa; p. 128 in MS): he has, he says, taken note of De Vaillant l’obligacion drawn up by the clerk Devoir, admires its heavy green wax seal, its ribbon a double queue; he notes that Vaillant’s obligacion is duly ratified and certified. Finally, an Intendit de la dite obligation par Me J. Caillau (Poésies, I, 162–63, no. CIIIb ; p. 129 in MS) provides an intendit, an affidavit: Vaillant, Jehan bears witness, is resigning tout son vaillant, all his worldly goods, unreservedly, ‘ne ne fait supplicacion De guerredon [with no request for any reward]’. Now, beyond

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the neatness of the conceit, what is remarkable here is the fact that a chance-met poet, who seems to have made only one, presumably rather fleeting, visit to Blois, has been able to capitalize on his artistic skills to manufacture his own inclusion. Vaillant, it seems, is close enough to, and sufficiently appreciated by, Charles to be allowed to participate in engaging with and developing a distinct narrative thread with the Duke and with one of his trusted familiars — he has, in other words, been admitted to one of the strategic and complex games in which Charles’ court specialized. What is also interesting is the fact that Vaillant recurs in Charles’ manuscript (fr. 25458, p. 435), as the poet of two rondeaux, one of them (no. CVII), the one I shall concentrate on, further embroidering the metaphor of the amoureux de l’observance and engaging in a three-rondeau dialogue with two other highly distinguished visitors to Blois, the Burgundians Olivier de la Marche and ‘George’ — George Chastelain.95 Olivier himself describes a visit to Charles’ court — perhaps this one. He had been, he says, highly gratified by the warmth of his welcome, and by the hospitality which Charles, ‘moult bon rethoricien’, offered to visiting poets able to match his own sophistication and ease with words.96 The three visitors, Vaillant and the Burgundians, appropriate the key

95

Champion, Vie, pp. 632–33. The four rondeaux are nos CCXXXV (Charles), CV (Olivier), [Chastelain]), CVII (Vaillant), on pp. 424, 434–35 of fr. 25458; Poésies, II, 350–52, 425. Champion’s edition does a disservice here by rearranging the contents and displacing poems from their manuscript context. The textual history of the manuscript is complicated; it awaits illumination in Arn’s forthcoming large-scale study, The Order of Composition. Champion (Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 47–82), as we saw in Chapter 2, divides the poems in fr. 25458 into five chronological groups A–E, with A those composed earliest, E those last. He would see the group of three poems, by Olivier, Chastelain and Vaillant, on pp. 434–35 of the manuscript, as composed in his Groupe B, and the single rondeau by Charles, no. CCXXXV , on p. 424 in fr. 25458, as belonging to his Groupe C, and thus presumably as composed later than, and presumably inspired by, the group of three. He considers that it is Charles’ hand which has scribbled the rubric ‘Rondel de George’ above Chastelain’s rondeau (on all these arguments, see above, pp. 84–85). That these poems represent two separate occasions seems unlikely: Charles, Vaillant and Jehan Caillau were, as we saw, complicit in developing the set of pseudo-legalistic ballades which follow on from Charles’ ‘Des amoureux de l’observance’; it is surely more likely that Vaillant, and Olivier and Chastelain, were all part of a group playing with the Observantist conceit.

CVI (‘George’

96 Morice, Mémoires, III, 115 (see Chapter 2, p. 135); the visit was made in 1447, but Olivier’s rondeau CV need not have been made then. A further rondeau by Charles himself on the same theme (no. CCXXXV ; Poésies, II, 424), appears in a different quire, and may or may not have triggered or been triggered by the little sequence of poems by Vaillant, Olivier and ‘George’.

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conceit of the amoureux de l’observance. Olivier de la Marche (no. CV) has, he says, entered the ‘Observantist’ order ‘pour amours des dames de France [for love of the ladies of France]’ — and his rondeau is largely a string of metaphoric labels (he has donned the corde de Souffrance [girdle of Suffering], the haire d’Aigre Desirance [hair shirt of Bitter Desire]); ‘George’ (no. CVI), in a rather more ponderous decasyllabic line, expresses pious confidence in God’s eventual mercy: ‘Toutevois, Dieu, soubz qui rien ne demeure, A telz servans ne fist onc decevance [Nevertheless, God, under Whom no-one is forgotten, never disappointed servants of that ilk]’; neither poet exploits the metaphor other than dutifully. The third of the rondeaux (no. CVII) — technically a bergerette since the rhyme changes in the second stanza — is Vaillant’s, and his is, by comparison, a lively little production that does much to renew what is rapidly, within the context of fr. 25458, becoming a fossilized metaphor: Des amoureux de l’observance, Je suis le plus subgiet de France, Car je sers d’estre mandien Et cherche le coctidien; Mais nul en mon sac rien ne lance. ‘Aux freres l’aumosne, pour Dieu’, Tousjours voys criant d’uys en huis: Las! Charité ne trouve en lieu, Ne Pitié ne scet qui je suis. Retourner me fault sans pitence; Desir, le proveheur, me tance, Puis le beau pere gardien: Pis suis que Boesme n’Yndien; L’ordre veil lesser sans doubtance Des amoureux de l’ordonnance. (fr. 25458, Poésies, I, 351–52, no. CVII) Of the lovers of the observance, I am the most obedient in all France, for I am a determined mendicant, begging my daily bread; but no-one throws a crust into my scrip. ‘Give alms to the brothers, for God’s sake’, I cry as I go from door to door: alas! I find no sign of Charity, and Pity does not even recognize me. I must return empty-handed; Desir, the steward, scolds me, and then so does the father superior: I’m worse than a Bohemian, or an Indian; I am determined to leave the order of the lovers of the observance.

What animates this rondeau, and distinguishes it from the string of others in Charles’ manuscript, is the mimeticism and density of Vaillant’s self-portrait. The poet has, he says, subscribed to the doctrines of self-abnegation: as a mandien, ‘mendicant’, in the old, strict sense — visually suggested by the

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evocation of his sac, the mendicant’s scrip — he must beg for his daily bread, his coctidien. But no charitable soul responds to his cry for alms — when he returns empty-handed to his friary, the steward, proveheur, and the père gardien, the superior, will chastise him and treat him as worse than a Bohemian or an Indian, as an outcast.97 What Vaillant has done, in other words, is specifically to ‘stage’ the generating image; he gives the formulaic metaphor-scheme that Charles seems to have initiated in his ballade no. CII an expressive, and rather witty, immediacy.98 Now, if indeed Vaillant, Olivier, and ‘George’ have been inspired by Charles’ ballade, then the process is not dissimilar from that which we explored in Chapter 2, where we saw Villon capitalizing on the givens of the manuscript to inscribe himself, probably unauthorized, on its pages. Was it Vaillant, who had taken part in the legalistic ballade-sequence I described first, who inspired the visitors, and ultimately Charles himself, to enlarge on the Observantist metaphor? Was it Charles, at ease with visiting poets, who suggested it? In either case, what is striking is the way in which, here as elsewhere in Charles’ manuscript, poetry is presented as a collective phenomenon open equally to habitués and visitors, in which social relations, and social positionings, are constructed via lyric dialogue, and where the manuscripts preserve what Louis Pinto calls ‘traces objectivées de gestes’:99 gestes whose dynamic has to do with collaborative and competitive activities operating within a particular court. The sparse and scattered little collection of Vaillant’s lyrics in Charles’ fr. 25458 suggests, in other words, what Chartier calls the text ‘event’. But how does Vaillant’s verse function in other courts as represented in other manuscripts? He seems, as I said, to have been one of that shifting population of poets who moved from household to household and used poetry as his entrée; his verse surfaces in both the collections, fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771, that I am exploring here. Indeed, as Table 5 shows, his rondeau ‘Des amoureux de l’observance’ is no. XIX in n.a.f. 15771, and it is reunited, ostentatiously, with

97

Champion suggests that Boesme, here, is the equivalent of bougre, Bulgarian (and hence thought morally dubious): Poésies, II, 612; I find no equivalent use of the word Yndien. 98

It is odd that this rondeau, when it surfaces in n.a.f. 15771, has undergone considerable changes: the final stanza reads — much less wittily — ‘L’un m’escondit, l’aultre me tance. Je suis mené a ceste dance Des ans a je ne scay combine, Et par Dieu, je m’esbahis bien Qu’aultrement, au fait, on ne pence Des amoureux [de l’Observance]’ (ed. by Inglis, no. XIX , p. 91). 99

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Charles’ (no. XVIII) on the facing page (fols 9v and 10r) where they were separated by some ten pages in fr. 25458 (Charles’ on p. 424, Vaillant’s on p. 435). But what I find most interesting, in the matter of the transmission of verse from court to court, is another little conversation, between Vaillant and Blosseville, in n.a.f. 15771. As I suggested earlier, most critics now agree that the original of this elegant little anthology was in all probability produced under the patronage of the rather shadowy Blosseville. It is a suggestion that may be reinforced by another, minor piece of evidence from the rondeaux composed on the generative formula ‘Sot Euil …’, and their disposition on the manuscript page. The formula is relatively fruitful: Charles himself had composed a rondeau on the theme for his collection (which figures as rondeau L in fr. 25458); this latter is copied into n.a.f. 15771 (as no. XXXIV), along with two responses, not in Charles’ manuscript, one by Vaillant (no. XXXV), and the other by Blosseville (no. XXXVI). All three rondeaux are also to be found in fr. 9223, but not copied consecutively: Charles’ and Vaillant’s are on fols 9r and 9v, nos X and IX respectively, Blosseville’s separately on fol. 17r, no. XXIX.100 The three rondeaux are very much in conversation with each other.101 Charles, it seems, initiates a mistrustful (‘Sot Euil, raporteur de nouvelles, Ou vas tu, et ne scay pour quoy …? [Foolish eye, inveterate gossip, where are you going without my knowing why?]’), hectoring tone (‘Chatier te veuil, par ma foy … [I swear I want to punish you]’). Vaillant echoes him with a semantic richness which even Charles’ rondeau cannot match: Vous estes mauvais segretaire,102 N’amés pas tant vostre plaisir! Sot Euil, [trop estes vollontaire]. Argus est dangereux noctaire, Tousjours espie a vous saisir: Faites vostre fait a loisir, Pour Dieu, soyés plus solitaire!

100

Only one other manuscript, incidentally, contains all three poems: BnF fr. 1719, on fols 60 , 52 r, and 52 v respectively; the relationship between fr. 1719, fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771 would need investigating, but it seems safe to say that in fr. 1719 no premium seems set on reading the poems concurrently. v

101

I transcribe from Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 106–08. See also Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 76–84. 102

Segretaire here means both ‘secretary’ and ‘keeper of secrets’ (see Godefroy, VII, 350); vollontaire means ‘brazen’; noctaire means ‘secretary’, but also ‘witness’. Once again, the puns make translation clumsy.

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Chapter 3 Sot Euil, [trop estes vollontaire]. You are a bad secretary: don’t concentrate so much on your own pleasure! Foolish Eye, you are far too wilful. Argus is a dangerous nocturnal beast, it lies in wait to seize you: don’t hurry over your work, for God’s sake, be more solitary! Foolish Eye, you are too wilful.

But Charles’ manuscript contains only Charles’ rondeau; n.a.f. 15771 (no. XXVI) and fr. 9223 (no. XIX) provide a third, by Blosseville (no. XXVI). Blosseville’s is less semantically rich than Vaillant’s and less inventive than Charles’, but like both of them, it accuses the Euil of imprudence (it has been glancing ‘follement [foolishly]’, just as Vaillant’s suffers from ‘fol desir [foolish desire]’; it shows dangerous signs of divided allegiance — ‘bien fort me trompas [you deceived me sadly]’ — like Charles’ — ‘Tu es trop tost accointé d’elles [You have got too close to them]’). The salient point, however, is what seems to be the rearrangement of the rondeaux so that in n.a.f 15771 Blosseville’s rondeau is copied consecutively with Charles’ and Vaillant’s, so that it is very obviously in dialogue with those of the two major poets.103 Is it fanciful to imagine that the patron, Blosseville, is stressing a prestigious social and textual affiliation, one which lends his collection a useful cultural capital? The pride in authorship which the emblematization of the name in this collection betokens, and which is shared by all of what I have called ‘coterie’ manuscripts, suggests that to place his poem in such company would be to flag up his status and to confirm a social bond with the ‘master-poets’ he has had anthologized. This trio of rondeaux would, in other words, confirm the impression given by the final few folios of fr. 15771, with their press of poems by Blosseville interspersed with others by Monbeton, Vaillant, Anthoine de Cuise, and Monseigneur de Torcy (nos LXXIX–XCIX), and, of course, with the telltale Debat (a weighty piece, at 385 lines), that this manuscript is designed to display Blosseville’s participation in the recreations of a particularly refined élite. In a sense, the rearrangement is, or purports to be, evidence of the sort of ‘event’ that I have pointed to repeatedly in this study — purports to be, because the manuscriptural ‘conversation’ cannot but suggest the equivalent social conversation, and which would have put Blosseville in flattering contact with Vaillant, and of course, above all, with Charles. This trio of rondeaux, then, illuminates the evolutionary dynamic of n.a.f. 15771. The manuscript, like all coterie manuscripts, testifies first to the mobility 103

As I said previously, it seems improbable that the three poems would be juxtaposed in the source manuscript and carefully dispersed for fr. 9223.

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of the lyric text: to the way in which lyrics themselves, and lyric themes, travelled from court to court, coterie to coterie, to be reworked and reincorporated into new social and manuscriptural environments. It is also a testament to the versatility of the lyric text in its potential as a pre-text for rewriting and response. But in a sense, it is also evidence of what it must have meant to ‘read’ a rondeau in the fifteenth century: the juxtapositions which this anthology manufactures allow us to gauge the individuality, and salute the success, of each rondeau (or ballade) precisely because of similarities in their structure and lexicon. Which means, in turn, that authorship is here an issue: to celebrate the culture of a particular court must surely involve parading its poetic identity, its difference from but partnership with other cultured courts, thus perhaps foregrounding the rich cultural interplay between the producer of the manuscript and the range of poets with whom he (or she) is in dialogue — all of which means making a parade of dialogue, and of the ‘event’, however factitious, which is at its centre. Fr. 9223, however, celebrates authorship rather differently, with a much more complete, and more coherent, collection of Vaillant’s rondeaux (Figure 12); this manuscript, by contrast, looks like evidence of what I have been calling the text ‘monument’. As Table 5 shows, what fr. 9223 evinces is what looks like a careful attempt at completeness. The compiler has accumulated fourteen rondeaux, and copied them almost consecutively as nos VIII–XXII (fols 9r–13v): almost consecutively, because he includes, as item X, Charles’ ‘Sot oeil …’ with which Vaillant’s no. IX is in dialogue and, at no. XX, a rondeau, ‘Vostre oeil, se fort harbalestier … [Your eye, which is so good a crossbowman]’, which might be thought also to pick up the emphasis on ‘eye’ and ‘sight’ which is evident not just in the ‘Sot oeil …’ pair, but also in rondeaux like Vaillant’s no. XXI, ‘Je le voys bien …’. Of course, we cannot know in what form this collection of Vaillant’s verse reached the compiler of fr. 9223: copied into a booklet or on loose sheets? Peddled to a new court by Vaillant himself as his passport to a favourable reception? In either case, significantly, the collection is matched neither in n.a.f. 15771 (which has many, but not all, of the same poems, scattered rather haphazardly across the collection) nor, more particularly, in fr. 2230 which looks like another studious attempt to gather Vaillant’s complete works. This section of fr. 9223 is distinctly author-centred,104 on a lesser scale than, but with similar effect to, Eustache Deschamps’ complete works in fr. 840 for instance, or Christine de Pizan’s Queen’s Manuscript. As with these latter manuscripts, so with the Vaillant sequence in fr. 9223, there is no attempt, however artificial 104

I borrow the expression from Huot’s ‘The Writer’s Mirror’.

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or fictional, to provide the sense of the textual community between poet, text, and audience that marks out the coterie manuscript. Rather, the manuscript presents what looks, for these miscellanies, like a new relationship between the production and consumption of literary collections where traces of organized editing ‘package’ the lyric production of a particular poet, as a celebration, not of the social circumstances of production, not as evidence of a rich coterie of poets, but rather as a way of celebrating an individual poet — as a way of establishing what amounts to a canon. There is, in other words, virtually no trace remaining of the communicative ‘event’ that might have produced any individual poem; rather, it seems, the patron looks to find a measure of prestige (or pleasure) from the possession of a volume constructed around the figure of the poet; a ‘monument’, in other words, to lyric reputation, result rather in a text ‘monument’. In this, of course, we rejoin what Sylvia Huot says of lyric compilations in the fourteenth century and earlier, about the growing importance of the figure of the author in the Old French chansonnier, as witness to the ‘careful attention to authorship in most trouvère anthologies’,105 and, of course, the conscientious staging of identity in the author-manuscripts orchestrated by the Froissarts, the Machauts, the Christines, the Charles’s, which we saw in Chapters 1 and 2. Certain fifteenth-century compilers of miscellaneous volumes, it seems, and particularly, perhaps, the compilers of coterie volumes, also, like their earlier counterparts, saw the recording of an author’s name, and even the circumstance of composition, as guarantees of quality or authenticity: witness the scribe of an Alain Chartier manuscript preserved in Barbentane who notes, with meticulous attention to detail, ‘Sy fine le lay de paix que fist Maistre alain charetier a la requeste de mon seigneur de bourgongne [Here ends the Lay de Paix that Master Alain Chartier composed at the bidding of my lord of Burgundy]’,106 or the compiler who advertizes, with obvious self-satisfaction, that for his patron Anne de Graville he has sought out the most prestigious of Chartier’s poems: ‘En maistre Allain, de ses oeuvres j’ay quis A mon juger, le plus fin et exquis ... [Among all the works of Master Alain, I’ve sought out what are in my opinion the most subtle and the most refined ...]’.107 Fr. 9223, it seems, is operating to the same intention. The arrangement and execution of the manuscript suggest a carefully organized literary construct in which it was important to parade a string 105

From Song to Book, pp. 46–80 (p. 47).

106

Quoted in Laidlaw’s introduction to The Poetical Works, p. 69.

107

BnF MS fr. 2253, fol. 4 v; see The Poetical Works, ed. by Laidlaw, p. 74.

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of known and named poets: not only, as Table 5 shows, has the anthologist marshalled Vaillant’s verse into a coherent group, he has done the same for the poet for whom the compilation was in all probability made, ‘Monsr Jaques’, and the miscellaneous poets like Blosseville/Blosset, Le Rousselet, or Anthoine de Cuise, or for poetic duos like ‘Itasse de Lespinay’ and ‘Anthoine’ (nos CLX–CLXXX).108 I do, here, see a very different mode of circulation from that which seems to have been obtained in n.a.f. 15771, and a fortiori in Charles’ own manuscript, which seems to have recorded poems as they were composed and originally circulated. By contrast, n.a.f. 15771 seems to have accumulated a random collection of verses largely from written sources, and fr. 9223, in this respect at least, seems to represent a collecting and classifying effort made after the time of original composition. But fr. 9223 does seem elsewhere to preserve traces of what looks like the text ‘event’, and I want now to turn to another segment of fr. 9223 which bears witness to the socioliterary dynamics of the manuscript via the sort of imitative,

Figure 16. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 9223, fol. 81 r. 108

For Blosseville and Anthoine de Cuise, see above, pp. 183–84; ‘Rousselet’, Raynaud says (in his introduction to Rondeaux, pp. xxiii–iv), seems to have been loosely connected to the court of Charles’ son, later Louis XII.

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competitive verse which, for Marotti, fosters ‘social bonding’,109 and which, he says, represents ‘group ownership of texts’: a little group of twelve rondeaux and bergerettes which Raynaud numbers CXLIII–CLIV (Figure 16). We have seen, over and over again, in this and the previous chapter, the imprint of generative formulae on the composition of the late-medieval lyric: refrains or first lines like ‘Des amoureux de l’observance’ or ‘Sot Euil’, ‘Le truchement de ma pensee’, or ‘Pour tous voz maulx d’amours guerir’. Fr. 9223 borrows from Charles’ circle a certain number of these generative lines. Take, for instance, one of the more productive of Charles’ formulae, ‘En la forest de Longue Atente’: productive, because Charles and his circle produced, and copied or had copied into fr. 25458, a ballade and nine rondeaux on the theme. As Table 6 shows, in fr. 25458 they emerge largely in two separate groups, on pp. 413–17 first and then on pp. 447–50, as if, on two separate occasions, Charles’ courtiers had enjoyed playing with the line:110 Table 6. The theme ‘En la forest de longue attente’ fr. 9223

Poet

XXXIII

Blosseville

XXXIV

Gilles [des Ormes]

p. 448, r. no.

CXXXIV

XXXV

Fredet

p. 416, r. no.

CCXXVII

XXXVI

Mons r d’Orleans

p. 417, r. no.

CCXXVIII

XLVII

Mons r d’Orleans

p. 414, r. no.

CCXXV

XLVIII

Madame d’Orleans

p. 415, r. no.

CCXXVI

XC

Jeucourt Nevers

109

fr. 25458

p. 413 111

Manuscript, Print, p. 30.

110

See Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 41–63. A further poem on the same theme, by ‘Thignonville’, appears in Carpentras 375, fol. 56 v; see above, pp. 152–54. 111

Although this rondeau is listed in Champion’s ‘Table des incipits’, it seems for some reason not to have been transcribed in his edition; it is therefore unnumbered in the Poésies.

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fr. 9223

Poet

fr. 25458

Guiot Pot

p. 448, r. no.

CXXXIII

Jacques bastart de la Trimoïlle

p. 450, r. no.

CXXXVIII

Antoine de Lussay

p. 447, r. no.

CXXXII

Philippe Pot

p. 447, r. no.

CXXXI

[Anon = Charles d’Orléans]

p. 131, ballade no.

CV

The five rondeaux on pp. 413–17 in Charles’ manuscript are copied all in the same hand, in the upper register, above a series of other rondeaux in a variety of hands.112 Those on pp. 447–50 are copied in a variety of hands on the recto and verso of a single leaf. Two things are interesting from the point of view of the transmission of the pieces to fr. 9223: first, the scribe whose work gave rise to it seems to have had access, in some form or another, to both groups; second, he transcribes another two poems, by Blosseville and Jeucourt, which do not appear among Charles’. Blosseville we have already met, as likely to have been the compiler of the collection on which fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771 are based; ‘Jeucourt’ is unidentified, although there have been a number of candidates proposed.113 And what this latter point suggests has to do with patterns of poetic production: that these particularly fruitful key lines, or key themes, circulated from coterie to coterie and, from time to time, as they were borrowed, that they generated new sequences. But beyond the names familiar from Charles’ manuscript and elsewhere, fr. 9223 includes poems by a large group of otherwise unknown poets who are not content to borrow generative formulae from Charles and his circle, 112

They belong therefore to Champion’s Groupe C, that is, the poems transcribed in the third phase of copying. The rondeaux on the lower register on these pages are from Champion’s Groupe A, those, that is, that were the original group (see Le Manuscrit autographe, pp. 46–50). The rondeaux from pp. 447–48 belong to Champion’s Groupe B, and were therefore transcribed, Champion believes, in the second phase of copying (on all this, see above, p. 87, n. 6). 113

By Raynaud (Rondeaux, p. xxi), by Champion (‘Remarques’, p. 113), by Angremy (‘Un nouveau recueil’, p. 15), and by Inglis (Une nouvelle collection, pp. 39–40). He appears nowhere other than in n.a.f. 15771, where he is also represented by the preceding poem, XXV .

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but who invent their own, like ‘Fortune veut le rebours de mon vueil [Fortune wants the opposite to me]’,114 and, in particular, ‘Pour acquerir honneur et pris [to win honour and reputation]’, which is the prompt for eleven of the ‘unknown’ poets in the second half of the manuscript, and on which I want to focus now.115 The eleven poets can, if only rudimentarily — thanks to Raynaud’s and Inglis’ combing of the archives116 — be identified: rudimentarily because, as I suggested earlier, we do know simply that some at least of them were attached to the household of Arthur III de Richemont. Arthur, the brother of Jean V, Duke of Brittany, is particularly interesting from our point of view.117 Like Charles d’Orléans, he had been captured at Agincourt and held prisoner in England until 1420.118 After he was ransomed he returned to France, and in 1425 entered the service of the King of France, Charles VII, as connétable de France. He remained close to Charles d’Orléans for the rest of his life, and paid a visit to Blois in 1458. The connétable, later to become, very briefly, from 1457–58, Duke of Brittany, gathered around himself a little entourage of loyal Breton knights — and the account-rolls for the dukedom from October 1457 to April 1458119 give some names — names which are, significantly, the names of some of our poets: Eustache d’Espinay (‘Istace de Lespinay’, nos CXXXVI, CXXXVII, CLI,

114

Nos CLVI, CLVII, and

CLX ;

Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud, pp. 133–34, 136–37.

115

Nos CXLIII– CLIV ; Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud, pp. 123–32; see also Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 98–109. 116

Supplemented by Champion’s ‘Remarques’.

117

For details, see E. Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, Artur de Bretagne, 1393–1458 (Paris: Hachette, 1886); Champion, Vie; and, for a brief overview, Malcolm Vale, Charles VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), esp. pp. 35–44. Richemont was to become Duke of Brittany himself, in 1457; he died in 1458. 118

See Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, pp. 43–46, 55–57. Richemont was paroled in 1420, then released in 1422. Richemont and Charles seem initially, briefly, to have been imprisoned together; see Champion, Vie, pp. 160–61. 119

For the document concerned, ‘Extrait du compte d’Olivier le Roux, Trésorier Receveur general sous le Duc Artur III’, see Morice, Mémoires, II, cols 1722–25; and cf. particularly J.-T.M. Trévédy, ‘Les Bretons compagnons du connétable de Richemont’, which can be found online at www.tudchentil.net/IMG/rtf/richemont.rtf [accessed 5 February 2007]; Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, Appendix, p. 658, transcribes a further document which shows that already in 1443–45, Richemont had on his pay-roll Jacques de Luxembourg (L livres), Pierre de la Jaille and André Giron.

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CLVII, CLX, CLXII, CLXIII, CLXV, CLXVII) is an escuier résident,120 as are André Giron (no. CL), Pierre de la Jaille121 (no. CLII) and Jehan de Loyon122 (no. CXLIX, CLXX). Eustache, André, Pierre and Jehan — along with a fifth poet Colas de la Tour or Court (no. CLIII) — were receiving a wage of 10 livres par mois.123 Very

interesting is the fact that another écuyer at the same date is referred to, specifically, as ‘Monsieur Jacques’ — and as we have already noted, a ‘Monsr Jaques’ is the author of no fewer than twenty-two rondeaux and bergerettes in fr. 9223. If this ‘Monsr Jaques’ can indeed legitimately be identified with the ‘Monsieur Jacques’ of the account-rolls (as Inglis suggested in 1985), then he is Jacques de Luxembourg, Arthur de Richemont’s nephew by marriage and close associate.124 Those of the other poets of this little group who can be identified do not seem to have Breton affiliations: ‘Ernoul de Crequy’ (no. CXLVIII) and his son ‘Galoys de Crequy’ (no. CXLVII) were seigneurs de Rimboval in the Pas-deCalais and had, if anything, Burgundian or royal affiliations; Arnoul was échanson to Philip the Good in 1450 and a Jean de Créquy, known as Le Galois, was attached to the royal court.125 And ‘Anthoine’ (no. CXLV) may well be the Antoine de Cuise who figures so large in this manuscript as the poet of ten pieces,

120 He had also been, in 1450, sufficiently close to the connétable to be entrusted with a confidential mission to the royal court (see Morice, Mémoires, II, col. 1550, and Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, p. 428), and in 1458 was sent to the King and Charles d’Orléans ‘pour signifier le deceix du feu Duc Artur’ (see Morice, Mémoires, II, col. 1727). 121

Who, in 1461, was attached to the court of the Duke of Brittany as one of the latter’s gens d’armes; see ibid., II, col. 1777, and cf. Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, pp. 462, 658. 122

Jehan had also been named as an escuier du duc — that is, of the Duke of Brittany — in 1451 (see Morice, Mémoires, II, col. 1604), and was presented with an étrenne, consisting of a gobelet d’argent de 2. marcs and of trois rubis en trois anneaux d’or, on New Year’s Day 1446 (ibid., II, cols 1395–96). In 1459–60, he is recorded as receiving ‘gages et pension’ of some 160 livres (ibid., II, col. 1746) from the estate of the connétable. 123

See Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 213–14. Meschinot, as we saw, was handsomely paid for a rondeau (see above, p. 174, n. 65). 124

On Jacques de Luxembourg, see Jacques Paviot, ‘Jacques de Luxembourg: politique et culture chez un grand seigneur du XV e siècle’, in Penser le pouvoir au Moyen Age, ed. by D. Boutet and J. Verger (Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 2000), pp. 327–41, and Sylvie Lefèvre, Antoine de la Sale: la fabrique de l’œuvre et de l’écrivain (Geneva: Droz, 2006), pp. 230–35. See also Cosneau, Le Connétable de Richemont, pp. 402–07, 458–62. Jacques was salaried as part of Arthur’s entourage: see Morice, Mémoires, II, cols 1710, 1722, 1725, 1752, 1757. 125

On these two, see Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud, pp. xiii–xiv.

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and in n.a.f. 15771 of nine, and who, if so, was a visitor to Charles’ court.126 Poirion suggested that fr. 9223 was the product of what he calls ‘une cristallisation [poétique] extérieure à la cour de Blois’ — perhaps, here, ‘une rencontre à l’échelle de la cour de France’;127 what we should then imagine, perhaps, is an occasion which brought the tight-knit little group of Bretons together with some members of the royal court, in which circumstance someone — ‘Monsr Jaques’? — proposed, for the assembled company, the generative formula ‘Pour acquerir honneur et pris’. It is to this little sequence of twelve poems, which so strongly retains a sense of the social environment of the verse and of its culturally encoded language, that I want to turn now. The first of the poems (no. CXLIII), by ‘Monsr Jaques’, is abortive: Jacques seems to have lost heart after composing no more than the first two stanzas. But if it was indeed he who initiated this little contest, then he seems to have angled the metaphor, from the outset, towards amatory rather than chivalric success: Pour acquerir honneur et pris, J’ay traveillé toute ma vie, Sans veoir dame qui eust envie De me loiger en son pourpris. To win honour and reputation, I have made every effort all my life, and yet I’ve never found a lady who had any wish to lodge me in her domain.

It is always tempting, of course, to find erotic meanings everywhere, but loger means, with suspicious frequency, ‘coucher avec’128 — it is even possible that we should see ‘Jaques’s’ contribution as faintly comic. Even if this erotic meaning was not in fact intended, Jacques has nevertheless programmed a particular range of meanings into the game; the remainder of the players, for the most part, willingly follow his lead.

126

A rondeau by him is transcribed on p. 518 of fr. 25458 (Poésies, II, 530, no. CCCXII). On Anthoine, see Une nouvelle collection, ed. by Inglis, pp. 29–33, and cf. L. Le Floch, Histoire de Cuise-la-Motte, Oise: institutions et vie locale depuis le XII e siècle (Paris: Le Floch, 1974). As Inglis says, it is worth noting that his reputation as a poet was such that one of his rondeaux was set to music by Dufay (see also Geneviève Thibault, ‘Le Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussée’, Annales musicologiques: Moyen Age et Renaissance, 7 (1974), 11–16. 127

Le Poète et le prince, pp. 188–89.

128

Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique, p. 399.

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Starting, in fact, with another effort from ‘Monsr Jaques’, this time completed. It looks as if he was rather taken by the possibilities offered by the rime riche pris/pourpris,129 and he pursues it into his second attempt: Pour acquerir honneur et pris, Il fauldroit avecque [ms. avecq] vous estre, Et toute son intencion mettre A querir d’Amours le pourpris, Et disposer ses esperis A servir a destre, a senestre: Pour acquerir [honneur et pris Il fauldroit avecque vous estre]. Mais s’on se sentoit bien fort pris, Et puis qu’on vaulsist faire pestre, De jouer ung bon tour de maistre, Jamès on ne seroit repris: Pour acquerir [honneur et pris, Il fauldroit avecque vous estre, Et toute son intencion mettre A querir d’Amour le pourpris.]130 To win honour and reputation, I ought to have committed myself to you and dedicated myself to finding the domain of love, and devoted all my thoughts to service, right and left: to win honour and reputation, I ought to have committed myself to you. But if you want to keep your liberty, and lead someone up the garden path or play tricks, you’ll never be chastised. To win honour and reputation, I ought to have committed myself to you and dedicated myself to finding the domain of love.

This second rondeau seems, initially, and for its first two stanzas, to return to seriousness — until with the third stanza comes another tonal shift which turns the rondeau into an exercise in cynicism. ‘Monsr Jaques’ defines ‘honneur et pris’ as useful tools, not as representing any inner or abstract ideal: once you’ve acquired a reputation as an honourable man, then you can get away with leading

129

All the poets of this group will construct strings of rhymes on the same etymological root: a rhetorical figure known as traductio much recommended by the Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique (see Fabri, Le grand et vrai art, II, 34–36; Molinet’s comments in Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, p. 252). 130

I quote this rondeau as Raynaud gives it, with the extended refrain in the third stanza; for Raynaud’s policy on refrains, see Rondeaux, ed. by Raynaud, pp. xli–xliii.

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someone up the garden path (‘faire pestre’)131 and playing tricks (‘jouer un tour de mestre’). The acquisition of honneur et pris becomes, here, in other words, no more than a strategy for seduction.132 Now, a number of the contributions are banal enough — and unimaginative enough, in purely formal terms. One of the more sententious and unexciting, that of ‘Galoys de Crequy’ (no. CXLVII), is the sort of rondeau simple which Pierre Fabri dismisses as le vieil jeu;133 three others are rather plodding exercises padded out with fillers (no. CLII: ‘Mon cueur, mon corps, aussy mon ame [My heart, my body, and my soul as well]’; ‘Ou qu’elle soit, par Nostre Dame, Sur toutes luy donne le pris ... [Wherever she may be, by Our Lady, I give her the first prize]’) and tautologies (no. CLIII: ‘Dames doibvent donner le pris Au mieulx servant par droit usage, Qui mieulx les sert et plus est saige; Pour ce ay de les servir empris ... [Ladies should give the prize, rightly, to the best servant, the one who serves best and who is wisest; that’s why I’ve undertaken to serve …]’). I want to concentrate on some of the rather more ambitious pieces, and first on two bergerettes layées,134 by André Giron (no. CL) and Eustache [Itasse] d’Espinay (no. CLI). As Pierre Fabri points out, the bergerette is rather more demanding than the rondeau — it requires more adept and inventive rhyming (the rhyme-scheme is Aaabbba cccdcccd aaabbbA) — and by layée is meant variable metre: here, the lines are of eight and four syllables. I quote Eustache’s: Qui veult avoir honneur et pris, Doibt estre saige et bien apris En tous peris, Hardy, couraigeux et vaillant, En deffendant ou asaillant Non deffaillant, Doubtant la mort plus que mespris. Mais qui cuide avoir d’avantaige Ung tel bien, par Dieu, n’est pas saige,

131

In the erotic sense; see Bidler, Dictionnaire érotique, p. 477.

132

Which ought, perhaps, to remind us of Amant’s cold calculation in the Roman de la

Rose. 133

The rondeau simple, which Pierre Fabri (Le grand et vrai art, II, 147) calls vieil jeu, has a first stanza of only two lines. 134 On the bergerette, see Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, treatise no. VII, 292 and Fabri, Le grand et vrai art, II, 71–72, where it is defined as a rondeau having two different rhymes for the second stanza; for layé, see ibid., pp. 449–50 (although as Langlois points out, the term is used inconsistently by the different treatises).

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Car maint passaige Dangereux luy fault ains passer: Estre aux fiers fier, ferme en couraige, Hardy en fais, doulz en langaige, Et fault se gaige Bien garder juc’au trespasser. De mesdire ne soit repris, Les dames serve sans despris, Ou trestout pris Est et du monde le vaillant; La doit on estre travaillant, En y veillant, Qui veult [avoir honneur et pris]. If you want to win honour and renown, you must be wise and welltrained, tough, courageous and valiant, never failing, more afraid of disgrace than of Death. But if you imagine you can have so great a good for free, then by God that is not wise, for you will have to overcome many dangerous ways, be proud among the proud, of firm courage, strong in your deeds, gentle in your language, and you must keep your faith until death. Let you not be accused of speaking maliciously; let you serve the ladies without hesitation, in places where all reputation is to be found; it is there that you must operate, always alert, if you want to win honour and renown.

Alone of all the participants, Eustache defines the refrain-terms honneur and pris in their more chivalric sense: his lexicon is a string of austere synonyms (‘Hardy, couraigeux, vaillant’, etc.); his is a lesson in valour. More interesting, in some ways, is his technical proficiency: synonymy is, after all, one of those figures of rhetoric of which Pierre Fabri wholeheartedly approves — as he does of chiasmus, which Eustache neatly provides with the nicely alliterative line ‘aux fiers fier, ferme en couraige’.135 Eustache manipulates rhythm with conviction — it is worth noting the way that enjambement is used to manufacture identical rhythms between the third and fourth lines of the latter two stanzas. This is, in other words, and unlike many of the rondeaux and bergerettes that this particular game seems to have invited, not an apprentice piece: Eustache exploits the potential of the theme with an admirable seriousness.

135

Le grand et vrai art, II, 22; for chiasmus, see ibid., II, 126.

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I shall look at just one other rondeau from this series before attempting to draw conclusions: no. CLIV (fol. 84r), which is anonymous but female voiced:136 Pour acquerir honneur et pris, Mon mieulx amé, j’ay entrepris De vous amer et sans mesprise: Point je n’en puis avoir reprise, Veu le bien qu’en vous est compris. Mon cueur est de vous sy espris Et vueult estre du vostre pris, Adfin que de vous soye prise, [Pour acquerir honneur et pris] … To win honour and renown, my dearest love, I have vowed to love you unambiguously: I cannot be criticized for this, given how much good there is in you. My heart is so enamoured of you, and wants to be prized by yours, so that I can be chosen by you, to win honour and renown …

Now, this is a perfectly competent piece, no more. The speaker, whether or not really a woman, has just one cultural weapon, a particularly impressive use of rhymes in -pris and -prise all deriving from the same root (the rhetorical figure traductio): we remember that this is a manœuvre heartily endorsed by the arts de seconde rhetorique and which therefore suggests if not expertise (Molinet explicitly suggests using strings of rhymes based on verbs like prendre, faire, venir ...), then at least, from the formal perspective, a wish to shine. I have stressed a number of times that these poems are no masterpieces: they may from time to time show some formal sophistication, they may sometimes be demanding or complex, but they can frequently be trite and jingling. This is, in part, because of an unfortunate choice of refrain. Fabri, for instance, is insistent that no refrain should begin with pour, because it, like others of its kind, leads to banality: ‘ilz sont tresdifficilles a recueillir substance’.137 The chosen refrain seems to have reduced the poets, predictably enough, to list-making and, more unfortunately, it does not have the metaphorical potential that drives the best of the games and that we have seen inscribed, almost invariably, in Charles

136

Nothing indicates whether this is a poem genuinely written by a woman; it could plausibly be by a ventriloquizing male poet. 137

Le grand et vrai art, II, 63: ‘Par et, pour, mais, donq, par, car, quant, Ne se doibt rondeau commencer ...’.

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d’Orléans’ studiously chosen refrains: ‘Les amoureux de l’observance’, ‘L’abit le moine ne fait pas’, ‘Jaulier des prisons de pensée’. In some ways, however, the very banality of this little string of poems is rewarding. Precisely because the poems are conformist, the relationships between the poets come to seem more visible. What is particularly striking, for instance, is the way in which the eleven poets, as it were, create their own readership: this string of poems is visibly not, I suggest, intended for an aesthetic response; rather, the poets celebrate (and perhaps consolidate) their sense of belonging to a group, and affirm, via the game, their place and function within the group. When Copin de Senlis and Ernoul de Crequy, for instance, adapt the refrain to read ‘Pour acquerre honneur et pris’, they disrupt the sequence of rondeaux with the much more unusual heptasyllabic metre,138 and produce precisely matching initial lines (Figure 16): Pour acquerre honneur et pris, J’ay empris De bien lealment amer ... (Copin de Senlis; no. CXLVI; my italics) To win honour and renown, I have undertaken to love loyally

and Pour acquerre honneur et pris J’ay empris De servir lealment Amours ... (Ernoul de Crequy; no. CXLVIII; my italics) To win honour and renown, I have undertaken to serve love loyally ...

What we have, surely, is a friendly challenge to the orthodoxies set by the original refrain, and addressed in a way which marks their particular alliance. What is useful here again, I think, is the analytical model I used previously: Gregory Bateson’s metacommunication, which allows us to focus, not on the poets, not on the poems as poems, but rather on the information they provide as to the social or affective relationships between speakers, and the functioning and management of the group.139 What the manuscripts discussed so far in this

138

See Henri Châtelain, Recherches sur le vers français au XV e siècle, p. 236. The anonymous Art et science de rhétorique (Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, ed. by Langlois, pp. 288–89, treatise no. VII) concedes that lines in 8, 10, or 12 syllables are by far the commonest. 139

As in Chapter 2: see Bateson, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, and ‘Information and Codification’; (related?) poems on this theme occur in the Jardin de Plaisance (no. 306), and in the Rohan chansonnier, p. 233.

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chapter are, I would argue, are repositories of the behaviours of such groups,140 incomplete, of course, since, like dramatic texts, the exchanges lack the impress of performance and the responses of any audience. But to revert to Bourdieu, they are evidence of a particular sort of cultural transaction where what is socially endorsed and aesthetically pleasing derives from the collective production of literary pleasure, where the totality of what is produced becomes more important than any individual manifestation, and where, finally, a coterie uses its control of form to advertize its cohesiveness and its particular identity. To consolidate these points, I should like to look at one last coterie manuscript,141 this time dating from considerably later, well into the Renaissance. Marguerite of Austria, at whose court it was produced, was born in 1480, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian I of Austria and Mary of Burgundy and so granddaughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy.142 She was initially betrothed to the future King of France, Charles VIII; she was moved in 1483, at a very young age, to the French court and spent some ten years there until, in 1493, Charles VIII repudiated the marriage. She then married, in 1497, John of Spain, and later, in 1501, after John’s death, Philibert of Savoie. After Philibert’s death, in 1507 and until 1530, she became Regent of the Low Countries on behalf of her nephew, Charles, the future Charles Quint who was to rule the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, and much of present-day Germany, and established a little regency court at Malines, in what is now Belgium. She was also one of the most remarkable artistic patrons of early sixteenth-century Europe: she offered her protection to countless architects and artists and artisans for the elaboration of the magnificent church at Brou which was to be the mausoleum for herself and Philibert; she collected a stable of musicians143 and poets that included, notably,

140

Some theorists of theatre make the same point for drama: see for instance Sandra L. Richardson, ‘Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance and the Canon of AfricanAmerican Literature’, in Performativity and Performance, ed. by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 64–88. 141

On which see my ‘Les Albums Poétiques de Marguerite d’Autriche: The Dynamics of an Early Renaissance Court’, Journal of the Early Book Society, special issue, 4 (2001), 150–71. 142

For a useful brief biography of Marguerite, see Charity Cannon Willard, ‘Marguerite of Austria: Regent of the Netherlands’, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. by Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 350–62; Josef Strelka, Der Burgundische Renaissancehof Margarethes von Österreich und seine literarhistorische Bedeutung (Vienne: Sexl, 1957). 143

On Marguerite’s artistic patronage, see Francisque Thibaut, Marguerite d’Autriche et Jehan Lemaire de Belges: ou, de la littérature et des arts aux Pays-Bas sous Marguerite d’Autriche

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Jean Lemaire de Belges;144 she assembled the luxuriant and tasteful and eclectic library described in Marguerite Debae’s magnificent recent catalogue.145 Given this wealth of possibilities, it seems perverse to concentrate on a rather unspectacular little volume of verses, usually known as her Album poétique,146 but it will be my argument that this unassuming manuscript should be set alongside the loci classici that we have explored in this and the previous chapter, because it too is a coterie manuscript which seems, like the others, to give us insights into the dynamics of a cultured and creative court at the very end of the Middle Ages. But first, the manuscript147 — and a little puzzle. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 10572, is a slim manuscript of just forty-nine folios consisting very largely of rondeaux (despite the fact that Marguerite’s inventory of 1523–24148 says

(Paris: Leroux, 1888; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), pp. 65–101, and most recently and elegantly Women of Distinction: Margaret of York and Margaret of Austria, ed. by Dagmar Eichberger (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2005). On Marguerite’s musicians, see Martin Picker, The Chanson Albums of Marguerite of Austria (Berkeley: California University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 21–47; idem, ‘A New Look at the “Little” Chansonnier of Margaret of Austria’, in Muziek aan het Hof van Margaretha van Oostenrijk/Music at the Court of Marguerite of Austria. Jaarboek van het Vlaamse Centrum voor Oude Muziek, 3 (1987), 27–31; cf. also G. Cammaert, ‘De muziek aan het hof van Margareta van Oostenrijk’, Handelingen van de Kon. Kring voor Oudheidkunde, Letteren en Kunst van Mechelen, 84 (1980), 76–95. On Marguerite’s cultural role, see Catherine Müller’s excellent ‘Marguerite d’Autriche (1480–1530), poétesse et mécène’, in Reines et princesses au Moyen Age. Actes du V e Colloque international de Montpellier, université Paul-Valéry (24–27 novembre 1999), Les Cahiers du CRISIMA, 5, 2 vols (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 2001), II, 764–76. 144

See G. de Boom, Marguerite d’Autriche-Savoie et la Pré-Renaissance (Brussels: Duchatel; Paris: Droz, 1935); on Lemaire more specifically, Thibaut, Marguerite d’Autriche et Jehan Lemaire, and Marie Madeleine Fontaine, ‘Olivier de La Marche and Jean Lemaire de Belges: The Author and his Female Patron’, in Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger, pp. 220–29. 145

La Bibliothèque de Marguerite d’Autriche: essai de reconstitution d’après l’inventaire de 1523–1524 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters, 1995), and Anne-Marie Legaré, ‘“La librairye de Madame”: Two Princesses and their Libraries’, in Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger, pp. 206–19. 146

Albums poétiques de Marguerite d’Autriche, ed. by Marcel Françon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Paris: Droz, 1934). There are some inconsistencies in the transcriptions, which I have silently corrected. 147

There is an excellent description in Debae, La Bibliothèque, pp. 94–96; see also my ‘Les Albums Poétiques’. For a very interesting discussion of this manuscript, see Müller, ‘Marguerite d’Autriche’. 148

Published by H. Michelant, ‘Inventaire des vaisselles, joyaux, tapisseries, peintures, manuscrits, etc. de Marguerite d’Autriche, régente et gouvernante des Pays-Bas, dressé en son

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that it ce nomme Plusieurs Balades). I have called it ‘unassuming’: it has little decoration other than a few pen flourishes and, with two notable exceptions, it is all written in the same neat hand. The first notable exception, which seems to make it incontravertible that the manuscript was indeed Marguerite’s, is a not especially distinguished little rondeau, ‘C’est pour jamés’ (fol. 21v; Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 131), entitled, according to an odd convention of this manuscript to which I return shortly, CHANSON FAITE PAR SEMADAMS [MADAME] (Figure 17). It is written in a rapid, angular hand (and in a black ink) quite different from the hand of the remainder of the

Figure 17. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 10572, fol. 21 v .

palais de Malines le 9 juillet 1523’, Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire, 3rd series, 12 (1871), 5–78, 83–136. An earlier fragmentary inventory of 1516 in the Archives du Nord was published by A. Le Glay, Correspondance de l’empereur Maximilien I et de Marguerite d’Autriche, sa fille, gouvernante des Pays-Bas de 1507 à 1519, publiée d’après les manuscrits originaux, 2 vols (Paris: Renouard, 1839), II, 468–77.

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manuscript, and scholars agree that the hand is Marguerite’s own.149 And not only that: the song also resurfaces in one of Marguerite’s other albums (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 228),150 this time set to music, Picker argues, by Pierre de la Rue, one of Marguerite’s most favoured musicians.151 The pertinent point is that the folios on which this latter is written are splendidly illuminated (Figure 18) with decorated initials and a floral border including daisies, ‘marguerites’.152 The point is pertinent because, although MS 228 was indeed richly illuminated on the opening folios, the illuminated borders continue only to fol. 18r, then start again on fols 50v–51v only for this rondeau, ‘C’est pour jamés’, after which the decoration vanishes again apart from pen-flourishes and grotesques. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that such lavish and exceptional decoration is likely to have been conceived for a patroness’ poem, rather than for some anonymous, nondescript rondeau. The implication is therefore that the CHANSON FAITE PAR SEMADAMS, ‘C’est pour jamés’, is indeed by Marguerite herself — and the fact that it is copied into BR 10572 in what appears to be her own hand makes it more than plausible that the latter manuscript is indeed Marguerite’s own.

149

An autograph document published by M. Bruchet and E. Lancien, L’Itinéraire de Marguerite d’Autriche, gouvernante des Pays-Bas (Lille: L. Danel, 1934), p. 333 (reproduced in Debae, La Bibliothèque, p. 586, plate 1b, from Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 9503-04) is in an identical hand; see Müller, ‘Marguerite d’Autriche’. How much of Marguerite’s albums consist of her own work is controversial: Thibaut (Marguerite d’Autriche et Jehan Lemaire, p. 54) thought her responsible for a number of the rondeaux in Brussels BR 10572, but more recent opinion is wary. Müller’s forthcoming study will re-examine the question. 150

On which see Picker, The Chanson Albums; Debae, La Bibliothèque, pp. 11–12.

151

For the arguments, see Martin Picker, ‘Three Unidentified Chansons by Pierre de la Rue in the Album de Marguerite d’Autriche’, The Musical Quarterly, 46 (1960), 329–43; what I say here echoes Picker’s remarks. Jean Lemaire de Belges stresses that Marguerite wrote ‘treselegamment tant en prose comme en rhythme Gallicane’: see his Couronne Margaritique, in Œuvres, ed. by A. J. Stecher, 4 vols (Louvain: Publications de l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 1882–91), IV , 111. 152

Reproduced in facsimile in Martin Picker’s Album de Marguerite d’Autriche: Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS. 228 (Peer: Alamire, 1986). That elaborate manuscript production, and highly complex musical settings, may be designed as a tribute to particular admired or generous patrons is suggested by Leeman L. Perkins, in his Music in the Age of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 635–39.

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Figure 18. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 228, fol. 50 v .

BR 10572 is another spaciously laid-out, carefully copied manuscript, with no more than one ballade or rondeau to the page. But there is one oddity, which I earlier called a puzzle: the fact that in the margin to the left of virtually every lyric is a name in an elementary code whereby the true name is discovered by reading each word backwards, and eliminating its first and last letters: thus ZNIDEZ is Edin, ETOCIPI, Picot, FELY STNEDISERPO ZEDO XELODZ is Le President de Dole, ADRATSABO DEDZ INOBRUOBA is Bastard de Bourbon. Now, virtually all these names — presumably those of the poets153 — 153

Françon (Albums poétiques, pp. 53–58) is wary of saying that these are the poets: the names, he says, are those of amateurs, and the poems are too undifferentiated so that no poetic ‘personalities’ can be discerned; he suggests that the names are those of the courtiers who inspired the poems. Gachet argues that the poems were a malicious act by one of Marguerite’s courtiers, written anagrammatically to satirize other courtiers (Albums et œuvres poétiques de Marguerite d’Autriche, gouvernante des Pays-Bas …, ed. by E. L. J. B. Gachet, Publications de la Société des Bibliophiles Belges, 17 (Brussels: Société des Bibliophiles Belges, 1849)). On this

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can be matched, from her archives, to those of members of Marguerite’s court:154 ‘Picot’, for instance, is Pierre Picot, Marguerite’s doctor; ‘Edin’ is Jean d’Ostin, her maître d’hôtel; ‘le Président de Dôle’ is Mercurin de Gattinara, who was chef of her Conseil privé; and the ‘Bastard de Bourbon’ was appointed by her as a gentilhomme to her nephew Charles V. But if I mentioned a puzzle, I refer not to the devising of this remarkably transparent code: I mean the function of the code itself in relation to the names. We could of course assume that the coded signatures were intended to conceal authorship — but the fact that the code is absurdly easy to break makes that hypothesis implausible. On the contrary, the coded names seem designed, like the acrostics which were so popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and rather like that other artifice of contemporaries, the anagram,155 to flaunt rather than to conceal: to draw the reader’s eye and invite participation in, and a sense of achievement at, the successful solving of a little private puzzle, and hence to make sterile processes of decipherment and identification part of a triumphant process of discovery — all the odder, of course, in the case of a manuscript which, everything suggests, circulated only among the members of Marguerite’s court and therefore among those whose coded identities the manuscript preserves. What this is, I suggest, is another of Bateson’s metacommunicative moves designed to reflect and celebrate a group identity:156 by participating in the game, the players affirm what I called their relatedness. By concealing their names so revealingly, they constitute themselves into an enjoyably closed and complicit circle. But what are the dynamics of a circle of which this manuscript gives us fugitive glimpses? What is intriguing, I think, is the fact that, like the others that we have looked at, this manuscript too has a distinct identity. Let me start with the relation of the courtiers to the patron, because this manuscript, unlike Charles’,157 unlike the others that we have explored in this chapter, is distinctly

topic, see my ‘Les Albums Poétiques’. 154

For details as to identities, see ibid.

155

See François Rigolot, Poétique et onomastique: l’exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1977), pp. 30–35; on anagrams, see most recently Laurence de Looze, ‘Signing off in the Middle Ages: Medieval Textuality and Strategies of Self-Naming’, in Vox intertexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. by A. N. Doane and Carol B. Pasternak (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 162–78. 156

‘Conventions of Communication’, p. 213.

157

It is surprising how very little encomiastic verse appears in Charles’ manuscript, and indeed in other collective volumes.

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ingratiating. Take, for instance, a poem on fol. 12r of the manuscript: a little rondeau which, labelled ZAMO TEMADI [Ma Dame], is this time probably addressed to, rather than composed by, Marguerite:158 Fortune fortunoit fort une En heure si bien opportune Que point ne soit imfortunée Celle a qui dure destinée A livré fortune importune. Jamais ne luy face rancune Fortune monstrant face brune; Mais comme tresbien fortunée Fortune fortunoit [fort] une. La non pareille soubz la lune, Sans avoir paragunde aulcune, Plus que nulle, puis cent an née, Mieux digne d’estre coronnée. Dont en bien, par la voix commune, Fortune fortunoit fort une. (VI, p. 111) Fortune forcefully favoured one lady, and at so propitious a time that she to whom importunate fortune has been so hard will not be come to grief. May Fortune, whose face is so often glowering, never frown on her; may she be good-fortuned; Fortune forcefully favoured one lady. She who has no equal under the moon, she who is paramount above all others in the last one hundred years, who is more worthy than any to bear a crown. So of her we should all say that Fortune forcefully favoured one lady.

The key to this little poem — which looks, offhand, like one of those addresses to Fortune in which the poets of the late Middle Ages specialized159 — is actually the fact that Marguerite’s own devise was Fortune infortune fort une and that this poem plays, dizzyingly and flatteringly, with that very conceit. The unknown poet — no coded name this time — is a master of synonymy and nearsynonymy (fortune, destinée, opportune); of rich rhyme (rime équivoquée, indeed: fort une/opportune/importune); of ambiguity (does heure here mean ‘fortune’, or ‘hour’?). His lexicon is encomiastic: non pareille — sans ... paragunde aulcune — mieux digne. More important, the poem also plays, discreetly, with Marguerite’s

158 159

I quote from Françon’s edition, by poem no. and page.

See Tony Hunt, Villon’s Last Will: Language and Authority in the ‘Testament’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 125–34.

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life history: she had indeed found Fortune importune, as the widow of two husbands; she had lost the queen’s crown that should have been hers when she was repudiated by Charles VIII, and a second crown, which she would have won at the death of her first husband John of Spain, heir to the crowns of Aragon and Castille.160 I would not wish to claim, of course, that this is a masterpiece; it does, on the other hand, develop a phrase in ways that might have pleased Marguerite by juggling appealingly with sound and meaning (another prime example of the rhetorical figure traductio, and something else which makes adequate translation impossible). The poet, in other words, like the others, has identified the mechanisms which will ingratiate: this is a volume which ensures the centrality of its patroness.161 But it is also a volume which, more systematically than those others we have explored, takes a commonsensical line on poetic cliché and the stereotypes of the poet-lover — and it is this which gives the collection its dynamic. Of course, it is occupied by a sufficiency of rondeaux and ballades where a poet lamente (no. XX), where he is consumed by regret (no. XXXIII), where he swears eternal fidelity (no. LXII). But the volume is replete also with sequences of rondeaux which treat lachrymose commonplace with brisk practicality. Take, for instance, the sustained dialogue between two of the stalwarts of the Album, ‘Edin’ (Jean d’Ostin, or d’Hesdin), Marguerite’s maître d’hôtel, and ‘Pirot’ [sic: Pierre Picot], her doctor. Jean d’Hesdin is, it seems, responsible for the first of the poems — which is also, perhaps not by coincidence, the first poem of the collection. His rondeau is melancholic — the characteristic lexicon, the characteristic topoi of the drooping lover: Las, quel regret, quelle melancolie, Las, quel soucy, quelle tristesse en l’ame Est d’ung amant qui a perdu sa dame Gracieuse, moult plaisante, jolye! (I, p. 91) Alas, what regrets, what melancholy! Alas what sorrow, what sadness inhabits the soul of the lover who has lost his lady who is gracious, agreeable, blithe!

160

I am grateful to the external reader for the ‘Text and Translation’ series for pointing out a second crown. 161

As does the superscription ‘the kynge h.viij’ for thirty-one lyrics in British Library Add. MS 31922: see Stevens, Music and Poetry, pp. 4–5.

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I italicize perdu here, because it is this lexeme, specifically, that will shape and structure the dialogue that follows. Picot seizes it and weaves it into a bracing response-ballade: C’est peu de fait, tant vous [Françon vour] fais asavoir Qu’avoir perdu l’amour d’une maistresse, Combien que fut bien belle et en jonnesse, Car l’on en peult assez telles avoir. (II, p. 92) Let me tell you that losing the love of a mistress is nothing very remarkable; however young and beautiful she was, there are plenty more just like her.

Edin is unconvinced; anyone would lament such a loss: Povre d’amours et riche de tristesse Est ung amant, cela j’ose bien dire, Qui a perdu sa dame, sa maistresse; Son cueur gemit quant sa bouche on voit rire. Je croy qu’a part grandement en souspire Quant perdu a ung si bon personnaige Qu’avoir choisi ou n’avoir que redire. Telle perte doit plaindre ung homme saige. (III, p. 93) Lacking in love and rich in sorrows, I swear, is a lover who has lost his lady, his mistress! His heart is breaking behind a smiling face. When he is alone he sighs gustily, having lost so good a person that he has chosen and in whom he can find nothing to criticize. Such a loss must be lamented by any wise man!

But Picot’s ballade is unrepentantly dismissive; there is no future in love: Et puis beaulté, tant d’aultre que de celle, Tost se passe comme beaulté de rose; Qui telle pert, choisisse une nouvelle; Ou recouvre a, perdre c’est peu de chose. (IV , p. 95) And anyway, beauty is as fleeting as the rose — for her as for any other woman. Anyone who loses one need only find another; when it’s so easy to recover, losing is nothing to write home about …

The two poets then institute a dialogue, in twenty-six huitains carrés, between ‘L’Ung’ (‘lung est znidex’) and ‘L’Aultre’ (‘laultre est Atocipo’), the contributions of each in the manuscript being written, intriguingly — and this is the second exception to the standard hand — in two slightly different hands. ‘L’Ung’ (Jean d’Hesdin) begins with a flourish, picking up sharply on the refrain of the preceding ballade, and playing acrobatically with the key lexeme:

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Perdre petit est peu de chose; Mais grandement perdre moult griefve, En ce ne fault texte ne glose. Aussi vray que lez ditz d’Orose, Grant perte peu gain ne reliesve; Mal fait perdre, soit pais ou triesve, Et n’eust-on ja perduz qu’ung fust, Oncques perdant contant ne fut. (Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 97) Losing something unimportant is nothing to worry about; only if you lose something worthwhile is grief appropriate. That’s not something we need to stress; it’s as true as Orosius’ words. A little gain cannot make up for great loss. It’s always bad to lose, in peace or in war, and even if you’ve lost a trifle, it’s never nice to lose.

‘L’Aultre’, unwisely perhaps, responds with some seriousness: Se cil qui pert ne se contente, Content est cil qui a le gain. Fortune jamais ne presente … (Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 98) If he who loses is always annoyed, by contrast he who wins is always pleased. Fortune is never giving …

and ‘L’Ung’ seizes on the reference to Fortune, with a neat little touch which suggests a wish to curry favour with Marguerite (or may, indeed, register her endorsement of the exchange), to play with Marguerite’s devise again: Vouldries vous dire que fortune S’entremette du fait d’amours, En disant, se j’aime fort une, Que fortune, par face brune, Tournera mon cas au rebours ...? (Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 98) Do you mean that Fortune should involve itself in love, saying, if I love someone forcefully, that Fortune, whose face is so often glowering, will reverse my fate …?

I have quoted this exchange at length so that one can begin to see its dynamics. The verses, of course, are neither particularly ingenious nor particularly flashy. Few of the rhymes are rich, there is a dismaying number of fillers (‘tant vous fais asavoir’, ‘plus ou telle’), and the refrains lack the punch with which the best poets of the period (Charles himself, Villon, Jean Lemaire) invest them. The poets are, on the other hand, adroit enough: even if the sentiments for which the poems are a vehicle are conventional, even if the lexicon is unremarkable, Jean d’Hesdin and Pierre Picot have managed to confect something stylish. And not only that: their tongue-in-cheek dialogue has a pointedness, a humour, to which

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it is difficult not to respond. Take, for instance, Pierre Picot’s last ballade of the series, and its manipulation of what by the sixteenth century was a weary topos, the Horatian carpe diem, ‘gather ye rosebuds’. Picot rewrites the commonplace: unlike Horace, unlike the latter’s countless epigones, he uses the rose metaphor as a consolation: ‘beaulté ... se passe comme beaulté de rose’, so the lover would in any case soon have tired of an aging, fading belle fille and should simply, and without regret, move on. But what is most striking is the relish with which the two poets attack the key lexeme, inflecting the etymon perdere though its different forms, verbal and nominal (traductio again); these are knowing reprises which suggest that this complicit circle took a knowing and real pleasure in linguistic agility. Because of this complicity, perhaps, because the manuscript seems to thrive on dialogue, it is also a manuscript of personalities: the ostentatious play with names may well be a sign that this is so. How far these personalities relate to the ‘real’ poets is of course, here again, unknowable, and it may well in any case be irrelevant. The poets themselves warn us, indirectly, not to take them too seriously: ‘Aubigni’,162 for instance, makes the game explicit: ‘Pour son esbat et aussi pour le mien, Je fain l’amant, elle fain l’amoureuse ... [For her amusement, and for mine, I impersonate the lover, she the mistress]’ (no. XLIII; Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 150; my italics) — as, again, does Picot: ‘L’on parle et dit l’on des propos, Et voulentiers je les escoute Sans croire le tout ... [People say things, and I listen to them willingly, but without believing them very far]’ (no. XLIX; Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, p. 156; my italics). But even if the personalities are entirely spurious, what the manuscript suggests is that ‘poetic personae’ are valuable for the poètes de circonstance that the Album creates. Picot’s consistent poetic stance, for instance, throughout the Album, is precisely the devil-may-care cynicism that the little exchange I have just quoted has crystallized: his is the rakish voice against which those of the more dutifully tearful of his colleagues are to be measured. A poet who is, for once, anonymous is sleepless: De quatre nuys les trois veillier Et la quatresme sommeillier En despitant ma vie toute

162 Not easy to identify — although Robert Stuart, seigneur d’Aubigny, later marshal of France, was present at the signing of Marguerite’s marriage contract with the future Charles VIII of France on 16 May 1483 (see my ‘Les Albums Poétiques’). But it seems unlikely that so exalted a personage would be referred to simply as ‘Aubigni’.

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Me fait celle qui passe route De cueur amoureux traveillier. (XII, p. 117) She who is unusually expert in torturing my amorous heart keeps me awake for three nights in four, and I spend the fourth dozing and hating my very life.

but is dismissed by Picot for mawkish sentimentality: De quatre nuys les trois que veille Et la quatresme ne sommeille, Il ne fault faire point de doubte Qu’il ne soit ung fol, somme toute, S’ainsi par amours se traveille. (XIII, p. 118) Anyone who says he stays awake for three nights and only dozes on the fourth, is someone of whom we have to say that he’s totally mad to let himself be tortured by love.

A Monseigneur de Poupet offers a disillusioned lyric:163 Au plus offrant ma dame est mise Et au dernier encherisseur. Je ne sçay se c’est par honneur Mais je n’en prise pas la guise. (LXXI, p. 178) My lady is available to the highest bidder. I don’t know how honourable it is, but I’m not impressed …

to which Picot devises a firm, and rather witty, response as if from ma dame, a response which picks up, ingeniously, not just the metaphor but precisely the same rhyme-scheme: Je ne suis pas en vente mise: Nul n’est qui soit de moy vendeur, Car, selon le bon entendeur, Ce n’est pas des dames la guise. (LXXII, p. 179)

163

Probably borrowed from the Jardin de Plaisance (fol. 115v ) which I explore in the next chapter. Another rondeau (fol. 19r, ‘Incessamment mon pouvre cueur lamente’) is also borrowed from the Jardin de Plaisance, fol. 122r. By no means all the poems in the Album are original, even though, as here, they seem to be attributed to one of Marguerite’s ‘poets’: did one or two of the less adroit participants present an occasional borrowed lyric as their own? Marguerite, notably, did possess a copy of the Jardin de Plaisance; see Debae, La Bibliothèque, p. 390. For a table of lyrics from the Album to be found in this and other miscellanies and anthologies, manuscript or printed, see Albums poétiques, ed. by Françon, pp. 75–78.

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Chapter 3 I’m certainly not available to the highest bidder: no-one’s selling me, for everyone of any intelligence knows that that’s not women’s way.

Picot’s forte, in other words, is light-hearted, often sharp-witted, cynicism, and his is expedient verse, verse at the service of other members of the court, not the verse of conviction. By contrast, another sequence of verses conducted largely, it seems, by the President de Dole (Gattinara) is political rather than personal. The originator, rather disconcertingly given his usual poetic persona, is Pierre Picot, modulating from what looks like mere platitude into seriousness: Le temps est trouble, le temps se esclarcira; Apres la plue [sic] l’on atent le beau temps; Apres noises et grans divers contens Paix adviendra et maleur cessera. Mais entre deulx que[l] mal l’on souffrera! (XLVII, p. 154) The times are troubled, the times will improve; after rain comes good weather; after hubbub and contention comes peace, and the end of unhappiness. But meanwhile, what great dismay we suffer!

Picot’s respondent, FELY STNEDISERPO ZEDO XELODZ, the President de Dole, will have none of this qualified optimism: the future cardinal’s164 is a dignified seriousness that befits the political and diplomatic status with which Marguerite had endowed him: Le tout va mal et sans loy est la terre, Ou puissance tient le lieu de justice Et ou le jour fait de la nuyt l’office Et le fuir tient lieu de bonne guerre. (XLVIII, p. 155) All is awry, and the world is lawless, when power replaces justice, when day takes the place of night, and when retreat replaces decent war.

His measured rondeau drags the Album into a temporary solemnity from which it is distracted by a rondeau by ‘Beavoir’,165 who seems to have seized upon the opening lexeme of Picot’s rondeau, but converted its unexpected seriousness into amorous self-centredness:

164

The Président de Dole — Mercurin de Gattinara — was chef of Marguerite’s Conseil privé, and was appointed cardinal in 1529: see my ‘Les Albums Poétiques’, and Carlo Bornate, Ricerche intorno alla vita di Mercurino Gattinara, gran cancelliere di Carlo 5 (Novara: Fratelli Miglio, 1899). 165

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Who is unidentifiable; see my ‘Les Albums Poétiques’.

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Le temps m’est long et j’ay bien le pourquoy, Car ung jour m’est plus long que une sepmainne; Dont je prie Dieu que mon corps tost ramainne Ou est mon cueur qui n’est plus avec moy. (L , p. 157) Time drags for me, and for good reason, for each day seems longer than a week; so I pray God that my body will soon rejoin my heart which is now distant from me.

LAS PELLESIOMEDA SEDZ FEREVO, demoiselle de Vere — the kidnapper of ‘Beavoir’’s tragic heart? — is tartly unimpressed by these dismal phrases: Le temps vous dure, je le croy, Et a moy non, je vous assure ... (LI, p. 158) So time drags, I gather; well, it doesn’t for me, I can assure you.

But just as the sequence seems to be veering towards the conventionally sentimental, the President de Dole reverts to the refrain that he had embroidered earlier and tugs the Album back to the social and political: Le tout va mal par grant varieté Car ung est deulx, mal pour bon est admis, Et a present amis sont ennemis, Dont plus n’a lieu en terre pieté. (LII, p. 159) All goes ill, in every way, for one is said to be two, evil is thought to be good, friends are now enemies, so that there is no longer any sense of piety on this earth.

What I am implying here is, of course, that just as Picot’s voice is sharply characterized in this miscellany as cynical, insouciant, so Gattinara’s, ponderous, substantial, comes to embody moral reflection: whatever their respective personalities — and nothing, of course, allows us to reconstruct them — their poetic personae have a depth and resonance, and their interactions, when examined closely, leap off the manuscript page. The phrase poetic personae which I have used several times here emphasizes the fact that in Marguerite’s album, as in Marie de Clèves’, as in fr. 9223 and n.a.f. 15771, all manuscripts where the proper name is prominent, ‘identity’ and ‘authorship’ are clearly at issue. Poetic communication, in these manuscripts, is socially positioned and socially motivated, and even if the concept of ‘literature’ and ‘literary reception’ are both alien to the courtly world of amateur versifying of which the manuscripts are a lasting record, in these manuscripts at least, authorship, however occasional and adventitious, is an important element in a patron’s cultural portfolio. These anthologies are a repository for exercises in

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particular modes produced for socially sophisticated and responsive audiences — and there is after all no evidence that they were ever intended, at origin, to be read outside the particular coteries in which they were created. They seem, in other words, to be the record of dynamic interchanges in which the individual contribution is less important than the total transaction between the named and familiar participants; the manuscripts record the language of social life in a particular circle.166 What they celebrate, therefore, is something that Homi Bhabha calls the ‘within’,167 that is, the ways in which poetic enterprise, and poetic performance, are strategies to shape a group, or coterie, identity. The relationship between the production of these manuscripts, and their consumption, is thus dialectical: their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers both produce and consume them. I return, then, to a distinction which has shaped much of this book: Roger Chartier’s distinction between the text ‘monument’ and the text ‘event’.168 These collections, essentially opportunistic, are not designed for the sort of admiring, attentive reading which a Guillaume de Machaut or a Christine de Pizan envisaged for their ‘show’ manuscripts, but rather as records of the ‘event’, affleurements de l’oralité, to use another of Chartier’s phrases:169 ways of preserving an evening’s entertainment,170 and thus of confirming and reinforcing social bonds, and of affirming the status and standing of a particular court. And, of course, these negotiations of voice and personality give life to the sort of fictions of intimacy which, at the outset of this chapter, I suggested were integral to the group of manuscripts that I proposed to discuss. It is impossible to judge just how these fictions may have related to the reality of Marguerite’s court, still less to the courts of the patrons of n.a.f. 15771 and fr. 9223, of whom we know so little — but what is certainly evinced in these displays of dialogue is the sort of shared understandings and shared frames of reference which create

166

As Marotti says (John Donne, p. 13), miscellanies ‘echoed back to a general readership the language they were already speaking’; see also Dara, ‘Recueils’, pp. 160–216. 167

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994; repr. 2004) is useful here. Bhabha’s focus is national narratives (nationhood or ‘people-hood’) — but his discussion of the role of the cultural in the construction of group identity is helpful. I first met Bhabha in Ardis Butterfield’s excellent Poetry and Music in Medieval France. 168

See above, pp. 67–68.

169

This time from his L’Ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIV e et XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992), p. 31. 170

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Cf. Olson, Literature as Recreation, pp. 19–38.

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the illusion at least, and a distinctly flattering one for the participants, of an interchange between initiates. The presence in Marguerite’s manuscript of the carefully decipherable names which suggest socially restricted literary communication, the interchanges between deliberately devised playful personae, give this coterie ownership of the anthology’s cultural wealth — and, of course, even without such name-games, the mere presence of the poets’ names suggests a desirable social ‘bonding’. In my final chapter, I propose to explore the ways in which one of the most energetic publishers of the early Renaissance in France, Antoine Vérard, has devised just such fictions of intimacy, just such illusions of the ‘event’, for the readers of one of his more ambitious enterprises: that of producing the very first printed anthology of French lyric verse, and inducting into it a new and bourgeois audience with a limited experience of the courtly and an underdeveloped understanding of the techniques of verse.

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A P RIEST OF P OETRY TO THE P EOPLE: A NTOINE V ÉRARD AND THE A NTHOLOGY

The ideal anthologist ... is a priest of Poetry to the people. He must be free from prejudices of his own ... He must, in fact, to be free of prejudice, actually dislike poetry. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (London: Cape, 1959), p. 51.

L

aura Riding and Robert Graves — the epigraph here is characteristically provocative — are no admirers of the methodical, professional anthology: on the contrary, the anthologist, they say, makes readers prisoners of his or her own taste, shackles their imaginations, and makes them lazy and unadventurous. The Earl of Shaftesbury, that passionate eighteenth-century dilettante, shares their patrician disdain: the ‘airy Reader’, he fears, will inevitably be oppressed by ‘a Coherence, a Design, a Meaning, [which] is against their purpose’.1 Modern taste has, it seems, largely changed. Anthologies proliferate, to the extent that it seems, sometimes, as if readers prefer their poetry preselected and packaged. Where once Shaftesbury’s ‘airy Reader’ may have wanted to be left to his or her own imaginative devices, modern critics anxious to cater for public demand and to rehabilitate the experience of reading collected works concur in detecting a studious architecture not only, for instance, in Les Fleurs du Mal (where it is possible, from objective evidence, to talk of careful editorial ordering), but also where it was previously unsuspected, in Scève’s Délie or

1

Quoted by Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 5.

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Ronsard’s sonnets.2 What I have said in previous chapters, about Charles’ personal manuscript, about fr. 9223, n.a.f. 15771, and Brussels 10572, has rather sidestepped questions of Coherence, and Design, and Meaning, by arguing that since the manuscripts are a reflection of the language of social life in a particular circle, of a cultural conversation which the manuscript owners orchestrate and in which they participate, coherence inheres in the sociocultural circumstances of their production, and not in any overall design. Ultimately, however, the question of design cannot be dodged, and I propose to join the modern critics by addressing it in the present chapter, by turning to a printed volume whose design, however rudimentary, however factitious, does indeed make it proper to use the term ‘anthology’: Antoine Vérard’s astonishing Jardin de Plaisance of 1501,3 which embodies a new, professionalizing culture in which the producer ‘packages’ the lyric by incorporating it into precisely the sort of meaning and design of which Shaftesbury and Riding and Graves are so contemptuous. Vérard creates, I shall suggest, what it is proper to call an anthology, and it is an anthology with a purpose: for the several hundred miscellaneous lyrics which are the centre-piece of this revolutionary volume, he provides an elaborate narrative–editorial context which foregrounds precisely the sort of connection between lyric verse and social relationships that we have examined in the previous chapters, and thus replicates, with remarkable ingenuity, the experience of verse-production and verse-reception in the world of the court. He supplies for the lyrics, in other words, a meaning and design of the sort which, as modern readers, we are rather inclined to welcome.

2

See for instance the essays in The Ladder of High Designs, ed. by Fenoaltea and Rubin, or in The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry, ed. by Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 3

I quote from the facsimile of the 1501 edition, ed. by Eugénie Droz and Arthur Piaget, SATF, 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1910–14), I; references are to their folio or item numbers (prefixed D/P), the latter from the astonishingly full commentary in volume II, to which I refer by page-number as D/P, II (we should, however, note that referencing their facsimile is complicated by the fact that the first 54 folios are unnumbered: they themselves advise readers ‘de bien vouloir les numéroter eux-mêmes’: D/P, II, 7. I have preferred to reference the first 54 leaves by quire letter and folio no.). I have silently punctuated, expanded abbreviations, distinguished i and j, u and v; many lines are hyper- or hypometric, and I occasionally correct, again silently. I rely on Droz and Piaget for their assiduous combing of late-medieval and early Renaissance lyric anthologies, in manuscript and in print. On the Jardin de Plaisance, see also Frédéric Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs de poésies du XVIe siècle (du Jardin de Plaisance, 1502, aux recueils de Toussaint du Bray, 1609) (Paris: Champion, 1922), pp. 3–11.

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This is not a claim which will commend itself to all readers. The Jardin de Plaisance is not customarily thought to be the result of any but the most skindeep design, nor to have much in the way of architecture or meaning. We are no longer, it is true, quite as dismissive as Rigoley de Juvigny in 1773 — ‘vieilles rimailles; esquelles je n’ai trouvé chose qui mérite qu’on s’amuse à y lire’4 — but even more sympathetic modern critics quail at the prospect of its multitudinous content: ‘un monde, où l’on se perd’, says François Cornilliat,5 and it is true that the volume is not especially approachable. Its contents are a miscellany of texts of the most various kinds. The centre-piece, which will be my subject here, is two suites of unadulterated ballades, rondeaux, and chansons which provide, says Kovacs, ‘a summa of courtly verse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’.6 Around them, framing them, is a welter of some forty-six narrative or didactic treatises, or parodies, or dits,7 or more or less topical satirical homilies whose function and coherency it is often difficult to determine. I shall, nevertheless, want to make the case that this apparently chaotic volume is not a miscellany but an anthology — but first, I need to explore what might be meant by the distinction in this late-medieval or early Renaissance context. Terminologies vary, of course, but there is a general agreement, among scholars of Middle English for instance, that by ‘anthology’ is meant a volume that brings a number of items together according to some governing principle, whereas a ‘miscellany’ is ‘the fruit of more random incorporation’:8

4

Les bibliothèques françoises de La Croix du Maine et de Du Verdier, ed. by Rigoley de Juvigny, 6 vols (Paris: Saillant et Nyon, 1772–73), IV , 557. 5

‘Or ne mens’, p. 79. I pay tribute here to the excellent pioneering article by Susan R. Kovacs, ‘Staging Lyric Performance in Early Print Culture: Le Jardin de Plaisance et Fleur de Rhétorique (c. 1501–1502)’, French Studies, 55 (2001), 1–24; cf. also my articles ‘“A rude heap together hurl’d”: Disorder and Design in Vérard’s Jardin de Plaisance (1501)’, in ‘De sens rassis’: Essays in Honor of Rupert T. Pickens, ed. by Keith Busby, Bernard Guidot, and Logan E. Whalen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 629–44; ‘Mise en mélange au quinzième siècle: feuilleter le Jardin de Plaisance’, in Le Goût du lecteur à la fin du Moyen Age, ed. by Danielle Böhler, Cahiers du Léopard d’Or, 11 (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 2006), pp. 47-63, and ‘Inventer le recueil lyrique à l’époque de l’imprimerie: quelques jalons’, Revue d’Humanisme et Renaissance (2006), 21–29. 6

‘Staging Lyric Performance’, p. 1.

7

For a definition of which, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Le dit’, in GRMLA, Littérature française aux XIV e et XV e siècle (Heidelberg: Winter, 1984), pp. 86–94. 8

VIII/I:

La

Julia Boffey, ‘Short Texts in Manuscript Anthologies: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate in Two Fifteenth-Century Collections’, in The Whole Book, ed. by Nichols and Wenzel, pp.

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unmethodical, unpremeditated (or, of course, to be more positive, serendipitous). An anthology, in other words, is, at least purportedly, a consciously created selection in which an intention to order can be perceived, whereas mere miscellanies — like those I discussed more briefly in my first chapter, BnF fr. 1719 or the Epinal manuscript — simply enshrine assorted items copied over time and as they come to hand, with none of the schemes of script and mise en page which betray advance planning. I do not, of course, want to imply that a medieval anthology is ‘meant’ as a modern anthology might be. Whatever the particular core of lyrics or particular manuscript configuration any patron or scribe or publisher may have had in mind — ‘exemplar poverty’, as Ralph Hanna puts it — the fact that so few manuscripts or exemplars are likely to have come their way will probably mean that ‘they were constrained to make the fullest imaginable use of any book that came to hand, and their planned core selections would come to coexist with other items’.9 We should not, in other words, except in the sort of single-author collections that I described in my first chapter, like Christine de Pizan’s or Machaut’s, set our standards of design too high; nevertheless, an anthology, by definition, has to derive from some decision process, intellectual, aesthetic, or pragmatic, which can be recovered or, at the very least, to embody the principle of clustering together different but similar items. Analogies may be made here with more scholarly discussions which, scholars agree,10 filtered out of the medieval scholarly world and into lay preoccupations, and which distinguish collectio, where no principle of order can be discerned, from compilatio, that is, the process of collection where the compilator takes responsibility for the collection, copying, and organization of a written collection: for imposing, in other words, ordinatio, where organization and mise en page of the contents are of particular importance. To put it briefly, and to use Nicolas of Lyra’s neat and convenient formulation: ‘A compilatio has ordinatio whereas a collectio has not’.11 What I shall want to argue here is that Antoine Vérard, however constrained by happenstance his choice of content may

69–82 (p. 73), and Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’. Gemino A. Abad, rather poetically, calls them suites and potpourris: see A Formal Approach to Lyric Poetry (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1978), pp. 24–25, 380–81. The equivalent in French — but it is only partial — might be anthologie and recueil. 9

Hanna, ‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity’, p. 47.

10

See Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio’, and Minnis, ‘Late-Medieval Discussions’. 11

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have been,12 however ersatz his efforts appear, nevertheless makes strenuous efforts to impose an ordinatio on the Jardin de Plaisance. He makes it a compilatio by using paratexts to create an aesthetic expressiveness, by arranging its miscellaneous contents so as to encourage the perception of an artful whole. His anthology flatters its readers by assuming their familiarity with particular literary idioms which function as signs of cultural sophistication and rhetorical mastery; it makes them free, for the price of a book, with the rich cultural resources and social milieu of late-medieval poetry. I want, therefore, ultimately, to focus on the mass of fixed-form lyrics in the Jardin de Plaisance, but first I need to say something at greater length about the elaborate narrative-editorial context that Vérard provides for them. I shall consider three elements: first, the means deployed to persuade us of the coherence of the volume via a sketchy story and a sequence of carefully contrived woodblocks; second, the ways in which the publisher creates an assumption of coherence via his prefatory and ancillary features; finally, and at greatest length, the way in which he, or his compiler, encourages a conviction that there are also formal and semantic and thematic similarities and modulations operating within the collection of lyrics, from poem to poem, and hence across the entire book. What is interesting is the ways in which he persuades us to believe that seemingly gratuitous juxtapositions, certainly as between the longer, more narrative poems but also, more strikingly, between fixed-form lyrics, may in fact be the result of selection in accordance with certain principles. I want to argue, in other words, that the story that frames the poems is designed to be more than just a ‘baggy monster’ with no end in mind other than to be as elastic and accommodating as possible, and that the paratextual apparatus which the publisher has devised is designed to foreground the authority and control of the compiler and the coherence of the content. I do this to reinforce the conviction that the design and layout of the volume create the illusion of the sort of social environment for the lyric to which Charles’ manuscript, and the manuscripts I looked at in Chapter 3, also seem to bear witness — and this in turn suggests that, for a highly commercial and astute businessman like Antoine Vérard, the social

12

Although of course, as a successful publisher, he had access to a remarkably wide range of texts of all sorts: for the breadth of his publishing activities, see John Macfarlane, Antoine Vérard (London: printed for the Bibliographical Society at the Chiswick Press, 1900; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), and most recently Mary Beth Winn’s breathtakingly complete Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher, 1485–1512: Prologues, Poems and Presentations (Geneva: Droz, 1997).

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environment of lyric verse is an essential component of the ‘package’ he needs to construct.13 The Jardin de Plaisance, then, consists of some 258 folios, deliberately designed, as Kovacs points out, as something like a ‘manuscrit-imprimé’,14 that is, to bear some resemblance to the more luxurious codices which circulated in royal and princely courts: set double-column in a costly, large in-folio, illustrated format. The centre-piece of the volume is that torrent of fixed-form lyrics, in two sections: some 626 all told, mostly rondeaux and ballades, almost all unattributed and indeed for the most part unattributable.15 Very few have a title which goes beyond ‘autre balade’ or ‘autre rondel’, and they are printed, discouragingly if quite spaciously, half-a-dozen or more to a page and decorated with nothing other than ornamental woodblock initials. Undiscouraged, Vérard’s public seems to have made the Jardin de Plaisance a considerable commercial success: it was

13 I am here, of course, making the assumption that it is Vérard’s workshop which is responsible for the design of the Jardin de Plaisance, or at the very least that he commissioned a design from some unknown compiler. Dr Roger Middleton, to whom I am extremely grateful, points however to an intriguing note in an eighteenth-century sale catalogue, Catalogue des livres de M. C**** [which the copy in the Bodleian Library completes as Coucicaut] (Paris: Martin, 1742). Page 8, inventaire 10 mentions: ‘Le Jardin de plaisance, MS. contenant des Pieces curieuses d’Histoire, des Poesies, &c’, which was sold for 1 franc 17 sous. If this description is correct (and assuming what is meant is not a copy of Vérard’s edition mistakenly described as a manuscript, or a manuscript copy of Vérard’s made after his), then it could imply the existence of a prior manuscript tradition. Unfortunately, the catalogue has no trace of the buyer. 14 ‘Staging Lyric Performances’, p. 1. She borrows the term from Dominique Coq, ‘Les incunables: textes anciens, textes nouveaux’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, 4 vols (Paris: Promodis, 1989–91), I, 203–27 (p. 219), and cf. on Vérard’s predilection for such manuscripts, Winn, Anthoine Vérard, pp. 31–32, and eadem, ‘Offerings for the King: Antoine Vérard’s Presentation Manuscripts and Printed Books’, in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing: some papers read at the Warburg Institute on 12–13 March 1982, ed. by J. B. Trapp (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1983), pp. 66–74. True manuscrits-imprimés are the careful productions, on vellum and with overpainted engravings, that Vérard presented to royal and other patrons. A magnificent presentation copy of the Jardin de Plaisance, on vellum, presumably intended for Louis XII, is in the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen (Perg. Haun. 18 2o ; for sample pages, see www.kb.dk/elib/mss/treasures/aeldste_trykte/perg18.htm [accessed January 2007]); the engravings are wonderfully hand-coloured and overpainted. 15

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republished seven times before 1530, by a variety of printers,16 and no fewer than seven copies are listed in inventories, mostly of the collections of prosperous readers from professional and bourgeois circles.17 This means, of course, that this lyric collection cannot be dismissed as the manuscripts I have so far looked at might be, as one-off celebrations of a particular court culture, or as self-gratifying commissions; rather, the publisher is targeting, successfully as it turns out, a public which may no longer be naturally familiar with the literary and cultural assumptions that shaped those manuscripts. And what his success has to do with is the artful commerciality, the exploitation of new technologies, and the skilful manipulation of readerly proclivities and public taste, that Vérard deploys to make the Jardin de Plaisance seem, to go back to my earlier remarks, not a miscellany but an anthology. An anthology, however, consisting of what? It is easy to accuse Vérard of producing something that is no more than a mish-mash of whatever texts came to hand: ‘easily made’, because at first sight there might seem no rhyme or reason to the choice of texts. They vary in origin and type and date from a little treatise on rhetoric to the sort of conventional dialogues on love and marriage in which Alain Chartier and the Belle Dame sans merci cycle specialize,18 from a modernized thirteenth-century treatise on female behaviour to a dubious skit on Aelius Donatus’s famous grammatical treatise, from an anti-matrimonial diatribe to a topical eulogy to royal peace-making. And yet the volume does have a narrative pretext, a diegesis banal enough, true, but which purports to draw its miscellaneous contents into a coherent whole. To simplify: the setting for the 16

By Vérard himself in c. 1504, by other Parisian printers Michel Le Noir (1505), Vve Trepperel and Jehan Jehannot (c. 1515), Michel Le Noir and Jehan Petit (c. 1518), Philippe Le Noir (1527), and twice by the Lyonnais printer Olivier Arnoullet for Martin Boullon (c. 1525 and c. 1530). D/P’s catalogue (II, 12–26) must be corrected by reference to Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs, pp. 3–11; Catalogue des incunables de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 2 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1985), II, 101; Bibliographie lyonnaise par le Président Baudrier, continué par J. Baudrier, 12 vols (Paris: DeNobele 1965), III, 61–62, X , 47–48. 17

See A. H. Schutz, Vernacular Books in Parisian Private Libraries of the Sixteenth Century According to Notarial Inventories (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). The total is remarkably rich in relation to comparable texts; owners include a conseiller du roi en sa chambre de comptes, a président des enquêtes, an avocat, a notaire, and a maître tapissier. 18

It is interesting that so few of Chartier’s dialogues find their way into the Jardin de Plaisance — despite the fact that the introductory rhetorical treatise, the Instructif de seconde rhetorique, praises him particularly as the flower of fifteenth-century poets: the anthology contains only Le Débat des deux fortunés d’amour (no. 620), and a group of fourteen rondeaux woven into a single dit (no. 621).

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volume as a whole is a Jardin de Plaisance, peopled by elegant youths and charming dames, and we meet our shy and retiring hero, ung povre amoureux, daring to address his suit to one of the ladies. The lady, conventionally enough, is scathing, and roundly rejects him; desolate, he laments his fate (‘la lamentacion faicte au Jardin de Plaisance du povre serviteur sans guerdon [the lament composed in the Garden of Pleasure by the poor servant without reward]’), and, privé de joye, finds himself in the purgatoire d’amours. Banished from the Jardin by Malebouche, the lover entr[e] en tristesse en plusieurs façons [expresses his sadness in various ways], and his lady meurt de courroux [dies of grief ]. And then, alas, having made his testament, composed a doleance de la mort de sa dame [lament on the death of his lady], he too, piteously, rend l’ame [gives up the ghost]. The terms in which I have summarized the story of the Jardin de Plaisance are deliberately reductive — deliberately, because no one would claim any particular originality for it. Indeed, it may be that its banality and its nebulousness are intended to be as accommodating as possible. But beyond this is another factor. This pedestrian story is, I want to suggest, carefully designed to provide for the larger pieces, and for the lyrics proper, a frame connotative of precisely the sort of élite sociability that I have discussed before: to evoke a vernacular high culture where verse is a tool to consolidate a group identity, and where, in a courtly environment, it acquires social and cultural value.19 The cue for the underlying fiction, and indeed the title for the collection as a whole, derives, it seems, from one of longer poems early in the collection: an anonymous piece known as Le Chastel de joyeuse destinee. This is one of those rather self-indulgent late-medieval dream poems in which the hero, lost in despair because distant from his lady, finds himself in a beautiful landscape peopled by allegorical figures like Doulx Regard, or Bel Accueil. The story is characteristically complicated: a quest takes the hero to a series of extraordinary adventures and finally to a magnificent parkland, a lieu de plaisance where beside a gente fontaine [a fair fountain] elegant lovers and charming ladies spend their time amoureusement, Gracieusement devisans En doulx langaiges et plaisans,

19

See Green, Poets and Princepleasers, pp. 71–100. That Vérard was pleased with the commercial success of his ‘package’ is surely shown by the fact that in 1509 he adopted very much the same strategy in his La Chasse et départ d’amours; see Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs, p. 13, for a list of rubrics, and note that the ‘cast-list’ of poets in this second anthology is remarkably similar to that for Le Jardin de Plaisance.

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Sans penser mal ne villenie. (D/P, fol. 54v ) Graciously conversing, in fair and pleasing language, with no thought of the coarse or the vulgar.

The garden, and the castle itself, are places of song and music and poetry, places where lovers dance and ladies sing moult plaisamment [most pleasantly], and talk of maintes choses ... entre eulx bien gracieusement [of many things … amongst themselves]. The poet here, in other words, is imagining a cultured society, which particularly values verse and amatory dialogue; a distinct social group to belong to which is token of one’s own delicious refinement. And the ‘within’ of the garden — the charmed circle to which the hero of the Jardin, l’Amant, belongs before his despair banishes him into an outer, loveless darkness — is, as we shall see repeatedly, a place defined by the making and hearing of poetry. It is not surprising, of course, given the peculiar appropriateness of this idyllic picture, that the possibility of calculation and organized editing should spring to mind. Vérard is about to provide his expanding literate audience with a showcase for the span and achievement of the late-medieval lyric; this must have been, however, as I suggested above, a financially risky venture,20 and we may surely assume that the ‘package’ he devises for the verses he or his compiler have gathered is another of his premeditated devices, this one intended to flatter its readers’ pretensions by creating a fiction of intimacy. What Vérard is marketing, in other words, is a book of poems which can represent, for its owners, tangible proof that they do indeed belong to a distinct and refined society, the sort of coterie of which the anthologies of my previous two chapters are evidence. The ‘package’, in this case, is mediated in particular by what I called earlier the paratextual features of the volume: the way in which the textual and iconographic apparatus evinces such fondness for dialectic and dialogue and debate. Take, for instance, the rubrics, whose role in this collection is only incidentally to mark textual boundaries. Far more important, they are what articulates the volume, guides the reader across its sequence of disjointed texts, and carries the rudimentary narrative which would otherwise be uncomfortably difficult to detect.21 The leitmotiv of Vérard’s rubrics is, isotopically,22 insistently,

20

Although Vérard has, of course, economized as far as possible — witness the fact that all the woodcuts in the Jardin de Plaisance are reuses. See Curt Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 59–61, on printers who failed to assess markets shrewdly enough. 21

On the role of rubrics in a manuscript culture, see Keith Busby, ‘Rubrics and the Reception of Romance’, French Studies, 53 (1999), 129–41; idem, Codex and Context: Reading

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and as my italics here will show, the lexicon of dialogue and conversation, to the extent that the reader is enrolled in the elegant company of the Jardin de Plaisance. He or she becomes, by implication, one of the avid and informed listeners who, fictionally, wait upon every speech, every monologue, every fixedform lyric: fol. 55r. Comment les amans estans au Jardin de Plaisance a leur plaisance: l’ung des amoureux se complaint [laments] de son cueur qui se debat a [debates with] son oeil. fol. 60 r. Comme les amans qui sont audit Jardin de Plaisance aprés ce debat du cueur et de l’oeil se esjoyssent et esbatent a faire plusieurs balades et rondeaulx [amuse themselves by composing numerous ballades and rondeaux] pour les dames qui y sont, les ungs pour l’onneur des dames et les autres au deshonneur. Ensemble les responces [the responses] des dictes dames aux amans. Et d’autres plusieurs choses joyeuses. fol. 126 r. Comment ung povre amoureux qui estoit en la compaignie des dames estant au Jardin de Plaisance s’enhardit de deprier [beg] l’une des dames, et les responces de la dicte dame a ycelluy amant. fol. 129 v. Comment deux amoureux, l’ung estrange de sa dame et l’autre escondit, se complaignent ensemble [lament together] au Jardin de Plaisance. fol. 132v . Comment ung amoureux fait ung dyalogue (holds a dialogue with) a sa dame au Jardin de Plaisance, et puis elle fait la conclusion (she draws the conclusion). fol. 136 v . Cy aprés s’ensuivent les lamentacions [the lamentations] de Jehan de Calais, lequel n’estoit plus au Jardin de Plaisance. fol. 142v . Comment au Jardin de Plaisance est baillé sentence [passed sentence] en la court d’amours contre la Belle Dame sans mercy. fol. 148 r. La relation faicte [the story told] au Jardin de Plaisance du debat [debate] de l’amant et de la dame qui est sans conclusion. fol. 153r. Le racomptement [the story told] fait au Jardin de Plaisance de deux amans fortunez d’amours. fol. 161r. La complainte [lament] du prisonnier d’amours faicte au Jardin de Plaisance fol. 162r. La lamentacion faicte [lament recited] au Jardin de Plaisance du povre serviteur sans guerdon.

Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 225–365; Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘Le Roman de la Dame a la Lycorne et du Biau Chevalier au Lion: Text, Image, Rubric’, French Studies, 51 (1997), 1–18; Sylvia Huot, ‘“Ci parle l’auteur”: The Rubrication of Voice and Authorship in Roman de la Rose manuscripts’, Sub-Stance, 56 (1988), 42–48. 22

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fol. 164 v. Comment au Jardin de Plaisance est fait debat [debate] de l’homme marié et de l’homme non marié.

The effect is cumulative, and does much to dispel what might otherwise seem dismayingly disparate: the rubrics give an incremental impression of voicedness that invites a holistic reading in terms of performance and sociability. I am reminded of what Roger Chartier says: that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘la lecture implicite du texte, littéraire ou non, est construite comme une oralisation, et son ‘lecteur’ comme l’auditeur d’une parole lectrice’.23 Here, accordingly, the elaborate counterfeit of the rubrics makes printed poetry the collective phenomenon that I described in previous chapters, the complex product of a socially situated act of utterance. Spuriously but ingeniously, the rubrics generate, to revert to Chartier’s expression, ‘les affleurements de l’oralité dans l’imprimé’.24 If the collection does indeed have an overall identity and create the fiction of a closed and intimate social circle, the impression is also mediated by another important paratextual device: Vérard’s iconographic programme, the series of woodcuts which support each of the rubrics and which people the pages with speakers and listeners. The woodcuts, and this is typical of Vérard’s commercial acumen, exploit a relatively new and ingenious technology which the publisher himself had very recently imported from Strasbourg for his edition of what he calls Therence en francoys: interchangeable blocks.25 What is involved is permuting a series of woodblocks — some thirty-one characters, male or female, young or old, of different social classes, with different and often representative expressions and hand-gestures, five architectures (two different castles, a city, a tower, a gateway), a set of four trees of different shapes and configurations, some miscellaneous vegetation, so as to provide illustrations for every conceivable occasion. Thus, for instance, one rubric explains that Hault Vouloir and Bon 23

L’Ordre des livres, p. 20; my italics.

24

Ibid., p. 31.

25

As D/P point out (II, 31–32), a publisher from Strasbourg, Jean Gruninger, had devised the technique in November 1496 to illustrate his own Terence, and it was borrowed by Vérard for his Therence en francoys, which was published somewhere between 1500 and 1503; see Anatole Claudin, Histoire de l’imprimerie en France au XV e et XVIe siècle, 4 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1900–14), II, 487–91; Macfarlane, Antoine Vérard, pp. 71–82, and Winn, Anthoine Vérard, pp. 128–29. On Vérard’s Therence, see H. W. Lawton, Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme en France: Térence en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Jouve, 1926; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970); on Vérard’s use of these blocks, and the history of the technique, see D/P, II, 29–34.

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Advis ‘s’en vont a ung chasteau environné d’espines et de ronces, et trouvent Dangier et autres qui se combatent contre eulx [go to a castle surrounded by briars and thorns, and find Danger and others who attack them]’, and the associated image is an ingenious amalgam of six of Vérard’s interchangeable blocks: from the left (see Figure 19; fol. giiiv), a block with a tuft of grass

Figure 19. Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Y e 168, fol. G iiiv.

signifying espines et ronces, an armed knight carrying a spear, a castle (one of what I called the ‘architectures’) printed hard against one of the blocks showing a halftree, then another character dressed in what looks like a furred jerkin, hose, and heavy boots, and finally another armed knight carrying a battle axe. Or take another composite image (fol. gviv), where the rubric reads: ‘Comment l’Amant se complaint a Fortune, et les autres l’escoutent derriere ung buisson [How the Lover complains to Fortune, and the others listen from behind a bush]’; here, the buisson is another of those convenient tree-blocks behind which les autres can lurk, while a slightly drooping figure looks over his shoulder at one of the nine standard female figures, who is made to represent the goddess Fortune. The

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figures are supplied with convenient banderoles on which, helpfully, Vérard or l’Infortuné have, when necessary, supplied labels. Now the publisher was, he says explicitly, conscious of the expressive and persuasive value of the image: he has, he says of his La Passion Jhesuschrist, used illustrations because ‘signes font esmouvoir Desirs ferventz plus que dictz mouvoir [what is visual moves fervent emotions more than words]’.26 Vérard, with typical professional flair, is reinforcing his chosen narrative frame with images which impose a certain order, and suggest what I earlier called ‘organized editing’ and editorial calculation. He is, as Figures 20 and 21 show, with their gesturing character-blocks, embodying dialogue — which is, as we have seen already, the chosen mode of the texts selected — in images. Of course, we should not exaggerate Vérard’s organization and calculation, for the publisher is often cavalier with his cuts. L’Amant, for instance, the ‘hero’ of the Jardin de Plaisance, is generally represented across the collection by a particular image (Figure 20): the backward-glancing, drooping figure in his

Figure 20. Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Y e 168, fol. G viv.

26

Quoted by Winn, Anthoine Vérard, p. 405.

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rather plain surcoat and hose. But he can also be a slender figure with a sword and an elegantly feathered hat expostulating with the God of Love (fol. iiv), or a gesticulating bearded figure with a stout staff in conversation with a Dame (fol. 126r; Figure 21). And the drooping figure which usually represents L’Amant can also transform itself into l’Escondit (fol. yiiiv) or le Serviteur (fol. 206r). It does not seem as if Vérard, or l’Infortuné, intended the composite woodcuts to be more than incidentally illustrative; what matters is, it seems, not the individual identities of the characters so portrayed, but the affect of the volume as a whole. We should, I think, see the images as forming what Michael Camille calls a supplementary ‘presentational language’, whose role it is to guide the reader through a welter of miscellaneous texts to the inferred behaviours of the Garden — behaviours which consist largely, and significantly, in conversation and

Figure 21. Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Y e 168, fol. 126 r.

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debate.27 What is remarkable, therefore, is the editorial effort expended to ensure what I called the affect of the volume: to ensure that the rubrics, however factitious, combine with the woodcuts to create a consistent direction and to give an impression of purposeful design, even when the choice of texts might least lend itself to that sort of coherence. Take, for instance, the pair of pseudo-narrative dits, nos 613 and 614, which purport to explain how l’Amant was turned out of that idyllic locus of courtly sociability, the garden. The rubrics are suitably sentimental. No. 613, for instance, which we saw above, is headed: ‘Comment ung povre amoureux qui estoit en la compaignie des dames estant au jardin de plaisance s’enhardit de deprier l’une des dames. Et les responces de la dicte dame a ycelluy amant’, and it is illustrated, appropriately, by a cut showing ‘la Dame’ and ‘l’Amant’ (fol. 126r; Figure 21).28 The rubric borrows the courtly lexicon of male supplicant and cruel lady: povre, s’enhardit de deprier ... and in the original fifteenth-century context, the poem probably conjured up images of Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans merci. In terms of the overall design of the Jardin de Plaisance — lovers’ tragedy, rejected lover, dying lady — the rubric and the image are neatly concurrent. As indeed is the text of 613: a young man begs the favours of the lady of his affections, and is roundly ejected. It is only when we read carefully that we realize that the text may be diegetically appropriate, but it is tonally at odds with the sentimental story that the Jardin de Plaisance purports to tell.29 The firstperson voice — purportedly that of the poet — tells us that early one morning, at dawn, he happens to be sitting on ung banc massis [a heavy bench] when he catches sight of a mignon D’aage moyen [an elegant gentleman of middle age]. The poet withdraws behind a vieulx tapis [an arras] to listen — and along comes

27

Michael Camille, ‘Reading the Printed Image: Illuminations and Woodcuts of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in the Fifteenth Century’, in Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1520, ed. by Sandra L. Hindman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 259–91 (p. 261). Elizabeth Eisenstein remarks that images may often be used not to illustrate but as ‘pointers or guide marks helping readers find their way about a text’: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I, 86. 28

Poem 613 is untitled, and has not been edited (see D/P, II, 257; 614 is also otherwise unknown (see D/P, II, 258). 29

The poem is anonymous, and otherwise unknown; see D/P, II, 257. Simply, it must date from the later fifteenth century, after 1460 or so, since the lover is made to compare himself to Villon (‘Aussi demeure povre comme Villon’).

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une dame precelente de corps, Discrete et saige [a lady with the most graceful figure, reserved and astute]’ (fol. 126v). The debate that follows makes it plain that the lover is nothing like the drooping, sentimental youth that the rubric promises (in spite of the poet’s smug description: ‘ce traicté De bonne amour qui n’est point deffendue ... [a story of virtuous and licit love]’); rather, he is a self-seeking fortune-hunter who throws himself at her feet, metaphorically, in aureate language and rime très riche: he is a second Hector, bolder even than Oliver, a more faithful lover than Pyramus or Paris, and she owes it to him to accept his suit — which he expresses in knowing double-entendres on the subject of money and sex which the reader is clearly expected to pick up:30 Et en comptant a moy seul vous soubstiens Pour mon penser de compter contenter, Mais si je peusse vostre faulcon tempter, Pour le conduyre a prendre la mauvys, Vous me feriez de tout mal exempter .... (fol. 128 r) And as I count, I maintain that you should count on contenting me, but if I could tempt your falcon to take your redwing, then you would save me from all ill.

The lady of 614 is commonsensical, like so many ladies in the wake of Chartier’s Belle Dame sans merci;31 she has no intention of succumbing to a poverty-stricken lover: ‘Voulez vous donc que pour neant je vous ame? ... [Do you imagine that I’d love for nothing?]’ (fol. 127v).32 This is certainly not, in other words, the romantic or sentimental piece that the rubric, and even the illustration, seem to promise. It is, however, irrespective of its actual content, chosen and marked for its convenience to the socio-narrative articulation of the volume. Much the same is true of the poem that follows, no. 614,33 rubricated as we saw above ‘Comment 30

The puns here on compter, ‘money-counting’, are obvious, as is the pun on faulcon and mauvys (see my Poetry of François Villon, p. 171): con is the female genitalia (which of course, because of sound, also impinges on comptant etc), vys the word for penis (another hopelessly impossible translation). 31

See my ‘Alain Chartier and the Unstable Discourses of Love’, in Mémoire en temps advenir. Hommage à Theo Venckeleer, ed. by Alex Vanneste and others (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 167–79. 32

The line as it stands is hypermetric: Vérard’s typesetters are often careless. Omit vous? Count neant as monosyllabic [nyã]? 33

Otherwise unknown; see D/P, II, 258. As D/P point out, the poem must predate 1465, date of the death of Pierre de Brézé, who is invited to be one of the judges for the debate (fol. 132 r).

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deux amoureux: l’ung estrange de sa dame et l’autre escondit, se complaignent ensemble au jardin de plaisance’, and illustrated (fol. 129v) with an eavesdropping acteur behind a tree listening to a dialogue between a backward glancing, drooping Escondit and an expository Estrange (notice the hand-gestures, which connote ‘speaking’ and ‘listening’).34 Either, of course, could be identified with the lover of no. 613; either is convenient for the overall narrative design of the volume. The point at issue in the rather petulant debate concerns which of the two lovers described is the more to be pitied: the lover rejected out of hand, who is, of course — deliberately? — indistinguishable from the lover of no. 613, or the hopeless lover who has lost the love of his lady. The conduct of the debate is banal and conventional enough; it is the editorial organization, the carefully phrased rubric and neatly calculated image, that show how far the Jardin de Plaisance is not a static repository of texts, not a reflection of an individual’s likes and interests, but rather a response to the preferences and practices of an audience. The articulation of the volume, in other words, and its variations in presentation, establish reading protocols and modify, for each text included, what Roger Chartier calls its ‘register of reference and its mode of interpretation’.35 Because I want to concentrate, ultimately, on the fixed-form lyrics of the Jardin de Plaisance, I shall not attempt to analyse all its voluminous pseudonarrative content. It is, however, and precisely because of the contextualization given to the lyrics, important to note how carefully, as with the two poems I have just analysed, the choice of texts, the phrasing of rubrics, and the manufacture of images contribute to the performative and gestural identity of the Jardin de Plaisance. Of course, given the fifteenth-century predilection for debate-poems and monologues, and especially in cycles like that of the Belle Dame sans merci,36 it cannot have been difficult to find narratives which represent communicative exchanges — from the Belle Dame cycle, for instance, the

34

On gesture in medieval illustrations, see François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au moyen âge, 2 vols (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982–89). 35

The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), p. 11. 36 On which see Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, and her ‘Collaborative Communities: The Manuscript Context of Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy’, Medium Aevum, 71 (2002), 226–40. Cayley postulates that individual poetic anthologies emerge from what she calls ‘collaborative debating communities’.

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compiler adopts three texts, La Belle dame qui eut mercy (no. 615),37 Baudet Herenc’s Parlement d’Amours (no. 617),38 and Achille Caulier’s Cruelle femme en amours (no. 618).39 Moreover, the illustrations are easily diverted to just such purposes because the blocks recycled here were originally designed to illustrate Terence’s theatre. But even allowing for this, it is interesting to note how consistently the compiler’s selection of texts has been guided by their dialogic character. Take, for instance, item no. 621, rubricated as above ‘La complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance’ (fol. 162r), and illustrated with the drooping, regretful lover juxtaposed to what is presumably to be understood as the prison of love.40 Now, what appears, here, to be a single poem is in fact an amalgam of fourteen of Alain Chartier’s rondeaux, shorn of their refrains and copied consecutively. Interestingly, James Laidlaw, whose knowledge of Chartier manuscripts is encyclopaedic, assures me that the rondeaux here are copied in an order which is found in no other manuscript41 — but which, here, provides a perfectly coherent little narrativité latente42 in the form of a monologue. The

37

Which, as no. 615, directly follows the two poems I have just analysed. It is an adaptation of a fourteenth-century original; for an edition, see Alfred Jeanroy, ‘Le Débat du clerc et de la demoiselle, poème inédit du XIV e siècle’, Romania, 43 (1914), 1–13. 38

Written c. 1425; see brief remarks by Arthur Piaget, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci et ses imitations. II. Le Parlement d’amour de Baudet Herenc’, Romania, 30 (1901), 317–20, now published in Le cycle de la Belle dame sans mercy: une anthologie poétique du XV esiècle, ed. by David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae, Champion classiques: série Moyen Age, 8 (Paris: Champion, 2003). 39

This has been edited by Arthur Piaget, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci et ses imitations. IV. La Cruelle femme en amour d’Achille Caulier’, Romania, 31 (1902), 315–49; now also edited in Le cycle de la Belle dame sans mercy. 40

This pseudo-narrative was republished in 1540 with the present rubric as title: see Arthur Piaget, ‘La Complainte du prisonnier d’amours’, in Mélanges offerts à M. Emile Picot, 2 vols (Paris: Rahir, 1913), II, 155–62. D/P, II, 271–75, list the manuscript appearances of this sequence; see also my ‘Mise en mélange au quinzième siècle’. The rondeaux are edited by Laidlaw in The Poetical Works, pp. 374–86. 41

A personal communication from James Laidlaw, to whom I am extremely grateful. I cannot, of course, guarantee that the compiler, here, has chosen the order of presentation; on the other hand, the fact that of the eighteen extant versions, it is only in this exemplar that the rondeaux appear in just this configuration must suggest a degree of deliberate choice. 42

The expression is Paul Zumthor’s: ‘Les narrativités latentes dans le discours lyrique médiéval’, in The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. by Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet and Robin F. Jones, French Forum Monographs, 22 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980), pp.

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first-person speaker, the lover, is too overcome with fear and trembling to declare his love (‘Pres de ma dame et loing de mon vouloir’); he is prey to that characteristic late-medieval conflict of sentiment (‘Je n’ay povoir de vivre en joye, Et si ne puis mourir de dueil [I can neither live in happiness, nor die of sorrow]’); his lady has become his courtoise ennemye; his Cueur submits itself to her wishes (‘Ainsi que bon vous semblera’); his heart is burning with sorrow (‘Au feu! Au feu! Au feu, qui mon cuer art Par un brandon tiré d’un doulx regart! [Fire! Fire! Fire! My heart is alight from an arrow from a sweet glance]’); if she does not hurry to his side, he will die (‘Avancez vous, ou vous viendrez trop tart [Hurry, or you’ll be too late]’). The narrative here is, of course, perfectly trite — but the mere fact that there is a narrative, however perfunctory, makes the little sequence of rondeaux encompassable and comprehensible. It illuminates connections and similarities with the remainder of the collection, and leads the reader to the conviction, if only retrospectively, that gratuitous and random texts have been selected in accord with certain aesthetic or narrative principles. This sort of retrospective patterning43 impinges also, to a degree, on our reading of the 637 fixed-form lyrics which are laid out so uninvitingly, in sequence, in two sections of the volume: fols 60v–126r and 198v–205v . But what I want to suggest is that the whole design of the volume reinforces the impression of editorial control which permeates it, an aspect that is striking for the careful and unprejudiced modern reader, which must surely also have been that of Vérard’s intended clientele — and which centralizes those 626 lyrics. A reader opening the volume in 1501 would, of course, come first to a rudimentary title-page:44 Le Jardin de Plaisance // Et fleur de Rhethoricque nouvellement imprime

39–55. What he means by a narrativité latente is the ‘back story’, as it were, implied by any lyric. 43

I borrow the term from Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 10–14. 44

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books do not necessarily have title-pages in the way we would understand; see R. Hirsch, ‘Title Pages in French Incunabula, 1486–1500’, GutenbergJarhbuch (1978), 63–66, and Albert Labarre, ‘Les incunables: la présentation du livre’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by Martin and Chartier, I, 195–215. On ways in which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century publishers used the ‘title-page’ to stamp their authority on their volumes, see Cynthia Jane Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); eadem, ‘Du manuscrit à l’imprimé en France: le cas des Grands Rhétoriqueurs’, in Les Grands Rhétoriqueurs: Actes du V e Colloque international sur le moyen français, Milan (6–8 mai 1985) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1985), pp. 103–23, and Adrian Armstrong, Technique and Technology: Script, Print and Poetics in France, 1470–1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

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a Paris: undecorated, other than with the initial L of Le decorated with Vérard’s trademark geometrical patterns and flourishes and grotesques.45 Most ‘title-pages’ in the early days of printing are as unassuming as this — but here, each term has its significance. The ‘garden’ metaphor — a commonplace admittedly in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,46 and one that Vérard himself had used already, with a Jardin de vertueuse consolacion in 1506 (?), not to mention the Vergier d’honneur and a Verger celeste in 1508 (?)47 — already on the one hand implies some control and selection, that someone has taken the trouble to select the best, and on the other hand suggests unity and cohesion, that this is a volume that is organic, complete. Plaisance, moreover, is not only selfadvertising: it also taps into a commonplace whereby the rondeau, in particular, is figured as a source of enjoyment (rondeaux joyeulx, rondeaux joyeux et fort nouveaulx, rondeaulx fort recreatifs, joyeux et nouveaux). There is a remarkable number of collections described or entitled with variations on this very theme — La fleur de toutes joyeusetez, Le joyeux devis recreatif — which points to the sheer pleasure of making and reading verse in the early days of printing. The ‘flower’ subtitle, of course, reinforces the ‘garden’ metaphor — and rhetoricque, which the vernacular uses, as we saw in Chapter 1, to refer almost exclusively to the fixed-form lyric, centralizes the 626 lyrics and invites admiration for a poetic expertise beyond the immediate experience of the intended readership. The implication of the title is, surely, that Vérard is transferring texts from the restricted social environment — the court — in which they would normally circulate, to the more public cultural environment of print — something which would furnish his would-be culturally fashionable readers, to pick up on the adverb nouvellement, with an artefact which is a tangible sign of their access to a cultured, modish, refined society — indeed, by extension, to a courtly society. Let me pursue briefly the experience of the Jardin de Plaisance precisely as an artefact. As Vérard’s readers turn the page, they find themselves confronted (Figure 22) with the commercially astute Anthoine Vérard stamping his

45

A reused design (see D/P, II, 27): Vérard borrows the L from another Parisian publisher, Jean du Pré, who had used it in a Légende dorée published in 1493 (see Claudin, Histoire de l’imprimerie, I, 268). 46

A fait divers: in WorldCat, 1500–1600, there are some thirty titles on the model Jardin de … or Fleur de … (http://www.worldcat.org [accessed January 2007]); cf. also Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs. 47

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Figure 22. Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Y e 168, frontispiece, fol. a iir.

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authority, firmly and characteristically, on the volume. Mary Beth Winn, in her excellent recent book on Vérard, and Cynthia J. Brown and Adrian Armstrong, in their studies of authorial and editorial self-assertiveness in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance,48 have all drawn attention to the way in which Vérard takes visual charge of the volumes he publishes by substituting for the conventional author-portrait with which medievalists are all familiar the image of the publisher presenting the finished work to the king or patron. The present volume is no exception: it opens with a presentation engraving showing the publisher himself,49 with his distinctive fringe of hair and his plain merchant’s robe, kneeling in front of the king to whom, it seems, the Jardin de Plaisance is dedicated,50 and surrounded by elegant courtiers. The image serves two functions: firstly, of course, it stresses how prestigious the volume is, precisely because it is worthy of presentation to the king, but by implication, it seems again to induct the reader into precisely the courtly, exclusive, refined world in which, it will suggest progressively, verses of this sort are common currency. The procedure is typical of Vérard’s audacity. As Winn points out,51 simply by enlisting royal patronage as he does here and elsewhere, the publisher systematically attaches the texts he publishes to a royal and aristocratic environment; here, the royal endorsement seems to underwrite from the very outset the quality of what he is presenting, and suggests an authoritative guiding editorial choice.52 This is also reinforced, surely, by a second presentation engraving on fol. diiiiv, this time showing a different presenter, a clerkly, scholarly figure, offering a completed, nicely-bound volume to an elegant ecclesiastic in an ermine-trimmed 48

See Winn, Anthoine Vérard; Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers, and Armstrong, Technique and Technology. 49

The image is recycled from the frontispiece for his edition of Aristotle’s Ethics (1488) (see Claudin, Histoire de l’imprimerie, II, 114–16); for a checklist of points at which the image is used, see D/P, I, 29–30, and for a reproduction, Winn, Anthoine Vérard, p. 437, fig. 5.24 (and, overpainted, p. 253, fig. 5.3). That the presenter is indeed Vérard is agreed: see Macfarlane, Antoine Vérard, no. 141, and cf. Winn, Anthoine Vérard, p. 483. 50

For Vérard’s royal patrons, see Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Chapter 4. The date of the Jardin de Plaisance would indicate that the royal patron was Louis XII, on whose relations with Vérard see ibid., pp. 123–30, as well as Macfarlane, Antoine Vérard. 51 52

Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Chapter 3.

As Brown points out, images like these are not, strictly or primarily, portraits; rather, they are emblematic of the ‘intersection of the worlds of literary creation, patronage, bookmaking, and marketing’: Poets, Patrons, and Printers, p. 103.

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robe.53 The message, that editorial control and choice have framed this volume for a refined clientele, is over-determined in a way which, as far as I am aware, is unique to this particular collection. What is implied is a particular cultural and political configuration. This is a large and prestigious collection, its contents selected by a sophisticated libraire from the wealth of texts and poems available to him, designed initially for a king but expecting to find a broader, responsive, and particularly knowledgeable readership: the message, in other words, is that this is a selection designed in the first instance for a royal patron — note the rather fawning little rondeau beneath the first presentation portrait54 — and for a noblesse d’épée et de robe but now made available, flatteringly, for a general public. When one turns the page, however, the first item in the anthology is a little treatise which, at first sight, seems out of place but which, I hope to suggest, has a particular role in creating the identity of the volume and the conditions of its reception precisely because it too flatters Vérard’s intended readership. It is also particularly valuable to the modern reader because, properly read, it defines something of the relationship between publisher and public: an ars poetica which its author calls L’Instructif de seconde rhétorique. It has received little critical attention, no doubt because, although near contemporaries like Pierre Fabri were admirers,55 it has never had a modern critical edition.56 Its author — who calls himself by one of those lachrymose late-medieval sobriquets, ‘l’Infortuné’ — is

53

This too is one of Vérard’s bread-and-butter portraits: as D/P point out (II, 30), Vérard had made use of it as early as 1492 for his edition of the Art de bien mourir. The seated figure, Brown suggests (Poets, Patrons, and Printers, p. 119), is representative of ‘the idea of a presentation, rather than a real-life scenario’. 54

‘Hault protecteur, vouloir tresmagnanime, Roy souverain, dominateur terrestre, Je qui te voy si noble en la terre estre, Ce don te donne de sens pusilanime ...’ (fol. aiir). 55

Pierre Fabri calls l’Infortuné an ‘acteur elegant’: Le grand et vrai Art, II, 6.

56

There is a succinct study in E. Langlois’s De artibus rhetoricae rhythmicae: sive De artibus poeticis in Francia ante litterarum renovationem editis, quibus versificationis nostrae leges explicantur (Paris: Bouillon, 1890), pp. 65–74, and a limited commentary in D/P, II, 43–60; there is a more recent, more nuanced study, by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, and Jean-Yves Tilliette, ‘Poétiques en transition: l’Instructif de la seconde rhétorique: balises pour un chantier’, Etudes de Lettres, special issue, 4 (2002), 9–22. Mühlethaler, here, analyses the writer’s debt to classical and medieval Latin rhetoric and, later, the ordo or dispositio of the Instructif; Cerquiglini-Toulet looks at the ‘canon’ of poets endorsed by the treatise.

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unknown;57 his treatise, it seems, predates the Jardin de Plaisance by some thirty years, since one of the serventois he quotes, is an adulatory piece celebrating a feste tresprincipale ordered in honour of the peace Louis XI engineered with the Burgundians in 1472.58 He has, says l’Infortuné, been invited, or commissioned, to compose the Instructif by ‘aucuns licensiez en loix [some bachelors of law]’ (precisely the clientèle, of course, which seems to have bought the Jardin); it is, he says, a petit livret with no pretensions to novelty (‘Sans entreprendre d’innover Arrogamment aucune chose [with no intention of being arrogant enough to suggest anything new]’); it is certainly not intended to soubztiver the rhetorical expertise of the bien expers. Rather, he says, with studied self-deprecation, his only intention is to sensitize readers (‘[leur] engin aviver’) to glories of rhetoric which they may never have been fortunate enough to have estudié ne parquis: Advertir pretend seulement Aucuns qui ne le sont encore, Du tresprecieux vestement De rhetoricque qu’elle a ore … (fol. aiiv) This book has no pretensions other than to sensitize those who are still ignorant of the remarkably valuable tool that rhetoric is today.

Now, l’Infortuné’s own rather convoluted rhetoric is interesting, particularly in the way it stresses its intended audience: not an audience of poets, nor an 57

Compare, for instance, Dolent Fortuné, the name adopted by the author of Le Chevalier des dames du Dolent Fortuné, ed. by Jean Miquet (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1990). None of the attempts made to identify l’Infortuné is convincing: see D/P, II, 36–40 for a judicious review. Their own modest proposal, that l’Infortuné might be identified with Regnaut Le Queux, the author of another of the liminal pieces, the Doléance de la Mégère, is unconvincing. It has been conventional to say that l’Infortuné was the compiler of the whole of the Jardin de Plaisance; it is difficult to see on what evidence this might be based, other than on the fact that the first item in the Jardin is attributed to him; unless I am mistaken, l’Infortuné never claims compiler-ship. I shall use the term ‘the compiler’, but without assuming that he is l’Infortuné; indeed, given Vérard’s creative energy, it seems perfectly possible that he himself played a major role in the selection and disposition of the contents. 58

The serventois is titled ‘De eodem’ — that is, ‘de servantaisio’ [sic]. The argument as to dating is made, persuasively, by D/P, II, 43–50; they rightly reject Langlois’s confident assertion that the Instructif is so indebted to Jean Molinet’s Art de rhétorique (1493) that the former must postdate the latter: the resemblances, they point out, are neither numerous nor compelling, and it is more logical to assume that Molinet borrows from the Instructif. Simply, of course, one must recognize that l’Infortuné could perfectly well have borrowed a pre-existing servantois — in which case there would be no longer be any reason to set the treatise as a whole at so early a date.

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audience of connoisseurs, rather an audience which has never been fortunate enough to receive instruction in rhetoric, but which needs to be au fait with current developments (presentement) if its members are to recognize rhetoric’s reverberation (fol. aiiv).59 It is an audience, perhaps, which would want a share of the mondaine glore which might attach to proper understanding of the arts of verse, and which in turn might be expected to qualify them to take a full part in the social and cultural circles in which the arts of verse were endemic. By ‘arts of verse’, here, are meant almost exclusively those that pertain to the fixed-form lyric — and I want to suggest that the little treatise serves one overt and two covert purposes: overtly, it purports to explain how to create the verses that are, as my first chapter suggested, the passport to social success and cultural capital; covertly, first to seem to guarantee the quality and expertise of what follows, and second to create what George Puttenham calls ‘ripe readers’,60 that is, readers who have mastered the art of reading poetry sufficiently to act as arbiters of taste in a courtly setting. What I want to argue here returns thus to Bourdieu, but from a slightly different angle. In my first chapter, I was suggesting that one facet of what he calls ‘cultural capital’ could be defined as the capacity to create verse, and that the Arts de seconde rhetorique were designed to instil, in the courtly amateur as well as in the ‘professional’, the necessary skills and ingenuities. Here, I posit that, in this case, the Instructif may play an additional and rather different role in the Jardin de Plaisance, and one no doubt that Vérard might have felt particularly valuable to his intended clientèle: to instil in its readers not just the rules for emulating the poet, but the refined receptivity — what in a modern environment we might call the taste — which will give the reader the proficiency to appreciate the contents of the anthology. In a sense, and with his usual commercial astuteness, Antoine Vérard is creating a competent audience which has the required adequate disposition. He does this by way of providing the means of access to the cultural capital he is putting at its disposal, and by ensuring appropriate conditions of consumption.61 I want to argue, in other

59

The exact phrase is ‘la reverberation De l’influence colorique’; reverberation, here, derives from the metaphor of colour, and means ‘reflection’, or ‘effusion’ (see Godefroy, X , 570). 60

The Art of English Poesie, ed. by Willcock and Walker, p. 195.

61

Vérard’s prefaces perform a rather similar function: see Winn, Anthoine Vérard. Compare however Terry Eagleton, who considers the commodification of poetry to be an eighteenth-century phenomenon: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 64–65.

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words, that the choice of the Instructif de seconde rhetorique as the liminal text to this apparently undisciplined volume is no accident. Even if the treatise was originally intended, by its author, to confer a socially accredited expertise in the production of ballades and rondeaux, redeployed and positioned as it is, it may also serve as a guide to reception for the audience for which Vérard is catering. Take, for instance, one of l’Infortuné’s major trouvailles. In his first section, on the vices to avoid, he gives a sort of handlist of technical faults. He covers incongruities of metre, inadequacies of rhyme, wilful obscurity, redundancy, lexical extravagance, fausse equivocation — that is, improper wordplay — and morphological distortion. The trouvaille is to ensure that each vice is actually exemplified in the verse devoted to it: thus for example inadequate rhyme (fol. aiiiv): Le second vice a extirper [rhyme in -er] Est comme cy peult apparoir: C’est quant fault bonne consonance [rhyme, inadequately, in -ance as opposed to -er] The second mistake to eliminate is the one that is evident here: a lack of proper rhyme.

or the lazy use of assonance in place of rhyme: Pour ce donc ce vice on evite Contenu en cestuy article (fol. aiiiv) For this reason, let the writer avoid the mistake that this item illustrates.

or repetitive rhyming: Le quart vice est fait de redite. Ne soit donc en cinquante vers, Car en quarante au moins redite … (fol. aiiiv) The fourth mistake is repetition. There should be no repetition within fifty, or at the most forty, lines.

where the vice consists in rhyming identical words with no change of function. Or thus again morphological distortion — l’Infortuné is scathing about the sort of strategems adopted by the inexpert poet, who skews morphology and orthography to produce rhymes (‘supply pour supplie, Ou semblablement onc pour oncques’; fol. aiiiiv) — or redundancy and lexical extravagance: one should at all costs avoid remplage, De nommer sens extravagant Et d’aliener son langage

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padding, and using absurd conceits, and making one’s language appear exotic, rather than modest.

and ostentatious Latinity, other than between clerks who are professionally qualified to admire it: L’on se peult aider toutesfois De termes latins entre clers, De clerc a clerc souventesfois, Mais encores fault il plus clers Termes ... (fol. aiiiir) It is reasonable to use Latin terms between clerks, but it is important to ensure that there are clearer terms.

Now, Droz and Piaget are unimpressed by this device63 — and they are right to say that it can sometimes make obscurer points of rhetoric difficult to understand. But it has, surely, two virtues. In the first place, for a would-be poet unacquainted with the arts and conventions of verse, to have a concrete example is particularly valuable in inculcating practical mastery of the codes of the ballade and the rondeau — and in the second, for the reader, it serves as an explicit and present guide precisely to decoding them, giving him or her the tools, from observation rather than arid prescription, to cultivate taste and thus to accede to the dominant culture. The question of ‘dominant culture’ here is especially interesting — not least because of l’Infortuné’s terminologies. To succumb to these vices, he implies, is evidence not so much of rhetorical clumsiness as of social solecism. Improper rhyme, failure to rhyme as in the first example above, is, he says, the preserve of ruraulx et lourdois [the provincial and the clod-hopping]; weak rhyme is rime de boutechouque, or de goret [only suitable for peasants or for vulgar folksong64]; redundancy is ‘indigeste,65 agreste, imbecile’ (fol. aiiiv); morphological distortion (making a convenient rhyme on mond in place of monde, for instance) is

62

Souffragant, here, seems to mean ‘modest’, ‘unassuming’ (see Godefroy, VII, 589). Montaigne uses it (in his Les Essais, ed. by Maurice Rat, Classiques Garnier, 3 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1952), III, 40) in contradistinction to imperieuse. 63

D/P, II, 50: ‘l’auteur s’est donné bizarrement la peine d’exposer les préceptes selon la forme d’un exemple’ (my italics). 64

See fol. b iiiir; for a discussion of these terms, see D/P, II, 55–59.

65

Seems to mean ‘intolérable’ (Godefroy, IV , 572) or ‘primitif’ (Huguet,

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outmoded and characteristic of a fusty poet like Jean de Meun (fol. aiiiir);66 a diptongue picarde67 is a solecism which will label the user provincial (fol. aviv). What l’Infortuné is doing, in other words, is inculcating a sophisticated sensibility which will certainly allow his readers to produce adequate verses, and may indeed have been designed, in the 1470s, for just such a purpose. It will also, however, and perhaps more relevantly for Vérard’s readers in the Jardin de Plaisance, serve to allow them to understand just how sophisticated and stylish are the verses that they are about to read. And the writer is doing so in terms which are particularly appropriate to a newly-sophisticated, urban audience which can have no time for what is rustic or provincial or old-fashioned: they are to be qualified to judge verses which conform to standards of poetic decorum which studiously avoid the vulgar, the unpolished, the excessive, or the antiquated. In a world in which, l’Infortuné laments, there are more and more poetasters — ‘Chascun s’en mesle en tous quartiers. Dieux! que de nouveaulx charpentiers [Everyone’s at it! God, how they botch it!]’ (fol. bvr) — social advancement, and social belonging, mean acquiring not just the skill, if required, to versify correctly, but also the sensibility to recognize correct and elegant versifying. The checklist of desiderata which makes up the remainder of the treatise seem also to serve this dual purpose: it supplies, as it were, a common set of masterpatterns against which the reader will be able to judge the efficacy, the precision, and the sophistication of the Jardin de Plaisance. L’Infortuné supplies an inventory of figures and essential colores rhetoricae, the principles of poetic ornamentation; he describes, carefully, stanzaic patterns and patterns of rhyme; he finishes with a brief overview of genres like mysteries, comedies, croniques and hystoires. At every turn, what we sense is the dual mission that I have repeatedly stressed here. Would-be poets, certainly, need to understand that by repetition, redite, is not meant a refrain (‘A ce propos l’on peult noter Que reffrain redite n’est pas ... [On this point, we should note that a refrain is not a repetition]’; fol. aiiiv) — but it is a piece of information which is just as necessary, if not more so, for someone aspiring to become a competent reader. Readers will find it useful to understand that there are different varieties of equivoque, from true homophony to:

66

Odd: mond appears in none of the modern editions of the Rose. But l’Infortuné may of course have spotted it in some manuscript. 67

On which see D/P, II, 53–54. A diptongue picarde rhymes, say, monosyllabic lieux /ljö/ with trisyllabic gracieux /grasiö/.

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ung mot divisé en deux, Comme seroit contre puissance D’honneurs, dire ainsi quasi de eulx:68 Bien vivre au monde ne puis sans ce. (fol. av r) A word can be divided into syllables, a word like puissance for instance; so one can say ‘Live in this world ne puis sans ce I cannot without this (sans ce)’.

What, in the early sixteenth century, passes for a critical vocabulary is surely as useful, if not more so, for the reader as it is for the would-be poet. To be able to distinguish rime annexee (‘Ainsi se fait rime annexee, Annexant vers a autre envers, Versifiee et composee ...’) from vers enchainez (‘Ainssi sont enchainez vers, Vers les vifz engins comme sens’), and from vers entrelacé (‘Entrelassez vers plaisans gracieux, Eulx se forment en telle forme ainsi, Si sont plaisant ....’)69 is to enlarge the reader’s structures of possibility by giving him or her an enhanced range of intellectual or aesthetic positions. And again — to return to Bourdieuian terms70 — what is most interesting is to see how l’Infortuné, quite explicitly, equips his readers with the strategies which will give them access to the distinction possessed by, and previously monopolized by, particular social groups. His readers, he implies, need no more than a brisk canter through the essentials. There may be innumerable couleurs auctentiques rethoricales, but the six that he has chosen to name, define, and exemplify are les plus principales, and to possess them will provide a poetic souffisance, ‘car plus souvent sont en usance Pour aplicquer et pour produire [they are the commonest in composition]’ (fol. aiiiir). His major concern, in other words, is to enable his readers to pass muster: if it is conventional, as I said in my first chapter, to see the Arts de seconde rhétorique as prescriptive collections of recipes or handbooks to poetic production, here, I suggest, on the contrary, the emphasis is primarily descriptive, designed to arm the readership with an understanding sufficient to the informed reception of the late-medieval and early Renaissance verse repertoire. Thus a bergerecte, which some, prejudiced by the name, might think primitive or unsophisticated, can, says l’Infortuné reassuringly, be perfectly acceptable among curiaux et gentilz, by which he means clerks and gentlefolk:

68

The sense of this phrase is impossible to grasp; it is probable that Vérard’s typesetters are as careless here as elsewhere. 69

Fol. civ.

70

See his ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’.

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Chapter 4 Bergerecte fetisse et propre Est a aucuns, curiaux et gentilz, Qui y prennent leur appetiz; Se bien fait est; n’est pas impropre. (fol. biiir) A bergerette is a perfectly acceptable verse-form for courtiers and people of good birth — indeed they enjoy it, as long as it’s correctly composed; it is not inappropriate.

L’Infortuné, we sense, is responding to a sort of cultural and social anxiety. He is reassuring an upwardly mobile readership, maximizing their mastery of the social resources required for success in these strategic and complex games. Thus we find the rules governing the role of feminine e; a brisk explanation of masculine and feminine rhymes and their function; suggestions as to ways of generating appropriate rhyme; remarks suggesting that there exists a ‘canon’ within vernacular writing, one where quality can be distinguished according to identifiable criteria.71 One telling term, in this context, auctorisé, implies precisely the sort of social discrimination of which an anxious reader might fear to fall foul. A ballade, the writer specifies, carefully, requires three stanzas, coupletz, rhyming ababbcbC, and an envoi, which he calls le prince — assuming which: L’on peult les balades forger En forme bien auctorisees ... (fol. b iiiir) Ballades can be forged in the authorized form.

L’Infortuné, in other words, stresses what one might call the gentility of more complex verse, designed for gens clers ou pour galans [for clerks or for gallants] by comparison with what pluseurs, the mass of the less sophisticated, are restricted to: vers simples ou par compos, Ainsi comme au cas il affiert. Mais la forme n’est tant prisee Que des balades les couplans, Dont en tel mode auctorisee ... (fol. b v r) Simple verse-forms and complex, as appropriate. But the form is less admired than is the ballade, so they are authorized.72

71

On this latter point, see particularly Mühlethaler and Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Poétiques en transition’. 72

The translation here is difficult: compos appears to mean ‘complex’ or ‘varied’ —perhaps ‘in different line-lengths’ (see Godefroy, II, 211). Couplans is puzzling: couple is ‘couplet’ (Godefroy, II, 335), but I find no mention of couplans, although the sense is reasonably clear.

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Readers should emerge from this little preliminary treatise better able to deal with the uncharted space that they will discover — and what l’Infortuné has provided are the means, productive certainly but primarily receptive, whereby the social groups the Jardin de Plaisance targets can make themselves distinctive:73 the range of intellectual and aesthetic positions, the cultural competencies, which allow social and competitive relationships to be conveyed or, crucially, recognized, in verse. What I am suggesting is something that we could call — borrowing modern sociological terminology — the deliberate commodification of verse.74 By choosing to preface his vast and intractable miscellany with the Instructif, Vérard is providing the means of access to the cultural capital he is putting at the disposal of a larger readership than that of the courts which produced the anthologies we have looked at in previous chapters. He is constructing an audience for what he intends to print, articulating the cultural field into which he is inviting his readers. By implication — and this is, I consider, an important move — Vérard is assuming that the ‘taste’ which gives access to the dominant culture is a cultivated rather than an innate disposition. Just as the ability to compose a clever rondeau or an accomplished ballade is a ready-made means to demonstrate one’s position within any cultural field, so to learn to recognize one — or rather to distinguish the competent from the botched, the clever from the mediocre — is to accede to an élite defined by its artistic sensibility or its dexterity.75 I suggest, in other words, that the choice of the Instructif de seconde rhetorique as the liminal text to this disparate, chaotic volume is not accident but design. Even if, when it was written, it was intended to confer a socially accredited expertise in the production of ballades and rondeaux, here, in the Jardin de Plaisance, it has a more important role as a guide to reception, to the decoding which provides an upwardly mobile audience with a set of cognitive rules which govern the process of reading and which therefore give it the tools

73

I return to Bourdieu, ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’.

74

See my ‘La double fonction de l’Instructif de seconde rhétorique’, as well as my ‘Inventer le recueil lyrique’. 75

I have in mind, here — and again in Bourdieuian terms — the analogy of the visual arts: for instance, of the role of abstract or ‘difficult’ art which can only be appreciated by a minority possessing ‘special gifts of artistic sensibility’; see Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in his Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 211–44.

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to judge the success or failure of any particular poem.76 Vérard is, as it were, providing his readers with precisely those criteria which the aristocratic readers of my earlier chapters were assumed so effortlessly to have possessed, and teaching them to respond, with agility, to the flowers of fancy and colours of rhetoric which they will find as they read. Pragmatically, moreover — and here again the word ‘packaging’ seems appropriate — the mere presence of an art of rhetoric as the first piece in the volume makes it seem a guarantee of excellence. It suggests either that the Instructif has acted as the benchmark for the collection (that is, that the pieces have been selected because they meet the criteria that the Instructif imposes), or because the pieces illustrate the criteria — that is, that the compiler’s choices are guided by poetic breadth and ambition. What is at stake is commercial judgement of a particularly acute kind: not just the ability to predict taste, but the intention of forming taste, of setting up a ‘good reading’, and guiding the reception and interpretation of exemplary texts for a socially diverse reading public. Let me return, then, to the story of the Jardin de Plaisance, with the reader of 1501 armed by the Instructif to pursue the remainder of the volume. In this context, I have to admit that my outline of the story was deliberately reductive; it was also unfair, because we ought certainly to salute the ingenuity with which the libraire, or his compiler, capitalizes on the malleability of late-medieval lovenarratives to appropriate them for new recombinations, and, of course, to set up the framework within which the 637 fixed-form lyrics77 will find their place. We must, of course, as modern readers, set aside our own knowledge of their miscellaneity and attempt to see the Jardin de Plaisance through the eyes of a contemporary readership probably unaware of the provenance or authorship of the individual poems (which are all left anonymous), and who would therefore be readier to be uncomplicatedly impressed by the way in which they fall into place and create a world of song and poetry and music.78 In this spirit, take, for 76

Cf. Eugene Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), who argues a similar function for the art of poetry which prefaces George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. 77 78

Which appear as nos 70, 612, 630–61, on fols 60 r–126r, 198v –205v .

I leave aside two other preliminary texts, Regnaut Le Queux’s Doleance de Megere, and Le Donnet baillé au feu roy Charles huytiesme de ce nom; it is, I admit, difficult to conceive of their function in terms of my ‘anthology’ model. D/P argue (II, 60–87) that the former may be included because ‘l’Infortuné’ is Regnaut Le Queux. Of Le Donnet, I wonder simply whether a Donnet, the popular elementary grammar by Aelius Donatus, highly popular in the period, might have seemed an appropriate pendant to the Instructif : according to Bühler, no

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instance, the very first of the longer poems that follows the Chastel de joyeuse destinee. It is introduced by the first of those ‘dialogic’ rubrics I listed above: ‘Comment les amans estans au Jardin de Plaisance a leur plaisance, l’ung des amoureux se complaint de son cueur qui se debat a son oeil’. Le Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil is in fact the work of a Burgundian court poet, Michault Taillevent,79 who enjoyed some considerable reputation in the fifteenth century. The fact that the poem appears in no fewer than sixteen manuscripts suggests that Vérard, commercial-minded as ever, is capitalizing, with typical ruthlessness and without any acknowledgement, on an established success. Michault’s Debat is a firstperson narrative that describes how, on a spring morning, the poet has gone out hunting when he hears women’s voices. He makes his way towards them and finds a fontaine where a group of the most elegant ladies and gentlemen — he has never seen ‘plus gayes gens ne mieulx tailliez [more joyous or more elegant people]’ (l. 60) — are amusing themselves. His welcome is flattering — de voulloir parfait (l. 98) — and he joins them in carefree song. But all of a sudden, he sees the most beautiful of ladies, who looks like un angle que Dieux Eust fait du ciel descendre [an angel who might have been sent down from heaven] (ll. 129–30), and falls hopelessly, painfully, in love. Pursuing his hunt, however, he loses his way in the forest, lies down to sleep, and has a dream in which he listens to his Cueur reproaching his Oeil, bitterly, for making the hero fall in love. Finally, the two challenge each other to a duel, a duel so rancorous that in the end Pitié has to intervene to reconcile them. They agree that neither of them is

fewer than 350 incunabula editions of it were published (The Fifteenth-Century Book, p. 67); Vérard, or his compiler, may not have read further than the title. For an edition, see Maria Colombo Timelli, ‘Le Donnet baillé au feu roy Charles huytiesme de ce nom’, in ‘Il n’est si beau passe temps Que se jouer a sa Pensee’: Studi di filologia e letteratura francese in onore di Anna Maria Finoli (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1995), pp. 135–71, and cf. eadem, ‘Dal manuale di scuola alla parodia: dal Donatus al Donnet’, in Studi di Linguistica. Storia della lingua filologia francesi. Convegno della Società Universitaria per gli studi di lingua e letteratura francese, Torino, 16 e 17 giugno 1994, ed. by Mariagrazia Margarito and Anna Maria Raugei (Alessandria: Edizione dell’Orso, 1995), pp. 21–34. 79

The Debat is edited by Robert Deschaux in Un poète bourguignon du XV e siècle: Michault Taillevent (Geneva: Droz, 1975), pp. 190–229; I quote by line-number. Deschaux’s introduction builds on Pierre Champion’s Histoire poétique du XV e siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Dumoulin, 1923), I, 285–338. D/P, II, 96–97, date the ‘Debat’ to c. 1430, Deschaux (Un poète bourguignon, p. 42) and Champion (Histoire poétique, pp. 314–17) to 1444 or so. For a brief and sympathetic study — Champion and D/P are rather dismissive — see Un poète bourguignon, ed. by Deschaux, pp. 327–32.

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innocent, since Oeil is merely the instrument of Cueur, and the poet is deputed to make a note of the terms of their reconciliation. Now, what is interesting is the fact that the Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil — opportunism? deft calculation? — picks up thematic echoes from the poem that precedes it, the Chastel de joyeuse destinee: the two poems are thus made to seem responsive to each other in ways which reinforce the impression that this is a consecutive and constructed collection. The last section of the latter poem described, we remember, a lieu de plaisance [a pleasure-garden] whose occupations are the epitome of courtliness. The setting of the Debat is identical, beside une fontaine D’eaues tresodorans de pris [a spring of delightful, good-tasting water] where tous deduis De chasse [all sorts of hunt] are simulated par nigromance [through magic]. It is a paradise for lovers whom the poet can see conversing: Avec leurs dames plaisamment, Et de maintes choses parler Entre eulx bien gracieusement; Les aucuns des amans dançoyent Avec les dames qui chantoyent Moult plaisamment. Autres a divers jeux jouoyent ... (fol. 54v )80 pleasantly with their ladies, and talking most graciously together about various things. Some of the lovers were dancing, while the ladies were singing delightfully. Others were playing a variety of games.

This is, of course, one of the more hackneyed topoi of late-medieval poetry, the locus amoenus, and it is true that the lexicon of such scenes is limited and literary, and essentially derivative; Michault provides a knowing little wink to his readers by telling them that extracts from the Roman de la Rose are engraved on the stand from which the God of Love watches the duel between Cueur and Oeil, ‘pour lire aux amans clers et lais [so that lovers, clerk and lay, can read them]’ (l. 415). But the semantic and thematic echoes between this description of an earthly paradise and the romantic little opening scene of Michault’s Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil are nevertheless noticeable, and it is difficult not to think, once again, that this is editorial calculation. The fontaine, of course, the hunt setting, the songs and dances are, to a large degree, replicated in the Debat: Puis l’une par la main me print Et une chançon ala dire; Chascune des autres emprint

80

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D’en faire autant, sans contredire ... (fol. 56r) Then one of the ladies took me by the hand and began to sing a song; all the others, without exception, began to do the same.

At the very least, and however supposititious, the interweaving of text with text here reinforces the suggestion that the volume is organized according to certain principles, that the choice and the ordering of these previously discrete dits and débats has been planned by whoever — Vérard? l’Infortuné? — supervised the production of the volume as a whole. The collection, in other words, because of the connection between the Chastel de joyeuse destinee and the Debat du Coeur et de l’Oeil, is underpinned by a sense of linearity, and this, I suggest, predisposes the reader to find meaning and order; it sets in motion the readers’ Gestaltist ‘set to perceive’, and invites them to search for inferential meanings, implied narratives, and covert intertextualities. Let me elaborate on the ‘set to perceive’ for a moment. What I want to suggest, in all that I shall say about the fixed-form lyrics of the Jardin de Plaisance, is that Vérard has carefully provided occasional cues — deliberate and genuine sequences — which capitalize precisely on our natural propensity to look for regularities, frameworks, and schemata on which we can, at least initially, rely, even if, progressively, they may require modification. The Gestaltist considers that all human beings share the propensity to classify perceived phenomena according to the simplest criteria:81 in other words, that however apparently chaotic are the objects or the events which we experience, we nevertheless look for patterns which will allow us to make sense of them — to the extent that simply to search for a meaningful pattern can be in itself enough to produce articulation.82 What Vérard does is to juxtapose and package the poems in ways which inflect the reader’s understanding of them. Take, for

81

I am indebted to a number of books on perception and on Gestalt theory: in the first place, to the studies by Bateson that I used in Chapter 2 (‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, and ‘Information and Codification’), but more generally to K. Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co, 1935). For other applications, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1962); Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 82 Annabel Patterson wonders, rightly, of sixteenth-century anthologies, ‘to what extent does the existence of authoritative and significant order in a volume depend on the predisposition of the reader to find it or to find it absent?’: ‘Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneity’, in The Poem and the Book, ed. by Fraistat, pp. 95–118 (p. 98).

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instance, the rubric which immediately follows the Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil, and which introduces that alarming series of 605 undiluted fixed-form lyrics: fol. 60 r. Comme les amans qui sont audit Jardin de Plaisance aprés ce debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil se esjoyssent et esbatent a faire plusieurs balades et rondeaulx pour les dames qui y sont, les ungs pour l’onneur des dames et les autres au deshonneur, ensemble les responces des dictes dames aux amans. Et d’autres plusieurs choses joyeuses. How the lovers who are in the Garden of Pleasure, having heard the Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil, greatly amused themselves by composing ballades and rondeaux for the ladies present, some in praise of ladies, others against. Along with the responses of the ladies to their lovers, and other amusing things.

As I suggested above, of course, this rubric thematizes performance and sociability. More important, however, is the fact that it picks up the rather tenuous link between the Chastel de joyeuse destinee and the Debat and seems to capitalize on them to provide a socially recognizable justification and contextualization for the torrent of separate lyrics and occasional pieces which will follow. It implies the sort of verse contests (pour l’onneur; au deshonneur; responces [in praise of, against, responses]) and distinct poetic practices which we saw in the first chapter, and which involve challenges of versification met and outdone; it situates the poets (les amans), the poem and the audience (les dames) in something very like one of the coteries that we examined in Chapters 2 and 3. If this hypothesis has some basis, if indeed Vérard or his editor is attempting to re-imagine the intimate social occasions which produced, transmitted, preserved, and collected social verse in the coterie manuscript, then what might we expect to find? What features might Vérard have wished to replicate? What we have seen in previous chapters suggests some answers. First, of course, there is the creation of what I have called fictions of intimacy: echo and answer poems, appeals to shared attitudes, a fondness for dialogue and debate, a sense that certain tastes, certain sorts of complexity, certain sorts of pleasurable wittiness, might conduce especially to sociability. Second, is that the volume might seem to offer evidence of its emergence from the collaborative artistic and social endeavours, the shared experience, of a coterie of poets such that, to quote Marotti, ‘authorship ... dissolves into group “ownership” of texts’.83 Finally, and less definably, the poems might seem to emerge from and respond to the literary language of contemporaries and predecessors: the poets would seem to immerse 83

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their own compositions in a shared literary language, and there would seem to be evidence of what only intimacy can suggest, the fundamental role of acquaintanceship, the negotiation of voice. There are, it must be recognized, dangers in looking for evidence of such fictions of intimacy. It is only too tempting to suppose editorially-intended links from poem to poem, given the ways in which the limited lexicon and the thematic similarities of late-medieval fixed-form lyrics can, quite by coincidence, produce this sort of relatedness. Take, for instance — quite at random, and as a corrective — a little group of lyrics, D/P’s nos 76–78, which might, at first glance, seem to suggest an associational chain of phrases and motifs and be thought intended to force connections centring on the key isotopic images ‘vision’ and ‘flower’. Ballade 76, a poem of amorous despair by Jean de Garancières, opens ‘Las, pourquoy vis je de mes yeulx Vostre belle plaisant beaulté …? [Alas, whyever did I see with my eyes your fair and alluring beauty?...]’ and has the refrain ‘Le premier jour que je vous vy [On the very first day that I saw you]’.84 Weight and significance would seem to be given to these images in the poem that follows, no. 77, and which is by Guillaume de Machaut, a rondeau with the refrain ‘Certes, mon oeil richement visa bel … [Truly, my eye saw most elaborately...]’. Its second stanza runs: Tel fleur ne fut veue depuis Abel, Quant ‘fleur des fleurs’ tout le monde l’appelle. Certes mon oeil richement visa bel, Quant premier [vis ma dame bonne et belle].85 No such flower has been seen since the time of Abel; all the world calls her ‘flower of flowers’. Truly, my eye saw most elaborately when it first saw my fair and virtuous lady.

84

It appears otherwise only in BnF fr. 19139, and is edited by Piaget in ‘Jean de Garancières’ (p. 441, my bold and italics), and by Neal in Les poésies complètes, p. 14 (incipit here is ‘Helas! Pourquoy virent mes yeulx …’); on the manuscript tradition, see ibid., pp. viii–xi. For Garancières, see Neal, Recherches. The Jardin de Plaisance also includes three other poems by Garancières: ‘Je hez ma vie et desire ma mort’ (no. 470, fol. 111v ); ‘Car, quant a moy, je ne vueil plus amer’ (no. 463, fol. 60 r); ‘L’autrier nous feusmes des compaignons plusieurs’ (no. 466, fol. 111r). 85 Published in La Louange des dames, ed. by Nigel Wilkins (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972), p. 106, with music on pp. 155–56; cf. also Guillaume de Machaut: poésies lyriques, ed. by V. Chichmaref, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 1909; facs. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), I, 210, no. 234 (again, bold and italics mine).

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This — by coincidence? — introduces a second dominant image, the image of the flower, an image which in turn will govern rondeau no. 78: Rose sans per [sur toutes separee], Nul ne se doit de vous equiparer, Car vous estes sur toutes couronnee, Rose sans per, sur toutes separee ...86 Peerless rose, set apart from all others, nothing can compare with you, for you are crowned above all others, peerless rose, set apart from all others.

But of course both images are entirely conventional: courtly verse played constantly, and most spectacularly in the inescapable Roman de la Rose,87 with the conceit of the eye as vulnerable to love’s wound — and in the wake of the Rose again, it is equally banal to compare the lady with flowers and roses. It would be unwise, therefore, to see what may well be chance juxtapositions as evidence of distinct poetic practices or as articulating artistic preoccupations. Moreover, codicological evidence is surely against the three poems reaching Vérard as a group. Even if Machaut’s rondeaux circulated widely,88 the mass of Jean de Garancières’ verse is today preserved, as we saw (p. 101), in only a single manuscript, fr. 19139. There may, of course, have been others — but it is significant that the present rondeau, ‘Las, pourquoy vis je de mes yeulx’, is one of only four that Vérard includes; none of the three poems appears in conjunction with any other, in any surviving exemplar. It is important, in other words, not to read intention into what are, in all probability, unintentional, and highly conventional, verbal and phrasal links.89 86

D/P find this anonymous poem nowhere else; emboldening mine.

87

See for instance Patricia J. Eberle, ‘The Lovers’ Glass: Nature’s Discourse on Optics and the Optical Design of the Romance of the Rose’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 46 (1976/77), 241–62. 88 89

See La Louange, ed. by Wilkins, alphabetical index, pp. 26–41.

Even within the œuvre of a particular poet, it may be unwise to pursue the hunt for coherence too energetically: La Louange, ed. by Wilkins, pp. 15–16, finds ‘certain runs of poems in some way thematically connected’; Poirion, Le Poète et le prince, p. 204, talks of des séries de poèmes ... reliées par le même motif, and Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, pp. 258–65, gives a complete list. In a fascinating article, ‘Love, Hope, and the Nature of Merci in Machaut’s Musical Balades Esperance (B13) and Je ne cuit pas (B14)’, French Forum, 28 (2003), 1–27, Elizabeth Leach finds subtle and unexpected linkages in Machaut’s musical settings for his fixed-form lyrics. Note however Wilkins’ caveat in La Louange, p. 16: ‘such similarities are also to be found between items which are not in consecutive order in the manuscript sources’.

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Conversely, however, the process of interweaving that I have just indulged in is, surely, the response that my Gestaltist ‘set to perceive’ is programmed for. If any pleasure is to come from the reading of more than six hundred cascading, unrelieved fixed-form lyrics, then one source of that pleasure must surely have been the reader’s active participation in detecting or constructing meaning — a meaning, as we have seen, to be articulated within a studiously-planned narrative sequence whose coherence is created by Vérard’s choice of texts and his rubrics, and sanctioned, it seems, by l’Infortuné’s Instructif. Careful readers are led to detect the similarities, persistences, and recurrences which I have just outlined for the little series of poems, nos 76–78. But Vérard is designing his great anthology for a new audience, an audience for which existing literary or cultural conventions may not be so very familiar. What I shall argue is that although there is nothing to suggest that the mass of fixed-form lyrics derives from anything other than random accumulation — the sort of process that creates, for instance, the equally torrential Rohan chansonnier,90 or the positively gargantuan Lille collection91 — nevertheless Vérard, or his compiler, have, it seems, and even allowing for the dangers of assuming intention, wanted to anchor the ‘reader’s wandering viewpoint’92 by playing intermittently with textual features and anthology items which neither of those collections includes, and which quite deliberately cue ideas of sequence. I say ‘deliberately’, because whereas it would be unwise to argue that Vérard, or his compiler, might have chosen to juxtapose nos 76–78, in the three cases I want now to concentrate on, it would be difficult not to detect some editorial intention. Take in the first instance the rubrics to individual lyrics which we may, I suggested, use as genuine evidence of ‘editing’. I implied earlier that the fixedform poems were, largely, labelled only generically: ‘rondeau’ or ‘ballade’. I was disingenuous: in fact, Vérard’s compiler intrudes on the string of ballades and rondeaux more creatively than I suggested, at least at the beginning of his mass of lyrics, by using these brief and intermittent intrusions to orient the reader’s

90

See details Chapter 2, p. 122. It is worth noting that the Jardin de Plaisance shares more of its content with the Rohan chansonnier than with any other surviving manuscript — but it is clear that Vérard did not have access to it, nor it to the Jardin de Plaisance. 91

Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 402: Poèmes de transition (XV e–XVI e siècles), rondeaux du ms. 402 de Lille, ed. by Marcel Françon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Paris: Droz, 1938). 92

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 108.

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expectations. Take, for example, the first two of the fixed-form lyrics which directly follow the chapter-rubric I gave above (p. 264: ‘Comme les amans … se esjoyssent et esbatent a faire plusieurs balades et rondeaulx’), and which appear headed by yet another of Vérard’s carefully-collated images — there are no tituli, here, but the woodblocks (Figure 23) with those gesturing hands have surely been

Figure 23. Le Jardin de Plaisance, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Y e 168, frontispiece, fol. 60 v .

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chosen to imply dialogue. These first two ballades (nos 7 and 8) are presented, specifically, by the poem-rubric of the second as answer-poems. The first is a ballade, rubricated ‘Et premierement balade d’ung amoureux a sa dame’, which seems unknown in any other context and which, on the surface, rehearses the standard rhetoric of male importunity: his lady is the source of all soulas, joye et deduit; he begs her for the don d’amer; let her give him signe d’amour parfaicte, for never has he dared to utter any chose villaine. What he is importuning her for is, however, it turns out, rather less decorous than is usual in conventional courtly poetry. A kiss is no longer enough, so, he begs: Ottroiez moy pardon, grace et respit Du bon du cueur, car vostre amour me hette. Dessus ung banc, ou dessus ung beau lit, Entre voz bras me vueillez faire feste ... Grant me pardon, mercy, and respite, out of the kindness of your heart, for your love. On some bench, or on a fine bed, I pray you to let me revel in your arms ...

The rubric of the ballade that follows is designed to underline the fact that this is, precisely, the lady’s response: ‘Response de la dame a l’amoureux’. This is a female-voiced poem which seems to say that her lover can indeed expect fulfilment: Oster vous vueil hors de ceste tempeste Ou vous estes, et de ce grant ennoy. Prenez bon cueur et si menez grant feste, Car au jour d’uy je vous acompliray Vostre desir ... (fol. 61r) I want to rescue you from the distress and trouble in which you are. Take heart, and be joyful, for today I shall fulfil your desires.

Now, the semantic and formal links between the two poems are relatively lax: they amount to little more than a shared rhyme in -este (tempeste/faire feste ...) which is so much part of the standard courtly lexicon that we may well doubt if the two poems are in fact answer-poems at all, or whether l’Infortuné has not capitalized on an echo which is merely fortuitous.93 This possibility receives some support from another pair of poems in the same initial group, nos 11 and 12, where a rubric seems designed to promote an impression of textual organization. 93

Neither poem seems to be known from any other source; there is therefore no way to discover if the two poems ‘travelled’ from collection to collection in tandem — but it would be highly unusual to find a rondeau used as an answer to a ballade.

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The first, labelled ‘Balade amoureuse’ (no. 11), is an address to a dame plaisant. The speaker is in despair, and all that can save him from death, the souveraine maistresse of the refrain, is a doulx mot de lyesse or ung petit mot de consolacion: Pour oster hors de tribulacion Mon povre cueur qui tant sent de destresse, Pour vostre amour et grant dilection: A la mort suis, souveraine maistresse. To rescue my poor heart, which is so distressed, from tribulation, by your love and kindness: I am near to death, sovereign lady.

So far so conventional — but what I want to draw attention to is the poemrubric to the next poem, no. 12, labelled ostentatiously ‘Rondel a ce propos’. Here, the titulus seems profoundly misleading: the keyword mort of the ‘Balade amoureuse’ appears nowhere, and the rondel seems to display no lexical, and no serious thematic, cross-reference: Pour prison ne pour maladie, Ne pour chose que l’en me die, Ne vous peult mon cueur oblier, Et si ne puis ailleurs penser, Tant ay de vous veoir envie. Even if I’m in prison, or sick, whatever anyone may say, my heart cannot forget you, and I cannot turn my thoughts elsewhere, so eager am I to see you.

Nor does it seem that any previous anthologist has detected similarities: D/P find the ballade in only two manuscripts, neither of which contains the ‘rondel’, which, by contrast, is a popular piece appearing in a number of lyric manuscripts. It is difficult not to conclude that the rather perfunctory link manufactured between the two poems is strategic: that the compiler is forcing the sort of retrospective re-reading that makes the collection accumulate meaning as it progresses. Let me be clear. I am not trying to suggest that the placement of every poem, the phrasing of every rubric, is intended as apprehensible or significant. There are pages of lyrics where no discernible attempt has been made to fabricate any connective,94 where, at most, the compiler has simply hinted at genre (‘Balade de bergerie’, no. 13; ‘Chançon’, no. 19; ‘Sote balade’, no. 34), or topic (‘Balade de 94

Nos 40–73, for instance, are labelled, monotonously, ‘Balade’, ‘Autre balade’, or ‘Autre rondel’. That series is broken only by no. 74, ‘Balade excellente en priant sa dame’, after which nos 75–95 revert to the uninformative labels.

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deux Escossois’, no. 21), or function (‘Rondel a noter’, no. 22). That said, in the initial pages of the collection of lyrics, he has made a point of scattering rubrics that imply deliberate positioning: a ‘Comedie joyeuse’ (no. 24) followed by a ‘Joyeux rondel’ (no. 25), an ‘Autre rondel de refus’ (no. 23), a ‘Balade de bergerie’ (no. 13) followed by a ‘Rondel moral’ which opens Robin, Robin (no. 14).95 The compiler, it is tempting to conclude, is giving an editorial density to his poetic aggregate by inveigling us from the outset into perceiving a spurious ‘serial’ arrangement across the collection with what seem to be purposeful iterations and links. And yet it is not always entirely spurious. I disclaim any intention to explore the collection in its entirety, but what I shall concentrate on, still in pursuit of the compiler’s editorial strategies, are some poetic ‘sequences’ that seem to evince principles of order.96 By ‘sequence’, here, I mean that the discrete poems appear to be linked by what Zumthor calls narrativités latentes, or by word or sound association, or indeed, editorially as it were, by rubric — and the first is a curious little group, nos 424–62 (which I have tried to tabulate here), in which the editorial framing seems to deny the fact of the discrete poems by implying that they are responsive to or prompted by each other, just as were the strings of lyrics in their social contexts explored in my previous chapters: Table 7. ‘Prison’ poems, nos 424–462 (fols 103r –110v) ‘Prison’ Poems

Miscellaneous

No 424: Balade pour ung prisonnier No 425: Balade morale ‘D’une dague forte et ague ...’ No 426: Balade joyeuse ‘Ung asne vy l’autre jour complaignant’ No 427: Autre balade ‘Las! que je seuffre grief tourment’

95

‘Robin’ is a name consistently associated with the pastoral.

96

That single-author volumes of lyric, like Machaut’s Louange des dames, contain ‘groupings’ of lyrics sharing common themes has been argued by a number of scholars: see for instance Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soubtil’, pp. 34–37, 96–99, and see below, p. 265.

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‘Prison’ Poems

Miscellaneous No 428: Autre balade ‘Ma dame, pour vous dire verité’ No 429: Balade de marriage ‘J’ay demouré entre les Sarrazins’ No 430: Autre balade ‘Chascun se loue de mariage’ No 431: Autre balade ‘Servir vous veuil bonnement sans faulx tour’

No 432: Balade pour ung prisonnier No 433: Autre balade No 434: Autre balade No 435: Autre balade No 436: Balade pour ung prisonnier No 437: ‘Balade d’ung amoureux a sa dame’ No 438: ‘Response de la dame a l’amoureux’ No 439: Balade pour ung prisonnier No 440: Autre balade pour ung prisonnier No 441: Balade pour ung autre prisonnier No 442: Encores balade pour ung prisonnier No 443: Encores de ce No 444: Balade ‘Or nous commence a venir le printemps’

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Miscellaneous No 445: Autre balade ‘Du tout me metz en vostre obeyssance’ No 446: Autre balade ‘Je vous choisy, noble loyale amour’ No 447: Autre balade ‘Mon seul amy tresbien aymé’

No 448: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘Ballade de l’appel’/‘Question au clerc du guichet’, 97 RH XV ] No 449: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘L’Epitaphe Villon’, or ‘Ballade des pendus’, RH XI ] No 450: Autre balade [‘Débat de Villon et de son coeur’,98 RH XIII ] No 451: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘Louange et requête à la cour’, RH XVI ] No 452: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘Ballade des proverbes’, RH V ]

97

Confusingly, there is no generally agreed numbering system for Villon’s poésies diverses; I make use of that proposed by Jean Rychner and Albert Henry (RH) in their edition of Le Lais Villon et les poèmes variés, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1977), just as I use their edition of the Testament (Geneva: Droz, 1974) as the reference for my comments. For convenience, I give the conventional titles, either those of RH, or, more rarely, those chosen by Clément Marot whose edition of Villon’s poetry, done for Galiot du Pré in 1533, has in general won recognition. Another poem of Villon’s, conventionally known as the ‘Ballade contre les ennemis de France’, is transcribed later in the Jardin de Plaisance (as no 643, fol. 200 v ). 98

Marot’s more accurate title is ‘Le debat du cuer et du corps de Villon en forme de ballade’.

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Miscellaneous No 453: Rondel [Villon’s (?)’Jenin l’anemy’] 99 No 454: Balade [Villon’s ‘Ballade des langues ennuyeuses’, Testament, 1422–56] No 455: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘Ballade de la Grosse Margot’, Testament, 1591–1627] No 456: Autre balade [Villon’s ‘Ballade des menus propos’, RH VI ] No 457: Autre balade [‘On parle de champs labourer’] No 458: Autre balade [‘H]ellas, mes yeulx, mon cueur avez trahy!’] No 459: Autre balade [‘Le monde va en amendant’] No 460: Autre balade [Alain Chartier’s ‘Il n’est danger que de vilain’] No 461: Autre balade [‘Las! je me plains d’amours et de ma dame’]

99

The rondeau is included among Villon’s works in editions under the title of Villon: Oeuvres by Louis Thuasne (Paris: Picard, 1923), p. 216, by Longnon/Foulet (Paris: La Cité des livres, 1932), p. 84, and by Jean Dufournet (Paris: Garnier, 1970), p. 314; and see also François Villon: Lais, Testament, Poésies Diverses, ed. by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Champion classiques. Série ‘Moyen Age’ (Paris: Champion, 2004), p. 334. It is not included by RH or by Claude Thiry, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Livre de poche, 1991). For a discussion, see RH’s Commentaire, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1977), p. 49, and David Fein, François Villon Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1997), pp. 120–26.

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‘Prison’ Poems

Miscellaneous

No 462: Autre ballade pour ung prisonnier

The ‘narrative’ backbone of the sequence derives from a series of seven balades, not all contiguous but printed in near proximity, explicitly labelled with variations on ‘Balade pour ung prisonnier’ (nos 424, 432, 436, 440, 441, 442, 443, 462), and printed across some seven folios (fols 103r–110r).100 In a fifteenthcentury context, as it happens, the imprisoned poet is something of a topos: the anonymous Prisonnier desconforté; Charles d’Orléans himself, of course, as we have seen, spent decades in prison; Jean Régnier, imprisoned in Beauvais in 1430, wrote a self-portrait there, Les Fortunes et adversitez,101 which incorporates a mock testament; François Villon, to whom we shall return shortly, celebrates his imprisonment in the Châtelet, and in Meung-sur-Loire. The compiler, then, is tapping a fertile and familiar vein.102 But he is, I think, doing more than this. By the way that he packages and juxtaposes this material with the accompanying unrubricated verses, he inflects the reader’s understanding of, and adds emotional complexity to, a sequence of what are plainly, in origin, unrelated poems often linked only tangentially to the theme of prison. The first ballade of this rubricated sequence, no. 424, ‘Balade pour ung prisonnier’, hints, if only barely, at what I earlier called a narrativité latente. The speaker is indeed, he claims, imprisoned: if only, he says, he could be released (‘S’au plaisir Dieu hors j’estoye’), he has every hope of attaining grant honneur, and of obtaining vengeance on ‘ceulx qui me font cy tenir [those who hold me prisoner here]’. There are no circumstantial details, no descriptions of hardships 100

Some of which are published in an appendix to Pierre Champion’s edition of an anonymous dit, Le Prisonnier desconforté du château de Loches (Paris: Champion, 1909). 101

Ed. by Eugénie Droz, SATF (Paris: Champion, 1923). On Régnier, see Champion, Histoire poétique, I, 227–84. 102

To which, of course, he reverts with the Chartier sequence I described above, and which he rubricates ‘La complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance’ (no. 621, fol. clxir). On ‘prison poetry’ — surprisingly popular in the fifteenth century — see Le Prisonnier desconforté, ed. by Champion, pp. xiv–xxi, and cf. René Ménage, ‘Deux poètes en prison: Maître Jean Reynier et “le prisonnier” de Loches’, Senefiance, 5 (1978), 239–49; on the English tradition Joanna Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Robert Epstein, ‘Prisoners of Reflection: The Fifteenth-Century Poetry of Exile and Imprisonment’, Exemplaria, 15 (2003), 159–98.

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or injustices, nothing that might localize; simply, some rather perfunctory moralizing on the themes of Fortune and misfortune, and some faint suggestion of youthful indiscretion. The reader must wait thereafter for some eight ballades before returning to an identical rubric with ballade 432. This time, imprisonment is graphic: the speaker is de toute joye desgarnis [deprived of all joy]; he spends his days contemplating ‘ras et souris, Poux, punaises comme formis, Et pulces ... [rats and mice, lice, bugs, ants, and fleas ...]’. In this lieu ort, umbragé et vieulx [filthy hole, dark and dismal], he has nothing left but hope. The speaker of ballade 436 (also labelled ‘Balade pour ung prisonnier’), by contrast, has lost hope: immured in a prison tenebreuse [dark prison], cursing his vie malheuree [miserable life], he prays for death, however fiere et hideuse [cruel and hideous] it may be. Ballade 439 (again, ‘Balade pour ung prisonnier’) is less dramatic but more specific: the speaker is, he says, incarcerated with no hope of immediate release — imprisoned, one is led to believe from the acrostich on DE BEAUVAIS which frames each of the three main stanzas, in one of the towers of the Châtelet known as Beauvais and which overlooks the Seine: Dure prison, fiere hostelaine, Ennuyeux, fier et dur lien, Me font regarder l’eaue de Seine, Enclos en obscur entretien ... (no. 439, fol. 106 v) My miserable prison, my relentless gaoleress, the cruel bonds that hamper me, leave me to stare out at the waters of the Seine, immured in darkness …

Unlike the others, therefore, this ballade is pleasantly circumstantial — but the fact that it is figured as an appeal for clemency to a lady who is chastelaine ... du tresor d’amours [guardian of the treasure of love], and the fact that it is so ostentatiously a virtuoso piece, might make one wonder if the ‘prison’ here is not a metaphorical one. The speaker most fears, he says, congié, which it is difficult to construe other than in the sense of ‘dismissal’ rather than literal release. There follows what is called ‘Autre balade pour ung prisonnier’, no. 440, whose speaker is, he says, ‘En prison ... obscure et desplaisante [in a dark and dismal prison]’; his only hope is God, who alone can offer any help. The three poems that follow (nos 441–43), however, seem to me to offer the most convincing proof that the compiler, here, has been deliberately seeking out unrelated poems. The first, labelled ‘Balade pour ung autre prisonnier’ (no. 441), is a lightly-moralizing love-poem. We should, says the poet, sententiously, serve the God of Love d’entente pure [with the purest of hearts], since it was, after all, Love/God who was our Saviour:

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Amours a fait homme et femme former, Et leur donner de tous biens largement, Car pour nous tous de prison defermer Receut Dieu mort tresangoisseusement ... (no. 441, fol. 106v ) Love it was that formed man and woman, and endowed them generously with gifts, for it was in order to free us all from prison that God accepted an agonizing death ...

The speaker, in other words, playing creatively with semantic ambiguity, conflates the God of Love with the Christian God; by the same token, the prison which is all that might feed into the existing narrativité latente which has shaped this sequence so far, here becomes a commonplace Biblically-based metaphor for the state of original sin. The second, no. 442, although it too is labelled ‘Encores balade pour ung prisonnier’, abandons even that minimal semantic link: nowhere in the ballade does the word prison appear — unless, which is unlikely, some faint recollection of the etymological root of the word chetifz, ‘captivos’ survives in a phrase from the second stanza, ‘les riches qui deviennent chetifz [the rich who become miserable]’.103 The poem is rather a simple hymn to human suffering and endurance, a recognition that when Fortune ‘... Tourne sa roe comme soubdainement [... abruptly spins her wheel]’, ‘Endurer fault humaine creature [mankind cannot but endure]’. Ballade no. 443 (‘Encores de ce’), it is true, reverts to the keyword prison, but it is difficult, from the context, to determine if the prison is real or metaphorical. The poem is addressed to a Cuer Desolé who/which, it seems, having youthfully revelled in pleasure, is now prins tost et soubdainement [captured very suddenly]; now, as Death approaches, it can no longer rire, chanter, dancer [laugh, sing, dance], it must desbatre, gemir amerement [struggle and groan bitterly]; useless to complain about prison: Tu te complains, disant que grief mal as, Et que prison te blesse rudement, Par quoy tu es de vivre saoul et las ... (no. 443, fol. 107r) You complain that you are beset by pains and that prison wounds you, so that you no longer want to live ...

My point, here, is not that these poems are a unit — indeed, although it is always possible that the poems reached our compiler in an existing group, it seems likely that he, or of course a predecessor, did indeed bring them together, and, as I hope my summary has shown, everything would suggest that the 103

I find no trace, in Godefroy or in Huguet, of chetifz still possessing this etymological sense in 1500 or so.

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elements that make them, rather spuriously, into a sequence are pretty perfunctory and adventitious, were it not for the rubrics. But it is the rubrics, and those minimal, cognitively grasped semantic links, that mean that it is impossible to read this group of poems without hermeneutic patterns suggesting themselves. We cannot but perceive them as what I called a poetic aggregate, given most density of course where the reader can detect narrative echoes, but acquiring, through the most minor of repetitions, an apparently playful or suggestive dialectic. Packaging and juxtaposition will inescapably have inflected the reader’s understanding of each individual poem and, more important, of the whole of the sequence: these poems possess, we assume, and irrespective of any intention the compiler may have had, significant relationships. This hypothesis as to ambitions for unity will, moreover, be tested and confirmed if we pursue our reading over the page, to a sequence of poems, nos 448–56, presented anonymously but actually by one of the most outstanding of fifteenth-century poets, François Villon. The group compiled here consists of some eight poems, with one of more doubtful attribution, as Table 7 shows. What I want to focus on, in the context of iterations or links which may or may not, it is important to remember, be purposeful, is the impact of the positioning of the first two of these poems: the relationships, tonalities, common themes, and imagery which it forces on the reader. Take, for instance, the first, no. 448, blandly entitled in the Jardin de Plaisance ‘Autre balade’, but which is in fact the poem conventionally known as the ‘Ballade de l’appel’. This ballade is addressed to ‘Garnier’: probably Etienne Garnier, who was indeed, as is indicated by the rubric supplied for this ballade in one of the manuscripts which preserve Villon’s œuvre, ‘clerc du guichet’,104 the clerk, that is, appointed to the prison of the Châtelet, in Paris, to register the name of any new prisoner assigned there, to handle any contacts with the

104

‘Ballade de l’appel’ is the title in two of the surviving manuscripts which contain Villon’s œuvre (C: Paris, BnF fr. 20041, and R, fr. 12490), in I, Pierre Levet’s editio princeps, and also in Clément Marot’s edition of 1533; it is MS F (Stockholm, Kungl. Biblioteket, V.u. 22) which offers ‘La question que feist Villon au clerc du guichet’, the title preferred by R/H. For recent editions of the poem, with more or less copious notes, see the editions by Longnon/Foulet, pp. 98–99, R/H, pp. 74–75, Dufournet, pp. 360–63, Thiry, pp. 318–19, Mühlethaler, pp. 302–03. Longer studies of the poem will be found in G. A. Brunelli, François Villon. Commenti e contributi (Messina: Peloritana, 1975), pp. 180–88, and on the links between this poem and another of 1463, the Sermon joyeux de saint Belin, which includes the ballade, see Jelle Koopmans and Paul Verhuyck, Sermon joyeux et truanderie (Villon – Nemo – Ulespiègle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), pp. 12–85.

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authorities, and to take charge of their release, or, of course, any other ultimate fate. Villon, it is known, having been embroiled peripherally in a brawl on the Left Bank in November 1462, was imprisoned in the Châtelet. He was, it seems, tortured, and was initially condemned to death (‘estre pendu et estranglé’), a sentence which was later, in 1463, commuted on appeal to banishment for ten years from Paris.105 This ballade is a rather exultant address to ‘Garnier’: it seems, pragmatically, to suggest that Garnier might have expressed doubts about Villon’s judicial appeal, might have told the jailer it was a folie [madness]. The poem is framed as a series of strutting questions turning around the refrain-line, ‘Estoit il lors temps de me taire? [Would I have been right to be silent?]’.106 Was he really wrong to speak out, Villon demands, when the sentence rendered by the court seemed so unjustified and so excessive107 (‘plaisir voluntaire [his simple whim]’)? Was he wrong to do so in the face of a purely arbitrary punishment (‘paine arbitraire’) imposed by fraud and deception, tricherie, and in the face of torture (escorcherie, literally ‘slaughter-house’)? And how about when, in the presence of a notary, he was told ‘Pendu serés’? Villon finishes, with a flourish of an envoi: Prince, se j’eusse eu la pepie, Pieça je fusse ou est Clotaire, Aux champs debout comme une espie ... Estoit il lors temps de me taire? (no. 448, fol. 108r) Prince, if my mouth had been stopped up with water, I’d long ago have been like Clotaire, hanged stone dead out in the fields … Would I have been right to be silent?

He would, in other words, had he allowed himself to be tongue-tied by Garnier’s

105

See Champion, François Villon, II, 235–47 and 289–90; Koopmans and Verhuyck, Sermon joyeux et truanderie, pp. 36–39; and Michael Freeman, François Villon in his Works: The Villain’s Tale, Faux Titre, 195 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), Chapter 1, pp. 27–55. We must, of course, be wary of detecting autobiography too airily in Villon’s verse: Villon, as ever, is playing with truth and game. 106

As cited in the last line of the first stanza, in the Jardin de Plaisance the line reads, erroneously, ‘Estoit il lors temps de taire’; the line is correctly copied for the third stanza and the envoi. 107

This is the interpretation of the phrase espoused by all critics, and, with reference to the Sermon de saint Belin, by Koopmans and Verhuyck, Sermon joyeux et truanderie, p. 39.

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objections,108 have been long hanged, planted gruesomely upright out on the gallows at Montfaucon.109 Now, it is not my purpose, here, to analyse Villon’s ballade in detail. What I am struck by, as regards Vérard’s artful publishing strategies, is the placing of this outstanding, and playful, example of a prison-poem in such close proximity to the little sequence of anonymous poems to which I have already referred, those labelled so ostentatiously ballades ‘pour ung prisonnier’. It is, I think, impossible to ignore, here, the impact of positioning, whether it is incidental or purposive: impossible not to guess at relationships from poem to poem. This little run of lyrics reshapes the equilibrium between the disparate parts and a possible whole; it seems to offer an apprehensible and significant aesthetic experience — and all the more so in that the poem which directly follows Villon’s ‘Ballade de l’appel’ in the Jardin de Plaisance is the ballade commonly known as the ‘Ballade des pendus’ but more properly as ‘L’épitaphe Villon’ (R/H, no. xi).110 This is not, it is true, a prison-poem. It is, however, incontrovertibly and obviously, a poem isotopically linked to the sequence I have described111 via the lexicon of appeal, justice, punishment, and hanging. The speakers, nous, are as it were actualizations of the fate that Villon claims in the ‘Ballade de l’appel’ to have avoided, triumphantly, precisely via his appeal: ‘occis Par justice’ (ll. 12–13), they hang lamentably on the gallows, ‘planted’ as Villon had feared he might be. They are the epitome of the suffering that the speakers in the other poems of the sequence have described — less dramatically, of course, less expertly, but still appealing to the same pity for those unjustly condemned to imprisonment or punishment. Let me not exaggerate the coherence of this little section of the Jardin de Plaisance. The semantic and thematic link ‘prison’ does not and cannot account for all the poems of the group, and by no means all of the discrete Villon pieces 108 On pepie see ibid., pp. 41–42, and cf. Mühlethaler’s note in François Villon, p. 340: ‘quand on a la bouche remplie d’eau, on ne peut, en effet, “pas parler”.’ 109

I derive these meanings from those generally agreed by critics: that to be like Clotaire, here, is simply a clichéd simile on the lines of ‘dead as a doornail’, and that the image of Villon ‘planted’ like a man on watch is meant to convey the hanged man on the gallows: see R/H, Commentaire, pp. 130–31, and Koopmans and Verhuyck, Sermon joyeux et truanderie, p. 42. 110

See the editions by Longnon/Foulet, pp. 96–97, Thiry, pp. 310–13, Mühlethaler, pp. 300–03. 111

I do not, by this, imply that the ballade was composed at the same time as the ‘Ballade de l’appel’, although it has been common to suggest so; I would agree with R/H that ‘Villon n’a pas dû attendre 1462 pour contempler le gibet ...’ (Commentaire, p. 110).

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that l’Infortuné provides have anything to do with that particular theme. That it has not been forgotten, however, is made clear when it is reactivated by one final ‘prison-poem’, no. 462, also entitled ‘Autre ballade pour ung prisonnier’. The first quatrain of the ballade returns to the prison theme: Hellas, je suis au pays de servage, Ou je me voy en grant subjection D’aucunes gens qui veulent mon dommage, Qui contre Dieu me tiennent en prison ... (no. 462, fol. 110 v) Alas, I am in the land of servitude, where I find myself in subjection to many who wish me ill, and keep me in prison contrary to God’s will ...

It transpires, although as usual there is nothing much in the way of circumstantial detail, that the ‘prison’ of the rubric seems more metaphorical than actual: the poet, he says, is living in a world governed by Oultrage le malostru and — borrowing from the Roman de la Rose — Danger and Malebouche, and it is from them that he prays to be delivered (the refrain runs ‘Que male mort si les puist accueillir [May an evil death overtake them!]’). But the mere presence of the poem with this rubric, bracketing, as it were, the eight Villon lyrics, predisposes the reader to find some sort of authoritative or significant order governing the organization of this section of the Jardin de Plaisance.112 We have no way of knowing how any one of this little group of ‘prisonpoems’ reached Vérard and l’Infortuné, and it is perfectly possible that they travelled, conjointly, from anthology to anthology, to be picked up by the magpie anthologizer of the Jardin de Plaisance.113 Almost certainly, the group of Villon’s poems arrived precisely in this way,114 but unfortunately it is the case that 112

Hélène Basso argues the same point for Machaut’s place in recueils collectifs: see ‘Présence de Machaut dans quelques recueils collectifs’, in ‘De vrai humain entendement’: Hommage à Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ed. by Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Jean-Yves Tilliette, Recherches et rencontres, 21 (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 15–27. 113

Cf. A. S. G. Edwards’ remark on English lyric manuscripts: ‘From fairly early in the fifteenth century, single texts or groups of smaller texts would often circulate as separate manuscript units, such units being collocated together by scribes or stationers into larger compilations to meet the needs of individual purchasers’: see his ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch.Selden B. 24’, p. 57, and cf. Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’. 114 As to the provenance of Villon’s lyrics here, variant evidence is unfortunately inconclusive: none of the other surviving exemplars of Villon’s verse conforms precisely to the versions printed by Vérard, although there are certainly similarities with F and C. There is, however, no real consistency; C is excluded as a source, given that it contains only two of the

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there seems to be no other surviving manuscript of any of the eight other anonymous prisonnier poems that form this little group, so that no conclusions can be drawn as to their manuscript history. Even if, however, the poems did arrive already constituted into a group, the rubrics are a device which seems likely to be that of the anthologizer(s), and they are, here, a contrivance as interesting as is the overall role of the rubrics that I analysed earlier and which are designed to carry the narrative of the collection as a whole. Intermittent as they are, they are nevertheless a rudimentary form of editing, seeming to reconcile this little sequence of disparate and disjointed lyrics. They are a way of fragmenting the huge, disorderly bulk of poems into a (relatively) manageable segment; they generate a meaning and a wholeness in ways which, I believe, have an impact on the very process of reading across this unwieldy volume. It is this perception of pattern, this drive to make poems read like this in sequence ‘mean’ in ways that they do not when read discretely, that ultimately constitutes, I shall argue — and here I return to the remarks I made above about the Gestaltist set to perceive — the pleasure of an anthology whose pleasures may well seem, to the modern reader, inaccessible.115 My argument is that the commercially canny Vérard plays with texts in ways which provoke a particular ‘plaisir du texte’: a pleasure which is implicit of course in any act of reading, but which their joint strategies have greatly enhanced.116 The reading of any text, after all, involves — quite independently of intention on the author’s or editor’s part — the construction of hypotheses which progressively create coherence and relevancy across the various data presented. This is an obligatory process because — and I turn here to linguists like Ducrot117 — it is impossible to read without hypotheses as to what might motivate the co-presence of specific events or discourses, hypotheses which can

poems from the Jardin de Plaisance, and F contains two additional lyrics, the ‘Ballade des contre-vérités’ and the quatrain ‘Je suis François’ which are not present in the Jardin de Plaisance; it would be difficult to understand the omission. That said, there is nothing remarkable about the fact that Vérard is selective: F itself detaches certain of the ballades from the Testament and gives them ‘disséminées comme des morceaux d’anthologie’ (Testament, ed. by R/H, p. 7). 115

Cf. my ‘‘‘A rude heap together hurl’d’’’, and ‘Mise en mélange au quinzième siècle’.

116

See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

117

I am indebted to Oswald Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire: principes de sémantique linguistique (Paris: Hermann, 1972), and to H. H. Clark, ‘Bridging’, in Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, ed. by P. N. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Wason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 411–20.

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be tested and refined as the reading progresses. The commonest of reading manœuvres is to ‘naturalize’ the text, to ‘bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural and legible’,118 and to make it conform to existing literary or cultural conventions. To do so is to engage actively with the text, to anticipate, to reread retrospectively — to note the sort of purposeful links and iterations that I have analysed above with the ‘prison-poems’ — to turn mere words into an apprehensible and significant aesthetic experience which in turn makes reading pleasurable and engaging. Because of this ‘drive for sense’, we are naturally predisposed to find coherence, and Vérard, consciously or not, carefully manipulates that natural disposition.119 Predisposed, the reader will, inevitably, read from poem to poem, coordinate text with text. In the present instance, as I have argued, the volume itself is provided with two concurrent codes, iconographic and narrative, which imply linearity and sequentiality, and which provide a narrative hypothesis familiar to the point of banality. This cannot but familiarize the text and mobilize the reader’s intertextual competences. It encourages him or her, in other words, to that most enjoyable of readerly activities: the constructing of ‘stories’ which will account for the apparent randomness of phenomena. That Vérard and his compiler have provided the merest outline of that ‘story’ makes the whole process, if anything, even more pleasurable. And what I am pursuing, here, are the ways in which the compiler’s strategies maintain a creative tension between integration and fragmentation, by providing for individual poems and sequences of poems contexts which cannot but suggest, however spuriously, architectural principles. Take, for instance, still geographically within the group of ‘prison-poems’ that I have been discussing here, ballade no. 429, rubricated ‘Balade de mariage’. The poem is by Eustache Deschamps,120 and is therefore to be found in BnF fr. 840, the anthology of his complete works; it is also, as Droz and Piaget point

118

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 123. 119

Some of the points I make here are implicit in essays edited by Fenoaltea and Rubin in The Ladder of High Designs, and by Fraistat in The Poem and the Book. 120

Edited in Queux de Saint-Hilaire’s edition of Deschamps’ Œuvres complètes, V , 217, where it is rubricated ‘La complainte d’un gentil homme marié en aage moien fait par Eustace par maniere de balade’.

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out, contained in two other manuscript miscellanies,121 and thus is one of the small number of Deschamps’ poems which travel more widely beyond his own personal collection. This is a poem — stereotypical enough — warning against marriage. The speaker, he claims, has suffered all kinds of hardships and privations, but nothing compares with the horrors of marriage: ‘Gard soy chascun qu’il n’y soit attrappé! [Let everyone beware not to be trapped!]’: J’ay demouré en forteresse assaillye, Siege devant, engins, charroy, bagage, Pierres, canons, gectans a grant oultrage. J’ay par envye esté prins et happé, Mais femme avoir me fait plus grant dommage: Gard soy chascun [qu’il n’y soit attrappé!] (no. 429, fol. 104v ) I’ve lived in a fortress under siege, surrounded by siege engines, baggagetrains, with canons hurling boulders at me. I’ve been trapped by envy, but having a wife is more damaging: let everyone beware not to be trapped!

His wife — poisonous woman (‘de femme le venins’) — is a termagant; why, he asks God, did he make the mistake of marrying? No one, he says in the envoi, however wise or foolish, finds any solace in marriage! I want to be quite clear here: this is not a ‘prison-poem’ in the sense that I have used the expression so far, nor is it rubricated as such, and nor is it probable that it travelled in company with the other ‘prison-poems’ I have discussed. What I do want to suggest, however, is that its incorporation in the group cannot but inflect our reading of it, and make it mean in ways not necessarily those of Eustache himself. I return once again to the Gestaltist model of reading that has been the backbone of this chapter, and call on two expressions which seem to me coterminous. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, in a characteristically subtle and inventive article,122 has recently explored the role of what he calls ‘cotextualization’ in the reception history of a little rondeau by an obscure, though quite prolific, fifteenth-century poet, Pierre d’Anché. This rondeau he finds for the first time in Charles d’Orléans’ personal manuscript, BnF fr. 25458, in a group of poems, by various other poets, which target the evils of the court. It

121

In the manuscript I discussed in Chapter 1, Bibliothèque Intercommunale EpinalGolbey, MS 217, and in Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, LIII. 122

‘“Gardez vous bien”’; see also his ‘Charles d’Orléans, une prison en porte-à-faux. Cotexte courtois et ancrage référentiel: les ballades de la captivité dans l’édition d’Antoine Vérard (1509)’, in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. by Arn, pp. 165–82.

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uses the figure of Fauvel, the devious allegorical horse of the Roman de Fauvel,123 to make a political and satirical point about the slippery double-dealing of the courtier. The rondeau, however, is something of an anthology piece, for Mühlethaler traces its progress across a number of sixteenth-century miscellanies where — and this is the point which is relevant for my purposes here — its cotexts are very largely erotic: Fauvel comes to seem, and is indeed presented by rubrics as,124 the image of the slippery, double-dealing lover. The ambiguity of Pierre’s rondeau — an ambiguity which, Mühlethaler suggests, is fundamentally characteristic of late-medieval lyric discourse — ‘crée l’espace pour des lectures divergentes [allows space for divergent readings]’,125 a space on which each new co-text126 capitalizes. He argues that poetic meaning is not fixed. Rather, what confers meaning, in anthologies and miscellanies particularly, are the juxtapositions, contrasts, and continuities orchestrated by patterns imposed on any particular volume, and proximities within that volume. A lyric when integrated into a collection seems, as a result, to offer a pleasure and significance not available to someone who reads it discretely. What I mean, concretely, by this is that a poem entitled ‘Balade de mariage’, which by and large rehearses the anti-matrimonial commonplaces that Eustache Deschamps had mobilized with such interminable complacency in his Miroir de mariage,127 acquires resonances and meanings precisely from its co-text. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker claims to have demouré entre les Sarrazins [lived among Saracens], to have mingled es esclaves [with slaves], to have spent time en vaisseaulx, en galees, en lins [in prison-hulks, in galleys, in chains]. What he says is unspecific, but the co-text, the insistent lexicon of imprisonment, 123

Le Roman de Fauvel par Gervais de Bus, ed. by A. Långfors, SATF, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1914–19); cf. most recently Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. by Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 124

In the collection published by Vérard called Le Vergier d’Honneur, the rondeau is indexed as ‘Rondel joyeux d’ung gaudisseur amant’; see Mühlethaler, ‘Gardez vous bien’, p. 143. Vérard is, in other words, using a rubric as he does in the Jardin, to angle the reader’s perception of the poem. 125

‘“Gardez vous bien”’, p. 146.

126

For the same phenomenon, Fraistat uses the term contexture; see The Poem and the Book, p. 3. By it, he means ‘the contextuality provided for each poem by the larger frame within which it is placed, the intertextuality among poems so placed, and the resultant texture of resonance and meaning’. 127

Edited in Œuvres complètes, IX .

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invites a process of triumphant decoding. The speaker is claiming to have been a prisoner of the Saracens, a slave in Syria, or a galley-slave; when we come to the stanza I quoted earlier, we are struck by the claim that the speaker has been par envye prins et happé [trapped by envy] — and that too must be a literal imprisonment. This sequence of chance-met poems comes to seem what I called a poetic aggregate, in which the disposition of the volume, whether this was or was not the intention of Vérard, or l’Infortuné, creates a predisposition in the reader to find, or at least to seek for, inferential meanings and covert intertextualities. Now, it is important not to exaggerate the ‘narrativity’ of this sequence. To revert to a phrase I used earlier, it is the search for a meaningful pattern which in itself produces articulation, irrespective of any compilatorial intention. Because its lexicon is so limited, its thematic range so conventional, the latemedieval lyric is essentially malleable, and everything suggests that scribes and copyists and compilers were, like l’Infortuné, pragmatically flexible in their appropriation of existing corpora. Because we know of no discussions of principles of compilation or anthologization for the fixed-form lyric, we are reduced to deriving such principles from the compilations themselves, and it may well be that we are — I am — tempted to hypothesize beyond what the evidence will support. On the other hand, if indeed any pleasure attended the reading of these cascading, unrelieved poems, then one source must surely have been the reader’s active participation in detecting or constructing meaning.128 At the very least, the aesthetic expressiveness which Vérard and l’Infortuné deploy so ingeniously in the overarching schema of the volume — the narrative framework, the iconographic programme — make it plain that they placed a value on ‘sequentiality’ and continuousness. Earlier, I disclaimed any wish to analyse the entirety of the Jardin de Plaisance; to do so would demand a whole book, rather than a single chapter. My intention, here, is simply to suggest some of the means which Vérard uses to design his readership by making what I called élite sociability the key to reading the Jardin de Plaisance. Let me turn now to a third and final segment of the

128

Cf. Roger Chartier’s remark that ‘texts are not deposited in books, whether handwritten or printed, as if in a mere recipient. Readers only encounter texts within an object whose forms and layout guide and compel the production of meaning’: Frenchness in the History of the Book: from the History of Publishing to the History of Reading. The 1987 James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book (Boston: American Antiquarian Society, 1988), p. 13; cf. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986).

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anthology, which appears just prior to the ‘prisoner’ sequence I described earlier: no. 420 in the collection (fol. 101v), which is rubricated ‘Demandes joyeuses’. I want to argue that one particular feature of the way in which it is reproduced by Antoine Vérard is, significantly, a positive invitation to what would now be called ‘audience participation’. Demandes joyeuses, or demandes d’amour, are a familiar late-medieval and early Renaissance literary and perhaps social phenomenon.129 Demandes d’amour, to simplify, pose questions of amorous principle and amorous etiquette: what is love? does beauty or virtue better inspire love? is there any such thing as an ugly lover? can a lover expect more from a lady who has never loved, or from one who has loved already? — followed by model answers: love is vie delitable [a life of delight]; beauty inspires love; no lady ever sees a lover as ugly; you can expect a better response from one who has loved already, because a lady who has never loved has ‘si grant paour d’estre decheue que elle ne se oze habandonner [such fear of being deceived that she dare not allow herself to love]’.130 They were immensely popular: Margaret Felberg-Levitt, for instance, finds no fewer than twenty-five manuscripts and thirty early printed editions.131 Vérard’s demandes are conventional enough — one of them, indeed, is very much in the same spirit as one of those I have just quoted: ‘Je vous demande: trois femmes sont toutes d’une beaulté et d’ung sens. Une en y a qui ayme et n’a point d’amy, une qui oncques n’ayma et une qui a amy. De laquelle seroit l’amour plus forte a avoir? [Here is a demande: three women are of equal beauty and wit. The love of one is unrequited; the second has never loved; one already has a lover. Which would it be most difficult to seduce?]’. They range from the relatively trivial (‘Se vostre amy vous avoit donné dix baisers, les prendriez vous tous a une foiz ou chascun a part? [If your lover promised you ten kisses, would you rather have them all at once or one by one?]’), to the agonizing:

129

On which see Amorous Games, ed. by Hassell, and more completely Margaret FelbergLevitt, Les Demandes d’amour (Montréal: CERES, 1995); cf. also Two Late Medieval Love Treatises: Heloise’s Art d’Amour and a Collection of Demandes d’Amour, ed. by Leslie C. Brook, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. 16 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1993). Felberg-Levitt has made an exhaustive study of the evidence for the social circumstances in which demandes might be posed: Les Demandes, introduction, pp. 16–36, and her article, ‘Jouer aux “Demandes d’amour”’, Le Moyen français, 38 (1997), 93–124. 130

These examples — paraphrased — are taken from Amorous Games, ed. by Hassell.

131

Felberg-Levitt, Les Demandes, pp. 41–124, to which should be added the Demandes d’amour in Two Late Medieval Love Treatises, ed. by Brook.

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Vous aymez tresfort une dame qui est vostre amie. Vous vous en alez hors du pays pour demourer ung an, et luy estes tousjours loyal ami. Vous revenez au bout de l’an et cuidez qu’elle vous soit loyale amie; vous trouverez qu’elle s’est forfaicte d’ung homme tant seulement, dont elle se repent et vient a vous a mercy. Lequel aymeriez vous mieulx, ou la trouver morte ou en ce point? You are deeply in love with your lady. You have to go to foreign parts for a year, but remain entirely faithful. You come back a year later assuming she will also have been faithful; you find that she has been untrue with just one man, and is now repentant and comes to beg your forgiveness. Which would you prefer, that she had died or that she had behaved as I’ve described?

But one element present in every other exemplar of the demandes d’amour that Felberg-Levitt mentions, or that I have been able to examine, is crucially missing in the Jardin de Plaisance: the responses.132 Simply, a rubric at the end of the little sequence of demandes issues an invitation to respond, always having regard to propriety (conscience) and enjoyment (plaisance): L’acteur Les responces de toutes ces demandes se font en conscience et a plaisance.133 The author speaks: the responses to all these questions should be prompted by conscience and wit.

As usual, it is impossible to determine if Vérard has happened across an anthology of demandes which do not include responses, or if he himself has suppressed them. All that we can say, with certainty, is that the publisher has selected this particular little sequence for incorporation — and this must be deliberate — not as a separate item, but precisely as one among the ballades and rondeaux and chansons covered by the original rubric (fol. lxr) which, we remember, ran ‘Comment les amans qui sont audit jardin de plaisance, aprés ce debat du cueur et de l’oeil, se esjoyssent et esbatent a faire plusieurs balades et rondeaulx pour les dames qui y sont, les ungs pour l’onneur des dames et les autres au deshonneur. Ensemble les responces des dictes dames aux amans. Et d’autres plusieurs choses joyeuses’. This initial rubric celebrates the cultural

132

Leslie Brook, intrigued by the fact that question and response seem to form an indissoluble pair, wonders (ibid., p. 22) if ‘the questions and answers [were] to be known by heart’ (cf. Felberg-Levitt, ‘Jouer aux “Demandes’’’, pp. 107–08, 120–23); Hassell, in his edition of Amorous Games, calls the games ‘riddles’. 133

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wealth of the circle that, fictionally, produces the anthology. The editor’s colophon, by making the readers responsible for the responces to the demandes joyeuses, defines a role for them and demands their imaginative engagement with the particular preoccupations of that circle. The dialogic character of the Demandes segment is designed to point inescapably to the connection between lyric verse and social relationships. Of course, I recognize that I am only touching the edges of the Jardin de Plaisance: its contents reflect phenomena for more complex and extensive than I have time to discuss in detail — and I could legitimately be accused of cherrypicking, of choosing for attention only those minimal sequences which lend themselves to analysis of this sort. What I am attempting to find here, however, is not an all-encompassing coherence, but rather a compass with which to begin to navigate the anthology — and I believe that its construction, and indeed its success, are best explained if we imagine that Antoine Vérard, consciously or unconsciously, is aping the system of amateur versifying and transmission by manuscript that we have seen pursued in previous chapters. Printing, says Arthur Marotti, ‘dislodges poems from their place in a system of transactions within courtly circles, and puts them in the more fundamentally ‘literary’ environment of the ... typographic volume’.134 The editorial strategy that we see, with the Jardin de Plaisance, seems to be a deliberate attempt to reverse that process: Vérard’s determined effort to re-imagine a social-narrative articulation for his anthology bespeaks an anxiety to provide poems with the sort of social context which alone, it seems, can give them legitimacy. I promised, at the beginning of this chapter, to talk about Coherence, and Design, and Meaning. It is my contention that these are precisely what Antoine Vérard intends to provide, however rudimentary or half-hearted his efforts may seem to us. And there is something which suggests that he found the editorial strategies he invented for the Jardin de Plaisance commercially advantageous. Eight years later, in 1509, he was to publish another lyrico-narrative anthology, La Chasse et le départ d’amours,135 which contains a large selection of Charles d’Orléans’ lyrics,136 as well as a number of occasional pieces — principally political — by some notable, saleable poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, in his excellent article on the 134

John Donne, pp. 12–13.

135

Partly edited by Mary Beth Winn in La Chasse d’amours, TLF (Geneva: Droz, 1984).

136

See Arthur Piaget, ‘Une édition gothique de Charles d’Orléans’, Romania, 21 (1892), 581–96.

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anthology,137 has tracked the ways in which, here as ingeniously as in the Jardin de Plaisance, Vérard has ensured the coherence of another apparently disparate volume by using ‘indices qui parlent en faveur d’une recherche de la cohérence sur l’ensemble du recueil’: rubrics, colophons, illustrations. And, most particularly, by situating the individual lyric pieces in a similar context of élite sociability. Once again, there is a narrative, a dead lady, a tragic lover, who embodies Charles’ lyrics and gives them a narrative raison d’être and a social context: ‘Comment l’Amant Parfait regrette sa dame, comme tout desconforté, par rondeaulx et par balades’ (fol. cc). The poem is thus presented as a social act, a poetic event in a sharply specified narrative frame of reference, and its meaning and aesthetic domain are constituted by that historico-narrative context. What Vérard manufactures, with his elaborate paratexts, his careful editorial procedures, is an encounter in which the interplay of text with text, poet with poet, is at the centre of the reading experience. For Vérard, who had made such a success of publishing romances and histories in the vernacular, the Jardin de Plaisance was a new and experimental, and potentially costly, venture: the first anthology of dits and lyrics to appear in print in French. Anxious no doubt to ‘manage’ the reception of something so unexplored, he, or his compiler, have exploited all the means at their disposal to make the volume encompassable and comprehensible. The narrative may be perfunctory or incoherent — but it is clearly intended as an invitation to the reader to structure and pattern the poems to which he or she is exposed. The woodcuts are recycled from Vérard’s Therence — but the simple fact that they were, initially, theatrical makes them essentially dialogic. The sequences I have isolated are, I freely admit, rudimentary and intermittent — but they nevertheless set in operation what I earlier called the Gestaltist ‘set to perceive’, and act as frames for reading based on models with which the reader may well already be familiar.138 If, as Annabel Patterson argues, finding ‘authoritative and

137 For an interesting discussion, see Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, ‘Ouvertures, clôtures, paratexte – réflexions sur le montage d’un recueil: La Chasse et le Depart d’Amours, imprimé en 1509 par Antoine Vérard’, in Seuils de l’œuvre dans le texte médiéval, ed. by Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne-nouvelle, 2002), pp. 223–47. 138

See Menakhem Perry, ‘Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its Meanings’, Poetics Today, 1 (1979), 35–64, 311–61; Perry usefully sums up psychological tests showing the crucial influence of reading frames on the process of perception.

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significant order in a volume depend[s] on the predisposition of the reader’,139 then we should surely salute the ingenuity with which Vérard, commercially astute as ever, has drawn his readers into the profitable fiction of élite sociability which may well have done much to ensure the libraire’s characteristic success.

139

‘Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneity’, p. 98.

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C ONCLUSION : W OUNDING THE T EXT

‘The very printers have wounded the text: they have put unnecessary headings and summaries at the beginning of the acts …’ ‘Que aun los impressores had dado sus punctures, poniendo rúbricas ó sumarios al principio de cada acto’: Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. by Julio Cejador y Frauca, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1955), I, 25.

T

he anthologies I have talked about in this book continue to pose awkward questions: what is their literary status? What are they? What are they for? The fact is that the paradigms we usually use to understand the process of reading do not — perhaps cannot — account for the organization and the contents of these unmanageable volumes. Are they — as Julia Boffey suggests — rather like autograph albums, with the poems scribbled down simply ‘to record the fact of the writer’s association with the manuscript’?1 How prestigious was it for the patron of an anthology to capture a piece by Villon, or Vaillant? Did an individual courtier — a doctor, or an écuyer, a Villon or a Vaillant — feel a warm glow of self-congratulation if he or she managed to smuggle a rondeau into Charles’ manuscript, or into Marguerite’s? And incidentally, is ‘smuggle’ the right word? Or did patrons compete to persuade poets, amateur and professional, to produce a graceful little piece for their anthologies? Did the owner of a manuscript, like the owner of the autograph

1

‘The Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 3–14.

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album, parade the sheer number of poems he or she had managed to collect? Or did patrons, like fans queuing up for autographs outside the green room door, compete for especially prestigious poets? And if so, was Charles’ court especially to be admired because so many prestigious poets had been cajoled or coerced into producing a rondeau? Are the anthologies, to use another modern analogy, rather like the leather-bound betting-books in London clubs in which convivial gentlemen made notes of bets laid: was the purpose of an anthology simply to make a quick note of the ephemera of an evening’s entertainment? Did patrons set store by their anthologies because they reminded them of the ‘event’, in Roger Chartier’s terms, that brought any individual poem into the manuscript? But suppose that the anthologies were read, read from cover to cover: what sort of reading protocols can we possibly imagine for these torrents of unrelieved rondeaux? Because we know a little about Charles’ life, we make strenuous attempts to impose biographical readings on his ballades and his rondeaux: was that how a passing visitor, desultorily flicking through the loose sheets on a table at Blois, was inclined to read? With an effort, modern readers can train themselves to recognize the formal ornament and rhetorical flourishes of the fifteenth-century poet: did fifteenth-century readers smile to themselves when they noticed a particularly adept use of chiasmus, or enjambement? Were they bored, or reassured, to find the commonplaces with which they were so comfortably familiar? Did they relish the poets’ exuberant variety in the exploration of the topical? Or did they sigh and look for nouveleté — and if so, what did they mean? How minutely did they examine the ballades and rondeaux and virelais that made their way into the anthologies? Is our difficulty in reading these anthologies to do with our inability to read in the peculiar way that, presumably, they require? Ought we to make ourselves into more attentive readers? Was attentive reading what an anthology, or even an individual rondeau, was meant to receive? Or did readers skim-read, looking for overall patterns rather than lyric fireworks? Was an anthology, in other words, a text ‘monument’ for reading and admiring? These are not questions that are easily answered — and I would not pretend to have answered them. But it is indisputable that we shall never construct the protocols and the paradigms of reading that the anthologies demand if we simply ignore the manuscripts and incunabula and early printed books which made them ‘public’. Anthologies may be as dismayingly difficult to encompass as might be a visit to a museum entirely devoted to varieties of barbed wire, but the material, concrete manuscript is nevertheless one of our few first-hand means of grasping the poem as a human act occupying a social space — and poetry, as we

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have seen, medieval poetry especially, is fundamentally a social activity. A lyric in a manuscript looks very different from the way it looks in a modern edition, or a modern anthology: how it appears, how it can be read, in that context, is one of the most useful indications of how it was regarded, and understood, in the Middle Ages.2 The writer who provides my epigraph here, Fernando de Rojas, was disappointed, it seems, to find the liveliness and potential of the manuscript page cramped — ‘wounded’ — by the conventions of print. If we are to understand how poems meant in the Middle Ages, we must pay attention to complex processes of production and consumption involving the poet him- or herself, other people like scribes and patrons and audiences, and the social institutions within which their encounters took place — and one of the few means at our disposal, I repeat, is the manuscript itself. It is only by returning to the manuscripts, paradoxically, that we shall appreciate as we should the patient, meticulous, invaluable work of the scholars who have edited these manuscripts — Gaston Raynaud, Barbara Inglis, Marcel Françon, Françoise Fery-Hue, Marcel Schwob. Only if we engage with their labours and attempt, through them, to understand the entirety of the poetic event; only if we read the medieval lyric in its concrete, material frame of reference; only then will we begin to grasp the aesthetic domain in which it operated, and see patterns of change and continuity, principles of selection and order: the ‘meaning’ of the lyric.

2

I rejoin, here, the preoccupations of an increasing number of scholars — witness, for instance, Keith Busby’s monumental Codex and Context.

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INDEX

Abad, Gemino A. 232n Achille Caulier 246 Acrostic 217 Aelius Donatus 235, 260n Agincourt, Battle of 89, 93, 101, 102, 204 Alain IX de Rohan 188n Alain Chartier 39, 101, 132n, 148, 150n, 152, 200, 235, 235n, 243, 244n, 246, 274 Album poétique (Marguerite of Austria) 213–27 Alexander Cycle 28n Alexander the Great 28–33 Alexander, J. J. G. 66n Allen, Judson 68n Alliteration 27, 161, 209 Anagram 217 André Giron 204n, 205, 208 Andreas Capellanus 94n Angremy, Annie 120n, 147–212 Anne de Graville 200 Anonyme Lorrain 43, 46 Anonymity and ‘namedness’ 72n, 167, 186–87, 199, 200–01, 216–17, 222, 224, 227 Anthoine de Cuise see Antoine de Cuise

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Anthologies and miscellanies 5–7, 9, 77–78, 89–90, 115, 185, 187–98, 231–33, 235, 260, 285, 286, 289–90, 293–94, 295 Antoine [Anthoine] de Cuise 48, 165, 198, 201, 205 Antoine de La Salle 14, 143n Antoine Vérard 10, 11, 70n, 227, 229–91 Apprenticeship 46, 47–48 Ariès, Philippe 19n Armstrong, Adrian 247n, 249 Arn, M ary-Jo 84n, 86n, 89n, 90n, 91n, 98n, 99n, 101n, 130n, 194n, 284n Arnaud de Corbie, Chancellor of France 65–67 Arthur III de Richemont 174, 188n, 204, 205 Arts de seconde rhétorique 40–46, 207n, 211n, 257 Aubailly, Jean-Claude 48n Aubigni 222 Avril, François 90 Bakhtin, Mikhail 128, 129, 129n Banderoles 241, 268 Barthes, Roland 11, 282n

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298 Basso, Hélène 281n Baswell, Christopher 105n Bateson, Gregory 8, 114–15, 129, 211, 217, 263n Baudet Herenc 42n, 246 Baudouin de Condé 32n Baudrier, le Président 235n Baumgartner, Emmanuèle 48n, 54n, 56n, 290n Baurmeister, Ursula 91n Bavaria, Duke of 14 Beaucourt, G. de 4n ‘Beavoir’ 224 Becker, Karin 62n Bell, Bill 67n, 68n Belle dame qui eut mercy, La 246 Belle Dame sans merci, La 235, 243, 244, 245, 246 ‘Belligere’ [Isabeau of Bavaria q.v.] 23, 27 Beltran, Evencio 43n, 44n, 46n Benedict XIII, Pope [Pedro de Luna] 65n Benedict, Barbara 229n Bénet, Jacques 121n Benjamin, Walter 259n Bennett, Philip 67n, 139n Benoist Damien 141, 142, 150, 153, 154 Bent, Margaret 285n Bergerette 175n, 177, 184, 257–58; bergerette layée 208 Bergeron, Réjean 20n Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac 25n Bernardino of Sienna 192 Berry, duc de 61 Berthault de Villebresme 105,154 Bertrand Richard 149n Bevan, Jonquil 67n Bhabha, Homi 226

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Index Bidler, Rose M. 132n, 158n, 159n, 206n, 208n Billotte, Denis 93n Blanchard, Joël 23n, 25n Blosset 188n Blosseville 48, 49, 166n, 167, 167n, 176, 177n, 183, 184, 197, 198, 201, 201n, 203 Boethius 66n Boffey, Julia 67n, 69n, 231n, 232n, 281n, 294 Böhler, Danielle 231n Bonnardot, F. 76n, 78n Boom, G. de 213n Bornate, Carol 224n Bossuat, Robert 101n Boucicaut 4, 14 Boulestreau, N. 54n Bourbon, Bastard de 216, 217 Bourbon, court of 76n Bourbon, Duke of 129 Bourdieu, Pierre 7, 33–35, 37, 40n, 66–67, 75, 80n, 81, 163, 196n, 212, 253, 257, 259n Boutet, D. 205n Bozzolo, Carla 13–18, 20n, 66n Brabant, Duke of 49n Brasseur, Annette 29n Brook, Leslie C. 287n, 288n Brooks, Jeanice 22n Brown, Cynthia Jane 247n, 249, 251n Bruchet, M. 215n Bruneau, Charles 76n, 77n, 78 Brunelli, G. A. 278n Brunetto Latini 96n ‘Bucarius’ 23–27 Buettner, Brigitte 36n Bühler, Curt 237n, 260n

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Index Burgess, Glyn 51n Burgundy, court of 76n Burgundy, Duke of 45, 88, 129 Burrow, John A. 94n Busby, Keith 3n, 89n, 231n, 237n, 296n Busnois 167 Butterfield, Ardis 80n, 226n Calin, William 89n Camille, Michael 242, 243n Cammaert, G. 213n Carey, Richard J. 28n, 29n, 30n Catachresis 2 Cayley, Emma 112n, 245n Cent Ballades (Christine de Pizan) 55, 60, 66n Cent Ballades d’amant et de dame (Christine de Pizan) 55, 60, 66n, 94, 99 Cent Nouvelles nouvelles 4 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline 17n, 35n, 38n, 47n, 48n, 50, 51n, 53, 53n, 54n, 165n, 231n, 251n, 258n, 271n, 281n Champ de pouvoir or field 33–35 Champion, Pierre 83–145, 148–63, 165n, 167–212, 261n, 275n, 278n, 279n Charles V, King of France 62 Charles VI, King of France 13, 23–27, 62 Charles VII, King of France 184, 185, 204 Charles VIII, King of France 212, 219, 222n Charles d’Orléans 4, 8–9, 45n, 70, 83–145, 147–212, 233, 275, 284, 289, 290, 294, 295 Charles Quint 212 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 212 Charpentier, Hélène 96n

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299 Chartier, Roger 64n, 67–68, 79, 113–14, 114n, 115n, 174, 196, 226, 234n, 238n, 245, 247n, 286n, 295 Chasse et départ d’amours, La 101n, 236n, 289 Chastel de joyeuse destinee 236–37, 261–64 Châtelain, Henri 175n, 211n Châtelet 275–76, 278–79 Chaucer, Geoffrey 41n Chiasmus 209 Chichmaref, V. 265n Chinca, Mark 34n Christine de Pizan 8, 18n, 19n, 20, 24, 32n, 37n, 38, 40, 48n, 55–61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 84, 86, 94, 97, 100n, 133, 199, 200, 226, 232 Cicero, M. Tullius 24 Cigada, Sergio 101n, 103n Clark, H. H. 282n Claudin, Anatole 239n, 248n, 249n Cleriadus et Meliadice, Roman de 148 Clermont, conte de (Jean II, Duke of Bourbon) 124–29 Clignet de Brabant 25n Colas de la Tour [Court?] 205 Collaborative communities see scribal communities Collectio 232 Colombo Timelli, Maria 116n, 261n Colours of rhetoric 40–46, 210, 251–57, 260, 294 Comparetti, D. 105n Compilatio 59n, 66, 232–33 Conceptual fields 118–23, 124–28, 143–45, 192–94, 195–96, 197–98 ‘Concours de Blois’ 105–06, 149n, 163n, 192n

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300 Constance, Council of 192 Contexture 285n Copin de Senlis 211 Coq, Dominique 234n Cornerie des anges de paradis, La 188 Cornilliat, François 43n, 51n, 123n, 231 Corrie, Marilyn 79n Cosneau, E. 204n, 205n Coteries and coterie manuscript 9–10, 31, 76, 77, 80, 105–14, 115, 117, 129, 131–35, 159, 163–65, 177, 186, 186n, 196, 198, 200, 202, 212, 213, 217, 226, 227, 237, 257, 264–65, 295 Cotextualisation 284–85 Coulet, Noël 121n, 130n Cour amoureuse 13–18, 23, 43, 49, 53, 66, 66n Coville, Alfred 160 Cowling, David 127n Culler, Jonathan 283n Cultural capital 7–8, 22–23, 27–28, 33–35, 37, 46, 187, 196, 198, 253, 259 Cultural identity 9–10, 16–17, 38 Daiements 77 Daly, Lloyd W. 64n Damien see Benoist Damien Dara, Christine xiv, 166n, 197, 202n, 204n, 226n Debae, Marguerite 213, 215n, 223n Debat des deux soeurs, Le 188 Debat du Cueur et de l’Oeil, Le 261–64 Debat du veil et du josne 176, 177, 183, 184n, 198 Defaux, Gérard 73n Demandes d’amour [demandes joyeuses] 77, 287–89 Dembowski, Peter 36n

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Index Deschamps see Eustache Deschamps Deschaux, Robert 53, 90n, 90n, 187n, 188, 188n, 261n ‘Design’ v. ‘happenstance’ 6, 89, 96–99, 135, 230, 241, 247, 265, 270 Desmond, Marilynn 57n Desplanque, A. 4n di Stefano, G. 132n, 158n Dialogism 92, 128–29, 159, 246, 261, 289 Dialogue 100–02, 112–13, 115, 127, 128, 131–33, 143, 144, 191, 197, 198, 199, 219–22, 226–27, 244, 245, 264–65, 269, 287–89 Diana 29 Diptongue picarde 256 Diverres, Armel 3n Doane, A. N. 217n Doléance de la Mégère 252n, 260n Dolent Fortuné 252n Donne, John 9 Donnet baillié au feu roy Charles huytiesme de ce nom, Le 260n Double entendre 73–75, 110–12, 155–59, 164, 197–98, 206–07 Droz, Eugénie 229–91 Dubost, Francis 48n Ducrot, Oswald 282 Dufay 206n Dufournet, Jean 274n, 278n ‘Duke’s Manuscript’: see Manuscripts and early printed books, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France Dulac, Liliane 37n, 56n, 61n, Dupont, Florence 68n Eagleton, Terry 253n Early printed books see Manuscripts and early printed books

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Index Earp, Lawrence 16n, 54n, 266n Eberle, Patricia J. 266n Edin see Jean d’Hesdin Edwards, A. S. G. 70n, 281n, 286n Eichberger, Dagmar 213n Eisenstein, Elizabeth 243n Elite sociability 10, 32, 145, 198, 236, 286 Emblematization of the name 72n, 216–17, 222, 224, 227 Emerson, Caryl 129n Epistre Othea 20, 59n, 60n Epstein, Robert 275n Ernoul de Crequy 205, 211 Esch, comtes de 76, 78 Espace de jeu 34–35 Espinette amoureuse 38, 47 Esther 25 Etienne Garnier 278–79 Eustache d’Espinay (‘Itace de Lespinay’) 201, 204, 205, 208–10 Eustache Deschamps 8, 14, 26n, 31n, 37n, 41, 42, 42n, 45n, 55, 61–67, 70, 71, 77, 86, 132n, 159n, 185n, 199, 283, 284, 285 Fabri see Pierre Fabri Fallows, David 91n Fauvel, Roman de 285 Fein, David 135, 274n Fein, Suzanna 79n Felberg-Levitt, Margaret 287–89 Fenoaltea, Doranne 55n, 230n, 283n Fenster, Thelma S. 38n Fernando de Rojas 294, 296 Fery-Hue, Françoise 68–75, 101n, 296 Fiction du lyon 62, 63 Fictions of intimacy 187, 264–65 Field see champ de pouvoir Fleur de toutes joyeusetez, La 248

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301 ‘Florentin’ [Charles VI of France q.v.] 23, 24 Foehr-Janssens, Yasmina 281n Foix, court of 187 Fontaine amoureuse 38 Fontaine, Marie Madeleine 213n Fortune 162, 218–19, 221 Foulet, Lucien 274n, 278n, 280n Foullée 167n Fourrier, Anthime 3n, 37n, 38n, 49n, 52n Fox, John 93n Fraistat, Neil 230n, 263n, 283n, 285n François Faret 153 François Villon 55, 70, 88, 103–14, 115, 127, 140n, 144n, 150, 196, 221, 243n, 273–81, 294 Françon, Marcel 73n, 213–27, 266n, 296 Fredet 106–14, 115, 116–18, 124, 125, 127, 145, 167, 182, 184 Freeman, Michael 30n, 110n, 279n Friedman, L. 95n Froissart see Jean Froissart Gachet, E. L. J. B. 216n Galderisi, Claudio 116n, 141n Galiot du Pré, printer 273n Galoys de Crequy 205, 208 Garancières see Jean de Garancières Garnier see Etienne Garnier Garnier, François 245n Gascoigne, George 147 Gaston Phébus, Count of Foix 3, 36 Gennrich, Friedrich 28n Georges Chastelain 75, 127n, 132n, 135n, 194 Georges de Montasié 153 Geremek, Bronislaw 138n, 141, 142n, 143n Gestalt 263–64, 267, 284, 290

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302 Giacchetti, André 39n Gibbs, Stephanie Viereck 90n Gibson, M. T. 66n Gieux a vendre see ventes d’amour Gilles des Ormes 105, 137, 182, 184, 186 Gombrich, E. H. 263n Gontier Col 14 Gonzalez, Elizabeth 152n Gossner, Jay W. 96n Graves, Robert 229–30 Green, Richard Firth 7n, 16n, 17n, 22n, 35n, 236n Greimas, A. J. 118n Griffiths, Jeremy 69n Gros, Gérard 14n, 84n, 90n, 115 Grunmann-Gaudet, Minnette 246n Guidot, Bernard 231n Guiette, Robert 50n Guillaume III d’Avesnes, Count of Hainaut 28 Guillaume de Machaut 21, 37n, 38, 40n, 47–48, 50, 56n, 63, 68, 77, 94, 97, 133, 200, 226, 232, 265–66, 271n, 281n Guillaume de Thignonville 150, 152, 153–54, 188n, 202n Guiot Pot 152, 153 Guiraud, Pierre 159n Habitus 7, 33–35, 40, 49 Hainaut, Count of 14 Hainaut, court of 28–33 Hanna, Ralph 69, 69n, 186, 232 ‘Happenstance acquisition’ 70, 186, 232n Harcourt, Monseigneur de 154, 162 Harf-Lancner, Laurence 56n, 290n Harrison, Anne Tukey 93n, 102n, 135 Hassell, James Woodrow 18n, 287n, 288n Hector 244

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Index Helen [of Troy] 25 Hemelryck, Tania Van 97n Henneman, John Bell 136n Henry IV, King of England 37n Henry VIII, King of England 219 Henry, Albert 105n, 106n, 111n, 123n, 137n, 143n, 273n Hero 25 Héron, M. 29n, 41n Hicks, Eric 14n Hindman, Sandra 20n, 57n, 58n, 59n, 60, 60n, 61n, 243n Hirsch, R. 247n Hoepffner, E. 28n, 40n Holtus, Gunter 147n Horace 222 Hughey, Ruth 79n Hugues le Voy 142, 144 Huizinga, Johann 18n Hult, David F. 246n Hunt, Tony 110n, 218n Huot, Sylvia 53n, 55n, 59n, 62n, 67n, 199n, 200, 238n Imbs, Paul 47n, 50n, 54n Impey, Oliver 10n Infortuné, l’ 251–60 Inglis, Barbara L. S. 107n, 165–212, 296 Instructif de seconde rhétorique 41, 251–60 Invention, nouveleté 51–53, 125, 248, 295 Isabeau of Bavaria 17n, 20, 23–27, 55–61 [see also ‘Belligere’] Iser, Wolfgang 267n Itasse de Lespinay see Eustache d’Espinay Jacques, bâtard de la Trémoïlle, seigneur de Saint-Civran 173 Jacques Coeur 188

Ordernr. 070468

Index Jacques de Luxembourg 167n, 174, 204–12 Jacques de Savoie, comte de Romont 174 Jacques Legrand 43, 46 Jakobson, Roman 114n Jammette de Nesson 184 Jardin de Plaisance 10, 70n, 74n, 101, 211n, 223n, 229–91 Jardin de vertueuse consolacion, Le 248 Jarry, E. 94n Jean II, Duke of Bourbon see Clermont, conte de Jean V, Duke of Brittany 204 Jean Blosset 184 Jean d’Angoulême, brother of Charles d’Orléans 188 Jean d’Hesdin or d’Ostin [Edin] 216, 217, 219–25 Jean de Calabre [de Lorraine] 119–24, 154, 160–61, 162, 164, 167n, 182 Jean de Créquy (Jean Le Galois) 205 Jean de Garancieres 39, 100–02, 265–66 Jean de Le Mote 28–33, 51 Jean de Lorraine see Jean de Calabre Jean de Meun 256 Jean de Montreuil 14 Jean du Pré, printer 248n Jean Dunois 129 Jean Froissart 1–3, 5, 6, 21, 36–37, 38, 49n, 50, 51–53, 65, 133, 200 Jean Gruninger, printer 239n ‘Jean le Seneschal’, purported author of Cent ballades 97, 99 Jean Lemaire de Belges 213, 213n, 215n, 221 Jean [Jehan] Meschinot 104, 167, 174n, 182, 205n Jean Molinet 41, 42, 43, 207n, 210, 252n Jean Régnier 275 Jean Robertet 105, 165

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303 Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy 23–27 [see also ‘Léonet’] Jeanroy, Alfred 246n Jehan Bodel 29n Jehan Caillau 105, 163n, 191, 192, 193 Jehan de Loyon 205 Jehan Petit, printer 235n Jehanne Fillieul 185 Jeucourt 184, 203 Jeux a vendre see ventes d’amour John of Spain 212, 219 Johnson, Leonard W. 18n, 159n Johnson-Laird, P. N. 282n Jones, Robin F. 246n Jouhaud, Christian 36n Joyeux devis recreatif, Le 248 Jung, M.-R. 43n, 76n Karczewska, Kathryn 90n Karnein, S. 94n Kelly, Douglas 28n, 29n, 51n, 52n, 52n, 74n Kelly, Henry A. 130n Kervyn de Lettenhove, Baron 23n, 36n, 75n Kibler, W. W. 40n Kintgen, Eugene 260n Koffka, K. 263n Kooper, Erik 3n Koopmans, Jelle 278n, 279n, 280n Kovacs, Susan R. 231, 234 La Rochefoucauld, lord of 14 Labarre, Albert 247n Laborde, Comte de 90n, 91n, 92n, 113n, 148n, 149n Lacassagne, Miren 42n Lachèvre, Frédéric 230n, 235n, 236n, 248n

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304 Lacroix, Paul 132n Lacy, Norris J. 89n Laffitte, Marie-Pierre 91n Laidlaw, James 20, 40n, 56n, 61n, 200n, 246 Lancien, E. 215n Langer, Ullrich 51n Långfors, A. 285n Langlois, Ernest 40–46, 208n, 251n, 252n Laurie, I. S. 62n, 65n Lawton, H. W. 239n Lazar, Moshé 159n Lazard, Madeleine 19n Le Floch, L. 206n Le Glay, A. 214n Le Queux de Saint-Hilaire 25n Le Rousselet 201 Leach, Elizabeth 266n Lechat, Didier 1n Lecocq, G. 147n Lecoy de la Marche, A. 148n Lecoy, Félix 94n Lefèvre, Sylvie 56n, 59n, 205n Legrand see Jacques Legrand Lemaire see Jean Lemaire de Belges Lemaire, Jacques 55n ‘Lëonet’ [Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy q.v.] 23, 24, 26, 27 Lewis, C. S. 51n ‘Lisible’ v.’ scriptible’ 11 Livre de Christine: see Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France Livre de l’advision Christine 56, 61 Livre du duc des vrais amants (Christine de Pizan) 38 Livre du Voir Dit (Guillaume de Machaut) 50, 54, 55 Livy 65

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Index Longnon, Auguste 1, 37n, 274n, 278, 280n Looze, Laurence de 38n, 217n Löpelmann, Martin 122n Lote, Georges 52n Louis XI, King of France 252n Louis XII, King of France 147, 201n Louis d’Orléans 23–27, 42n, 45n, 62, 94, 100 [see also ‘Tristifer’] Louis de Mâle, Count of Flanders 37n Louis, Duke of Bourbon 13–14 Love, Harold 112 Loyau, Hélène 13–18, 17n, 66n Luce, Siméon 36n, 62n ‘Lupal’ [Bernard VII, comte d’Armagnac] 25, 25n Lusignan, Serge 43 Macaronic verse 107–12 Macfarlane, John 233n, 239n, 248n, 249n Macgregor, Arthur 10n Machaut see Guillaume de Machaut Mahoney, Dhira B. 57n Malines 212–27 Mantovani, Thierry 73n Manuscripts and early printed books Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz MS Kupferstichkabinett 78. B.17 122n, 183n, 211n, 266 [Rohan chansonnier] Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 228 215 MS 9503-04 215n MS 10572 9, 213–27 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College Library MS 187 44n Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine

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Index M S 375 9, 148–63, 176, 202n Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek M S Perg. Haun. 18 2 o 234n E p i n a l - G o lb e y , B ib lio th è q u e Intercommunale M S 217 8, 67, 76–81, 84, 232, 284n Geneva, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire MS 179 bis 18 Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 402 73n, 266 London, British Library Add. MS 31922 219n MS Harley 2253 79n MS Harley 4431 20, 48n, 55–61, 199 [Queen’s Manuscript] Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 MS Digby 86 79n Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MSS fr. 835, 606, 836, 605, (?) 607 2 0 n , 56 n , 6 1n [ ‘D u k e’s Manuscript’] MS fr. 840 8, 62–67 MS fr. 1661 176n MS fr. 1719 8, 67–75, 183n, 232 MS fr. 19129 91n MS fr. 2159 44n MS fr. 2230 188 MS fr. 2253 200n MS fr. 2375 44n MS fr. 9223 9, 164–212, 225, 226, 230 MS fr. 12779 20n [Livre de Christine] MS fr. 19139 101 MS fr. 22545-46 44n

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305 MS fr. 25458 8, 9, 83–145, 155, 159, 160, 177, 186, 188, 194, 196, 198, 284 MS n. a. f. 15771 9, 122n, 164–212, 225, 226, 230 Rés. Y e 93 18n Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket MS LIII 284n MS V. u. 22 278n Toulouse, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 822 66n Turin, Biblioteca Già Reale MS Saluzzo 188 66n Margaret of Scotland 4, 185 Margarito, Mariagrazia 261n Margolin, Jean-Claude 19n Marguerite d’Angoulême 188 Marguerite of Austria 9, 212–27, 294 Marie d’Orléans, daughter of Charles d’Orléans and Marie de Clèves 103, 105 Marie de Clèves, Duchess of Orléans 9, 121, 137, 147–63, 174, 182, 187, 188n, 225 Marie de Luxembourg 174n Marot, Clément 273n, 278n Marot, Jean 73 M arotti, Arthur M. 9, 10, 73n, 163–64, 202, 226n, 264, 289 Martin Boullon, printer 235n Martin le Franc 53, 90n Martin, Henri-Jean 64n, 234n, 247n Mary of Burgundy 212 Maulde-la-Clavière, R. de 147n Maximilian I of Austria 212 McGrady, Deborah 54n, 57n McKenzie, D. F. 286n

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306 McRae, Joan E. 246n Méchoulan, Eric 43, 45 Meiss, Millard 57m Meliador, Roman de 1, 36, 37–38, 51, 52 Ménage, René 275n Meschinot see Jean Meschinot Metacommunication 8, 18n, 114–15, 125–26, 128–29, 131–35, 154, 211, 217, 225–27 Metre 15, 15n, 29–31, 42–43, 79, 122, 130, 139, 139n, 140, 162, 208, 254, 256, 258 Meyer, Leonard 263n Meyer, Paul 64n, 77n Michau Boudet of Blois 92 Michault Taillevent 97n, 261–63 Michel Le Noir, printer 235n Michelant, H. 213n Middleton, Roger 234n Milton, John 83 Minet-Mahy, Virginie 96n Minnis, Alastair 66n, 232n Miquet, Jean 252n Miroir de mariage 62, 63, 285 Mise en page 15–16, 18, 20–21, 53–56, 59–61, 62–63, 67, 69, 83–95, 99–100, 103, 106, 149, 166–67, 175–76, 183, 200, 214–16, 232 Moi, Toril 35n Molinet see Jean Molinet Monbeton 182, 198 Montaiglon, Anatole de 19n, 176n, 255 Montaigne, Michel de 255 Montfaucon 280 Montmorency, lord of 14 Montpellier Codex 5n Mora-Lebrun, Francine 143n M orice, Dom Hyacinthe 174n, 194n, 204n, 205n

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Index Moss, Ann 92n Mühlethaler, Jean-Claude 83n, 93n, 119n, 131n, 141n, 158n, 161n, 162n, 251n, 258n, 274n, 278n, 280n, 284, 285, 289, 290n Müller, Catherine M. 147n, 153n,154, 160n, 213n, 215n Mus, David 30n Musso, Noël 47n Mutacion de Fortune (Christine de Pizan) 20 Narrativité latente 246, 271, 275, 286 Navarre, Duke of 14 Neal, Y. A. 39n, 100n, 265n Neilson, William Allen 93n Newton, Richard C. 70n Nice, Richard 34n Nichols, Stephen G. 69n, 75n, 231n Nicolas of Lyra 232 Nouveleté see Invention Observance, Franciscans of the 192 Occasion poems 79, 129, 131 Oliver 244 Olivier Arnoullet, printer 235n Olivier de la Marche 135n, 194, 195 Ollier, Marie-Louise 43n Olson, Glending 41, 130n, 226n Ordinatio 66, 232–33 Ornato, Ezio 20n Ornato, Monique 17n Orpheus 25, 45 Otis, Leah Lydia 158n Oultré d’amour (Georges Chastelain) 75 Ouy, Gilbert 20n, 60n, 91n Ovid 110, 148

Ordernr. 070468

Index ‘Packaging’ 10–11, 53–56, 63–66, 67, 86–89, 92–95, 234, 237, 259–60, 262–64, 267, 271, 278, 280, 281, 283, 286, 288, 290 Page, Christopher 5 Paratext 57–59, 233, 237–45, 290 Parfait du paon, Le 28, 49, 50, 52n, 81 Paris, Trojan hero 25, 45, 244 Parker, Andrew 212n Parkes, M. B. 66n, 79n, 232n Passion Jhesuschrist, La 241 Pasternak, Carol B. 217n Pastoralet, Le 23–27, 33, 45–46, 81 Patterson, Annabel 263n, 290 Paviot, Jacques 205n Pearsall, Derek 69n, 294 Penelope 25 Pensom, Roger 140n Performance 1–3, 11, 11n, 8n, 14–16, 17, 23–31, 55, 103, 126–27, 225, 226, 239 Perkins, Leeman L. 215n Perronnette see Toute Belle Perry, Menakhem 290n Petit Jehan de Saintré, Le (Antoine de La Salle) 148 Philibert de Savoie 212 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 13–14 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 61, 147, 102–03, 205 Philippa of Hainaut 28 Philippe de Hédouville 153 Philippe Le Noir, printer 235n Phoebus 25 Piaget, Arthur 14n, 18, 100n, 187n, 229–91 Picker, Martin 213n, 215n Picoche, Jacqueline 137n Picot see Pierre Picot Picot, Emile 246n Pierre Chastelain 187n

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307 Pierre Chevalier 154 Pierre Col 14 Pierre d’Anché 161n, 284 Pierre de Bourbon 188n Pierre de Brézé 183n, 184n Pierre de Hauteville 14–18, 29, 53 Pierre de la Jaille 204n, 205 Pierre de la Rue 215 Pierre de Nesson 132n, 185 Pierre Fabri 29n, 41, 51, 107n, 208, 209, 210, 251 Pierre Levet, printer 278n Pierre Picot 216, 217, 219–25 Pinkernell, Gert 103n, 113n, 147n Pinto, Louis 80n, 196 Planche, Alice 122n, 136n, 142n, 192n Poetic games 6–7, 15–16, 18–22, 33–34, 114–16, 131–32, 192, 202–12 Poetic identities 78, 92, 94–98, 161–63, 195, 219–25, 227 Poirion, Daniel 23, 23n, 32n, 35n, 39n, 41n, 48n, 52n, 63n, 92n, 95n, 119n, 174, 183, 185, 188n, 206, 266n Polyphony 128–29 Pomian, Krzysztof 10n ‘Pompal’ [Clignet de Brébant] 25, 25n Pons, Nicole 17n Poupet, Monseigneur de 223 Presentation miniatures/engravings 57–58, 84–86, 248–51 President de Dole [Mercurin de Gattinara] 216, 217, 224, 225 Prison amoureuse, La 49n, 50, 52, 54 Professional v. amateur 6–7, 17, 29, 32–33, 38–39, 41–46, 50–51, 56, 62, 78–79 Pseudo-autobiography 38, 46–48, 93–98, 101–03, 116–17, 136–37, 139–10 Puttenham, George 1, 13, 260n, 253

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308 Puys 13–18, 28, 41, 42, 43 Pygmalion 25, 45 Pyramus 244 ‘Queen’s Manuscript’: see Manuscripts and early printed books, London, British Library Querelle de la Belle Dame sans merci 18 Raoul Tainguy 62–67 Rastier, François 118n, 238n Rat, Maurice 255n Raugei, Anna Maria 261n Raynaud, Gaston 25n, 49n, 165–212, 296 Récit de publication 1–3, 36, 55 ‘Recorderly’ manuscript 11, 67–68 Refrain 30–31, 118, 124, 133–38, 160, 202, 204, 211 Regalado, Nancy Freeman 55n, 98n, 103, 106, 112, 113n Regnault le Queux 148n, 252n, 260n Regné d’Orenge 167n, 185 Relihan, J. C. 5n Remede de Fortune (Guillaume de Machaut) 55 René d’Anjou, King of Sicily (‘Sesile’) 90n, 121, 130–33, 187 Reno, Christine 20n, 37n, 56n, 60n, 61n Rhyme 15, 44, 33, 38–39, 42, 44, 45, 118–19, 111, 127, 130, 136, 143, 254–57, 258 Ribémont, Bernard 19n, 20n Richard II, King of England 36–37, 54, 61n Richardson, Sandra L. 212n Riding, Laura 229–30 Riffaterre, Michel 2 Rigoley de Juvigny 231 Rigolot, François 217n

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Index Rime de boutechouque/de goret 255 Rime equivoque 19, 218–19, 256–57 Rime leonine 38 Rime pauvre 19, 24, 25 Rime riche 21, 24, 27, 33, 105, 207 Robert du Herlin 148n Robertet see Jean Robertet Robinson, Pamela 69n, 186n Rohan chansonnier see Manuscripts and early printed books, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Roman à clef 23–27 Rose, Roman de la 14, 93, 94, 110n, 112n, 208n, 256n, 262 Rossiaud, Jacques 158n Rouse, Mary A. and Richard H. 28n, 64n Roy, Maurice 20n, 21n, 40n, 57n, 59n, 61n Rubin, David Lee 55n, 230n, 283n Rubrics 56–58, 62–63, 66, 69, 87–89, 100, 103, 124, 234, 237–40, 243, 267–78, 281–82, 287–89 Ruesch, Jurgen 114n Ruhe, Ernstpeter 51n Rus, Martijn 18n, 20n Rychner, Jean 105n, 106n, 111n, 123n, 137n, 143n, 273n Saint-Pol, Count of 14, 23n Saluts d’amour 77, 78 Scattergood, V. J. 17n Scève, Maurice 229 Scheler, Auguste 28n, 32n, 52n Schutz, A. H. 235n Schwob, Marcel 68, 70n, 72n, 73n, 74n, 296 ‘Scribal’ or ‘collaborative’ communities 112, 114, 163, 200

Ordernr. 070468

309

Index Sebeok, Thomas A. 114n Sebille: trou Sebille 143 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 212n ‘Sesile’ see René d’Anjou Set to perceive 263–64, 267, 282–84, 290 Shaftesbury, Earl of 229–30 Sherborne, J. W. 17n Simon de Hesdin 65 Simon de Lille 28, 32 Simonnet Caillau 117–23, 137 Sinnreich-Levi, Deborah 41n, 42n, 62n Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 247n Sotte ballade 74, 270 Spilsbury, S. V. 74n Stakel, Susan 5n Stam, Robert 129n Stecher, A. J. 215n Stevens, John E. 51n, 130n Stirnemann, Patricia 90 Stock, Brian 112n Strasbourg 239 Straub, Theodor 17n Strelka, Josef 212n Strubel, Armand 119n Suffolk, Duke of 4 Summers, Joanna 275n Tables 60–61, 64–65, 66, 72 Tacuinum sanitatis 107n Tanegui du Chastel 184, 185 Taste 49–50, 71–72, 75–76, 148, 235, 253, 255, 259, 260, 264 Taylor, Robert A. 51n Terence 239n, 246 Tesnières, Marie-Hélène 62–67 Text ‘monument’ v. text ‘event’ 67–80, 79–81, 113–15, 154, 174, 196, 200, 226, 294–95

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Therence en francoys 239, 290 Thibaut, Francisque 212n Thibault, Geneviève 206n, 215n Thignonville see Guillaume de Thignonville Thiry, Claude 41, 41n, 274n, 278n, 280n Thomas, A. 28n Thompson, John J. 69n, 232n, 281n Thuasne, Louis 137n, 274n Tietz, Manfred 6, 7n, 50n Tilliette, Jean-Yves 251n, 281n Tischler, Hans 5n Todorov, Tzvetan 128, 129n Torcy, Monseigneur de 184n, 198 Toute Belle [also Perronnette] 47–48, 54 Traductio 210, 219, 222 Trapp, J. B. 234n Trepperel, Vve, printer 235n Trévédy, J.-T.-M. 204n ‘Tristifer’ [Louis d’Orléans q.v.] 23, 26 Tschann, Judith 79n ‘Typological personality’ 72–73 Tyson, Gerald P. 70n Ungrammaticality 2 Vaillant 135n, 167, 187–201, 294 Vale, Malcolm 204n Valentina Visconti 167n Valentine’s Day 4, 14, 16, 130–31, 153 Valerius Maximus 65 Vanneste, Alex 244n Vegetius 66n Venckeleer, Theo 244n Venditions d’amour see ventes d’amour Ventes (or venditions) d’amour; gieux a vendre 18–22, 77 Venus 29

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310

Index

Vérard see Antoine Vérard Verger celeste, Le 248 Verger, J. 205n Vergier d’Honneur, Le 248, 285n Vergy, châtelaine de 25 Verhuyck, Paul 278n, 279n, 280n Versification 15, 17, 46–47; see also rhyme, rime Viala, Alain 36n Villon see François Villon Voir Dit, Livre du (Guillaume de Machaut) 47, 94

Wilkins, Nigel 86, 87n, 139n, 265n, 266n Willard, Charity Cannon 212n Williams, Sarah Jane 54n, 56n Wilmet, Marc 41n Wilson, Katharina M. 212n Wimsatt, James I. 40n Winn, Mary Beth 233n, 234n, 241n, 249, 253n, 289n Witty, Francis 64n Woodblocks 234, 239–45, 268–69 Wordplay 218–19, 254, 277 Wunderli, Peter 76n

Wagonheim, Sylvia S. 70n Wason, P. C. 282n Wathey, Andrew 285n Watriquet de Couvin 43n, 52n Wavrin, lord of 14 Weissman, Ronald 115n Wenceslas of Bavaria or Bohemia 3, 6, 51n Wenzel, Siegfried 69n, 231n Whalen, Logan E. 231n

Ysaye le Triste, Roman d’ 39 Yzabeau d’Albret 188n

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Zephir 25, 45 Zimmerman, Susan 115n Zink, Michel 86n, 87n Zohn, Harry 259 Zumthor, Paul 8, 11, 25n, 52n, 107n, 143n, 159n, 246n

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