Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut

In "Poetry and Music in Medieval France", first published in 2003, Ardis Butterfield examines vernacular song in medieval France. She begins with the moment when French song first survives in writing in the early thirteenth century, and examines a large corpus of works which combine elements of narrative and song, as well as a range of genres which cross between different musical and literary categories. Emphasising the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Arras, Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied, including narrative romances, satires and love poems. She uses manuscript evidence to shed light on medieval perceptions of how music and poetry were composed and interpreted. The volume is well illustrated to demonstrate the rich visual culture of medieval French writing and music. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to both literary and musical scholars of late medieval culture.

CONTENIDO:

List of illustrations
List of tables
List of music examples
Acknowledgments
Bibliographical note
List of abbreviations

Prologue

Part I. Text and Performance
1. Song and written record in the early thirteenth century
2. The sources of song: chansonniers, narratives, dance-song
3. The performance of song in Jean Renart's Rose

Part II. The Boundaries of Genre
4. The refrain
5. Refrains in context: a case study
6. Contrafacta: from secular to sacred in Gautier de Coinci and later thirteenth-century writing

Part III. The Location of Culture
7. 'Courtly' and 'popular' in the thirteenth century
8. Urban culture: Arras and the puys
9. The cultural contexts of Adam de la Halle

Part IV. Modes of Inscription
10. Songs in writing: the evidence of the manuscripts
11. Chante/fable: Aucassin et Nicolette
12. Writing music, writing poetry: Le Roman de Fauvel in Paris BN fr. 146

Part V: Lyric and Narrative
13. The two Roses: Machaut and the thirteenth century
14. Rewriting song: chanson, motet, salut, and dit
15. Citation and authorship from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century

Part VI. Envoy: The New Art
16. The Formes fixes: from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut

Epilogue

Glossary
Appendix
Bibliography