RESEARCH ON THE FRENCH MEDIEVAL LYRIC
Durham University
This is, of course, a vast and intractable subject:1 some four centuries, and a number of competing disciplines.2 I can do no more, therefore, than concentrate on what I would see as the main lines of investigation that scholars are currently pursuing, and invite those interested to turn to a major research bibliography specific to this area, Encomia (published annually by the International Courtly Literature Society). I shall intend principally to address more thematically based work, or studies of individual poets which have a resonance beyond their single subject — which is not, let me emphasize, to underestimate the value and importance of studies on individual poets: on the contrary, I recognize that the last twenty years or so have witnessed the publication of some of the best and most imaginative analyses that we have so far seen. Simply, in the limited space available, it is impossible to do them justice — and it will be more valuable for the reader, perhaps, to have some idea of the wide range of current critical discussion, and indirectly therefore of the directions which research might usefully follow. I shall also, incidentally, separate the earlier Middle Ages (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) from the later, partly because it has been traditional to do so, partly because, whereas the courtly lyric of the earlier period maintains the link between music and verse, the fourteenth century, as crystallized in Eustache Deschamps's distinction between musique naturelle and musique artificielle, voice and music,3 sees a growing distinction between the poem proper and any musical accompaniment.4
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Let me start, here, with some of the major research tools published in the last couple of decades. The most obvious, I suppose, is the second volume of the Grundriss, which was published in 1980 and deals exclusively with the lyric, and which is an invaluable compendium of information about the form and substance of the lyric5 — but rather more recent are the invaluable répertoires: Eglal Doss-Quinby's research guide, current to 1990,6 and her catalogue of trouvère refrains,7 the exhaustive and invaluable repertory of metres we owe to Ulrich Mölk and Friedrich Wolfzettel,8 Keith Val Sinclair's exhaustive repertories of religious and pious lyric to which he has devoted himself for some ten years and which have made identifying poems, and themes, infinitely easier.9 We might perhaps add to these the useful and often quite comprehensive anthologies of particular lyric genres, which again make us aware of just how large and broad-ranging the repertories of such genres can be: we now possess anthologies of débats and jeux-partis and songs voiced by women, to say nothing of pastourelles and politics.10 It is probably useful to mention, moreover, some of the more general and usually bilingual anthologies,11 including a Pléiade anthology,12 which are bringing trouvère lyric to the attention of wider audiences — and, in particular, the remarkably complete collection, with music, entitled Chanter m'estuet.13
These latter are not, however, scholarly editions in the strict sense of the term; scholars have of course been busy providing precisely such editions — most usefully perhaps Michel Zink's edition of the complete works of Rutebeuf,14 and Pierre-Yves Badel's of those of Adam de la Halle.15 What have, however, proved especially valuable have been a few examples of true editorial collaboration between textual scholars and musicologists: I think, for instance, of recent editions of the works of Andrieu d'Arras or Gace Brulé or Blondel de Nesle,16 where philological allied to musicological expertise enables the reader to gauge just what is the aesthetic pleasure of word allied to melody, of rhetoric governed and disciplined by music. I think also, of course, of Hendrik van der Werf's invaluable anthology of the music attached to a wide variety of twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrics:17 the most complete, and probably the most musicologically accurate, transcription/edition of trouvère melody to date, and which will perform a most useful function in enabling us to gauge the nature of the medieval performance of the lyric.
I say this, of course, because some of the most passionate critical debates in recent years have turned around the ‘orality’ of the medieval lyric (and indeed of earlier medieval ‘literature’ in general). The major impetus here has, of course, come from Paul Zumthor who, in a series of important papers and books,18 draws attention to the fact that our critical models, drawn largely from written poetry, cannot adequately account for poetic modes intended for performance and for musical accompaniment. Others since then have thus paid particular attention to questions of performance: have scoured the existing records to discover what they can about modes of performance, and the relationship between text and music.19 Yet Zumthor and others do not despair of deriving from the fragmentary existing records — the texts and the manuscripts — evidence as to performance practice: we need, he says, to be particularly alert to what he calls indicators of orality, that is, anything within the lyric text that suggests that the human voice has intervened in its ‘publication’: I use scare-quotes here because of course, as Zumthor himself points out,20 we can be certain of oral performance only if the music itself is provided — but minute alterations in the text, variants, changes, may nevertheless indicate, usefully, the presences of prior performers, and clues as to their modes of performance. This approach — based on precisely this phenomenon which Zumthor calls mouvance,21 the mutability of the manuscript text — has given rise to some subtle and complex studies: Marc-René Jung's, for instance, on the chanson,22 Rupert Pickens's on Jaufré Rudel23 or Luciano Formisano's on the chanson de toile.24 A somewhat similar approach has been followed, on a larger and more comprehensive scale, in a recent, excellent book by Ardis Butterfield which spans the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, and wonders, as did Zumthor, ‘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?’.25 Her hypothesis — and of course this meshes with much current work on the codex and the mise en page — is that the performative character of medieval trouvère lyric and song is readable from the minutiae of the medieval manuscript. We should note, however, that the status and identity of what it is conventional to call ‘the medieval minstrel’ or the ‘jongleur’ is more complex than it appears at first, unquestioning sight: there are those who are doubtful about his or her identity, and especially about the relationship of such a performer with the major chansonnier manuscripts of the thirteenth century and later.26
‘Orality’, of course, raises formal questions: how are the inert texts on our manuscript pages to be ‘translated’ into voice, and how far did their effect depend on rhythm and modal effects? This is a question which is still, perhaps, relatively under-investigated: one that Nigel Wilkins and Roger Pensom have pursued for many years,27 but which is now, in their wake, receiving more pressing attention.28 Some of the major contributions have been made, not unnaturally, by musicologists: by Vincent Corrigan, for instance, in relation to rhythm, and by Susan Bécam, in a major systematic statistical study of the functions of rhyme.29
However, it is the case still, of course, that most of our lyric verse is inert on the page — in chansonniers and recueils lyriques — more and more of which are now available in facsimile or in modern editions, and which are therefore ready for scrutiny by the scholarly public. The chansonniers have proved a particularly fruitful field in a scholarly world where more and more attention is paid to the manuscripts which transmit the lyrics as well as to the lyrics themselves: scholars are no longer content to see chansonnier collections as simply adventitious, the sum merely of available material with no organizing mind. Maria Carla Battelli, for instance, has attempted a typology of chansonnier manuscripts on the basis largely of their decorative programmes;30 Christophe Callahan has made a special study of what he calls the scriptologie — the hands and scripts — of the chansonniers;31 Stephen Nichols Jr has argued, admittedly for troubadour manuscripts but with wider resonances, that many of the recueils and chansonniers are organized according to aesthetic or other principles, and that it is the duty of the scholar to attempt to understand the reading-programmes that make their often very disparate contents cohere.32 Increasingly, in other words, chansonniers and recueils are felt to reveal something of the socioliterary dynamics of particular texts and the social history of their transmission; it is important therefore to be attentive to the reception and reproduction of the lyric in a range of social, cultural and historical circumstances. Of course, to mention these factors points to another direction in which current research has been moving, one which I hinted at a moment ago when I spoke of scholars combing the archives. More and more attention, recently, has been paid to what can be gleaned about the social status and function of the poet or the jongleur within the medieval court: Marie-Geneviève Grossel's study of Champagne under the trouvère poet-duke Thibaut de Champagne is a model of the genre in taking into account the full range of evidence available, and all the factors which impinge on the poetic milieu.33 There is, I believe, nothing else quite so complete — but there have been commendable attempts at just such studies: Pierre Bec, for instance, on what he calls ‘l'espace Plantagenêt’,34 Quentin Griffiths on Nesle and Soissons,35 Lepage on the court of Richard I.36 We should add a major study of the socio-cultural environment not of a court, this time, but of a city: Roger Berger's major study of Arras.37
One useful source of information as to the socio-cultural function of the lyric derives from narrative texts: those which include lyric insertions. Maureen Boulton's The Song in the Story38 covers the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and is probably the most complete compendium at present. There have also been useful theoretical studies, such as the issue of Perspectives médiévales devoted to the lyric insertion,39 and to the function of the lyric insertion in certain, by now canonical, texts: Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose, for instance, or Guillaume de Dole.40 All these studies stress how far these vers de société are symptoms of a certain sort of social activity, how far they reflect the complex manoeuvrings of a complex court society; they also show how multiple are the functions imagined for verse: recreative, of course, and often erotic, but also therapeutic,41 marks of intimacy which negotiate voice within specific literary coteries that critics have been exploring in some of the works I cite above: in Champagne, at the court of Richard I, and so on.
Yet there has been a grand absent in what I have so far said about the medieval lyric: its form and its subject-matter. Let me turn first to the question of genres, something which surfaced earlier in this piece but which has occupied, and continues to occupy, considerable critical space. The key work here is probably Pierre Bec's La Lyrique française au moyen âge, XIIe–XIIIe siècles, which is now the starting-point for any new approach to the different poetic genres prevalent in the earlier Middle Ages,42 but there has been a little string of studies, on the chanson de toile, the chanson de croisade, the estampie, the jeu-parti43 and, most interesting perhaps, the motet. I mention the motet last because it has attracted particular attention, and particularly exciting work, notably in Sylvia Huot's Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet44 which argues, convincingly, for its highly sophisticated exploitation of the ludic intertextuality inherent in a hybrid genre, and which brings together the sacred and the erotic in ways designed to be mutually enriching. Huot has opened up a very promising field; more will be possible once we possess the sort of full critical editions, from all existing manuscripts, on which textual scholars and musicologists might collaborate.45
However, lyric, of course, is also the topics addressed and the formal modes adopted — and here I find myself at a loss as to how to cover the ground. Certain genres, true, impose their own topics: chansons de toile, or estampies, or motets, but more generally, and in relation especially to the grand chant courtois, it is perhaps worth pointing out how engaging the problem of the status of the ‘I’ of the lyric remains: present-day critics are less apt to accept the critical orthodoxy that the ‘I’ of the twelfth-century lyric is defined by a grid of intertextual coordinates, or, to use Zumthor's expression, registres, which frustrate any attempt to discover the individuality or the subjective world of the poet.46 Michel Zink's La Subjectivité littéraire47 has been something of a corrective — but this is a topic that has continued to provoke discussion, as witness, for instance, Sarah Kay's typically clear-minded essay on ‘personnalité’ in troubadour verse.48 Questions of subjectivity, moreover, have been of particular interest to the study of women's voices: are female-voiced lyrics simply pastiche, or are we privileged hearers of authentic women's voices? The question remains controversial:49 how can one distinguish a male poet expertly feigning a woman's words, from a woman exploring, with sincerity, her own? Is the woman's voice, in other words, no more than a topos?
Which brings me to a research methodology that has proved remarkably fruitful, and amply applicable to other domains: the study of phenomena across the whole spectrum of particular genres in search of what might constitute the ‘originality’ of the medieval lyric.50 In a recent article, Maciej Abramowicz has compared, meticulously, the opening reverdies of the pastourelles and the chansons de toile51 — and his findings refute the rather simple-minded contention, still dispiritingly current, that the medieval lyric simply involves the knitting together of commonplaces. Enterprises of this sort will be much facilitated when it becomes practicable to multiply concordances like that done for Thibaut de Champagne's chansons52 — but meanwhile, similarly, Mihaïl Stanescu has studied repetition as a formal device in the chanson, and has shown that it is a meaningful element in the lyric and not simply a tired device;53 Andreas Haug has extended this to the function and form of the refrain;54 Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Marcel Faure have re-explored the topos of the losengiers;55 Michel Zink has examined the interchange between the sacred and the vituperative, and so on.56
Which brings me to a final category, shamefully left until last: the poetry of piety which, of course, as we saw with the motet, specializes in just such interplay. A useful Europe-wide survey, and a not altogether successful attempt at systematization, is given by Patrick Diehl;57 more successful, perhaps, have been smaller-scale but precise studies of particular phenomena such as Gérard Gros's study of prayers in verse addressed to Virgin Mary.58 This remains an area which needs further investigation — and where studies such as Françoise Ferrand's interesting investigation of the reasons why the grand chant courtois did not, rather unexpectedly, attract ecclesiastical condemnation, and Anna Drzewicka's of Gautier de Coinci's borrowings of the profane for sacred purposes, may well show interesting ways forward.59
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It is probably true to say, by now, that there exist acceptable modern editions of the works of the major, and most of the minor poets of the later Middle Ages: I say ‘acceptable’ because, ideally, one would still wish to see editions of, say, Christine de Pizan's lyrics, or Machaut's, or even Charles d'Orléans's, prepared according to current working practices, and readily available.60 We also have at our disposal, increasingly, the sort of tools which make advanced research easier — Lawrence Earp's extraordinarily complete Machaut bibliography, for instance,61 or the Villon bibliographies done by Peckham and Sturm62 — and these mean that it is henceforward possible to concentrate anew on analysis of the late-medieval lyric itself.
Pleasingly in this context, critics have now abandoned the outdated and dismissive approaches of earlier critics like Siciliano and Henry Guy, who found the late-medieval lyric tedious and repetitive,63 in favour of those like Daniel Poirion's which are sympathetic enough not to ask of the late-medieval lyric what it cannot, does not intend to, give.64 They have, for instance, explored the assumptions about the literary process articulated in their work by the poets themselves: rather than deploring the lyric as essentially a matter of rehearsing dull platitudes, they have taken at face value the late-medieval search for poetic nouvelleté and explored precisely what that might mean.65 They have recognized the ways in which late-medieval critical language places a particular emphasis on craft and skill — that is, on what can be catalogued and learnt: where Ernest Langlois saw the so-called arts de seconde rhétorique as evidence of tired invention, new editions have encouraged critics to understand that poets saw rhetoric as a mark of distinction, a way of improving their medium, and to explore precisely how the resources of rhetoric informed the poetic inventions of the lyricists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.66 Symptomatic is the fact that modern criticism no longer sees the once-reviled Grands Rhétoriqueurs as mere showmen indulging in pointless rhetorical peacocking; rather, their self-conscious and unequivocal endorsement of the high style has come to seem, at the hands of sympathetic critics like Leonard W. Johnson, Paul Zumthor and François Cornilliat,67 a laudable and worthwhile enterprise.
Critics have been particularly interested not just by verse per se, but also by the social embeddedness of the lyric: they seize on the evidence which the lyric shows of the playing of cultivated games requiring a high degree of sophistication and compositional skill, as a token of the social history of literature and the socioliterary dynamics of particular texts. The late-medieval lyric caters for the demands of an expanding literate audience: an audience for which there is an increasing separation between lyric and music, Eustache Deschamps's musique naturele and musique artificiele. Jacqueline Cerquiglini, for instance, insists on the rondeau as a pratique sociale;68 other critics, following Poirion's lead in Le Poète et le prince, have explored the role of poetry in cementing elite sociability. However, one of the most fruitful moves in recent years, here as in the earlier period, has been the recognition that it is impossible to divorce the substance of the text from the way in which it is preserved and presented physically. Critics, in pursuit of this, have seized with particular interest on the surviving traces of organized editing: Sylvia Huot, for instance, has examined the ways in which poets professional and ‘amateur’69 have taken care to present their work advantageously70 — but attention has also been paid to the collective compilations which reflect some of the uses of lyric verse within an actual social environment, and where verse is anthologized as if to proclaim membership of an educated and refined elite. Many of these great anthologies have now received careful modern editions;71 what is now needed are studies of the dynamics of the collections and their miscellaneity, studies which will take account of the complete list of their contents: courtly verse, politically topical verse and — given that many miscellanies derive from a private, closed world — refined bawdy and obscenity. A model of this sort of analysis — which shows how different are our interpretation and understanding of a particular lyric depending on what he calls its ‘co-textualisation’ — is Jean-Claude Mühlethaler's penetrating study of a single, not obviously exciting little political lyric, whose purport, he shows, varies depending on its inter-relation with other lyrics in its vicinity.72
Of course, not all lyric verse is preserved in miscellanies. I reverted a moment ago to Sylvia Huot's argument, that progressively, across the Middle Ages, French poets make strenuous efforts to present their verse flatteringly and in ways which will show it to best advantage: Froissart and others dramatize this process metaphorically with accounts of poems elegantly presented in little embroidered silk purses, or graceful little caskets.73 I am thinking, of course, of poets like Christine de Pizan — not only a poet but also the director of her own workshop and therefore an ‘editor’74 — or Guillaume de Machaut, so careful, it seems, as to the disposition of his collected works,75 but also of the cases where the poets themselves order their works within an elaborate narrative-dialogic frame: cases like the Cent Ballades of ‘Jean le Senechal’, Christine de Pizan's Cent Ballades d'amant et de dame or indeed François Villon's Testament.76 Critics have argued that such lyrico-narrative hybrids evince a self-conscious desire for control over the precise preservation and ordering of what might, at origin, have been loose lyrics not necessarily set at the service of some narrative eventuality,77 and that they articulate evidence of distinct poetic practices which address the role of the poem in its materiality.
Critics of the late-medieval lyric have, in general, and in line with new preoccupations in all the domains of late-medieval French literature, been much concerned to ensure that the substance of the text is not divorced from the physical form of its presentation, and that modern readers recognize that any poem is, to quote D. F. McKenzie, a ‘complex structure of meanings which embraces every detail of its formal and physical presentation in a specific historical context’.78 They have, for instance, noted the increasing concern with the meaning-potential of the manuscript itself — as witness for instance the artful disposition of the text of Machaut's Voir-Dit in BNF fr. 9221 where lay-out, hand, and illustration ‘dramatize’ the volume, so that prose is carefully and discriminatingly copied in a cursive hand, verse in a bâtard,79 or Adrian Armstrong's determined analysis of the ways in which Grand Rhétoriqueur manuscripts exploit paratextual features to underline the sense and structure of the lyric.80 This latter, of course, spans the (rather artificial) divide between ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaissance’ and by the same token the advent of printing: a number of major studies, by Mary Beth Winn and especially Cynthia Brown, explore the appropriation of lyric by print culture.81
Poems are not, of course, produced in a social vacuum: the poet-as-solitary-visionary is very largely a Romantic invention, and we need to take account, especially perhaps in the Middle Ages, of the fact that, as my earlier quotation from McKenzie pointed out, they derive materially and physically from ‘a specific historical context’. Daniel Poirion's Le Poète et le prince was very much the pioneer, but strenuous efforts have since been expended on understanding the social dynamics which, in the late Middle Ages, provoked and facilitated verse. Prime attention, of course, has been paid to Charles d'Orléans's court at Blois — and much is now known, archivally and historically, about poetry as a vehicle of social inclusion there, about the ways in which the circulation of verse, within Charles's court and beyond, created coteries of reader-poets and established textual conventions.82 Yet critics have also looked, with equal interest, at the lyric at the Burgundian court,83 at the court of Anjou,84 and more recently at the court of Bourbon.85 Courts of this sort — where a stable of domesticated poets was a useful adjunct to, and often a mouthpiece for, princely and aristocratic power — show the first signs of what one might call the ‘institutionalization’ of poetry, the beginnings of the process whereby the lyric became ‘literature’. Something rather similar might be said of verse emanating not from royal courts but from the more ‘bourgeois’ environment of Northern France, the puy: that is, the poetic celebrations and competitions which might occupy one or more days.86 What, we need to ask, are the social circumstances which drive the poetic enterprise — is there such a thing as a specifically local poetic ‘climate’?
Yet verse, of course, is much more than its historical context or its material support: we read verse for what it says and for how it sounds. All critics emphasize the fact that, by the end of the Middle Ages, poets are, in general, no longer necessarily poet-musicians — but late-medieval poetry remains a poetry of performance. I do not, of course, mean that poetry was no longer allied to music: one need only consult the remarkable Fauvel manuscript, BnF fr. 146, of the early fourteenth century, to see how interwoven are music and text — and indeed image and history.87 Machaut, of course, was a highly accomplished musician who set many of his own verses to music,88 and David Fallows's exemplary Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–148089 reminds us that verse and music were indispensable companions throughout the period. However, increasingly and more innovatively, certain critics, like Roger Pensom, have come to concentrate on the rhythms and sonorities of late-medieval verse, thus enabling critics to move from judging poetry on its thematic content to understanding its intrinsic, phonetic appeal.90 This gives added impetus to arguments — still by no means resolved — over what is the formal constitution of poetic staples of later-medieval verse: the value of the refrain in the ballade, for instance, or the shape of the refrain in the rondeau, or the exact prescriptions of the virelai. A starting-point is, of course, the arts de seconde rhétorique — but their prescriptions are often unclear (and indeed contradictory), their terminology baffling, and these remain topics of often passionate discussion.91
More thematically — because it is important not to fall into the trap of supposing that the content of late-medieval verse is so conventional and stereotyped as to be unworthy of attention — considerable attention has been paid to the topics of late-medieval verse. Central, of course, is love-poetry, and here particular attention has been paid to the question of the ‘I’ in late-medieval poetry, and a fortiori therefore in the lyric. The argument had been, of course, that the individual is the discovery of the Renaissance, and that self-speaking and self-fashioning are not something which the medieval poet either intended or achieved: Zumthor, as we saw, was inclined to see the ‘I’ as merely a grammatical convenience. More recent critics — Michel Zink92 was something of a pioneer — find this argument reductive, and a number of recent books and articles have explored both the nature and the role, and the development, of the ‘I’ and of poetic subjectivity.93 Yet poetry is not only the expression of a particular subjectivity: crucially, in the courts at which it was at home, it was also recreation,94 and a series of studies has addressed the more ludic varieties: the vendition, the demande amoureuse, the riddle, the debate, and so on.95 We are, in other words, extending our understanding of the repertory of late-medieval verse and also, by the same token, of its place in the structures and socio-cultural dynamics of late-medieval French society.
This does not, of course, mean that there is nothing to be pursued: on the contrary, the lyric remains something of a poor relation in critical appraisals of late-medieval France. It is interesting to note, for instance, that the lyric has made relatively little impact on the Christine de Pizan industry, by comparison with the overwhelming attention paid to Christine as defender of women and ‘autobiographer’;96 Machaut's dits have been subjected to exhaustive analysis where critics have, perhaps understandably, been much more wary of La Louange des Dames.97 This relative neglect reflects, perhaps, a persistent discomfort with the lyric: our students — who are rarely readers of poetry but who are brought up, still, on Romantic notions of sincerity and self-revelation — take some pleasure in Villon but are cowed by Charles d'Orléans and his avatars; enjoy Rutebeuf's apparent ‘sincerity’ but quail before Thibaut de Champagne. To read the medieval lyric, and to get beyond what can so often appear like empty rehearsals of platitudes, requires an understanding of its form, its conventions, its technicalities, its social function, its modes of preservation — a large programme, but one on which current research, gallantly, is embarking.
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Footnotes |
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1 Two valuable mises au point have recently been published in Perspectives médiévales (2005), in a special number entitled Trente ans de recherches en langues et en littératures médiévales: Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Poésie des XIVe et XVe siècles: bilan des trente dernières années’, pp. 115–26, and Gérard Gros, ‘Lyrisme médiéval (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): poésie courtoise et poésie pieuse’, pp. 221–37; there is unsurprisingly considerable overlap between these and what follows, although Gros has made very little reference to English-language work.
2 To a very large extent I leave aside the Occitan lyric: like all who work in this area, I recognize the centrality of the troubadours, but it would be impossible to take them into account adequately in the space available. A large number of recent studies, however, continue to bring troubadours and trouvères together; see for instance The Cultural Milieu of the Troubadours and Trouvères, ed. by Nancy Van Deusen (Ottawa, Institute of Medieval Music, 1994).
3 On which distinction see Roger Dragonetti, ‘La poesie ... ceste musique naturelle: essai d'exégèse d'un passage de l'Art de dictier d'Eustache Deschamps’, in La Musique et les lettres: études de littérature médiévale (Geneva, Droz, 1986), pp. 27–42, and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 1991).
4 See a useful article by Michel Zink, ‘Musique et subjectivité: le passage de la chanson d'amour à la poésie personnelle’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 25 (1982), 225–32. As I shall point out later, however, it is by no means the case that all critics vould see the development of a literary, rather than performance-based, poetry in such simple linear lines: see D. Rieger, ‘La poésie des troubadours et des trouvères comme chanson littéraire du Moyen Âge’, in La Chanson française et son histoire, ed. by Dietmar Rieger (Tübingen, Narr, 1988), pp. 1–14, and Lawrence Earp, ‘Lyrics for Reading and Lyrics for Singing in Late Medieval France: The Development of the Dance Lyric from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut’, in The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, ed. by Rebecca A Baltzer, Thomas Cable and James I. Wimsatt (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1991), pp. 101–31.
5 Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, II, Les Genres lyriques, ed. by Dieter Rieger (Heidelberg, Winter, 1980).
6 The Lyrics of the Trouvères: A Research Guide (1970–1990) (New York, Garland, 1994).
7 Les Refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York, Peter Lang, 1984).
8 Répertoire métrique de la poésie lyrique française des origines à 1350 (Munich, Fink, 1972) — admittedly published more than thirty years ago, but remaining indispensable.
9 His Prières en ancien français (Hamden, Archon Books, 1978) was a supplement to Jean Sonet's Répertoire, published in 1956 by Droz; since then, Sinclair has produced another volume, French Devotional Texts of the Middle Ages (Westport — London, Greenwood Press, 1979), and a further supplement to Sonet: Prières en ancien français: additions et corrections aux articles 1–2374 du répertoire de Sonet, supplement (James Cook University of North Queensland, 1987). It is worth adding an anthology intended primarily for performance: ‘Prions en chantant’: Devotional Songs of the Trouvères, ed. and trans. by Marcia Jenneth Epstein (Toronto University Press, 1997).
10 Respectively Pierre Bec, La Joute poétique: de la tenson médiéval aux débats chantés traditionnels (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000) and Medieval Debate Poetry, ed and trans. by Michel-André Bossy (New York, Garland, 1988); Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed. and trans. by Eglal Doss-Quinby et al. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001); Pastourelles, ed. by Jean-Claude Rivière, 3 vols to date (Geneva, Droz, 1974–).
11 Although this is not, strictly, research, we should salute two series of nicely priced texts which transform the reading of medieval French literature in general and the lyric in particular: Les Lettres Gothiques, directed by Michel Zink, and Champion Classiques, directed by Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner.
12 Poèmes d'amour des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. by Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Françoise Ferrand (Paris, UGE, 1983); Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. by Jean Dufournet (Paris, Gallimard, 1989); Anthologie de la poésie française: Moyen Âge, XVIe siècle, XVIIe siècle, ed. by Gérard Gros (Paris, Champion, 1991).
13 Chansons des trouvères: Chanter m'estuet (Paris, Livre de Poche, 1995).
14 
uvres completes, ed. by Michel Zink, 2 vols (Paris, Bordas, 1989–90).
15 uvres completes, ed. by Pierre-Yves Badel (Paris, Livre de Poche, 1995).
16 The Songs Attributed to Andrieu Contredit d'Arras, with a translation into English and the extant melodies, ed. by Deborah Hubbard Nelson, with music ed. by Hendrick van der Werf (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1991); The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brulé, ed. by Samuel N. Rosenberg and S. Danon, with music ed. by H. van der Werf (New York, Garland, 1985); L'uvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle: textes, ed. by Yvan G. Lepage (Paris, Champion, 1994) and L'uvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle: mélodies, ed. by Avner Bahat and Gérard Le Vot (Paris, Champion, 1996). Lepage appeals specifically and rightly for just such editions in his ‘L'édition de textes lyriques: le cas de Blondel de Nesle’, Actes du XVIIIe Congrès International de linguistique et de philologie romanes, Université de Trèves (Trier), 1986, ed. by Dieter Kremer (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1988), pp. 88–99.
17 Trouvères-Melodien, 2 vols (Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1977–79): it includes the melodies attached to the work of most of the major lyricists of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
18 Notably Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris, Seuil, 1983); La Poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris, PUF, 1984); La Lettre et la voix: de la ‘littérature’ médiévale (Paris, Seuil, 1987). It is nevertheless important to note that there may have been a public specifically for the written lyric, see Dietmar R, ‘Audition et lecture dans le domaine de la poésie troubadouresque’, Revue des langues romanes, 87 (1983), 69–85 and Elizabeth Aubrey, ‘Literacy, Orality and the Preservation of French and Occitan Medieval Courtly Songs’, Revista de musicologia, 16 (1995), 2355–66; this is a line of investigation that should not be lost in critical fascination with performance. For a somewhat more recent survey of research on this topic, and a nicely balanced one, see Dennis H. Green, ‘Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 65 (1990), 267–80.
19 Notably perhaps Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France (1100–1300) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987); The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life And Ideas in France 1100–1300 (London, Dent, 1987); Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997); ‘Listening to the Trouvères’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 638–59.
20 La Poésie et la voix, pp. 13–14. See however Reinhard Strohm's interesting article on the reconstruction of music orally transmitted, and which may be something of a corrective: ‘Unwritten and Written Music’, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. by Tess Knighton and David Fallows (London, Dent, 1992), pp. 228–33.
21 ‘Intertextualité et mouvance’, Littérature, 41 (1981), 8–16.
22 ‘A propos de la poésie lyrique d'oc et d'oïl’, Romanica Vulgaria Quaderni, 8/9 (1986), 5–36.
23 ‘Jaufré Rudel et la poétique de la mouvance’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 20 (1977), 323–35.
24 ‘"Mouvance", "variance", microfilologia: appunti sulla "chanson de toile"’, Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena (Padua, Editoriale Programma Italiano, 1993), pp. 175–94.
25 Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15.
26 See for instance P. Bracken, ‘The Myth of the Medieval Minstrel: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Performers of the Chansonnier Repertory’, Viator, 33 (2002), 100–16.
27 Nigel Wilkins, The Lyric Art of Medieval France (Fulbourne, New Press, 1988); Roger Pensom, ‘On the Prosody of the Decasyllabic Lyrics of the Roi de Navarre’, French Studies, XXXIX (1985), 257–75, and Roger Pensom, ‘Thibaut de Champagne and the art of the trouvère’, Medium Aevum, 57 (1988), 1–26 (I return to Pensom's theories as to medieval prosody below).
28 See for instance the major article by David Maw, ‘Rhythm and Accent in the Polyphonic Rondel’, Medium Aevum, 75 (2006), 46–83.
29 Rhyme in Gace Brulé's Lyric: Formal and Semantic Interplay (New York, Lang, 1998).
30 ‘Les manuscrits et le texte: typologie des recueils lyriques en ancien français’, Revue des Langues Romanes, 100:1 (1996), 111–30.
31 ‘Aspects de la scriptologie des chansonniers français des XIIIe et XIVe siècles’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 68 (1990), 680–97.
32 ‘‘Art’ and ‘Nature’: Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan Chansonnier N (Morgan 819)’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 83–121.
33 Le Milieu littéraire en Champagne sous les Thibaudiens, 2 vols (Orléans, Paradigme, 1994), to which we might add a useful collective volume edited by Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruel, Thibaut de Champagne. Prince et poète au XIIIe siècle (Lyon, La Manufacture, 1987), valuable because it brings together musicologists, textual scholars, historians, etc.
34 ‘Troubadours, trouvères et espace Plantagenêt’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, Xe–XIIe siècles, 29 (1986), 9–14.
35 ‘Royal Counselors and trouvères in the Houses of Nesle and Soissons’, Medieval Prosopography: History and Collective Biography, 18 (1997), 123–37.
36 Yvan G. Lepage, ‘Richard Coeur de Lion et la poésie lyrique’, in ‘Et c'est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble’: hommage à Jean Dufournet, 3 vols (Paris, Champion, 1993), pp. 893–910.
37 Littérature et société arrageoises au XIIIe siècle: les chansons et dits artésiens (Arras, Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais, 1981).
38 The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); see the useful review article by Sylvia Huot, ‘Songs and Stories: Medieval French Romance and the Technique of the Lyric Insertion’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 22 (1995), 171–7.
39 Perspectives médiévales, 3 (1977); see particularly the useful article by Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Pour une typologie de l'insertion’, pp. 9–14.
40 See most recently M.-R. Jung, ‘L'empereur Conrad chanteur de poésie lyrique: fiction et vérité dans le Roman de la Rose de Jean Renart’, Romania, 101 (1980), 35–50, and Danièle Duport, ‘Les chansons dans Guillaume de Dole’, in ‘Et c'est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble’, pp. 513–23.
41 See Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982).
42 La Lyrique française au moyen âge, XIIe–XIIIe siècles: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux — Études et textes, 2 vols (Poitiers, Université de Poitiers: Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale 6/Paris, A & J Picard, 1977).
43 Respectively, on the chanson de toile, Michel Zink, Belle: essai sur les chansons de toile (Paris, Champion, 1979); on the chanson de croisade, Françoise Barteau, ‘Mais à quoi songeaient les croisés? Essai sur quelques chansons de Croisade ...’, Revue des langues romanes, 88 (1984), 23–38, C. Th. J. Dijkstra, La Chanson de Croisade (Amsterdam, Schiphouwer en Brinkman, 1995), and M. Gosman, ‘Poetic Fiction and Poetic Reality: The Case of the Romance Crusade Lyrics’, Neophilologus 79 (1995), 13–24; on the estampie, P. W. Cummins, ‘Le problème de la musique et de la poésie dans l'estampie’, Romania, 103 (1982), 259–77, and Dominique Billy, ‘Les empreintes métriques de la musique dans l'estampie lyrique’, Romania, 108 (1987), 207–29; on the jeu-parti, Michèle Gally, ‘Disputer d'amour: les Arrageois et le jeu-parti’, Revue des langues romanes, 92 (1988), 55–76.
44 Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford University Press, 1997). Roughly contemporary, and arguing on somewhat similar lines, is a collective volume: Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Dolores Pesce (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997) which brings together musicologists and literary scholars.
45 See T. Städtler, ‘Für eine philologische Interpretation altfranzösischer Motettentexte’, in Alte und Neue Philologie, ed. by Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1997), pp. 189–200.
46 Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, Seuil, 1972), pp. 231–45. For views of this sort, see also Robert Guiette's fundamental D'une poésie formelle en France au Moyen Âge (Paris, Nizet, 1972), and Roger Dragonetti's La Technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: contribution à l'étude de la rhétorique médiévale (Geneva, Slatkine, 1979).
47 La Subjectivité littéraire: autour du siècle de saint Louis (Paris, PUF, 1985).
48 ‘La notion de personnalité chez les troubadours: encore la question de la sincérité’, in Mittelalterbilder aus neuer Perspektive. Diskussionsanstösse zu amour courtois, Subjektivität in der Dichtung und Strategien des Erzählens: Kolloquium Würzburg 1984, ed. by Ernstpeter Ruhe and Rudolf Behrens (Munich, Fink, 1985), pp. 166–81.
49 See, for instance, Wendy Pfeffer, ‘Complaints of Women, Complaints by Women: Can one Tell Them Apart?’, in The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature Across the Disciplines, ed. by Barbara K. Altmann and Carleton W. Carroll (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp.125–31; E. Doss-Quinby, ‘Rolan, de ceu ke m'avez/parti dirai mon semblant: The Feminine Voice in the Old French jeu-parti’, Neophilologus, 83 (1999), 497–516; and Joan Tasker Grimbert, ‘Diminishing the trobairitz, Excluding the Women Trouvères’, Tenso, 14 (1999), 23–38. For the cynical view that the trobairitz, for instance, were no more than tongue-in-cheek inventions of male writers, see Jean-Charles Huchet, ‘Les femmes troubadours; ou, la voix critique’, Littérature, 51 (1983), 59–90.
50 And which might therefore begin to answer W. C. Calin's question: ‘Singer's Voice and Audience Response: On the Originality of the Courtly Lyric, or How "Other" was the Middle Ages and What Should We Do About It?’ L'Esprit créateur, 23 (1983), 75–90.
51 ‘Le lieu commun et l'imaginaire: exordes des pastourelles et des chansons de toile’, Romania, 109 (1988), 472–501, and cf. Jeff Rider, ‘Genre, antigenre, intergenre’, L'Esprit créateur, 33 (1993), 18–26.
52 Les Chansons de Thibaut de Champagne: concordances et index établis d'après l'édition de A. Wallensköld, ed. by G. Lavis and M. Stasse (Liège, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, 1981).
53 ‘Chanson d'amour et repetition’, Revue des langues romanes, 84 (1980), 13–19.
54 ‘Ritual and Repetition: the Ambiguities of Refrains’, in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and Modification, ed. by H. H. Petersen, M. B. Bruun, J. Llewellyn and E. Ostrem (Turnhout, Brepols, 2004), pp. 83–96.
55 Respectively, ‘Trouvères et losengiers’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 25 (1982), 171–78, and ‘Le losengier dans la chanson des trouvères des XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, in Félonie, trahison, reniements au Moyen Age, Cahiers du CRIS-MA (Montpellier, 1997), pp. 189–95.
56 ‘Poète sacré, poète maudit’, in Modernité au Moyen Âge: le défi du passé, ed. by Brigitte Cazelles and Charles Méla (Geneva, Droz, 1990), pp. 233–47.
57 The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica (Berkeley, California University Press, 1985).
58 Ave vierge Marie: étude sur les prières mariales en vers français, XIIe–XVe siècles (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2004); cf. also Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (University of Toronto Press, 2005).
59 Respectively, ‘Ut musica poesis: la relation de la lyrique profane des XIIe–XIIIe siècles à un modèle sacré’, in L'Imitation: aliénation ou source de liberté ?, ed. by Anna Drzewicka, Gérard Gouillet and Maurice de Gandillac (Paris, La Documentation Française, 1986), 107–28, and ‘La fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci’, Le Moyen Âge, 91 (1985), 33–51, 179–200.
60 Christine's lyrics must still be read in Maurice Roy's edition (uvres poétiques, 3 vols, SATF [Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1886–96]); Machaut's Louange des dames was edited by Nigel Wilkins (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1972), but in a limited edition which is no longer available; Champion's edition of Charles's poems (Paris, Champion, 1923–24) is misleadingly arranged according to rather out-dated assumptions as to the circumstances of composition, but Jean-Claude Mühlethaler's (Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1992) gives only the Duke's poems, and not those with which they are in dialogue.
61 Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, Garland, 1995).
62 François Villon: A Bibliography (New York, Garland, 1990), and Rudolf Sturm, François Villon. Bibliographie und Materialien, 1489–1988 (Munich, Saur, 1990).
63 Italo Siciliano, François Villon et les themes poétiques du Moyen Âge (Paris, Nizet, 1933), sees Villon as tediously conventional — and Henry Guy, Histoire de la poésie française du XVIe siècle, I: L'École des Rhétoriqueurs (Paris, Champion, 1910), appears to have devoted years of his life to poets for whom he seems to feel nothing but profound contempt.
64 Le Poète et le prince: l'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans (Paris, PUF, 1965). I think also, here, of Paul Zumthor's Essai de poétique médiévale.
65 See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres au XIVe siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris, Hatier, 1993).
66 Ernest Langlois's Recueil d'arts de seconde rhétorique (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1902) remains fundamental — but see, for instance, Deborah Sinnreich-Levi's edition of Deschamps's Art de dictier (East Lansing, Colleagues Press, 1994), Evencio Beltran's edition of L'Archiloge Sophie (Geneva, Slatkine, 1986) and David Cowling's of Les Douze Dames de Rhétorique (Geneva, Droz, 2002). See also Claude Thiry, ‘Prospections et prospectives sur la Rhétorique seconde’, Le Moyen Français, 46–47 (2000), 541–62. For a particularly sympathetic and stimulating exploration of the way rhetoric informs late-medieval verse, see Douglas Kelly, Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
67 Rhétoriqueur ‘prosodic pyrotechnics’ (the expression is Johnson's) are explored in, respectively, Le Masque et la lumière: la poétique des Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Paris, Seuil, 1978); Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1990); ‘Or ne mens’: couleurs de l'éloge et du blâme chez les ‘grands rhétoriqueurs’ (Paris, Champion, 1994).
68 In her entry in the Grundriss (see above, note 6).
69 It is not clear, of course, that this distinction is entirely valid: by ‘amateur’ I mean simply those poets — like Charles d'Orléans — for whom poetry is a diversion and not a profession. For the distinction, see 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.
70 From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1987).
71 There have, for instance, been recent, scholarly editions of BnF n.a.f. 15771 (Une nouvelle collection de poésies lyriques et courtoises du XVe siècle: Le manuscrit B.N. nouv. acq. fr. 15771, ed. by Barbara L. S. Inglis [Geneva, Droz, 1985]), and of those parts of fr. 1719 which were not included in Marcel Schwob's Le Parnasse satyrique du quinzième siècle: anthologie de pieces libres (Paris, H. Welter, 1905): ‘Au grey d'amours ...’ (Pièces inédites du manuscrit Paris, Bibl. nat., fr. 1719): étude et edition, ed. by Françoise Fery-Hue, Le Moyen Français, 27–28 (Montreal, CERES, 1991); Alessandro Vitale-Brovarone, Recueil de galanteries (Torino, Archivio di Stato, J. b. IX 10). Le Moyen Français, 6 (Montréal, CERES, 1980).
72 ‘"Gardez vous bien de ce Fauveau!" Co-textualisation et symbolique animale dans un rondeau de Pierre d'Anché’, Reinardus, 11 (1998), 131–48: ‘le regard que nous portons sur une poésie change selon son co-texte, qu'il s'agisse d'une pièce lyrique insérée dans un texte narratif ... ou d'une pièce lyrique dans une anthologie’ (p. 134).
73 See, for instance, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Fullness and Emptiness: Shortages and Storehouses of Lyric Treasure in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. by Daniel Poirion and Nancy Freeman Regalado, Yale French Studies, special issue (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 224–39.
74 I borrow the phrase from James Laidlaw: see his ‘Christine de Pizan: A Publisher's Progress’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 35–75.
75 I am thinking, of course, of the famous BNF fr. 1584 with the copyist's superscription, ‘Vesci l'ordenance que G. de Machau wet qu'il ait en son livre’, on which, among others, see Sarah Jane Williams, ‘An Author's Role in Fourteenth-Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut's Livre où je met toutes mes choses’, Romania, 90 (1970), 433–54. Lawrence Earp (‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France: The Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1983, p. 53) warns us not to take this at face value, but it is surely, at the very least, evidence of Guillaume's concern with his own 
uvre.
76 Jean le Sénéchal, Les Cent Ballades, ed. by G. Raynaud, SATF (Paris, Firmin Didot, 1905) (I use scare-quotes because the attribution is now considered doubtful); Christine de Pizan, Cent ballades d'amant et de dame, ed. by Jacqueline Cerquiglini (Paris, Union Générale d'Editions, 1982); François Villon, Testament, ed. by Albert Henry and Jean Rychner (Geneva, Droz, 1974).
77 See for instance Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Quand la voix s'est tue: La mise en recueil de la poésie lyrique aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, in La Présentation du livre: actes du colloque de Paris X — Nanterre (4, 5, 6 décembre 1985), ed. by E. Baumgartner and N. Boulestreau (Université de Paris X — Nanterre, 1987), pp. 313–27; Nancy Freeman Regalado, ‘Gathering the Works: the "uvres de Villon" and the Intergeneric Passage of the Medieval French Lyric into Single-Author Collections’, L'Esprit créateur, 33 (1993), 87–100; Sylvia Huot, ‘From Life to Art: The Lyric Anthology of Villon's Testament’, in The Ladder of High Designs: Structure and Interpretation of the French Lyric Sequence, ed. by Doranne Fenoaltea and David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 26–40. A slightly different case is that of the lyric used as ornament or punctuation for a romance or other narrative — on which see Maureen Boulton, The Song in the Story.
78 ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Fünftes Wolfenbütteler Symposium vom 1 bis 3 November 1977, ed. by Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg, Ernst Hauswedell, 1981), pp. 80–92.
79 See Sarah Jane Williams, ‘The Lady, the Lyrics and the Letters’, Early Music, 5 (1977), 462–68.
80 Technique and Technology: Script, Print and Poetics in France, 1470–1550 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000).
81 Cynthia Jane Brown, The Shaping of History and Poetry in Late Medieval France: Propaganda and Artistic Expression in the Works of the Rhétoriqueurs (Birmingham, AL, Summa, 1985), and Poets, Patrons and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995); Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher, 1485–1512: Prologues, Poems and Presentations (Geneva, Droz, 1997).
82 Mary Jo Arn, for instance, uses manuscript evidence with great finesse to demonstrate sequence of poetic events (‘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 Mary Jo Arn [Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2000], pp. 61–78), and Anne Coldiron turns to such things as translation to explore the reception of his verse, in Canon, Period and the Poetry of Charles d'Orléans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2000).
83 Pierre Champion's Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle (Paris, Champion, 1923) is still the most complete study of the literary Burgundian court — but for poetry as a political and social weapon, see Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Poétiques du quinzième siècle: situation de François Villon et Michault Taillevent (Paris, Nizet, 1983), and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler and Joël Blanchard, Écriture et pouvoir à l'aube des temps modernes (Paris, PUF, 2002).
84 Enough of René d'Anjou's accounts survive to make a study of his court as an artistic centre valuable: see A. Lecoy de la Marche, Extraits des comptes et mémoriaux du roi René, pour servir à l'histoire des arts au XVe siècle (Paris, École des Chartes, 1873). We still await a full study of literary and poetic patronage at René's court, but in the interim, see Noël Coulet, Alice Planche and Françoise Robin, Le Roi René: le prince, le mécène, l'écrivain, le mythe (Aix-en-Provence, EDISUD, 1982).
85 See C. M. Zsuppan, ‘Jean Robertet's Life and Career: a Reassessment’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 31 (1969), 333–42, and cf. David Cowling's edition of the Douze Dames de Rethorique.
86 On the puy, fundamental are the recent books by Gérard Gros, Le Poète, la vierge et le prince du puy (Paris, Klincksieck, 1992) and by Denis Hüe, La Poésie palinodique à Rouen: 1486–1550 (Paris, Champion, 2001).
87 See 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, 1998).
88 On Machaut's motets specifically, see Anne Walters Robinson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
89 Published by Oxford University Press, 1999, and cf. also Margaret Switten's Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: a Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song (New York, Garland, 1995). I should also mention in this context Michel Zink's important work on the chanson: Le Moyen Âge et ses chansons; ou, un passé en trompe-l'il (Paris, Fallois, 1996).
90 Le Sens de la métrique chez François Villon (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2004), based on his Accent and Metre in French: A Theory of the Relation between Linguistic Accent and Metrical Practice in French, 1100–1900 (Bern, Peter Lang, 1998). For a study based on the same principles, see David Maw, ‘"Trespasser mesure": Metre in Machaut's Polyphonic Songs’, Journal of Musicology, 21 (2004), 46–126.
91 Poirion's Le Poète et le prince remains fundamental, as does the Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, VIII/1: La littérature française au XIVe et XVe siècles, ed. by Daniel Poirion (Heidelberg, Winter, 1988). More specific mises au point include P. E. Bennett on ‘Le rondeau: forme fixe, forme courte, forme brève’, La Licorne, 21 (19991), 21–30, and P.-Y. Badel on ‘Le rondeau au temps de Jean Marot’, in Les Grands Rhétoriqueurs, Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier, 14 (1997), 13–35; Marc-René Jung, ‘La naissance de la ballade dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle, de Jean Acart à Jean de la Mote et à Guillaume de Machaut’, Actes du IIe colloque sur la littérature en moyen français, Milan 8–10 mai 2000, in L'analisi linguistica e letteraria, 8 (1994), 7–29; Michel Zink, ‘Le lyrisme en rond: esthétique et séduction des poèmes à forme fixe au Moyen Âge’, in his Les Voix de la conscience: parole du poète et parole de Dieu dans la littérature médiévale (Caen, Paradigme,1992), pp. 177–96l; R. Mullally on ‘Vireli, virelai’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 101 (2000), 451–63.
92 La Subjectivité littéraire: autour du siècle de saint Louis (Paris, PUF, 1985).
93 See for instance Friedrich Wolfzettel's ‘Zur Poetik der Subjektivität bei Christine de Pisan’, in Lyrik des ausgehenden 14. und des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Franz V. Spechtler, Chloe. Beihefte zum Daphnis (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1984), i, pp. 379–97; Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Catherine Attwood, Dynamic Dichotomy: The Poetic ‘I’ in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998); Didier Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’: métamorphoses du ‘je’ chez Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart et Christine de Pizan (Paris, Champion, 2005).
94 With therefore a therapeutic value. There is no equivalent specifically for French of Glending Olson's important Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982), but its conclusions impinge on French literature and are important for our understanding of the perceived function of poetry in the late Middle Ages.
95 There are now, for instance, major editions of a number of these varieties: see Les Devinettes françaises du Moyen Âge, ed. by Bruno Roy, Cahiers d'Etudes Médiévales (Montréal, Bellarmin/Paris, Vrin, 1977); Les Demandes d'amour, ed. by Margaret Felberg-Levitt (Montréal, CERES, 1995); The Love Debate Poems of Christine de Pizan, ed. by Barbara K. Altmann (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1998). A useful general study is Giovanna Angeli's Il mondo rovesciato (Rome, Bulzoni, 1977); on the venditions, 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, and most recently 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; on the debate, see Emma J. Cayley's Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford University Press, 2006).
96 One of the few major recent enterprises has been the collective volume Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, ed. by E. J. Richards (Gainsville, University Press of Florida, 1998). It is instructive to look at Angus Kennedy's exhaustive bibliographies in this connection: Christine de Pizan: A Bibliographical Guide (London, Grant and Cutler, 1984; supplements 1994, 2004).
97 It is interesting, for instance, to consult Lawrence Earp's monumental bibliography: the lyric attracts only seven pages of entries; see also Gilbert Reaney, ‘Guillaume de Machaut: Lyric Poet’, Music and Letters, 39 (1958), 38–51. It is important to notice, however, how much attention has been paid to the alliance of word and music in Machaut's lyric manuscripts: see most recently Machaut's Music: New Interpretations, ed. by Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2003).
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