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Article Dans Une Revue Textus & Musica Année : 2022

'To his beloved friends…': The epistolary art of song in medieval France

Mary Channen Caldwell
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Résumé

The search for written traces of medieval Latin song has long consumed musicologists and literary scholars, leading to numerous catalogues and editions carefully tallying and comparing wide-spread concordances. As is readily acknowledged, however, song’s written transmission is complicated and inflected by its intangible transmission through oral processes, including as a form of knowledge and didactic tool whose lessons are remembered long after the melody has faded from sound. Shifts in language and register also influence the mouvance of Latin song, with melodies and poems slipping in and out of other genres and contexts through written and oral processes of citation, quotation, borrowing, and contrafacture. Song was on the move in the medieval Europe, carving out circuitous byways among places, people, and manuscripts. One less explored path for Latin song follows that laid by a literary medium well-known for its mobility: the medieval letter. Reflecting in practice the intersection of the pedagogically linked ars dictaminis and poetriae, letter writers since antiquity have included poetry and song in personal correspondence. While this relationship has been studied in vernacular contexts, contemporary Latin practices have been largely overlooked. This oversight is understandable; unless collected post factum into collections of model materials (formularies), letters – and accompanying poetic or musical content – were uniquely penned and intended for a specific audience to read and digest. Undertaken chiefly for personal correspondence and teaching, manuscript survival for letter collections containing poetry generally reflects planned compilations for posterity and teaching, or simple happenstance. Despite this challenging archival situation, extant manuscripts shed light on aspects of Latin song’s circulation within and alongside epistolary writing, revealing how the arts of letter writing and poetry intersected and how epistolary modes of communication influenced the circulation of Latin song. As a comparative case study, I examine two such manuscripts copied in northern France in the late twelfth and late thirteenth centuries, respectively. The first is the Liber epistolarum of Gui of Bazoches, a collection of the twelfth-century French cleric and chronicler’s personal letters in a single manuscript (Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, 27). A notable feature of the Liber epistolarum is that nearly all of Gui’s letters are accompanied by poetic verses of varying lengths and forms. The second manuscript is a textual miscellany, often labelled the St-Victor Miscellany (Paris, BnF, Lat. 15131), whose final gathering intermixes model letters, sermons, and Latin and multilingual poems. The two poetic-epistolary collections differ in terms of how each conveys ideas of authorship, modes of production, and the function of poetry in, and in relation to, letters. Both manuscripts, however, complicate the definition and identity of Latin song and its modes of circulation. Dozens of unique, unnotated Latin poems are copied into the two sources: Lux. 27 includes metrical as well as rhythmical poems (metra and rithmi), while in Lat. 15131 the poems are exclusively rithmi. Examining the identity of Latin rithmi in these manuscripts as songs – as opposed to poems unintended for musical realization – situates these sources within the broader culture and history of medieval Latin song and its circulation. Exploring how and why songs were copied with and alongside letters fosters an opportunity to explore how Latin song participated within lesser-studied networks that developed out of the teaching and practice of letter writing.
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hal-04132890 , version 1 (19-06-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04132890 , version 1

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Mary Channen Caldwell. 'To his beloved friends…': The epistolary art of song in medieval France. Textus & Musica, 2022, 5. ⟨hal-04132890⟩

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