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Abstract
This article provides a revisionist account of thirteenth-century refrain use, challenging the presumed connection between the refrain and oral song traditions. The distribution patterns in the surviving sources reveal no strong connection between refrain use and the rondet, the song genre often posited as the refrain's point of origin. Further, a significant corpus of refrains circulated only within the motet repertory, independently of monophonic song. Close comparison of refrain concordances in surviving sources reveals careful attention on the part of composers and scribes to the preservation of their melodic identity. Together, these findings suggest new contexts for understanding the refrain. The author relocates refrain use within clerical practices of quotation, particularly auctoritas, exploring case studies in which refrains are interpreted exegetically. In motets, chansons avec des refrains and a vernacular translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, refrains are treated as sources of vernacular knowledge and objects of commentary.
Notes
1 It is common to identify both structurally repeated phrases and intertextual musical references as ‘refrains’ despite the potential confusion, since the two types are distinct yet not mutually exclusive. I will introduce a new term below, namely ‘intertextual refrain’, for clarity and in order to signal my focus on refrains that are extant in at least two different musical or poetic works. For studies devoted exclusively to refrain use in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du XII e siècle au début du XIV e (Paris, 1969); Eglal Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères du XII e siècle au début du XIV e (New York, 1984); and Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Wandering Voices: Refrain Citation in Thirteenth-Century Music and Poetry’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2007).
2Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005), i: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, 120.
3‘Sie geben einen Beitrag zur Geschichte des Volkliedes und spiegeln in ihrer Manichfaltigkeit den Volkscharakter treulich wieder.’ Karl Bartsch, Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen (Leipzig, 1870), xvi. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
4‘Le dernier écho d'une poésie naïve et simple, perdue sans retour’. Alfred Jeanroy, Chansons, jeux partis et refrains inèdits du XIII e siècle (Paris, 1896), 51. The word ‘naïve’ here could also be interpreted as ‘folk’.
5Early rondets were six-line songs with the structure aAabAB. In late thirteenth-century versions of this type, usually termed rondeaux, the refrain was also sung in the first two lines, making the structure ABaAabAB. While there is no clear scholarly consensus about the use of these terms, I use rondet for the early examples that are found in romances, reserving rondeau for the later examples, such as those by Adam de la Halle and Guillaume d'Amiens. When summarizing research by other scholars, I retain the term they employ.
6See description in Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyrical Insertions in Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), 83–7.
7Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1899), 106, 113.
8 Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1899), xxi.
9See Joseph Bédier, ‘Les fêtes de mai et les commencements de la poésie lyrique du moyen âge’, Revue des deux mondes, 135 (1896), 146–72, and idem, ‘Les plus anciennes danses françaises’, Revue des deux mondes, new ser., 31 (1906), 398–425.
10Boulton devotes an entire chapter to refrains that appear in such scenes. See her The Song in the Story, 80–119.
11Jean Renart, Le roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris, 1962), 1.
12See, for example, Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Pour une typologie de l'insertion’, Perspectives médiévales, 3 (1977), 9–14; Mark Everist, ‘The Rondeau Motet: Paris and Artois in the Thirteenth Century’, Music and Letters, 69 (1988), 1–22; idem, ‘The Refrain Cento: Myth or Motet?’, Journal of the Royal Music Association, 114 (1989), 164–88; Boulton, The Song in the Story; Judith A. Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets: Sampling and Grafting in the Middle Ages’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 644–80; Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002); and eadem, ‘Enté: A Survey and Reassessment of the Term in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Music and Poetry’, Early Music History, 22 (2003), 67–101.
13für Stücke aus populär gewordenen Liedern angesehen werden müssen, aus denen sie, wie ein Schlagwort, abgelöst werden und in neue Lieder übergehen’. Gustav Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, 4 pts (Strasbourg, 1888–1902), ii/1 (1902), 661.
14Pierre Aubry, ‘Refrains et rondeaux du XIIIe siècle’, Riemann-Festschrift: Gesammelte Studien: Hugo Riemann zum sechzigsten Geburtstage überreicht von Freunden und Schülern, ed. Carl Mennicke (Leipzig, 1909), 213–29, esp. p. 218.
15Jacques Chailley, Histoire musicale du moyen âge (Paris, 1950), 184.
16Jacques Chailley, ‘La nature musicale du Jeu de Robin et de Marion’, Mélanges d'histoire du thé'âtre du moyen-âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1950), 111–17.
17Ardis Butterfield rightly notes that this theory of origin has ‘died hard’. See her ‘Repetition and Variation in the Thirteenth-Century Refrain’, Journal of the Royal Music Association, 116 (1991), 1–23 (p. 1, n. 4).
18‘Les liens étroits qui unissent les deux genres’; ‘dans la littérature du XIIIe siècle nous retrouvons ces mêmes refrains de rondeau employés dans d'autres contextes’. Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 9, 15.
19See, for example, Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript, ed. Gordon A. Anderson, trans. Robyn E. Smith, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 75 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1977), xxxvii, and Anderson, ‘A Small Collection of Notre Dame Motets ca. 1215–1235’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 22 (1969), 157–96.
20Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–1300 (London, 1989), 119.
23Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 49.
21See, for example, Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères, 94, echoed in Boulton, The Song in the Story, 2, and Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 50. Boogaard seems to take both sides on this issue; see his Rondeaux et refrains, 16.
22Judith A. Peraino, ‘Et pui conmencha a canter: Refrains, Motets and Melody in the Thirteenth-Century Narrative Renart le nouvel’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 6 (1997), 1–16.
24Anne Ibos-Augé, ‘Quatre nouvelles oeuvres contenant des refrains musicaux’, Romania, 113 (1995), 540–5.
25See Suzannah Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16 (2007), 31–59.
26Many studies address the difficulties that arise in dealing with the so-called ‘unique’ refrains in Boogaard's catalogue. See, for example, Robyn Smith, ‘Gennrich's Bibliographisches Verzeichnis der französischen Refrains: Tiger or Fat Cat?’, Parergon, 8 (1990), 71–101; Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation’, 2; Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry, Genre (Cambridge, 1994), 54–7; and Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete” ’, 47.
27Whereas Clark has argued compellingly that some of these passages probably were quoted from other sources, these cases must be evaluated individually. See ibid., 48.
28See discussion in Everist, French Motets, 54–7.
29I am grateful to Mark Everist for suggesting this terminology.
30Doss-Quinby's monograph is based upon a statistical sample of 100 randomly selected items from Boogaard's catalogue; see Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères, 18. My doctoral dissertation is the first study to focus exclusively on the surviving corpus of intertextual refrains; see Saltzstein, ‘Wandering Voices’, 11–13.
3111 of the refrains from Adam's 13 polyphonic rondeaux appear in other songs, motets and romances: nos. 12, 156, 289, 430, 496, 746, 784, 823, 1074, 1229 and 1445. Six of the refrains from Guillaume's ten rondeaux appear in other sources: nos. 338, 477, 703, 777, 1531 and 1717.
32On the dating of this romance, see Jean Renart, The Romance of the Rose, or, Guillaume de Dole, trans. and ed. Patricia Terry and Nancy Vine Durling (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), 1.
33Interestingly, it is also quite rare to find the refrain of one rondet used in another rondet. There are only two rondets in Boogaard's catalogue that use the same refrain: nos. 7 and 194. For an edition of the Douce Chansonnier, see The Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308, ed. Mary Atchison (Aldershot, 2005).
34For references to the dating of these romances, see Boulton, The Song in the Story, 126, 256 n. 23, and 61 respectively.
35Refrain nos. 237, 287, 1157 and 1361. See Everist, French Motets, 66–71.
36Refrain nos. 36, 54, 78, 148, 230, 232, 237, 287, 329, 523, 587, 604, 664, 673, 750, 796, 824, 835, 996, 1032, 1059, 1084, 1157, 1233, 1237, 1327, 1346, 1354, 1361, 1535, 1540, 1671, 1691, 1699, 1731, 1739 and 1894.
37Everist notes four such refrains, but does not indicate their pervasiveness in the repertory. See French Motets, 66–71. In her edition of the texts of the motets in fascicles II, V and VII of the Montpellier motet codex (Mo), Robyn Smith includes a table listing refrains found only here. She lists these as ‘possible refrains, found only in other motets’, positing the connection with monophonic song as necessary for classification as a refrain. See her French Double and Triple Motets in the Montpellier Manuscript: Textual Edition, Translation and Commentary, Musicological Studies, 68 (Ottawa, 1997), 354.
3828 appear in two or more different motets with the same melody. Only four of these refrains are transmitted with different melodies in some of their surviving versions: nos. 54, 148, 1354 and 1739.
39These refrains are as follows: ‘Bele dame m'a mandé’ (237) in L'autrier (M402) / C'est la jus (M403) / Patribus; ‘Bone amour ai’ (287) in Ne m'oubliés mie (M754) / Benedicamus; ‘G'irai toute la valée’ (1157) in L'autrier (M83) / Demanant grant joie (M84) / Manere; ‘Ne m'oubliez mie’ (1361) in La plus bele riens vivant (M567) / [Pacem]; ‘Se j'ai demoré’ (1671) in Quant voi (M236)/En mai (M237) / [Immo]latus; and ‘S'ele ne m'aime’ (1699) in Mout soloie chant et joie (M233a) / [Immo]latus.
40Numbering for motets follows Friedrich Gennrich, Bibliographie der ältesten französischen und lateinischen Motetten, Summa musicae medii aevi, 2 (Darmstadt, 1958).
41There are examples of refrains that appear both in clausula motets and in monophonic songs. Refrain 338, ‘C'est la fin, la fin, que que nus die, j'amerai’, for example, appears in two chansons avec des refrains and a rondeau by Guillaume d'Amiens. See Everist, French Motets, 66–7.
42Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 17.
43I am not the first to come to this conclusion about refrain use. See also Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation’, 21, and Everist, French Motets, 149. Smith at one point describes refrains as ‘plural and diverse phenomena’, yet overall her study is devoted to the development of a new set of generic criteria for accurately classifying refrains. Smith, ‘Gennrich's Bibliographisches Verzeichnis’, 76.
44Given that the surviving refrains are not well represented in the extant rondet sources, one could argue that all accounts that posit such a relationship are assuming either that a given refrain cites lost written rondets or that it is drawn from an oral culture.
45Hendrik van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972), 26–34.
46 Hendrik van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972), 28.
47Mary O'Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford, 2006), 53–79.
48 Mary O'Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford, 2006), 67–8.
49 Mary O'Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford, 2006), 72.
50Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 7. Boogaard cites his lack of musical training and his desire that the catalogue be a manageable size as reasons for the omission of the refrain melodies.
51See Butterfield, ‘The Language of Medieval Music: Two Thirteenth-Century Motets’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 1–16; Everist, French Motets, 101–4; and Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets’.
52This is true of Renart le nouvel, the Roman de la poire and the Roman de Fauvel. Music is also preserved for refrains in Adam de la Halle's vernacular plays, the Jeu de Robin et Marion and the Jeu de la feuillee. Transcriptions of these refrains appear in Maria Vedder-Fowler, ‘Musical Interpolations in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century French Narratives’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1979). Anne Ibos-Augé provides a comparative edition of lyric insertions found in poetic sources with the melodies of their concordances, along with extensive classification of these refrains according to mode, poetic structure and literary function. See her ‘La fonction des insertions lyriques dans des oeuvres narratives et didactiques aux XIII et XIV siècles’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III, 2000).
53‘Il est généralement admis aujourd'hui que l'association d'un texte-refrain à une seule mélodie, qui lui serait propre, n'est pas nécessairement maintenue, un refrain pouvant se retrouver dans plusieurs contextes accompagné de différentes melodies.’ Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères, 103–4.
54Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation’, 3.
55Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 79.
56 Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 83. See also Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete”’, 46.
57Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique, 102. See discussion in Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères, 102–4.
58Hans Spanke, Eine altfranzösische Liedersammlung: Der anonyme Teil der Liederhandschriften KNPX (Halle, 1925), 316.
59‘Bon jor ait’ (refrain 285).
60See Smith, ‘Gennrich's Bibliographisches Verzeichnis’, 78.
61Numerous scholars have articulated the need for such a study. See Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation’, 3; Everist, French Motets, 101; and Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete” ’, 46.
62Full modern editions of these motets appear in Hans Tischler, The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270): A Complete Comparative Edition, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1982), ii, 1180, 1515. The editorial policy for examples in this article is as follows. In polyphonic transcriptions, beam groups and slurs are used to indicate ligature patterns; crossed stems indicate plicas. In monophonic transcriptions, slurs are used to indicate ligatures; small notes indicate plicas. Orthographical differences reflect differences in the sources. Italics are used to indicate the presence of a refrain within a French text. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of text underlay are my own.
63The refrain also appears in a Salut d'amour in Paris, BNF, MS fr. 837, without music notation.
64For modern editions of the full motets, see Tischler, The Earliest Motets, ii, 1541, and idem, The Montpellier Codex, 4 vols. (Madison, WI, 1978), iii, 116. Transcriptions of melodies in Renart manuscripts can be found in Fowler, ‘Musical Interpolations’, 489.
65Sigla for the manuscripts of Renart le Nouvel follow Fowler: β = Paris, BNF, MS fr. 372; Υ = Paris, BNF, MS fr. 1593.
66This version simply repeats the pitch rather than descending a semitone.
67See, for example, ornaments on the syllable ‘dez’.
68Numbering for monophonic songs follows Hans G. Spanke, Raynaud's Bibliographie des altfranösischen Liedes (Leiden, 1955).
69Full modern editions of R1596, M508 and M492 can be found in Hans Tischler, Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition, 15 vols. (Ottawa, 2006), x, 921; idem, The Earliest Motets, ii, 1485; and idem, The Montpellier Codex, iii, 57.
70The fourth context, R146, diverges significantly from these three songs in both its melody and its text. Interestingly, its text is the same as the refrain cited in the Confrère d'amours.
71This marked interrelationship between music and text can also be observed in refrains 587, 1009 and 1781. Butterfield describes a much looser version of this phenomenon in ‘Repetition and Variation’, 14. Her exploration of several related but syntactically differentiated refrains showed a correspondence in melodic contour between smaller melodic units within otherwise textually varied refrains. These melodic units included differences in pitch, rhythm and intervallic structure.
72See modern editions in Tischler, The Montpellier Codex, ii, 80, 106, 168.
73Refrain 1651 contains a similar interjection. Since chronology is impossible to determine here, either the interjections were inserted into the shorter version of the refrain, or the interjected refrain could be the original, making the other refrain a pared-down version. The linguistic status of an interjection makes the former explanation the more logical one, however.
74These are refrains 12, 65, 156, 232, 237, 287, 314, 338, 366, 370, 387, 430, 477, 516, 532, 550, 587, 595, 599, 604, 633, 662, 664, 665, 673, 746, 755, 777, 784, 796, 806, 823, 824, 870, 906, 912, 935, 948, 996, 1009, 1074, 1084, 1112, 1127, 1148, 1149, 1157, 1166, 1170a, 1228, 1237, 1327, 1346, 1361, 1375, 1427, 1428, 1464, 1473, 1477, 1535, 1540, 1555, 1651, 1669, 1671, 1673, 1691, 1731, 1781, 1822, 1840, 1859 and 1865. This list cannot be comprehensive, as new refrains continue to be found.
75These are refrains 78, 80, 114, 144, 200, 289, 387, 405, 496, 523, 538, 539, 587, 673, 750, 793, 796, 835, 900, 934, 1047, 1127, 1155, 1233, 1287, 1396, 1402, 1447/8, 1531, 1605, 1633, 1669, 1686, 1699, 1781, 1840, 1856, 1858 and 1894. The refrains indicated here all preserve interval content, but some contain variation of interval quality.
76Anna Maria Busse-Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 83.
77One can rarely determine whether a refrain in one piece was copied from another because the original source could have been lost.
78John Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance, ed. John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld (Aldershot, 2004), 60–88 (p. 88).
79The medieval usage of the term ‘refrain’ does not seem to have been compatible with the modern scholarly usage. Peraino notes that in the majority of instances in which the word ‘motet’ is used to describe a musical composition, the piece in question is in fact a monophonic refrain. See Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets’, 644. Further, thirteenth-century romance authors use terms as disparate as cancon, rondet or rondet à carole, motet, mot, conduit and sonet to describe refrains. See Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 48.
80There is no scholarly agreement as to whether refrains are citations or quotations. In the Middle Ages, the Latin verb ‘citare’ was a legal term meaning ‘to summon’ or ‘to call to witness’, a usage that metaphorically resembles refrain citation. Neither of the verbs ‘citare’ and ‘quotare’, explained above, is used to describe the employment of refrains in medieval music and poetry. I adopt the term ‘quotation’ rather than ‘citation’ to describe refrain use because the author or source of a refrain is rarely identified in practice. For a thoughtful discussion of these terms, see Sarah Kay, ‘How Long is a Quotation? Quotations from the Troubadours in the Text and Manuscripts of the Brevari d'amour’, Romania, 127 (2009), 140–68.
81This usage appears in the vernacular as well. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 102–3.
82 This usage appears in the vernacular as well. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 189.
83A classic treatment of the commentary tradition remains Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952). See also Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism: The Commentary Tradition c.1100–1375, ed. Alastair J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (Oxford, 1988).
84Alastair J. Minnis, Magister amoris: The Roman de la rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001).
85See Jean Leclercq, Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1992), 75.
86Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 168.
87See Jacques Monfrin, ‘Humanisme et traductions au moyen âge’, Journal des savants, 148 (1963), 161–90.
88See discussion in Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 11 (Cambridge, 1991), 106.
89See Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 1988), 160–210. According to Minnis, ‘scholastic literary theory did not merely provide these poets with technical idioms: it influenced directly or indirectly the ways in which they conceived of their literary creations; it affected their choice of authorial roles and literary forms’. Ibid., 160.
90In his continuation of the Roman de la rose, the most widely read and imitated romance of the French medieval literary tradition, Jean de Meun uses Latinate strategies of authorization to situate Ovid as an auctor of love (a magister amoris), and creates a tradition of vernacular commentary focused on Ovid's works. Ibid., 63–80.
91See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
92See, for example, Roberta Krueger, ‘Desire, Meaning and the Female Reader in Le chevalier de la charrete’, The Passing of Arthur: New Essays on Arthurian Literature, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe (New York, 1988), 31–51, and Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 1995), 103.
93See Huot, From Song to Book, 83–90, and Kevin Brownlee, ‘Generic Hybrids: 1225? Guillaume de Lorris Writes the Prologue to the First Part of Le roman de la rose’, A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 88–93.
94Nancy Freeman Regalado, ‘Des contraires choses: La fonction poétique de la citation et des exempla dans le “Roman de la rose” de Jean de Meun’, Littérature, 41 (1981), 62–81. Moreover, quotation delineates the voices of the romance's two author figures at the text's mid-point, where Jean de Meun separates his authorial voice from that of Guillaume de Lorris by quoting the last lines Guillaume wrote and attributing them to the other author. Quotation defines the authorial identity of both writers.
95Nancy van Deusen, The Harp and the Soul: Essays in Medieval Music (Lewiston, ME, 1989), 111–19, 165–77.
96 Nancy van Deusen, The Harp and the Soul: Essays in Medieval Music (Lewiston, ME, 1989), 111–19, 177.
97 Nancy van Deusen, The Harp and the Soul: Essays in Medieval Music (Lewiston, ME, 1989), 111–19, 168.
98See, for example, Hans Tischler, ‘English Traits in the Early 13th-Century Motet’, Musical Quarterly, 30 (1944), 458–96, and idem, ‘The Earliest Motets: Origins, Types and Groupings’, Music and Letters, 60 (1979), 416–27.
99References to this relationship are too numerous to list in full. See Hans Nathan, ‘The Function of Text in French 13th-Century Motets’, Musical Quarterly, 28 (1942), 445–62; Dolores Pesce, ‘The Significance of Text in Thirteenth-Century Latin Motets’, Acta musicologica, 58 (1986), 91–117; and Gerald R. Hoekstra, ‘The French Motet as Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant florist la violete/El mois d mai/Et gaudebit’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 32–57.
100For a summary of extensive research on this topic, see Margaret Switten, ‘Versus and Troubadours around 1100: A Comparative Study of Refrain Technique in the “New Song” ’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16 (2007), 91–143, esp. pp. 91–7.
101The supremacy of the Latin language, however, is never in doubt, since the Latin refrain ‘surrounds and contains the vernacular as if to hold it in check’. Ibid., 101.
102 The supremacy of the Latin language, however, is never in doubt, since the Latin refrain ‘surrounds and contains the vernacular as if to hold it in check’., 95.
103Dolores Pesce, ‘Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu grief/Robin m'aime/Portare’, Hearing the Motet: Essays in the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Pesce (Oxford, 1997), 28–51; Hoekstra, ‘The French Motet as Trope’; and David J. Rothenberg, ‘The Marian Symbolism of Spring, ca.1200–ca.1500: Two Case Studies’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59 (2006), 319–98.
104Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet (Stanford, CA, 1997).
106The translations of Douce dame and Povre secors are modified from those by Susan Stakel. See Tischler, The Montpellier Codex, iv, 51–2, 15.
105See Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, 134–54.
107A full modern edition of this motet can be found in Tischler, The Earliest Motets, ii, 1032.
108Inventing a female response is a common form of clerical domination over female voices in literature. See Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 10.
109Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 258.
110Butterfield's comments that music can lend a refrain citation ‘a more emphatic authorial presence’ are relevant here. Ibid., 251.
111A full modern edition can be found in Tischler, The Earliest Motets, ii, 1334.
112Huot, Allegorical Play, 13.
113 L'art d'amours (The Art of Love), trans. Lawrence B. Blonquist (New York, 1987), x.
114O'Neill, Courtly Love Songs, 15.
115On the dating of Mo, see Mark Everist, Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France: Aspects of Sources and Distribution (New York, 1989), 110–34; Mary E. Wolinski, ‘The Compilation of the Montpellier Codex’, Early Music History, 11 (1989), 263–301; Catherine Parsoneault, ‘The Montpellier Codex: Royal Influence and Musical Taste in Late Thirteenth-Century France’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2001); and Alison Stones, ‘Les manuscrits du Cardinal Jean Cholet et l'enluminure Beauvaisienne vers le fin du XIIIème siècle’, L'art gothique dans l'Oise et ses environs (XII ème –XIV ème siècles): Architecture civile et religieuse, peinture murale, sculpture et arts précieux: Colloque international organisé à Beauvais les 10 et 11 octobre 1998 par le Groupe d'Etude des Monuments et Oeuvres d'Art de l'Oise et du Beauvais (Beauvais, 2001), 239–68.
116Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete” ’, 47–8.
117Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets’, 646.
118Peter L. Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia, PA, 1992), 46–58.
119This text is the work of two anonymous translators; the first wrote Books 1 and 2 in the early thirteenth century, while Book 3 was written later by a different clerk. See L'art d'amours, trans. Blonquist, x.
120Minnis, Magister amoris, 47–8.
121 Minnis, Magister amoris, 46.
122See Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 257.
123 Ars amatoria, Book 1, verses 137–8. In L'art d'amours, the translation occurs in lines 484–5: ‘Gardes, se tu pues parler a lui, que tu ne lui faces signes ne guignements.’ Bruno Roy, L'art d'amours: Traduction et commentaire de l’Ars Amatoria d'Ovide (Leiden, 1974), 85.
124Minnis, Magister amoris, 46.
125Roy, L'art d'amours, 86.
126Although the rhyme words vary in subsequent verses, the liaison is maintained throughout, also appearing in the truncated envoi.
127The KNPX chansonniers provide music only for the first refrain in chansons avec des refrains.
128Several scholars maintain the possibility of such ‘newly composed’ refrains. See above, n. 21. Clark, however, argues that the formal structure in interpolated narratives and chansons is often enough to determine the presence of a refrain. Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete” ’, 47.
129 Several scholars maintain the possibility of such ‘newly composed’ refrains. See above, n. 21. Clark, however, argues that the formal structure in interpolated narratives and chansons is often enough to determine the presence of a refrain. Clark, ‘“S'en dirai chançonete” ’, 48–54.
130See Roger Dragonetti, La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: Contribution à l’étude de la rhétorique médiévale (Bruges, 1960), 140–1.
131Elizabeth Eva Leach identifies a similar irony in Machaut's music. See Leach, ‘Singing More About Singing Less: Machaut's Pour ce que tous (B12)’, Machaut's Music: New Interpretations, ed. Elizabeth Eva Leach and Suzannah Clark (Woodbridge, 2003), 111–24.
132Beryl Smalley, ‘Peter Comestor on the Gospels and his Sources’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 46 (1979), 84–129.
133Minnis, Magister amoris, 63. Given the connection between this motet and L'art d'amours, it is interesting to note that Minnis claims this prologue came to be strongly associated with Ovidian commentary.
134See Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 102–3.