Song and the Soundscape of Old French Romance

The topic of this essay is song’s presence in romance and, in particular, its status and

meaning as sound. The tradition under consideration is that of Old French romance, from

its early incarnation in the 1170s, in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, to the early decades

of the thirteenth century. Romance’s emergence coincided with a period of extraordinary

creativity in the realm of vernacular song, most notably with the emergence of a Northern

lyric tradition of the trouvères, with the continued cultivation of their Occitan inspiration

in the lyrics of the troubadours, and with the earliest efforts at codification of both, in

songbooks or chansonniers, the earliest examples of which date from the 1230s. That

there was a natural sympathy between romance and song culture is self-evident. Both

speak out to, and about, aristocratic habitats of the court, espousing values of chivalry

and fin’ amors; while scenes of festivities, replete with musical performances, were a

familiar feature of the courts represented in romance. There is evidence, too, of a more

practical, creative entanglement of the two, best witnessed in a category of texts dating

from the early thirteenth century in which songs from the lyric tradition are interpolated

into narrative, a genre sometimes referred to as the romans à chansons.1 Jean Renart’s

Roman de la Rose, also known as Guillaume de Dole (c. 1218), claimed to inaugurate the

practice,2 and drew liberally from the stock of vernacular song (both Northern and

Occitanian), using them to animate characters, and to enliven scenes of courtly

celebration.3

Despite the seeming proximity of these two creative media, there remains from a

scholarly perspective a significant distance between them; a gap attributable in part to the

ambiguous status of song as a sounding phenomenon. Thus, for example, song’s

1

interpolation in romance has frequently led to a sub-categorisation within the romance

genre, and characterisation of such texts as a “hybrid” mix of two traditions.4 Music’s

quoted presence is a mark of difference, even from the many romances sans chansons

which contain lavish descriptions of music-making. Yet if music is a signal of their not-

quite-literary status, the romans à chansons have had only modest purchase in the

musicological mainstream. This may be attributed, paradoxically, to the fact that as only

partial citations, many without musical notation,5 the songs in romance do not quite

constitute musical works, or fully singable songs, in a historiography of song that more

usually begins with the fully notated chansonniers of the mid thirteenth century.

Meanwhile, literary approaches to romance (with and without song) suggest that what

scenes of music-making connote is not itself a musical act at all, but rather a

representation of an act: the simulacrum, then, of an active performance or voice, but not

the performance itself.6 Finally, in work that most clearly forges bridges between literary

and musical traditions, Sylvia Huot’s and Ardis Butterfield’s exploration of the

interaction of performative traditions with written media of manuscripts in the thirteenth

century points to the ways in which earlier oral traditions underwent a conceptual

transformation in their inscribed, repeatable form. Huot’s proposition of a “poetics” of

manuscripts is specifically concerned with what she perceives to be a shift in lyric from a

“performative toward a more writerly poetics” in the thirteenth century.7 Thus, within the

discourse of the manuscript, romances (with and without song), and songs themselves,

are represented according to a “writerly concept of the song.”8 Butterfield’s work on the

same repertories likewise detects a certain slipperiness in the relationship between

writing and performance.9 Accordingly, works such as Guillaume de Dole “go[es] hand

2

in hand with new self-consciousness about the significance of writing songs.” Thus

Butterfield is cautious about the notion that such texts can contain a “real presence” of

performance, and argues that they are rather “always functioning in a borderline area in

which constant negotiations take place between public and private, vocal and aural,

physical and abstract concepts of communication.”10

This brief overview of disciplinary perspectives of song and romance points to the

multiplicity of functions song could have, in and outside romance, and also to the ways in

which early romance and song repertories continued to “live,” in their transformations

into written media. It points, too, to an ontology of song that is more varied and variable,

and often quite different from later, more familiar, concepts of music rooted in the idea of

a work. Yet in all these accounts, song’s most vital qualities, emanating from its sonic

presence, remain muted. Here, I think there is a case to be made for an integrated

approach, more grounded in the possibility that song in romance draws upon effects

derived from oral and aural encounter – in song’s most songish dimensions, as a thing

produced of a voice, and encountered by an ear: a thing drastic, performative, emotive,

alive to human encounter. Approached as an integrated history, the story of romance and

song offers a rare opportunity to attune to that most elusive aspect of music history: a

history of sound’s effects. It is a story that may inform an understanding of vernacular

song, but also invite new modes for listening to romance.

In this essay I pursue one line of enquiry, with the hope of inviting further

investigation of these dual histories, similarly flexible with regards to disciplinary

category and expectations. What follows offers some ways to “turn up the volume” on

romance. While the romance soundscape is made up of a diverse sonic spectrum ranging

3

from song to terrifying noises of combat, I will attend primarily to sounds that are most

obviously musical (knights and ladies who sing, or jongleurs who provide instrumental

entertainment). Bound into the impetus to listen is a curiosity about the significance of

musical sound as an event linked to a phenomenological reality, and to its socialising and

emotional potential. My examples are characterised by Northern French production and

reception, and by their largely “courtly” content.11 They include three romans à

chansons: two closely-related romances, Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole, Gerbert de

Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette, and a later thirteenth-century romance attributed to

Jakemés, his Roman du Châstelain de Couci et de Dame de Fayel, a work modelled on

those earlier examples. These texts cite liberally from Northern and Occitanian song

traditions, and in the case of Jakemés roman, base an entire narrative around the life of a

trouvère, the Châtelain de Couci.

My evidence is not limited to romans à chansons alone. It includes examples

from the early romance tradition of the last quarter of the twelfth century. These include

Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle and Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu.

All of these were written without musical interpolations, but contain lengthy episodes

representing music-making. According to John Baldwin, it is texts such as these that

provide the “‘horizon’” for the romans à chansons of Renart and Montreuil.12 Placing

literary and musicological accounts of these texts into dialogue, and drawing, too, on

recent work in musicology and studies on the soundscape, I shall demonstrate that the

soundworlds of romance were not merely decorative, and nor were they incidental to the

narrative. Rather, sound – and in particular musical sound – emerges as a crucial means

of generating a sense of place and community. Equally, it was the means by which social,

4

emotional and affective values were forged. These values may not have been limited to

the interior world of romance, and the later part of the essay will consider the extent to

which the musical values depicted in romance connected to the external environments in

which romance and songs were performed and enjoyed.

A brief word finally about the linguistic scope of this study. My essay limits its

review to texts and music from the medieval French tradition. However, the issues

pertaining to sound are by no means unique to this tradition. Early Arthurian romances

from the French tradition of course exerted considerable influence on other linguistic

traditions of romance, and this extended, too, to the presence of sound and

representations of music. In the English tradition, for example, many of the scenarios of

musicking we shall explore here were imported as a site of emulation, and indeed, the

soundscape was itself a topic of invention and expansion in some instances.13 Meanwhile,

writers in traditions from Old Norse saga, to Dante’s Vita Nuova display a preoccupation

with the frictions and compatibilities between narrative and lyric composition. The

concern with sound, then, is a universal concern of romance culture. By retaining a close

focus on a network of texts from romance’s inauguration in France, I hope to offer a

model that may be adapted and applied to the broader romance tradition, with a view to

encouraging readers to listen in on their texts, and to be attentive to the sonic qualities of

the materials of romance.

The Festal Soundscape

Sounds of many kinds abound in French romance. Some recall an older epic tradition:

sounds of warring knights and the clash of hooves and armor, bellowing oliphants, the list

5

goes on.14 Indeed, the endurance of such sounds may offer an interesting intervention in

disputes about the generic categories of romance and, in particular, distinctions between

romance and chansons de geste.15 Christopher Page, in his exploration of literary sources

for music-making in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notes that the earliest examples

of romance bring with them a subtle change in the range of sounds evoked. Musical

performance is not an explicit part of epic. The Chanson de Roland has implied

musicality – as its name suggests, it was represented as a song,16 and its hero foresees his

deeds will be remembered in songs, and worries that a false move may result in a “male

chançun.”17 But Roland himself never utters a note, nor are there any other scenes of

song-making in the story. This is in contrast to the hero of an early romance, the Roman

de Horn, which fashions a warrior of a different stripe: one who can “converse with

ladies and deport himself in a way that inspires emulation;” he can also sing and play the

harp.18 As courtly values take hold in the twelfth century – in court life as in literature –

they also, crucially, become audible. They manifest as eloquent, elegant behavior:

behavior that was often musical in nature.

Communal, courtly music-making is perhaps the most stable of a number of

recurring – and highly conventionalized – sonic tropes in romance.19 Christopher Page

and Peter Noble offer a useful “selective typology” of public categories of music in early

romances without interpolation, which includes music associated with feasts (including

those associated with weddings and tournaments); caroles sung and danced at court, and

sometimes within feasting contexts; singing parties, where court members entertain

themselves. There are also categories associated with singing on horseback, examples of

the “lai/harp” complex, where a courtier will sing and accompany himself on the harp;

6

solo performances by minstrels or courtiers; and catalogues of musical prowess in

accounts detailing the courtly accomplishments of characters.20 Romans à chansons, such

as Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette, seem to supply songs implied in the

earlier romances. I suggest that the absence of interpolations in those earlier texts should

not inhibit an effort to listen to romance’s musical representations. So repetitive and

stylized can such representations be that it may be tempting to tune them out as signs of

literal sonic effects, and understand them instead as literary devices: decorative, verbal,

or visual effects. Indeed, their conventional nature might be understood as a facet of

genre: that is, as a set component or episode to be deployed in part of what Matilda

Tomaryn Bruckner terms the “art of shaping” in romance.21 In the sense of offering a

predictable interlude within a form given to episodic organization,22 the scenes of large-

scale performance might be understood to operate rather like the ekphrastic episodes

found in romance: the ekphrastic description, a “hyper-conscious creation of art within

art,” also briefly suspends action, representing a kind of “time out” in the flow of then

narrative.23 While there is more to pursue in considering sound’s place in debates about

generic categories of romance, I here wish to consider the sonic implications of such

scenes. Is it possible to understand them as ripples or wrinkles in the experience of the

narrative, borne of a recognition of sound’s effective and affective power?

Scholars of troubadour and trouvère repertories have pointed to close

relationships between the worlds depicted in song lyrics and romance texts, and the

courtly environments in which they circulated, and speculate that scenes of musicking in

romance may have a partially documentary quality.24 Building on that work, I would

propose a somewhat different approach, one that derives inspiration from recent work in

7

the field of sound studies, specifically that associated with soundscapes. Here, it will be

useful to follow the lead offered by the foundational text of soundscape studies: R.

Murray Schafer’s 1977 The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning the

World. Schafer sets out a curriculum for an aural engagement with the world – that of the

past as well as present – that has been taken up in a number of scholarly constituencies. 25

Among the most fruitful aspects of Schafer’s project is the invitation to attend to the

keynote of the soundscape – a sonority specific to a particular place, at a given time, and

which participates in shaping the meaning of that environment, and the way its

inhabitants define their community. How, then, might the sounds depicted in romance –

ranging from the non-musical clash of swords to the highly stylized compositions of the

wedding scenes – establish a soundscape? Here it will be helpful to examine two aspects

of this complex area: the way in which sound creates an acoustic space; and how such

space might facilitate and manipulate social and emotional interactions among those

within, and involved in making, this acoustic space.

It will helpful to illustrate one aspect of the soundscape in some closer detail:

those sounds associated with courtly festivities – including weddings, feastings,

tournaments, knightings, and vows. As Noble, Page and Boulton all note, the festal

setting quickly acquired a standardized sonority in early romances; these scenes were

subsequently enlivened with interpolated music in the romans à chansons. The festal

soundscape was also evoked in texts as late as Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, where

courtly festivities were now a source of nostalgia for the chivalrous past.26

Chrétien’s Erec and Enide offers a template for the “classic” festal soundscape,

one frequently emulated and alluded to in later generations of romance authors. The

8

wedding of Erec and Enide at Pentecost is marked by a suite of activities: the inviting and

assembling of knights for two weeks of festivities, which included tournaments,

knighting ceremonies, as well as extensive feasting to celebrate the nuptials.27 The feast

that accompanies that union is marked by a specific acoustic:

Quant la corz fu tote assemblee,

N’ot menestrel en la contree

Que rien seüst de nul deduit,

Que a la cort ne fussent tuit.

En la sale mout grant joie ot;

Chascuns servi de ce qu’il sot:

Cil saut, cil tume, cil enchante;

Li uns conte, lis autres chante;

Li uns sible, li autres note;

Cil sert de harpe, cil de rote,

Cil de gigue, cil de vïele,

Cil fleüte, cil chalemele;

Puceles querolent et dancent;

Trestuit de joie faire tencent.

N’est riens qui joie i puisse faire

Ne cuer d’ome a leesce traire,

Qui ne soit as noces le jor.

Sonent timbre, sonent tabor,

Muses, estives et fretel

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Et buisines et chalemel.28

When the court was completely assembled, all the minstrels in the land who knew

any entertainment were present. And the court was not silent. In the main hall

there was great joy; everyone showed what he could do, one jumped, another

tumbled, a third did magic tricks, one told stories, another sang; one whistled,

another played an instrument, this one the harp, that the rote, this the gigue, that

the Vielle, this one the flute, another the shawm. The young ladies made caroled

and danced; everyone outdid themselves to show joy. Nothing that could bring

joy nor plunge the heart of man to happiness was missing from the wedding day.

The sounded tambourines and tabors, musettes, flutes and pipes, and trumpets and

reed pipes.29

There are several aspects to note. These include the wide variety of performances, which

range from singing, playing a comprehensive orchestra of instruments, to story-telling.

There are also specific physical activities associated with them, such as youthful caroling

and dancing. Equally important to register is the almost pedantic typology of instruments

and performances, and the formulaic nature of the writing (for example, the recourse to

listing “li uns… li autres,” and “cil… cil…”). Both the music and activities, and the

writerly devices by which they are inventoried, form part of the convention that moves

across the tradition.30 Thus while this kind of sonority, in particular its detailed

description, is quite rare in Chrétien, the example is among the earliest cases of a musical

representation that persists across the tradition, as far as Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede

de Fortune. Such duplication of the syntax and “paratactic formulae” also carries over

10

into a number of other festal accounts; these were as conventional as the sounds

depicted.31

The early romans à chansons enliven festal episodes with the interpolation of

actual music. Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette have both interpolated and

uninterpolated festal scenes. Both texts begin with extended descriptions of the festal

court, in which the copious refrains and dance songs (several with concordances),

performed by the members of the court, establish singing and dancing as integral to the

identity of the group.32 At the end of Guillaume de Dole, the revelation of the seneschal’s

treachery and the ultimate union of Conrad and Liénor unfold against the playbook of

festal conventions, from public performances by minstrels and courtiers from every

corner of the land to dancing and storytelling.33 According to Boulton, Renart’s addition

of songs in scenes of courtly festivities, “did no more than amplify the references to

musical performances that were already conventional in the representations of those

scenes punctuating most romances.”34 However, while agreeing with this, I would argue

that reading interpolated and uninterpolated festal scenes together helps to broaden the

evidential horizon for a consideration of these scenes as soundscapes. Together they

provide a substantial body of evidence not only for the sorts of sounds and music

associated with the festive courtly environment (which has been the primary concern with

these scenes to date). They also offer multiple opportunities to explore the work that

sound performs within the courtly communities and spaces represented. Understood on

those terms, they afford important insight into what sound does in such scenes. The

soundscape, in other words, restores sound, as an effect, to these scenes.

11

Accepted and understood as soundscapes, the noises implied by the numerous

instrumentalists and singers in festal settings contribute to the romance keynote by

establishing what Shafer terms a “soundmark”: that is, “a community sound which is

unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by people in

that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for

soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.”35 The repetition of the

festal sonority across centuries of romance may then be understood as just such an act of

preservation. In addition, the presence of that identifiable soundmark brings with it the

implication of an acoustic environment: “the acoustic space of a sounding object is that

volume of space in which the sound can be heard.”36 The sense that sound defines space

is apparent in the example of Erec and Enide. The location of the wedding festivities is

familiar enough: it is the hall at the court of King Arthur. However, the festal soundscape

is implicated in an expansion of the court’s boundaries on this occasion. The description

of music-making is followed by the narrator’s comment that “N’i ot guichet ne porte

close:/ Les issües et les entrees/ Furent totes abandonees,/ N’en fu tornez povres ne

riches” (“Neither gate nor door was closed: the entrances and exits were all abandoned

that day, and neither rich nor poor were turned away”).37 Sound and space interact here,

and the sheer volume of music-making, among the loudest scenes of the whole

romance,38 is marked by a dilation of the festal space. The court is both limitless and

excessive but, at the same time, also benevolently communal.

Another highly dramatic example of music’s role as spatial marker occurs in

Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu.39 One of the most memorable adventures facing the

hero of this early thirteenth-century romance is a trial by music. The scene of his

12

challenge is a grande sale. Unlike that depicted in Erec et Enide, this ceremonial

chamber is void of feasting nobles. It is located in the derelict and empty Cité de Ruine,

which is an inversion of the more regular festal setting and, accordingly, deploys music-

making here to perverse effect. The room has a thousand windows, and in each window

space there sits a jongleur, sumptuously attired, and armed with an instrument and a

candle. These form part of an enchantment and perform what is, in effect, an excessive

version of the festal soundscape trope, with instruments and pieces listed according to

convention.40 Not to be outwitted by their enchantment, the hero resists the jongleurs’

sonic temptation, and failure is marked by their extinguishing their candles and noisy

departure.41 Sound and space converge here, and as the jongleurs leave, taking their

music with them, the scene is plunged into darkness – the space becomes literally

indecipherable.42

While sound can establish environment, it can also establish those within it as an

“acoustic community.”43 Acoustics contribute to order and interaction within the

community; sounds which enter the acoustic community from outside are able similarly

to determine actions and reveal the community. In romance, the festal soundscape is most

explicitly bound into communal values, since it is also part of the economy of the court.

Demonstrations of largesse, hospitality and almsgiving were integral to aristocratic life,

and were no less a feature of the courts of the romances. Such occasions were often tied

to demonstrations of benevolence and gift-giving,44 and the acoustic component is

integral to that economy. Thus, the festal scene from Erec et Enide cited above concludes

with payment of the minstrels, while Conrad’s jongleur, Jouglet, in Guillaume de Dole, is

rewarded with a fur cloak for entertaining his lord with his quasi-lyric description of

13

Liénor.45 The festal soundscape also articulates – and sometimes suspends – categories of

class and gender. Musicologists have observed that implied or cited festal music is

markedly different from the introspective, emotional songs performed by individuals or

couples.46 Where festal scenes are interpolated they are often filled with rondets de carole

and refrains or rondeaux. The topics are light, with little hint of the lovelorn, inward-

looking style of the chanson courtoise traditions which comprise personal outbursts. This

distinction registers differently in the romance venue, where the acoustic space is also

one where hierarchies of gender and social class are established. In Gautier d’Arras’s

Eracle, a so-called historical romance, in which classical characters are translated into

contemporary chivalric context, aristocratic order is exaggerated around festal

performance. Singing, dancing and instrumental playing dominate communal gatherings

and are explicitly linked to rank.47 With the arrival of the empress Athanaїs, the

soundscape is transformed; it becomes overwhelming (“Grans est li noise environ li,”

“the commotion around her was deafening”) as she is thronged by instrumentalists, all

with noble backgrounds (“… frans et de halt lin,” “…noble and aristocratic family”).48

The more noble they are, the closer they get to the empress, as they dance and leap to the

music (“Et selonc se que cascuns valt/ S’en trait plus prés et tresque et salt,” “the higher

the status the closer they approached the empress, dancing and leaping as they went.”)49

The festal soundscape also permits a shift in gender relations. Women and men of the

court are represented as equal in entertainment, and in Guillaume de Dole, women

instigate singing and dancing as often as men. In the opening scene, undesignated knights

(“chevaliers”) and ladies (“dames”) interrupt one another to sing, while later Renart calls

14

out individuals by rank: the noble sister of the Duke of Mainz, followed by the Count of

Savoy, followed by the Count of Luxembourg, and so on.

The soundscape also permits certain modes of emotional interaction. Thus, it is

not simply that characters in romance marry, or that courtiers gather to celebrate: the

soundscape itself is a factor in determining public actions and private interactions. While

tournaments and jousts might coordinate knights in bodily combat and oppose heroes

against villains, music-making coordinates characters in more intimate, emotionally-

driven interactions. For example, the festal soundscape is a soundtrack to dancing, and

often involves a “call out” of members of the community to sing a song while others

listen or dance. The communal scenes of Guillaume de Dole witness members of

Conrad’s court taking turns to sing refrain songs, or “chansonnettes.”

In Jakemés’s Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel (c.1280?),

based on the life of the eponymous trouvère,50 the socializing effects of the festal

soundscape evolve as the mechanism for intimacy, intrigue, and ultimately deadly

revelation. Thus, shortly after the long-awaited consummation of the relationship

between the Châtelain and Dame de Fayel, courtiers assemble for festivities in the

Vermandois “en un lieu qui fu biaus et gens.”51 While Jakemés takes pains to locate the

event in a specific place, he also articulates it by means of its acoustic – not only in terms

of what was heard, but also, interestingly, in terms of what was not:

Trois jours dura entirement

La fieste ensi en teil deduit

C’on n’i demena autre bruit

De tournoiyer ne de jouster,

15

Fors de treskier, de caroler

Et de bien donner a mangier.52

The festivities lasted three full days in this way, in such delight that the only noise

was of dancing, of caroles, and of copious feasting, without that of tournaments

and jousting.

There follows a check-list of jongleurs, who are once again paid for their services, and

then dancing and singing ensue. In the course of that, one of the ladies present, a “dame

de Vermendois,” who carries a torch for the Châtelain, takes the opportunity of the feast

to try to get close to him. Against the backdrop of music and dance, she observes him,

growing increasingly suspicious that his downcast air and sighs belie a secret – that he is

in love with someone else. This gradual unfolding of suspicion to jealous intent is

punctuated by both her own performance, and that by the Dame de Fayel, as well as of

other ladies of the court, all of whose lyrics reflect their unuttered thoughts of suspicion

and joy.53 The secrets revealed in this musical hiatus set in motion a chain of events that

will prove fatal for the Châtelain. There is of course much more to say about the effects

of song in Jakemés roman, but this example offers insight into how the acoustic

environment can facilitate and stage highly nuanced intimacies. The festal acoustic is

thus also an emotional environment.

Soundscape as “Reality Effect”

Understood as a soundscape, festal sound in romance is infused with significance. Sound

is present in these scenes as a marker of spaces, and makes those spaces briefly

extraordinary, permitting behaviors and interactions among members of the acoustic

16

community that are equally unusual. What, though, of the status of the festal soundscape

of romance as “earwitness” to court performance, and thus as a witness to contemporary

musical traditions? As noted earlier, the documentary status of romance has been much

debated among literary scholars.54 Meanwhile, Schafer himself, and historians who have

followed, have remained sensitive to the difficulties of speaking of the historical

soundscape, particularly with regards the veracity of historical records as earwitness.55 In

the specific context of medieval romance, indeed any literary product of this period, one

needs to be cautious of assigning evidently rhetorically charged scenes with too much

documentary purpose. These texts were not mirror-images of an aristocratic venue, but

highly intricate, highly crafted products, just as was song-culture. However, while there

needs to be some caution about taking them at face value, there are also good reasons to

understand them dialogically – as speaking back to certain social milieu in very specific

ways. Indeed, the chivalric behaviors and values espoused in chansons de geste and

romance by their very nature were not bounded to literary artefact, but were lived, social

values too.56

In the case of romance, there is robust evidence to encourage a dialogic reading.

Early generation romances conversed from within and to an aristocratic audience.

Romances of Chrétien, Renart and Montreuil addressed specific noble patrons, and thus

spoke out to particular court culture.57 And there was a long tradition of the court

speaking – at times singing – back to romance. Archives and documentary histories of

court life testify to audiences who were not only attentive listeners to romance, but who

also, on occasion, sought to emulate it in court ritual and festivities. Broadening the

horizon of romance beyond the literary and musical sources reveals an active,

17

participatory audience among the aristocrats of a number of European courts. Understood

in the broader context of chivalric values, and their shift in the thirteenth century, as

aristocratic courts were increasingly brought into tension with an emergent bourgeois

culture, it is hardly surprising that these exchanges between fiction and reality

prevailed.58 Work by historians of court culture reveals the considerable interplay

between fiction and reality, as life imitated art imitating life. Thus, albeit in rather

perfunctory terms, contemporary Latin chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth

centuries note numerous festal scenarios, from coronations, to royal entries, to knighting

ceremonies.59 In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a manuscript such as

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, which records the Tournoi de Chauvency (based

on events of a week-long tournament in Chauvency in 1285), demonstrates the complex

ways in which the fictional worlds of romance were woven into construction of the

realities of aristocratic constituencies across Europe.60 By the early fourteenth century,

the festal scene had acquired a historical status, evocative of a bygone age. In his study of

court culture in North-West Europe, Malcolm Vale illustrates the many ways in which

certain public rituals were modeled on activities of romance.61

Returning to the earlier examples of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,

song might be understood to serve as an important mediator between the habitat of

literary representation in romance, and the environment of consumption, which was often

itself one of performance. Indeed, it is worth rehearsing some well-known facts about the

early generation trouvères. The most obvious of these is that a significant cohort of early

generation song-writers emerged from aristocratic backgrounds. Bondel de Nesle (ca.

1150-1200), Conon de Béthune (fl. ca. 1180-1219-20), Gace Brulé (fl. ca. 1185-1210),

18

the Châtelain de Couci (fl. 1186-1203), and Thibaut de Champagne (1201-1253) were all

linked to aristocratic families and were themselves of noble birth. Like the troubadours in

the later vidas and razos, their lives were often subject to amplification and restyling in

their later codification.62 But in some cases there is independent corroboration, as well as

internal referencing and self-referencing in song texts, which offer clues to their social

origins. Their social context is all important, since it demonstrates that they were part of

the culture that shared and defined the chivalric values depicted in romance narratives.

The social compatibility of song-makers and the inhabitants crafted into the

fantasy worlds of romance is evident, for instance, in Guillaume de Dole. In his

appropriation of songs into romance, Jean Renart makes the unusual gesture of naming

certain authors, notwithstanding his opening declaration that no one will know the songs

are not his own, because of his careful grafting of them into the story. Among those

named are Gace Brulé, Vidame de Chartres, and Renaut de Beaujeu, who were only

recently deceased at the time Renart was writing. The naming of authors indicates not

just that their songs were in circulation in his milieu, but also that the idea of them as

authors mattered. While it is easy to see this as precursor to the author-bias of the

chansonniers, it also offers insight into older contexts, in which the social rank of the

songmaker was significant to their audience, and significant, also, for their correlation to

the social orders depicted in romance narratives. A closer look at Renart’s cues of

trouvères evokes them along with cast of many nobles named in the text. Guillaume de

Dole is almost pedantic in the way it names and ranks members of the entourage, many

of them known historical figures, and moreover uses the festal scenes as opportunities for

call outs. It is in this context that composers are named, sometimes with the afterthought

19

that their song was the ideal song for the situation. A case in point is that of Renaut de

Beaujeu, whose song Conrad sings, overjoyed at the arrival of Guillaume at his court. In

this instance it is likely that the song is misattributed (it appears in later sources with

alternate attribution, and is, in any case, the only song attributed to Renaut in the

repertory).63 But the attribution itself is fascinating for bringing the romance author,

Renaut, into the cast of characters:

La chançon Renaut de Baujieu,

De Rencien le bon chevalier,

por son cors plus esleechier

de joie dou bon bacheler

commença lués droit a chanter:

Loial amor qui en fin cuer s’est mise…64

Out of joy at the good young man, and to delight his heart, he at once began to

sing the song of Renaut de Beaujeu, the good knight of Reims:

Faithful love which enters a noble heart…

The trouvère, hailing from Reims, and “bon chevalier,” enters the story like any number

of the other characters. Indeed, on finishing the song, Conrad hails Guillaume’s entry

with similar shorthand of name, place and rank: “Dole! Chevalier! A Guillaume!” (v.

1477). Singing the songs performs a kind of resuscitation, as their makers join the

community, briefly, as phantom nobility.

These brief examples point to a degree of reciprocity between the vernacular song

repertories and romance. Indeed, perhaps of all the musical scenarios of romance, the

20

festal interludes invite consideration for their “reality effect”: informed by, and

informing, the musical lives of their audience. Beyond the specific case of festal music,

this essay has sought to demonstrate how much more remains to be learned from an

approach to song and romance which collapses traditional generic boundaries. For

musicology, romance offers fresh challenges to the early history of song. The evidence of

the part of romance in illuminating a darker period of song history prior to its written

transmission should not be underestimated. The fundamental fact that texts such as

Guillaume de Dole or the Roman de la violette predate the earliest examples of musical

theoretical texts and notated chansonniers, the more familiar staple of the discipline, is an

important one. Perhaps the most pragmatic offering of romance studies to musicology,

then, is the reminder that the material life of song should not be constructed as one

bounded by the emergence of notated chansonniers. These are points that have been

underlined by scholars working in the middle ground between musicology and literary

studies, but the fact of song’s history before its material, notated, singable records begin

has yet to claim full purchase in the modern conception of medieval song. The

reconnection of the story of song with the music recorded in the romans à chansons, and

implied in the older romans sans chansons is one example of how broadening song’s

horizons might facilitate an ontological shift in the status of song, placing greater

emphasis on sound’s effects, and their connection to social and emotional values. What

emerges from the preceding discussion is the sense that as modern disciplines work

through the confusion that arises from too reified an approach to song, a new way

becomes apparent, one which invites reconsideration of the essential parameters of what

song is, how it works on those who make it, reiterate it, experience it in book, voice or

21

ear. Romance offers fresh insights into song history; conversely, attending to song as a

sonic presence in romance has the potential to enrich the understanding of that august

literary tradition.

22

1 This is the term used by Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17, and one I adopt throughout this essay.2 Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques français du moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1962). For a recent edition with translation see Jean Renart, The Romance of the Rose or of Guillaume de Dole (Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole), ed. and transl. Regina Psaki (New York: Garland, 1995). Quotations from Guillaume de Dole follow Psaki’s translation with minor adjustments.3 The classic study of the tradition, including detailed exploration of the range of song’s narrative functions remains Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 4 For example, in the introduction to her Song in the Story, Boulton states: “A narrative in which lyric poems or songs are inserted is essentially a hybrid creation, combining two disparate forms.” See Boulton, Song in the Story, 1. See also Simon Gaunt, “Romance and Other Genres,” in Roberta Krueger, ed., Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45, for problems of genre in romance scholarship.5 Butterfield and Boulton offer useful appendices which combine to form a comprehensive survey of romances with musical insertions, brief summaries of the numbers and types of songs included, catalogue of manuscripts with some information about the presence of musical notation or otherwise. See Boulton, Song in the Story, 295-299 and Butterfield, Music and Poetry, 303-313. This work can be supplemented by that of John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21-24, which tabulates sources for troubadour and trouvère melody and includes thirteenth-century literary works with notated interpolations (with manuscripts).6 The most provocative example of this is Michel Zink, Roman rose et rose rouge: Le roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole de Jean Renart (Paris: Nizet, 1979). Key elements of his argument about the status of lyrics as performance in Guillaume de Dole are rehearsed in his “Suspension and Fall: The Fragmentation and Linkage of Lyric Insertions in Le roman de la rose [Guillaume de Dole] and Le roman de la Violette,” in Nancy Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 105-121, discussed by Butterfield in Poetry and Music, 18-24. See, too, Maureen Barry McGann Boulton, “Lyric Insertions and the Reversal of Romance Conventions in Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose or Guillaume de Dole,” in Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 87-88.7 Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 1.8 Huot, From Song to Book, 4.9 Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 13, here with reference to accounts of the relationship between written record and sound as framed by Michael Clanchy and Paul Zumthor. For more recent discussion of these issues, see her essay “The Musical Contexts of Le Tournoi de Chauvency in Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 308,” in Mireille Chazan and Nancy Freeman Regalado, eds., Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine médiévale : Autour du Tournoi de Chauvency (Ms. Oxford Bodleian Douce 308) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012), 399-42210 Butterfield, Music and Poetry, 17.11 Here I follow Sarah Kay’s categorization, which posits a common thread of chivalry and courtly love linking lyric, romance, romans antiques and saints’ lives. See her Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 36-37. Kay in turn draws from Reto R. Bezzelo’s important argument linking the origins of courtly literature to “the interaction between aristocracy and clergy in medieval aristocratic courts,” quoted from Kay, Courtly Contradictions, 36. See his Les Origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident (500-1200), 5 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1966-1968).12 John Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190-1230 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1. For a more

extended discussion of the audiences of these romances and their familiarity with the older Arthurian tradition, see 248-55. 13 For an excellent account on the performativity of English romance see, for example, Linda Marie Zaerr, Performance and the Middle English Romance (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2012).14 On which see Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100-1300 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1987), 3-11.15 On which see especially Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and esp. 1-21 for the argument that the two genres were much less distinct that modern scholarship traditionally argues for. See, too, Gaunt “Romance and Other Genres”. 16 On the performance of epic, see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 188-89.17 A point emphasized by Jane Gilbert, “The Chanson de Roland,” in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22.18 Page, Voices and Instruments, 4.19 Peter Noble, “Music in the Twelfth-Century French Romance,” Reading Medieval Studies, 18 (1992), 17-31. 20 These are detailed in Page, Voices and Instruments, 151-59.21 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” in Roberta Krueger, ed., Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. See, too, her Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).22 Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance,” 24-25.23 See Linda Clemente, Literary objets d’art: Ekphrasis in Medieval French Romance, 1150-1210 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), quoting from 5.24 For example Christopher Page, “Listening to the Trouvères,” Early Music 25 (1997), 639-60, Ruth Harvey, “Courtly Culture in Medieval Occitania,” in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8-27. The status of texts as documentary witness has long been a source of debate among literary scholars, however, with scholars such as Zink, Zumthor, Dragonetti among others argue against a “historical-positivist” view in favor of a more purely literary/rhetorical approach. For a succinct review of these positions, and for an alternative, historically-orientated reading of romance, see John H. Baldwin, “‘Once there was an emperor …’: A Political Reading of the Romances of Jean Renart,” in Vine Durling, ed., Jean Renart and the Art of Romance, 45-82, esp. 45-46.25 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993). Schafer’s original book was published in 1977 under the title The Tuning of the World. For a useful overview on the treatment of Schafer’s soundscape, see Ari Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies,” Sense and Society, 5 (2010), 212-34. 26 Boulton devotes a chapter to “song as description,” which includes a number of examples of festal scenes in the romans à chansons. Her note 2 at 80 also lists examples where singing and dancing are mentioned without lyric quotation: Erec and Enide, Yvain, Panthere d’Amors, Guillaume de Dole, Cleomadés, Sone de Nansai, Escanor, and Froissart’s Chroniques. See Boulton, Song in the Story, 80-119.27 For further examples, see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 163-74.28 Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. Jean-Marie Fritz (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992), vv. 2031-2050.29 Translation by Carlton W. Carroll, Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 62, with adjustments.30 Page, Voices and Instruments, 155.

31 Page, Voices and Instruments, 155. See, for example, the wedding festivities in the Provencal romance Flamenca: The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and transl. E. D. Blodgett (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), vv. 587-713.32 Gerbert de Montreuil, Le Roman de la Violette ou de Gerart de Nevers par Gerbert de Montreil, ed. Douglas Buffum (Paris: Champion, 1928), vv. 65-304, Guillaume de Dole, vv. 259-556.33 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 5169-5656.34 Boulton, Song in the Story, 81.35 Schafer, The Soundscape, 10.36 Schafer, The Soundscape, 214.37 Erec et Enide, vv. 2052-55.38 For discussion of the volume of historical soundscapes (here that of seventeenth-century England) compared to the modern soundscape, see Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 49-51. 39 Renaut de Beaujeu, Le Bel Inconnu, ed. G. Pierre Williams (Paris: Champion, 1929). For a more recent edition with English translation, see Renaut de Bâgé, Le Bel Inconnu (Li Biaus Descouneüs; The Fair Unknown), ed. Karen Fresco, transl. Colleen Donagher, music ed. Margaret Hasselman (New York and London: Garland, 1992).40 Le Bel Inconnu, vv. 2887-2899.41 Philippe Walter has connected the conjunction of candlelight and jongleurs to a number of popular rituals and literary representations, including to the liturgical processions associated with the Feast of the Purification (Candlemas) and to miracle stories retold in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame. For more on the context for the scene in Le Bel Inconnu, see Philippe Walter, Le Bel Inconnu de Renaut de Beaujeu: Rite, mythe et roman (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 213-26.42 Discussed in Noble, “Music in the Twelfth-Century French Romance,” 25-6.43 Schafer, The Soundscape, 215-17.44 On which see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 98-121.45 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 724-25.46 Boulton, Song in the Story, 81.47 Gautier d’Arras, Eracle, ed. and transl. Karen Pratt, King’s College London Medieval Studies, 21 (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2007).48 Eracle, vv. 3450-54. 49 Eracle, vv. 3455-60.50 Jakemés, Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, ed. and transl. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009).51 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, v. 3751.52 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, vv. 3874-3879.53 Roman du Châtelain de Coucy, vv. 3831-3863. The lady of Vermendois sings Cescuns se doit esbaudir mignotement, and the Dame de Fayel sings J’aim bien loiaument.54 See note 24.55 See also Bruce R. Smith, “Coda: How Sound is Sound History?,” in Mark Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 389-94.56 The classic resource for this point remains Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), first published 1984. See also Baldwin, Aristocratic Life. The relationship between the values of courtliness as practice, and as literary and intellectual formation are subject, too, of an important new study of chivalry and knightly values by Craig Taylor, see his Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France During the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chapter one, “Texts and Contexts,” 19-53. 57 Joseph Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 4-23 on his dedicatees, and on the patrons for Renart and Montreuil, see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 31-67. Buffum’s commentary to his edition also includes a detailed list with short biographies of characters identified as historical figures. See Le Roman de la Violette, LV-LXXIII.

58 For a classic account of the literary witness to these political and social changes in France, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 11-54.59 Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, 163-67.60 The manuscript is subject to an important new study: Chazan and Freeman Regalado, eds., Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine mediévale. 61 Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).62 For a useful discussion, see John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33-38.63 For an edition, translation and discussion of the song see Margaret Hasselman’s appendix to Le Bel Inconnu, ed. Fresco, 416-27.64 Guillaume de Dole, vv. 1450-1462.