Capital, Value, and Exchange in the Old Occitan and Old French Tenson (Including the Partimen and the Jeu-Parti)
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Capital, Value, and Exchange in the Old Occitan and Old French Tenson (Including the Partimen and the Jeu-Parti) Eric Matheis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 @2013 Eric Matheis All rights reserved ABSTRACT Capital, Value, and Exchange in the Old Occitan and Old French Tenson (Including the Partimen and the Jeu-Parti) Eric Matheis This dissertation examines the genre of lyric debate poetry in Old Occitan and Old French known as the tenson. It evaluates the creation, performance, and diffusion of tensons from the perspective of capital—cultural, social, and economic capital. It views tensons as negotiations between poets for various types of capital. It also briefly uses game theory to analyze certain types of tensons as formal games. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 1. Language and the terms of exchange in a tenson ................................................4 2. The early partimen and jeu-parti, value, and capital .........................................22 3. Overview of chapters .........................................................................................39 Chapter 1: Capital, Discourse, and Voice ..........................................................................47 1.1. Definition of the corpus and the genre ............................................................50 1.2. Tenson, Canso/chanson, and other genres of lyric .........................................60 1.3. Historical origins and development ................................................................69 1.4. Previous scholarship on lyric and the tenson ..................................................76 1.5. Theoretical framework: capital, discourse, and voice ....................................83 1.6. Poets and capital .............................................................................................94 1.7. Economic and social setting of troubadour and trouvère lyric .....................110 1.8. Lyric discourse and fin’amor ........................................................................116 1.9. The practice of poetry and cultural capital ...................................................121 1.10. Voice and capital in the tenson ...................................................................125 1.11. The compilation of tensons in the manuscript tradition ..............................136 Chapter 2: Negotiation and Capital in the Tenson ...........................................................150 2.1. Tensons concerning apprenticeship and cultural capital ...............................152 2.2. Tensons between poets about patronage .......................................................160 2.3. Reputation, competition, and social capital: the case of Sordel ...................169 2.4. Tensons with patrons.....................................................................................184 2.5. Women speakers: patrons, joglaresas, and fictive voices ............................200 i Chapter 3: Value, Evaluation, and Exchange in the Partimen and Jeu-parti .................................................................................................226 3.1. The nature of the game: exchange and the accumulation of capital .......................................................................................................228 3.2. The partimen/jeu-parti as a game: chess and other contemporary models ...................................................................................239 3.3. Game theory, rewards, cake-cutting, and market exchange .........................252 3.4. The language of value and evaluation ..........................................................264 3.5. Economic thinking and the jeu-parti ............................................................290 3.6. Marriage in the partimens and the jeux-partis ..............................................299 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................307 Index of Poets Cited .........................................................................................................315 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................321 Appendix: Corpus of Tensons ..........................................................................................338 ii LIST OF CHARTS AND DIAGRAMS Table 1.1. Tensons in Occitan Chansonnier D ................................................................146 Table 2.1. Tensons and female voices .............................................................................202 Table 2.2. Occitan tensons with a female voice ..............................................................206 Diagram 3.1. The jeu-parti as an extensive-form game ..................................................259 Appendix: Corpus of 201 Occitan tensons ......................................................................338 Appendix: Chansonniers and manuscripts containing Occitan tensons (including partimens) .........................................................362 Appendix: Corpus of 202 French tensons ........................................................................364 Appendix: Chansonniers and manuscripts containing Occitan tensons (including partimens) .........................................................389 iii Abbreviations used (see Works Cited for full citation) COM Ricketts and Reed. Concordance de l’Occitan médiéval (COM 2). P.C. Pillet and Carstens. Bibliographie der Troubadours. PSW Levy. Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch. 8 vols. R (for “Raynaud”) Spanke, ed. G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes. All citations from French jeux-partis are from Långfors, and noted by Spanke-Raynaud number (“R”) (see Appendix for page number in Långfors) Letters or sigla of Occitan and French manuscript songbooks are listed in the Appendix (after the table of works in the corpus) iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Research for this dissertation was made possible in part by the following research grants: Dissertation Fellowship from the Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University Reid Hall Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University Special thanks to Professors Sylvie Lefèvre and to Caroline Jewers for their help v Dedicated to Mary Ann, Karen, Todd, Linda, and Danielle vi Introduction This study begins with two lyric debate poems, or tensons: “Bella, tant vos ai preiada” (P.C. 397,2), and “Jauseme, quel vos est semblant” (P.C. 178,1=167,30b). The two works were likely composed within about ten years of one another, in the period between the early 1180s and the early 1190s. At this time, troubadour lyric had been advancing for some eighty years,1 and was coming into the period of its greatest productivity; it was also becoming more standardized and entering what can be seen, in retrospect, as its classical era (Gouiran; Paden, “System”; Chambers, Versification 156). By this point, lyric by known trouvères had been developing for at least a few decades.2 The dialogue genre known as the tenson had existed in Occitan since at least 1137.3 Of the two tensons here, “Jauseme” is, intriguingly, half in Occitan and half in French, and may be among the earliest tensons that contains French-language dialogue. These two tensons are close in date, and are bilingual—both being half in Occitan— although they differ in several respects. They originate from two different border areas into which Occitan lyric had spread: “Bella” hails from northern Italy and is half in Italian, and “Jauseme” comes from western France and is half in French. “Bella” is made up of a free discussion between two speakers, typical of the sort of open tenson that first originated in the Occitan tradition, and which would continue to be practiced in both Occitan and French. “Jauseme” is a very early example of a specialized type of tenson called a partimen or joc partit in Occitan, and called jeu-parti in French. In this type of work, the discussion is limited to a single question with two options. The first speaker formulates the question; the second speaker must select one of the choices and then argue for it, and subsequently the first speaker defends the remaining choice. Despite their differences, the two poems—one a simple tenson and the other a partimen/jeu-parti—may be connected by only a degree or two of separation. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, one of the partners in “Bella,” may have participated in another tenson with 2 Gaucelm Faidit, who is a partner “Jauseme”; in addition, mutual acquaintances debated both men in other tensons.4 “Bella” and “Jauseme” illustrate the reasons why the tenson was so attractive to poets, patrons, and audiences of the time. Troubadours composed about two hundred tensons, and the trouvères about as many. In the two traditions, poets created works in the genre over a period of a hundred and fifty years, and across a large geographic area. Medieval compilers diligently collected them and copied tensons into manuscript songbooks, along with other types of Occitan and French lyric. Yet compared to the love songs that the troubadours and the trouvères created, the tensons are much less read and studied in modern times. Indeed, separated from their context,