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Levitsky Dissertation The Song from the Singer: Personification, Embodiment, and Anthropomorphization in Troubadour Lyric Anne Levitsky Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Anne Levitsky All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Song from the Singer: Personification, Embodiment, and Anthropomorphization in Troubadour Lyric Anne Levitsky This dissertation explores the relationship of the act of singing to being a human in the lyric poetry of the troubadours, traveling poet-musicians who frequented the courts of contemporary southern France in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that the troubadours surpass traditionally-held perceptions of their corpus as one entirely engaged with themes of courtly romance and society, and argue that their lyric poetry instead both displays the influence of philosophical conceptions of sound, and critiques notions of personhood and sexuality privileged by grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. I examine a poetic device within troubadour songs that I term ‘personified song’—an occurrence in the lyric tradition where a performer turns toward the song he/she is about to finish singing and directly addresses it. This act lends the song the human capabilities of speech, motion, and agency. It is through the lens of the ‘personified song’ that I analyze this understudied facet of troubadour song. Chapter One argues that the location of personification in the poetic text interacts with the song’s melodic structure to affect the type of personification the song undergoes, while exploring the ways in which singing facilitates the creation of a body for the song. Chapters Two and Three examine specific types of body formation located in the tornadas of the personified songs. In Chapter Two, I argue that the troubadours exploit pedagogies of singing and philosophical conceptions of sound to undercut the privileging of heterosexual relationships as the only, “natural” form of sexual relationship. In Chapter Three, I argue that troubadour lyric poetry engages with Latin grammatical treatises to undermine the primacy of a binary gender system, and open up space within the lyric for a third gender. I examine songs whose tornadas include both of the differently gendered (masculine and feminine) versions of the Old Occitan noun for “song,” exploring the complicated (and often contradictory) way in which multiple subject positions were expected to inhabit a single person, and suggesting a fluidity of gendered constructs that permeates the lyric corpus as a whole. In my final chapter, I argue that the troubadours continue to act as social critics even after their poetic tradition comes to an end, as the songs form different types of bodies through their contact with the parchment page of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. I analyze the songs’s lives as objects of literary transmission, exploring how the concept of the personified song changes when its audience no longer encounters it in performance. I argue that, although the personified songs do not make explicit reference to the parchment on which they come to be written, they are similarly embodied with parchment-skins that simultaneously serve as body and body-covering. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Examples and Illustrations ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Performance and Personification 14 Chapter 2: Learning and Embodiment 64 Chapter 3: Language, Gender, and Personification 101 Chapter 4: Parchment as Skin 150 Conclusion 197 Bibliography 211 Appendices 235 !i LIST OF EXAMPLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS Examples Example 1: Melody, Raimon de Miraval, “Aissi cum es genser pascors,” 35 first stanza and tornada, from MS G, 68r. Example 2: Melody, Raimon de Miraval, “Aissi cum es genser pascors,” 37 first stanza and tornada, from MS R, 83v. Example 3: Melody, Guiraut de Bornelh, “Leu chansonet’ e vil,” 44 first stanza and tornada, from MS R, 9v. Example 4: Melody, Bernart de Ventadorn, “Conortz aras sai eu be,” 46 first stanza and tornadas, MS R, 57v. Example 5: Melody, Bernart de Ventadorn, “Conort era sai ben,” 47 first stanza and tornadas, MS G, 20r. Example 6: Melody, Raimon de Miraval, “Tot quan fatz de be ni dic,” 51 sixth stanza, MS R, 85v. Example 7: Melody, Rigaut de Berbezilh, “Ausiment con lolifant,” 55 fifth stanza, MS X, 84r-v. Example 8: Melody, Rigaut de Berbezilh, “Atressi com l’olifanz,” 56 fifth stanza, MS W, 195v. Example 9: Melody, Rigaut de Berbezilh, “Atressi com l’olifanz,” 57 fifth stanza, MS G, 63r. Example 10: Melody, Bernart de Ventadorn, “A, tantas bonas chansos,” 59 first stanza and tornada, MS R, 58r. Example 11: Melody, Peirol, “D’un sonet vau pensan,” first stanza and 94 second tornada, MS G, 43v. Example 12: Text, Peirol, “D’un sonet vau pensan,” ed. Aston. 95 Example 13: Melody, Guiraut Riquier, “Aissi pert poder amors,” 181 first stanza and tornada, MS R, 103v. !ii Example 14: Melody, Guiraut Riquier, “No"m sai d’amor,” 184 fifth stanza, MS R, 104v. Example 15: Poetic Structure of Guiraut Riquier’s canso redonda “Volontiers faria.” 186 Example 16: Melody, Guiraut Riquier, “Volontiers faria,” 187 sixth stanza, MS R, 106v. Example 17: Melody, Guiraut Riquier, “No cugey mais d’esta razon chantar,” 190 fifth stanza, MS R, 110v. Illustrations Illustration 1: Guiraut Riquier, “No"m cugey mais d'esta razon chantar,” 194 MS R, 110v. Illustration 2: Guiraut Riquier, “No cugey mais d’esta razon chantar,” 195 in MS C, 306v. !iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank here the many people whose intellectual insights, creative endeavors, and emotional support helped me form, hone, and complete this dissertation. First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation advisor, Susan Boynton, whose guidance has been invaluable to both my development as a scholar and to the development of this project. Professor Boynton helped me to refine my ideas and my writing while allowing me to explore myriad avenues of thought, some more successful than others. I have also benefited hugely from exposure to her methods of scholarship and writing. I am also grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee. Ana Maria Ochoa’s courses and comments on my work have challenged and broadened my ways of thinking and have shaped the ways I approach my work. Anna Zayaruznaya’s fascinating work has helped me both to refine this project and think about future research, and I look forward to more thought- provoking conversations with her. Eliza Zingesser’s comments have been crucial to the development of this project, and I am indebted to her for her support with things both dissertation-related and otherwise. I am grateful to Giuseppe Gerbino for his helpful and considered feedback at various stages of my graduate studies, and especially during the early stages of this project. Elizabeth Eva Leach read an early draft of my first chapter, and kindly invited me to present my work to her graduate and postdoc group when I was in Oxford in the fall of 2015, and again last summer. She and her students (particularly Joe Mason, Henry Drummond, Meghan Quinlan, and Matthew Thomson) welcomed me into the Oxford medieval vernacular song scene, and I am grateful for their feedback and support. I would also like to thank Ellie Hisama, who !iv has helped and supported me in innumerable ways during my time at Columbia. I took her course in my first semester of graduate school, and both her work in feminism and her advice on the practicalities of writing and publishing have had a lasting influence on me. My colleagues at Columbia have provided emotional support and intellectual stimulation in steady supply. I would like to thank especially Maeve Sterbenz, Paula Harper, Ralph Whyte, Will Mason, John Glasenapp, AJ Johnson, Russell O’Rourke, Elliott Cairns, Galen DeGraf, and Ben Hansberry. I am sincerely grateful for those who I make music with, especially Joe Power, Kathleen Cantrell, Evelyn DeGraf, and the rest of GHOSTLIGHT Chorus. Singing with them has brought much-needed balance and creative restoration into my life. My family, David Levitsky, Laura Williams, and Rachel Levitsky, has been giving me support, love (sometimes tough, when necessary), and encouragement since long before I started graduate school. Thank you for your patience and for your belief in me. And finally, to Kit Kowol (and Charlemagne), for everything. !v for Mom and Dad !vi Introduction In this dissertation I explore the role of song in the medieval vernacular lyric corpus of the troubadours, poet-musicians who frequented the courts of northern and southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The troubadour corpus is one of the earliest examples of secular vernacular poetry and the earliest in a Romance language. It provides insight into the roles men and women played in Occitan courtly society, and marks the beginning of a tradition of love poetry continued in later Western cultures. This corpus was more than just a collection of songs—it was a network of poets and songs that, through poetic tropes, constructed a fictional courtly world where ideas and images of the perfect lover and the ideal lady (and the relationships between them) were worked out. I explore instances in the troubadour corpus in which the songs themselves are treated as people, which I call personified songs. The songs are asked (via direct address) to serve as messengers for their composers and are instructed to travel some undetermined distance to the message’s recipient—usually a patron or the troubadour’s beloved.1 I argue that this act of personification lends the songs human capabilities. Additionally, the direct address combines with performance connected with the composition and oral transmission of the lyric to create 1 While the idea of troubadour songs serving as messages, usually to distant ladies and patrons, is one of the central tenets of scholarship on the corpus, the notion of the song itself as both message and messenger is not as common.
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