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352 Saltzstein
Chapter 12 Adam de la Halle’s Fourteenth-Century Musical and Poetic Legacies
Jennifer Saltzstein
His likely death in the Kingdom of Sicily around 1288 may have put an end to a brilliant artistic career, but Adam de la Halle’s music and drama resonated throughout northern France long afterward.1 In the smudged, dirty margins of fr. 25566, we see traces of the many hands who turned the pages of Adam’s works. So worn and soiled are the pages of Méjanes 166, a copy of Adam’s Jeu de Robin et Marion, that several of its comic-book style marginal illuminations are nearly indecipherable. We may never know exactly how many Adam de la Halle enthusiasts used these books during the fourteenth century and beyond, although new collaborations between humanists and scientists are offering ex- citing clues about the anonymous traces medieval readers have left behind in their manuscripts.2 Did the medieval people who handled these books merely read Adam’s lyrics and plays silently while feasting their eyes on the beautiful miniatures?3 Or were these readers diligently learning and memorizing their lines and their melodies, preparing for new performances of a beloved reper- tory by a treasured local artist? It seems unlikely that these manuscripts sat untouched on lecterns or collected dust on the shelves of aristocratic libraries; they were clearly used, and used well, for quite a while after Adam’s demise. As Mark Everist rightly notes, during the first half of the fourteenth century, the music of Adam de la Halle and his fellow trouvères “was very much alive (even if its creators were dead), copied and cultivated well into the fourteenth cen- tury. This practice continues a thirteenth-century tradition that prized older music at the same time as it reworked it….”4
1 For arguments against the theory that the “Adam of Arras” who is listed as a hired performer at Caernarvon Castle during Edward II’s coronation as the first Prince of Wales in 1306 was Adam de la Halle, see Chapter 1 in this book by Carol Symes. 2 See, for example, K.M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2 (2010),
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Adam De La Halle’s Fourteenth-century Musical 353
Adam’s music and lyrics were entered into a number of manuscripts pro- duced in the early fourteenth century, many years after his death. A group of Adam’s chansons was copied into the pages of I-trouv. in the early fourteenth century.5 This chansonnier is organized by genre, and the “grands chants” sec- tion begins with a song by Blondel de Nesle, who represents the earliest gen- eration of trouvères. Elizabeth Eva Leach notes that although not announced with a pen-flourished capital or included in the chansonnier’s index, a lyric by Adam de la Halle is appended to the end of Blondel’s song.6 This gesture posi- tions Blondel and Adam as bookends of a lyric tradition lasting over century. Several of Adam’s polyphonic rondeaux appear in k and CaB, manuscripts that also likely date from the early fourteenth century.7 Adam’s motet Entre Adan (725) / Chiès bien (726) / Aptatur (O 45) is found in Tu, a motet codex thought to have been copied around 1300. Chapters by John Haines and Judith Peraino in this book have shown the ways in which trouvère chansonniers could func- tion as cultural history books, not only preserving a repertoire but also creating narratives for their readers that contextualized the songs they recorded as ur- ban and clerkly, in the case of T-trouv., or as emblems of a dying aristocratic world, in the case of M-trouv. What might Adam’s music have signified to read- ers and listeners in the fourteenth century? To assess Adam’s artistic legacies, we must consider, in particular, his impact on polyphonic song and the echoes of his words and lyrics that resound in later Old French verse narratives. Among the earliest literary reactions to Ad- am’s works might be the satirical romance Renart le Nouvel. Scholars have long noted a corpus of refrains shared between Adam’s plays and rondeaux, Renart, the Tournoi de Chauvency, and the songs of I-trouv., among other sources. Nico van den Boogaard offered the first account of this interlocking intertextual re- frain network, noting shared refrains between Renart and, in particular, ms. I-trouv.8 Exploring this network further, Ardis Butterfield stressed the relation- ship between Renart and the Tournoi, as well as strong connections between these two romances, Adam’s rondeaux, and the refrains found in Adam’s Jeu de Robin et Marion and Jeu de la feuillée. Butterfield states, “It seems clear from
5 On the dating of I-trouv., see Eglal Doss-Quinby, Samuel N. Rosenberg, and Elizabeth Aubrey, The Old French Ballette: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 308 (Geneva: Droz, 2006), liii–liv. 6 Elizabeth Eva Leach, “A Courtly Compilation: The Douce Chansonnier,” in Leach and Helen Deeming, eds., Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 221–46, 231. 7 On the dating of these manuscripts, see Mark Everist, “‘Souspirant en terre estrainge’: The Polyphonic Rondeau from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut,” Early Music History 26 (2007): 1–42, 8–11. 8 Nico H.J. van den Boogaard, “Jacquemart Giélée et la lyrique de son temps,” in Henri Roussel and François Suard, eds., Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jakemart Giélée et leur temps (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980), 333–54, 351.