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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Poetry in Motion: The Mobility of Lyrics and Languages in the European Middle Ages Murray, David Alexander Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Nov. 2017 Poetry in Motion: The Mobility of Lyrics and Languages in the European Middle Ages David Alexander Murray King’s College London This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 0 Abstract Lyric poetry is privileged in many literary histories as the foundation of the European vernacular tradition. For medievals it was a particularized expression, beyond the bounds of normal discourse, worth careful critique, dissemination, and preservation. Transmitted with or via music, whose mobility and mouvance differs from that of written texts, courtly song was part of a cultural phenomenon common to most of Western Europe. The rise of the courtly lyric created a common poetic culture in which lyric poetry moved freely between and across geopolitical entities, where knowledge of ‘foreign’ poetry was far from unusual. Medieval poetry thus challenges modern conceptions of normative boundaries: the requisite recalibration is the subject of this investigation. It is concerned especially with linguistic boundaries: these differ, naturally enough, from modern ones, and invite closer examination of what languages were or could be in literary circles in the High Middle Ages. The material examined centres on Occitan and Old French literature between c. 1140 and 1350, but also makes substantial reference to works produced in Italian and German-speaking areas, and, occasionally, to Catalan, Latin and Middle English texts. My aim is to examine the different modes in which lyric poetry and lyrical forms moved around medieval Europe, suggesting patterns of crossing and confronting linguistic boundaries, both in their composition and their subsequent MS transmission. Each variety of mobility (contrafactum, multilingual poetry, lyric intercalation, translation, and the adoption of ‘foreign’ languages) has formed in previous scholarship a single topic of discussion. It is thus the novelty of this work to bring them together in order to give a richer account of European lyrical culture in the Middle Ages. There emerges a polycentric poetic field which does not map onto the Europe of standard national languages and literatures, but where the most important language was that of the courtly lyric itself. 1 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................................. 5 Introduction: Song in the European Middle Ages ................................................................................. 6 1.Poésie sans frontières: The fate of Bernart de Ventadorn’s ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ .............. 18 The MS transmission of ‘Can vei’ ....................................................................................................................... 21 Occitan responses to ‘Can vei’ ............................................................................................................................ 27 The ‘Carestia’ Debate............................................................................................................................................ 36 The Clerical Reception of Bernart de Ventadorn ............................................................................................ 54 Plus ultra: The Further Adventures of ‘Can vei’ .............................................................................................. 65 Citations of ‘Can vei’............................................................................................................................................. 72 A European Song .................................................................................................................................................. 78 2. Chanson, or puez aler par tout le monde: Multilingual lyrics and linguistic boundaries............ 80 Medieval Theories of Language. ......................................................................................................................... 83 Linguistic boundaries and literary conventions: Raimbaut and Cerverí ....................................................... 89 A Genoese Yankee at the Court of King Alfonso ........................................................................................... 98 Dante’s lingua trina ............................................................................................................................................. 106 Lyrics and Languages in Medieval England .................................................................................................... 115 The Multilingual Lyrics of Oswald von Wolkenstein .................................................................................... 120 Raimbaut redux — Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 132 3. Lyric poetry in and out of context ................................................................................................... 139 ‘Doctores vulgares’ .............................................................................................................................................. 143 Marcabru: Always already community ............................................................................................................. 155 Into Narrative: Jean Renart’s ‘novele chose’ ................................................................................................... 161 Raimon Vidal: Poetic Knowledge in Catalonia .............................................................................................. 168 Ulrich von Liechtenstein: ‘Nu hœret! die wîse sprachen alsô’ ..................................................................... 177 ‘Vita Nova’: Dante, the ‘libello’, and the creation of poetic identity ........................................................... 186 Conclusion: The Prose Tristan and its lyrical contexts ................................................................................. 195 4. Choosing a Language for Song: The Lyric Beyond ....................................................................... 201 Catalonia I: Guillem de Berguedà ..................................................................................................................... 205 Catalonia II: Cerverí, the ‘Last’ Catalan Troubadour .................................................................................... 215 Italy I: A New Beginning? .................................................................................................................................. 222 Italy II: South to North with Elephants .......................................................................................................... 231 2 Middle High German at Large: Prague, Breslau and beyond ....................................................................... 242 Conclusion: On the outside looking in? .......................................................................................................... 256 Conclusion: Lyrics, Languages, and Poetic Community in the Middle Ages ................................. 259 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 264 I. Editions, textual repertories, and printed MS reproductions .............................................................. 264 II. Critical studies and reference works ........................................................................................................ 268 Appendix I: MS sigla used in this dissertation .................................................................................... 287 Occitan Chansonniers .......................................................................................................................................