PART THRE E LYRICIS M AND THE BOOK IN THE FOURT EENTH CENTURY Or veult l'amant faire dis et balades, Lettres closes, segrectes ambaxades; Et se retrait Et s'enferme en chambre ou en retrait Pour escripre plus a l'aise et a trait. [Now the lover wants to make dits, ballades, closed letters, secret dispatches; and he withdraws, and shuts himself up in his room or in a retreat, in order to write more comfortably and leisurely.] Alain Chartier, "Debat de deux fortunes d'amour" Ch apter 7 The Vernacular Poet as Compiler: The Rise of the Single-Author Codex in the Fourteenth Century As we move from thirteenth- to fourteenth-century poets, we encoun­ ter significant innovationsin both poetic and codicological practices. Not only is there a new self-consciousness in the manipulation of lyric and narrative, in performative and writerly modes, and in the concept of poetic identity, but also the works of these later poets appear in an­ thology codices devoted entirely to a single author. Guillaume de Ma­ chaut and Jean Froissart, and after them such writers as Christine de Pizan and Charles d'Orleans, evidence an involvement with the process of compilation and book production that was not apparent in the poets of the thirteenth century. The codices of Machaut and Froissart were almost certainly organized by the authors themselves; Machaut may well also have designed, or at least influenced, programs of illumination for his works. 1 A given poem appears in the context of other poems by the same author; the sequence of texts defines a particular poetic person­ ality and the development of his career. That the composer of lyric and lyrical narrative poetry is also identified as the author of a book is of great significance, reflecting both a new consciousness on the part of poets and also an audience interest in possessing a given poet's complete works. Before analyzing individual texts, it is well to examine the overall 1. There is little question that both Machaut and Froissart supervised the preparation of codices, although of course we do not know precisely the extent of their involvement. Machaut's role in manuscript preparation is discussed by Avril, "Manuscrits enlumines"; Byrne; and Williams. Poirion refers to the innovative quality of Machaut's carefully or­ dered manuscripts during his discussion of Machaut in Poete et le prince, pp. 192-205; Brownlee discusses the literary significance of Machaut's compilations in "Transforma­ tions of the Lyric :Ie"'. Froissart refers to the preparation of codices in his Chronicles, as will be seen below. In the introduction to his edition of the Espinette, Fourrier suggests that both of the surviving anthology manuscripts of Froissart's poetry (Bib!. Nat. fro MSS 830, 831) could have been copied from an autograph original (p. 16). 211 Lyricism and the Book in the Fourteenth Century organization of the codices themselves and the precedents for this kind of manuscript production. In the opening chapters we saw that the middle and late thirteenth century witnessed some tendency toward the compilation of texts by a single author. Trouvere songs, perhaps because of the identification of author and protagonist and the centrality of the lyric "I," are nearly always grouped by author; evidence suggests that Thibaut de Navarre ' had his works compiled, and a complete compilation of the works of Adam de la Halle survives, though not necessarily from within the poet's lifetime. Among narrative texts, the romances of Chretien de Troyes are treated as an author corpus in MS Bibl. Nat. fro 1450, and they fre­ quently appear elsewhere in pairs or groups. In manuscripts other than MS 1450 nothing (such as rubrics or author portraits) explicitly indicates that they are to be read as an integrated corpus or that common au­ thorship is the basis for their association. But Chretien's system of inter­ textual allusions, such as the connections between Yvain and the Charrette or the reference to Erec et Enide in the prologue to Cliges, would author­ ize such a reading. The works of Adenet Ie Roi likewise tend to be transmitted in pairs or groups; and we saw that authorship is an organi­ zational principle in Arsenal MS 3142. MS 3 142 is interesting not only for its association of narrative poems by the same author but also for its collections of dits. The dit, like the song, was a genre that lent itself to transmission in author corpora, perhaps again because of the centrality of the poetic "I" as authority figure. The romance narrator grounds his authority in the real or fic­ tional written source(s) of his story, whereas the persona of song or dit is himself the authorizer of poetic truth; he speaks from his own experi­ ence, be it of love, of political intrigue, or of life in general. Rather than citing a previous written work, the dit poet is more likely to cite a dream or an event witnessed in the world. Since the narrative dit figures so prominently in the oeuvres of both Machaut and Froissart, it is impor­ tant to consider both the nature of the dit as a literary genre and the relationship between dit poetics and the organization of single-author codices. In a discussion of Machaut's Livre du voir dit, Jacqueline Cerquiglini offers two hypotheses concerning the dit as a genre: that it is a genre marked by a principle of discontinuity and that it is a type of discourse in which an "I" is always represented.2 Cerquiglini further associates the firstcharacteristic with the dit as an explicitly written genre; the princi­ ple of discontinuity, of a compositional structure that is extrinsic rather 2. Cerquiglini, "Clerc et l'ecriture," pp. 158 and 160. I do not take these characteristics of the dit as fixed generic requirements, but they do provide a useful insight into the affinities between poetics and compilation practice during this period. 212 The Vernacular Poet as Compiler than intrinsic to the material, is a function of writing.3 The "I" of the dit in turn is a voice projected into writing. According to Cerquiglini, the voice of the dit is neither the universal "I" of trouvere lyric nor that of the romance author who writes himself into his text in the third person to distinguish himself from the first-person voice of the live narrator who will read aloud or recite his works. The voice of the dit may mimic oral declamation, and dit poets such as Watriquet de Couvin undoubted­ ly recited their works at court; but the written text is primary. These two hypotheses concerning the generic distinction of the dit are useful for an understanding of the relationship between the dit as a literary form and the phenomenon of single-author codices. First of all, as I have said, the centrality of the poetic "I" clearly lends itself to an association of poems by the same author. Moreover, if the dit is to be associated with a principle of discontinuity, with ordering principles extrinsic to the material, then it is logical that the dit would lend itself to compilation: the series of individual dits is marked by the rhythm of closure and reopening, as one text ends and the next begins. The orga­ nizational principles peculiar to single-author compilations-au­ thorship, patronage, circumstances of composition-are associated with the extratextual act of poetic composition rather than, as in romance compilations, with the fictional or didactic world within the text (al­ though in many cases the process of composition may be represented within the text). In other words, this manner of compilation itself can be associated with what Cerquiglini has identifiedas a typical feature of dit poetics. It is a difficult and perhaps fruitless endeavor to determine whether the evolution of the dit influenced or was influenced by habits of manu­ script production; most likely the process worked in both directions. For the present, it is enough to say that the dit and the single-author codex are related phenomena. Our investigation of the single-author codex must therefore include not only such poets as Adam de la Halle, Thibaut de Navarre, Chretien de Troyes, and Adenet Ie Roi but also the masters of the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century dit; I will focus here on Rutebeuf, Baudouin de Conde, his son Jean de Conde, and Watriquet de Couvin. "Rustebuef, qui rudernent oevre": A Thirteenth-Century Author Corpus The poetry associated with the figure Rutebeufmust have enjoyed an immediate and fairly widespread popularity, for it is transmitted in 3. Ibid., pp. 159-60. In the same passage Cerquiglini cites Zumthor's statement in Essai de poetique medievale, p. 41, that "oralite et ecriture s'opposent comme Ie continu au discontinu." 213 Lyricism and the Book in the Fourteenth Century twelve manuscripts. Three large compilations of his works survive from the late thirteenth century, though none can be dated with certainty from within his lifetime, and his poems additionally turn up in an­ thologies of didactic and allegorical verse, sometimes in pairs or small groups of three or four. About Rutebeuf himself, nothing is known except what can be deduced from his works. The persona that emerges is in the tradition of the Latin Goliards: he laments his poverty and sings of life in the taverns. To what extent his works can be taken as auto­ biographically accurate is unclear. What can be said is that Rutebeuf spent most of his adult life in Paris; that he was educated and evidently made his living through his verse; and that he was deeply involved in the disputes between the University of Paris and the mendicant orders.4 There is no evidence to suggest that Rutebeuf himself ever undertook the preparation of codices of his collected works.