Familia como construcción social

the phenomena that this project sets out to examine: namely, why late medieval poets engage so closely with form in their use and adaptation of specifically formes fixes lyric across regions divided by the Hundred Years War and why they turned to the formes fixes

in particular when theorizing wartime cross-Channel literary exchange.

I. The Pennsylvania Manuscript: Physical Features, Contents, and Background

The manuscript comprises 101 folios in a modern binding in twelve gatherings of eight folios and a final gathering of five folios, foliated in a later hand and ruled in two columns with 32-39 lines per page, 35 lines per page predominating. The folios are 300mm x 250mm, bound to 300mm x 240 mm. The text block measures roughly 195- 200mm x 170-180mm. The quality of the parchment varies significantly from gathering to gathering as well as within gatherings, from thick, white, well-processed folios to thin, poorly drained folios with prominent hair follicle markings, holes, and gashes. The anthology was made in two separate booklets, as evidenced by the fact that fols. 1r-48v are ruled in ink with a triple middle gutter, whereas in the second half of the manuscript the ruling has been simplified by placing just a single middle gutter on the page; the ruling here also alternates between ink and lead. There is also no catchword on fol. 48v, and fol. 49r starts with a new lyric. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the booklets were separately produced and joined together only later, though that was a popular practice in the period.47 The scribe of the first booklet continues the second

47

On booklets and fascicular production, see P.R. Robinson, “The ‘Booklet,’ A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts,” Codicologica 3 (1980): 46-69, and Ralph Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations,” Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986): 100-111; “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England,” in The Whole Book: Cultural

34 booklet, although his ink is darker, and he is working with a different, thicker quill.48 As noted above, two more scribes appear in this second booklet: one comes in only briefly to write out two lyrics on fols. 73r-v and to add an extra line, stanza, and an envoy to a work on fol. 82r. The third and final scribe takes over halfway down the page on fol. 86r and continues until the abrupt end of the compilation halfway down the page on fol. 93v.

The organization of the volume suggests over-arching design and careful planning. It begins with a set of unattributed pastourelles and serventois, written in the dialect of Hainault and extant only in this manuscript; these run from fols. 1r-8r.

Immediately following, from fols. 8r-16v, comes a set of lyrics by Granson. The next set, running from fols. 16v-29r, consists of primarily unattributed balades and several

unattributed lais; among them are found one lyric by Deschamps, the balade exchange between Vitry and Le Mote, and one lyric from Machaut’s Loange des dames, a self- contained collection of formes fixes poetry included as a separate section in all of Machaut’s major collected-works manuscripts. From fols. 29r-39v is a set of lyrics that are all by Machaut and almost all taken from his Loange des dames.Intriguingly, here these Loange lyrics are arranged in a unique order, even though the Loange’s eleven

other witnesses demonstrate a largely stable organization from manuscript to manuscript. This entirely rearranged version of Machaut’s Loange is succeeded by a set of

Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nicholls and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 37-51; and Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 21-34.

48 _{The hand that starts the second booklet is definitely working in a darker ink and a thicker quill. The letter} forms are largely identical, though the l’s and the g’s have a slightly different ductus. The second section might be, perhaps, slightly later and thus represents an evolution in the original scribe’s hand. Despite the presence of some kind of difference, the new booklet works directly with the organization of the one preceding, as we will see in this chapter, so I do not think that the two booklets were created separately from each other or at drastically different dates.

35 unattributed virelais, balades and rondeaux, mostly extant only here, with a balade by Granson and, at the very end, another small grouping of Machaut’s Loange lyrics; this set runs to fol. 48r, or the end of the first booklet.

The second booklet begins on fol. 49v with Machaut again, this time copying a set taken almost entirely from among balades that Machaut set to music, which, like the lyrics of the Loange, also occur within a discrete section in all of his collected-works manuscripts. These lyrics, however, are interspersed with several other works, which are not by Machaut but are, rather, mostly unattributed. From fol. 59v, the Machaut selection exhibits another alteration: it becomes dominated by examples of Machaut’s virelais, which we had not earlier seen in the manuscript, and they are derived from a new source, Machaut’s long narrative dit with intercalated lyrics, LeLivre du Voir Dit.49 This

extensive Machaut section, which forms the entire middle third of the compilation, gives way, at fol. 72v, to a varied set of unattributed balades, rondeaux, and chansons royaux until, at fols. 80r-82v, we get a second small grouping of balades by Granson. The manuscript concludes with another set of unattributed works, extant only here, of mostly balades and rondeaux with another three works from Machaut’s Loange. Several of the balades copied in the compilation’s final quire, moreover, contain envoys, a formal feature borrowed from the earlier fourteenth-century puys tradition that came into the balade sometime towards the end of the fourteenth century and became a prominent

49 _{Wimsatt posits that this arrangement is suggested to Penn’s compiler by the internal organization of} Paris, BnF fr. 9221, a major collected-works manuscript eventually owned by Machaut’s patron, Jean de Berry: Ch, 54-55.

36 feature in the fifteenth century.50 On a very basic level, therefore, the compilation appears to open and close with a set of unattributed works, unique to this manuscript, and places a large selection of Machaut’s lyrics, drawn from three major sources within his own work, at its physical center, framed by other unattributed lyrics as well as by work from

Granson. The following chart visually reproduces the categorizations suggested above:

Table 1. Schema of Contents of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Codex 902

Folios author form notable features

1r-8r unattributed pastourelles, serventois in Hainuyer dialect 8r-16v Granson balades & complaintes

16v-29r mostly unattributed

mostly balades, several lais 1 Machaut, 1 Deschamps, Vitry-Le Mote exchange

29r-39v Machaut balades, rondeaux, chansons royaux

from Loange des dames in unique order

40r-48v Machaut & unattributed

balades, rondeaux, virelais 1 Granson; anon until 47v, then Machaut

49r-59v mostly Machaut mostly balades from lyrics that Machaut set to music 59v-72r mostly Machaut balades, virelais, rondeaux from those set to music & Voir Dit 72v-79v unattributed balades, rondeaux, chansons

royaux

“Ch” lyrics interspersed here 80r-82v Granson &

unattributed

balades “Ch” lyrics interspersed here 82v-93v mostly

unattributed

balades, rondeaux 3 Machaut, others only extant here; some balades have envoys

There are no early records for the Pennsylvania manuscript before it eventually surfaced in the early twentieth century. In his description and partial edition of the manuscript in 1932, Giulio Bertoni referred to it as belonging to Leo S. Olschki’s

personal collection, as did Arthur Piaget in his 1941 edition of Oton de Granson’s work.51

50

See Poirion, Poète, 373-74; James C. Laidlaw, “L’Innovation métrique chez Deschamps,” in Buschinger (ed.), Autour, 127-40, especially 127-28, 130, 134, and Yeager, “Audience,” 82-83. Cf. Laidlaw, “The Cent balades: The Marriage of Content and Form,” in Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards (University Press of Florida, 1998), 53-54, where he notes that the number of envoys in Pizan’s Cent Balades increases in later recensions of the work between 1399 and 1411.

51 _{Giulio Bertoni, “Liriche di Oton de Grandson, Guillaume de Machaut e di altri poeti in un nuovo} canzoniere,” Archivium Romanicum 16.1 (Jan-Mar 1932): 1-32. Piaget was clearly not acquainted with the

37 At some point, the antiquarian bookseller Lawrence Witten seems to have purchased the manuscript from Olschki and sold it to the University of Pennsylvania in 1954.52 Lacking a colophon and any identifications of ownership, the manuscript itself provides few clues as to its own background. In a later hand, written across the top of the first folio, are the words “Droit & ferme.” Fly-leaf marginalia suggests that the manuscript’s eventual owners were Italian, which may explain its resurfacing in a private collection in Florence: fol. 94r has five lines from sonnet 146 of Petrarch’s Rime sparse written in a later Italian humanist hand, and fol. 97r has the beginnings of an index of first lines to the

compilation that gets through A and stops three entries into B; the hand here is also Italian and may be the same as the one that did the foliation throughout the manuscript. Finally, fol. 101v has a scribbled line in Italian in an Italian cursive hand.

In his 1972 Ph.D dissertation, Charles Mudge proposed that the manuscript might have originally emerged from the milieu of Isabeau of Bavaria. He bases this conclusion on two pieces of evidence: the motto written at the top of the first folio that he links to Bavaria, and the presence in the anthology of two acrostics by Oton de Granson on the name Isabel, based on which he proposes that this manuscript may be the “livre de ballades messire Othes de Grantson” from Isabeau’s accounts.53

In his work on the manuscript, Wimsatt agrees with Mudge’s suggestion, though he acknowledges two significant counter-arguments: (a) that one-third of the Pennsylvania manuscript’s

actual manuscript, since he reproduces erroneous information about the manuscript from Bertoni’s article, so perhaps he is just repeating Bertoni on the manuscript’s provenance: Grandson, 115-116.

52 _{Norman P. Zacour and Rudolf Hirsch, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Libraries of the University of}

Pennsylvania to 1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 57.

53 _{Charles Mudge, introduction to The Pennsylvania Chansonnier: A Critical Edition of Ninety-Five}

Anonymous Ballades from the Fourteenth Century (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1972), 1-54, especially 10-16.

38 content is by Machaut, not Granson; and (b) that the manuscript is not adorned with any miniatures and does not boast the kind of exquisite decorative programs of other late medieval royal presentation copies. Wimsatt’s solution for these unusual features is that Granson is figuring in Isabeau’s inventory entry not as author, but as compiler of the manuscript in question, whereby Wimsatt takes the phrase “livre des ballades messire Othes de Grantson” to mean “a book of ballades of Granson,” rather than “a book of ballades by Granson.” Wimsatt writes: “... if Granson had personally ordered the manuscript to be made for Queen Isabel, the attribution of the whole to him would be quite natural. And if he had dedicated (or rather rededicated) the Isabel poems to her, her contentment with an unilluminated codex would be understandable—the texts themselves would possess the main personal interest.”54

Wimsatt supports his hypothesis by pointing additionally to the very rough indications of a chronology governing this volume: the pastourelles and serventois with which it opens are, he argues, internally datable to the late 1350s and early 1360s,55 while the very end of the collection is taken up with ballades that have envoys, revealing them to be late fourteenth-early fifteenth century productions. Wimsatt posits that Granson may have come across material such as the Hainuyer pastourelles and the Vitry-Le Mote exchange during his service at the heavily Hainault-connected English court of Edward III. Granson’s return to Savoy after his father’s death in 1386 explicates for Wimsatt the presence of later fourteenth-century ballades with envoys included in the end of the manuscript: these may have been the kind of lyrics that Granson was coming across in

54 _{Wimsatt, Ch, 88.}

39 Savoy during his stay there. Finally, the manuscript’s abrupt end in the middle of the page on fol. 93v, with the rest of the gathering fully ruled but blank, finds for Wimsatt its reasonable explanation in Granson’s ignominious death by judicial duel in 1397 that may have halted the production of the compilation that he had commissioned.56