Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The Book of the World at an Anglo- Norman Court: The Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaon as a Theological Performance
- 2 Monks, Money, and the End of Old English
- 3 Sustainability Romance: Havelok the Dane's Political Ecology
- 4 Locating the Border: Britain and the Welsh Marches in Fouke le Fitz Waryn
- 5 From disputatio to predicatio – and back again: Dialectic, Authority and Epistemology between the Roman de la Rose and the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine
- 6 Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts
- 7 Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal
- 8 ‘What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?’: Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of ‘Chaucer’
7 - Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The Book of the World at an Anglo- Norman Court: The Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaon as a Theological Performance
- 2 Monks, Money, and the End of Old English
- 3 Sustainability Romance: Havelok the Dane's Political Ecology
- 4 Locating the Border: Britain and the Welsh Marches in Fouke le Fitz Waryn
- 5 From disputatio to predicatio – and back again: Dialectic, Authority and Epistemology between the Roman de la Rose and the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine
- 6 Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts
- 7 Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal
- 8 ‘What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?’: Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of ‘Chaucer’
Summary
When Johannes de Grocheio comes to present his somewhat idiosyncratic taxonomy of music and song at the end of the thirteenth century, he admits to encountering some difficulties:
Nobis vero non est facile musicam dividere recte, eo quod in recta divisione membra dividentia debent totam naturam totius divisi evacuare. Partes autem musice plures sunt et diverse secundum diversus usus: diversa ydiomata, vel diversas linguas in civitatibus vel regionibus diversis.
(But it is not easy for us to divide music correctly, since in a correct division the dividing branches ought to exhaust the full nature of the divided whole. The parts of music are many and diverse according to diverse uses, diverse idioms, or diverse tongues in diverse cities or regions.)
For Johannes, the classification of music, which for him includes secular songs in the vernacular, is a daunting project; with a vast plurality of languages and local cultural traditions spanning medieval Europe, it is impossible to establish universal generic criteria. Johannes's trepidation reveals him to be a rather sensitive genre theorist. He does not display what Gerard Genette diagnosed as symptomatic of the history of genre theory, the tendency to present essentialized literary genres as universal or ‘natural’ categories. Indeed, the very fact that Johannes is happy to include literary genres as diverse as the narrative chanson de geste or the lyric rondeau under the heading of musica suggests, perhaps, how artificial our own modern taxonomies might be. But it is not only the explicit theorization of genre in the Middle Ages that asks surprising questions about modern critical categories; the same issues can be explored implicitly through literature itself, through experiments in writing that challenge an essentializing perspective on literary or indeed musical genre. Ultimately this essay will be an investigation into how both modern and medieval expectations of lyric and narrative genres are put under pressure by an important and rarely examined work of the last decades of the fourteenth century: the Cent Ballades attributed to Jean le Seneschal d'Eu (amongst others). The Cent Ballades is what I will call a ‘narrativized lyric sequence’, and by blurring or overriding the boundaries between lyric and narrative this work forces us to interrogate how these two categories interact, and how this interaction is played out across a variety of social and material contexts.
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- Information
- New Medieval Literatures , pp. 213 - 249Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016