....................................................................................................................................................... 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

Poetry in motion : the mobility of lyrics and languages in the European Middle Ages

This study explores how education and the medieval intellectual and pedagogical discipline of \(grammatical\) developed in Iceland during the medieval period, defined roughly from the official conversion to Christianity c.1000 to the Reformation c.1550, The first chapter deals with social, institutional, and financial aspects of teaching and learning in medieval Iceland, surveying key figures and places, but also arguing that more attention shoulder be paid to the costs of learning and the effect of that on poor students. The second chapter addresses Latin education, discussing the importance of Latinity in medieval Iceland and the types of education that would involve Latin. It also addresses the idea of bilingual education and suggests ways in which extant venacular writings can provide evidence for how Latin was taught and learned using the vernacular, using the model of Old English bilingual education. Finally, the third chapter addresses vernacular topics of learning, focusing on the development of a venacular \(grammatical\) which is focused on the interpretation and normalization of Old Norse texts, rather than the understanding and use of Latin. Discussing these three components of educational history together is fundamental to understanding the intellectual and pedagogical dynamics behind the extant medieval Icelandic textual corpus.

The development of education and Grammatica in Medieval Iceland

The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Corrective FormbyChad Gregory CrossonDoctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Steven Justice, ChairThe long and sharp debate over Geoffrey Chaucer’s moral aims for the Canterbury Tales has been shelved in recent years, not resolved. The question of his moral aims is unavoidable by design, but it is also irresolvable by design. At least that is my claim: I show that Chaucer’s fictional narrative devises a corrective process based on grammatical emendation that was tied, by a long-standing analogy, to moral reform. Through his narrative, Chaucer pushes his reader to retrace the corrective structure in the Tales, yet the sort of corrective process he recreates is so closely akin to moral practice as to make any distinction between the two difficult. The resulting form is a defining characteristic of the Tales and answers why his moral aims have been irresolvable: in this literary form, the literary and moral are inseparable; they become versions of each other. Medieval grammatical and textual practice inherited this analogy of correction from traditions of classical grammar. Grammatical theory, pedagogy, and practice all developed around the correction of error in several related areas – grammar, pronunciation, style, and (eventually) scribal reproduction. Grammarians and scribes understood correction as a task requiring chronic vigilance and recursive reform, and they treated these various arenas of fault and correction as analogous to each other. But they further used language that suggested an analogy with moral reform, so that evocations of textual emendation could allude to moral correction; in turn, moral error could as easily allude to textual and scribal error. Medieval grammarians and thinkers recognized that errors persist not only despite emendation, but even as a result of emendation. Roger Bacon insisted that correction perpetuated error, and handbooks like the correctoria, which listed textual variants to help correct copies of the Bible, themselves fostered errors; they perpetuated what they were designed to eliminate. And just as grammarians and scribes recognized error as inevitable, they understood emendation as recursive: since authors and scribes need chronically to re-correct their work, they could never consider emendation complete. The dissertation’s first chapter traces this history of correction: its theory in antique and medieval grammatical arts, its practice in scribal emendation, and the development of the analogy between these unending processes of verbal correction and the process, also unending, of moral correction. The remaining three chapters treat the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, more than his predecessors, explicitly notes the recursive logic of error, as famous passages in the Troilus and his “Adam Scriveyn” show. At the same time, he bases his narrative poetics on this recursive logic, developing from it a structure and theme for his Tales. The discussion of Chaucer begins in chapter two, perhaps unpromisingly, with the notoriously unsatisfactory Tale of Melibee, where Chaucer recreates the recursive process of correction to suggest both the ambitions and the dangers of his artistic and moral project. The Melibee’s narrative – like the rigorous training of the grammar student, like the tireless work of scribal correctors, like a monk’s continual attempts at self-reform – outlines paths of correction while perpetually creating new material for emendation. The tale portrays a slow, incremental repetition that only gradually brings about change. In that way, the tale displays the ambitions of the project. Its dangers are clear enough, because it is notoriously unsatisfactory. Chaucer however deliberately stages those dangers in the Melibee and contrasts the dangers with a solution. Chapter three shows this solution at work in the structure of the Tales as a whole. The work revolves around topics discussed by the pilgrims, but these topics will either dissolve or change through shifts in the storytelling or by the pilgrims’ interruptions. Indeed, the series of tales soon abandon the very ideas and vocabularies that set them in motion and frame their narratives. The pilgrims not only adopt each other’s terms and ideas, but modify and sometimes distort them, creating the incremental repetition of the Tales. But while in the Melibee that incremental repetition illustrates literary pitfalls, in the Tales it becomes a means for literary innovation: the certainty of error and the corruption of discourse provide an artistic method. What looks on the small scale like accident and entropy proves on the large scale to be recursion, and by this Chaucer shapes the narrative of the Tales to the analogy he inherited from classical grammar traditions. Thus the work’s pilgrimage is not strictly anagogical, as Chaucer’s Parson and D.W. Robertson suggested it was, but also literal, errant, and discursive. Through Chaucer’s narrative design we understand that pilgrimage involves going astray, that a moral path must always be redirected. And while the Tales’ conclusion indicates an end is near, as the pilgrims approach Canterbury, such a conclusion still leaves the pilgrims in a wandering state; their physical and moral journey remains incomplete. Still, although he depicts the certainty of error, Chaucer emphasizes that persistent correction leads to renewed possibilities. I make this point clear in chapter four, as I read the Melibee in the context of Fragment VII, vis-a-vis both the tale of Sir Thopas and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale presents a singular literary opposition to the Melibee, that the recursive process of correction, more than just an analogy for Chaucer’s idea of pilgrimage, is a tool for literary creation. Similarly, rather than just indicating humankind’s perpetual state of sin, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale points out humankind’s enduring re-creative potential. We can witness how repetition produces the interminable narrative of the Melibee, where the protagonist needs constant re-correction. However, synthesizing the surrounding tales, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale reveals repetition with a difference, an incremental repetition whereby the Tales as a whole will revisit topics, but never in the same way. What this recursive process lends to Chaucer’s moral outlook is not doomed repetition or the failure of humankind, but the idea of human renewal, of a society replete with possibilities. Through this argument, my dissertation resolves a conundrum in critical history: why the question of Chaucer’s moral aims has been widely contested but more recently shelved. The exegetical method of the 1950s and early 1960s in Chaucer studies presented an approach that relied on Augustinian doctrine and allegorical exegesis to convey a determinate moral message. Those who rejected this allegorical method tended to point instead to Chaucer’s artistic complexity. However, an inability either to dispose of or to defend the exegetical method seemed to exhaust that debate, since the question of his moral aims is now largely ignored. Yet the very fact of this debate should make us ask: what is it about his poetry that invites disagreement on a topic so fundamental and leaves it unamenable to resolution? This debate betrays a unique quality of his art: something about it that generates the question of a moral agenda but makes that question irresolvable. I argue that Chaucer develops a method by which he can consider moral concerns without subordinating his art to those concerns. The Tales’ corrective process and its resulting structure have made his moral aims elusive because the elusiveness of moral clarity is precisely the lesson he learned from this tradition. However, while the Tales may evade moral clarity, the recursive nature of correction allows Chaucer to present both texts and humans as ever-malleable subjects, and provides the literary occasion for ongoing intellectual, artistic, and moral exercise.

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The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's Corrective Form

ed types: the distant lover who refuses mercy, the supplicant who insists on his loyalty, the benevolent or silent empowered figure. Such lyric is generated not via a mimesis of the poet’s personal life and experiences, but rather a conscious variation on established, literary commonplaces. Criseyde’s question is an attempt to assign this general song a peculiar identity. Despite its abstract and thoroughly conventional treatment of the subject of love and its rewards, the song carries for Criseyde the potential to embody an actual scenario, to be unmediated by the literary tradition and truly representative of individual experience. Criseyde, by seeking the name of the author, not only wishes to determine that author’s intentio, but also to associate the described experiences with a unique individual, thereby assigning the lyric a sort of mimetic potential: the ability, in other words, to reflect ontological truth and not just literary custom. Criseyde wishes to affix to the song specific details, to withdraw it from the anonymous realm of a purely literary lyric and ground it in everyday experience. In a sense, what Criseyde seeks with her question is a method of demonstrating that the song can indeed have a generating impulse in a single individual. Once she discovers that the author’s station is equivalent to her own, Criseyde immediately begins to apply the song to her own specific situation, to occupy fully the speaking position and to identify the generalized lyric song—devoid of specific details—as a description of her own private life. Even Troilus’ songs, born from his peculiar emotional struggles, lack the individual character of modern lyric. Although we might hear

Piers plowman and the invention of the lyric

Many medieval women mystics undermined misogyny with persuasive eloquence. This essay does a comparative rhetorical analysis of Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Riwle, positing that the...

Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Riwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations of Mysticism

No single medieval discipline embraced all that we call literary criticism or theory today, but the discipline closest to literary criticism – in the sense of the interpretation of a traditional literary canon and the description of literary language – was grammatica . The scope and cultural effects of grammatica are large topics, embracing literacy, linguistic theory, traditions of commentary and exegesis, and the development of a literary canon, but here we must limit the field to those aspects of grammatica that had a direct bearing on the practice of literary criticism and interpretation. Grammatica was traditionally defined as having two main methodological divisions and subject-areas: ‘the science of interpreting the poets and other writers and the systematic principles [ ratio ] for speaking and writing correctly’, that is, the methods for reading, interpreting and evaluating literary works, especially the canon of classical poets, and the rules or principles for speaking and writing according to normative Latin conventions. The literary division of the discipline, scientia interpretandi , was understood to have four main parts or methodological divisions – lectio , the principles for reading a text aloud from a manuscript, including the rules of prosody; enarratio , exposition of content and the principles for interpretation, including the analysis of figurative language; emendatio , the rules for establishing textual authenticity and linguistic correctness, and iudicium , criticism or evaluation of writings. In the linguistic division, the object of analysis was the language of classical literary texts, the auctores , not ordinary speech. From its beginnings, then, grammatica was a science of the text, embracing a systematic description of the authoritative textual language (Greek or Latin) and the methods for reading and interpreting an established literary canon.

Martin Irvine

Papers

Grammatica and literary theory