Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches 9781512803815

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Sappho and Her Daughters: Some Parallels Between Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song
2. Ides . . . geomrode giddum: The Old English Female Lament
3. Women's Performance of the Lyric Before 1500
4. Ca no soe joglaresa: Women and Music in Medieval Spain's Three Cultures
5. Feminine Voices in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo
6. Sewing like a Girl: Working Women in the chansons de toile
7. Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours
8. The Conception of Female Roles in the Woman's Song of Reinmar and the Comtessa de Dia
9. Reason and the Female Voice in Walther von der Vogelweide's Poetry
10. Ventriloquisms: When Maidens Speak in English Songs, c. 1300–1550
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Medieval Woman's Song

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Medieval Woman's Song Cross-Cultural Approaches Edited by

Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Medieval woman's song : cross-cultural approaches / edited by Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen. p. cm. — (Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index. ISBN 0-8122-3624-6 (alk. paper) 1. Women singers. 2. Women musicians. 3. Vocal music — 500–1400 — History and criticism. 4. Vocal music — 15th century—History and criticism. 5. Music — Social aspects. I. Klinck, Anne Lingard, 1943- II. Rasmussen, Ann Marie. III. Series. ML82.M45 2001 809. 1'4099287'902— dc21 2001043073

Contents

List of Abbreviations Introduction

vii

Anne L. Klinck

1

1. Sappho and Her Daughters: Some Parallels Between Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song 15 Anne L. Klinck 2. Ides . . . geomrode giddum: The Old English Female Lament Pat Belanoff 3. Women's Performance of the Lyric Before 1500 Susan Boynton

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47

4. Ca no soe joglaresa: Women and Music in Medieval Spain's Three Cultures 66 Judith R. Cohen 5. Feminine Voices in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo Esther Corral 6. Sewing like a Girl: Working Women in the chansons de toile E. Jane Burns 7. Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

81 99

127

8. The Conception of Female Roles in the Woman's Song of Reinmar and the Comtessa de Dia 152 Ingrid Kasten 9. Reason and the Female Voice in Walther von der Vogelweide's Poetry 168 Ann Marie Rasmussen

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10. Ventriloquisms: When Maidens Speak in English Songs, c. 1300-1550 187 Judith M. Bennett Notes

205

List of Contributors Index

261

263

Acknowledgments

280

Abbreviations

A-S BRAE CB

Anglo-Saxon Boletin de la Real Academia Española Carmina Burana, ed. Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1941) CC Carmina Cantabrigiensia, MGH Scriptores 40, ed. Karl Strecker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1926) CCM Cahiers de civilisation medievale CCSL Corpus Christianorum series latina CL Comparative Literature DLMGP Dicciondrio de literatura medieval galena eportuguesa, ed. Guila Lancíaní and Giuseppe Tavaní (Lisbon: Camínho, 1993) EEC The Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd ed. (1935; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) EETS ES / OS Early English Text Society, extra series / original series ES English Studies GG Emilio Garcia Gomez, Lasjarchas romances de la serie arabe en su marco, 2nd ed. (1965; Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975) GRLM Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters GRM Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift HTR Harvard Theological Review ICLS International Courtly Literature Society Index of Middle English Verse IMEV JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JHP Journal of Hispanic Philology MD MusicaDisciplina ME Middle English ME Des Minnesangs Frühling, ed. Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren (Stuttgart: Hirzel). MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica MHG Middle High German MLN Modern Language Notes

viii MLR MS (S) NM ns OE OF PLL PMLA PQ RES RN RP S-S SWT

TSLL VF

VT ZfdA

Abbreviations Modern Language Review Manuscript (s) Neuphilologische Mitteilungen new series Old English Old French Papers on Language and Literature Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Philological Quarterly Review of English Studies Romance Notes Romance Philology Josep M. Sola-Sole, Corpus depoesía mozárabe (Barcelona: Hispam, 1973) Songs of the Women Troubadours, ed. and trans. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, and Sarah White (New York: Garland, 1995, 2000). Texas Studies in Language and Literature Vox Feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman's Song, ed. John F. Plummer, Studies in Medieval Culture 15 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1981) The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. William D. Paden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum

Introduction AnneL.KUnck

It is now twenty years since the publication of Vox Feminae,1 an essay collection which gave currency in English-language scholarship to the term "woman's song" — the kind of female-voice love-lyric long familiar to French and German medievalists as chanson defemme or Fmuenlied. That volume also broadened the study of woman's songs, previously focused mainly on Continental poems, to include Middle English and Celtic materials. The editors of this new collection feel that another survey of the subject, directed at the English reader, is timely. The present book reflects the developments of the last two decades, especially in feminist scholarship, and also addresses another important issue, the musical performance of woman's songs, a subject too often ignored.2 Our focus is on voice rather than authorship, that is, on textual femininity, present in all the poems examined here, but constructed in various ways. Most of the essays included are new; those by Matilda Bruckner and Ingrid Kasten are reprinted here because they represent major contributions to the study of medieval woman's song. Although the book concentrates on the literature of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and on texts dating between A.D. 900 and 1500, it also gives consideration to the affinities of European woman's song with Jewish and Arabic literature, and to parallels with woman's songs in the ancient world. Because our anthology focuses on poems in which women speak, we include essays on both female-voice and female-authored love-lyric, categories which have traditionally divided the study of medieval woman's song. The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors in the medieval sources is small, some of the best known being those of the twbairitz or women troubadours of southern France. Not all woman authored poetry is woman's song in our sense, but, as we shall see, there are good reasons for including the trobairitz within this category. However, many examples of woman's-voice medieval lyric are extant, sometimes anonymous and sometimes authored by men. In fact, woman's song is a literary type, too loosely defined to be termed a genre.3 Constructed in a supposedly "popular" rather than courtly mode (we

2

Introduction

will return to this issue below), poems of this type were composed for oral delivery, and most of them were sung with musical accompaniment. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases the musical notation has not survived. Woman's song is characterized by strophic structure, often with repeated lines or phrases creating parallelism or refrain; simplicity of vocabulary and syntax; lack of narrative and descriptive detail; emotional, often exclamatory language; focus on certain natural objects — water, trees, birds, animals — which assume a symbolic function; and a strong physical element in the speaker's account of herself and her feelings. The mode of woman's song is frequently signaled at the opening by grammatical markers of feminine gender, and by an apostrophe to the speaker's mother, lover, or confidante(s). The theme always relates to love, typically, but not universally, in terms of loss or longing. These features apply especially to monologue, but they also appear in dialogue, and in narrativeframed speech. The distinction between female-authored and female-voice woman's song is a vexed one, though it is still respected by most scholarship. Defining the type by textual rather than authorial femininity allows us to include poems authored by known men and women, as well as many anonymous works. Although where known authorial gender can be very significant (see Kasten's essay below), the classification of woman's songs by the femininity of the text rather than that of the author is an approach particularly appropriate to the medieval period, when many texts are anonymous, the attribution of others is conventional and sometimes dubious, and the persistence of oral delivery makes the audience often more conscious of performance than authorship.4 Thus, the identity of a male author might be submerged in that of a female performer. It is, of course, possible that a woman's song might be performed by a man, which would add an element of irony. But the adoption of the mode of woman's song is, as Pierre Bee said, C£un choix typologique"5 that may be made by either a man or a woman. The primacy of the text, rather than the author, has been a preoccupation of poststructuralist approaches to literature.6 Focusing on textual femininity avoids the biographical fallacy on the one hand, and, on the other, the nihilism which concludes that in a system dominated by men there can be no such thing as a woman's voice (cf. Bruckner below). This approach also sidesteps the ultimately insoluble problem of which texts of doubtful ascription were actually authored by women.7 Some feminist scholars have urged the recuperation of anonymous female-voice lyrics into the canon of women's texts.8 Others have insisted on the essentially feminine discourse of woman's songs regardless of their authorship.9 In the present book, however, we see these characteristic features as evidence not of an essential biological femininity, but of a persistent convention.

Introduction

3

The earliest investigations of woman's songs were concerned largely with the origins of European lyric. Although most extant medieval woman's songs are attributable to male authors, there was a tendency to trace the type back to preliterate songs actually composed by women. Goethe, Jakob Grimm, and others saw in the early German and Balkan Frauenlieder andFmuenstrophen the traces of the "alteste Volkspoesie."10 Wilhelm Scherer believed that some of the male-attributed Frauenlieder in Lachmann's Minnesangs Fruhling collection were in fact originally composed by women.n Alfred Jeanroy and Gas ton Paris traced the whole of European lyric back to the dance songs of young girls at their spring-time celebrations. It was Jeanroy who, in his 1889 study of the origins of French lyric, formulated the first real definition of woman's song. For him, it was ccun monologue de femme," specifically, the utterance of a young girl, on the subject of love, and usually sad.12 He hypothesized that originally these songs were composed spontaneously by the young girls themselves to accompany their dances (445) ,13 but assumed that all extant versions were literary and of male authorship (299). While his book focuses principally on French and Occitan poetry, Jeanroy also considers Portuguese, German, and Italian. Gaston Paris expanded Jeanroy's hypothesis, and traced a line of descent from the Floralia of Venus, through the medieval "Kalenda Maya,"14 to May songs in modern times ("Fetes de mai," 611). This theory seems probable enough,15 though its exclusion of other sources and its assumption of the historical priority of woman's songs are more dubious. The characteristics of the Frauenlied were explored further by Theodor Frings in a number of studies, notably his 1949 monograph Minnesinger und Troubadours.16 For Frings, too, the woman's song is chronologically prior to courtly poetry, but at the same time he stresses the universality of the type, giving examples ranging from ancient Greece to China. Even though Jeanroy himself admitted that no genuinely oral and popular examples survived, the view of woman's songs as popular, in contrast to courtly lyric, has persisted. Pierre Bee redefined Jeanroy's terms, preferring to speak of a "registre popularisant" (as opposed to "aristocratisant")17 to which the chanson de femme belonged. Bee thus suggests composition in a popular style, although not necessarily in a popular context. He also insists that the chanson de femme is not merely "pre-courtoise" but also "para-courtoise" and "post-courtoise" (Lyriquefran$aise^ i :6i). As he defines it, the chanson de femme embraces a variety of more circumscribed genres, especially the chanson d'ami (young girl's song about her feelings for a lover), chanson de malmariee^ chanson de toile sung to accompany needlework, and the alba^ as well as thcpastourelle (to some extent), and various types of dance songs. We shall see these genres reflected in the examples which follow. Bee subdivides the chanson d'ami further into the

4

Introduction

chanson de delaissee and chanson de departie. Perhaps because poets and audiences were more conscious of these narrower forms, no real equivalent to the modern comprehensive term existed in the Middle Ages. The closest is the GalicianPortuguese cantiga de amigo (chanson d'ami}^ contrasting with the male-voice cantiga de amor.18 Modern scholars have tended to exclude from the category of woman's song those genres which they regard as aristocratic or courtly, or in which the woman's voice is only "reported," but there is much disagreement about particular cases.19 Some types of woman's songs are specific to particular cultural backgrounds. Thus, the marinha (sea-song) and barcarola (boatsong) uttered by a woman waiting for her lover by the shore, are characteristic subgenres among the cantigas de amigo ^ while the romaria^ set in the context of a pilgrimage to a local shrine, only appears in this Galician-Porruguese group. The chanson de toile is exclusive to northern France. But most of the genres recur: in the various Romance vernaculars, in German, in Middle English, and in medieval Latin. The essentially "popular" nature of these various genres is in fact highly problematic. Although many songs are anonymous, many, especially the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo and the German Frauenlieder^ are attributed to named poets, often members of the upper class, and thus popular neither in authorship nor in audience. Considering these complications, Ulrich Molk proposed to make a distinction between popular and elevated poetry (volkstumlich Igehoben), instead of the usual popular/courtly antithesis ("Die friihen romanischen Frauenlieder," 69-70). He advocates stripping woman's song of its typological ambiguities and aura of Romantic theories about origins, and defines it as "a love-song in a popular register, in which the woman's perspective is realised as monologue, dialogue, or reported speech" (88). This definition has the advantage of including poems in which the woman's voice figures prominently but not exclusively20 However, it fails to solve the problem inherent in designating poetry "popular" — whether by origin or by register. What is characteristic about woman's songs is not their rusticity but their artless posture — whether spontaneous or not. Also, they retain much that is oral and traditional in origin. Some of the genres involve a rural setting —like thepastourelle with its encounter between knight and shepherd girl. Others do not: the action of the chanson de toile^ for instance, is located among aristocratic women in the upper room of a castle.21 Finally, the popular/courtly dichotomy ignores the evidence of the trobairitz^ who were aristocratic poets. Characterizing a particular mode as "popular" or even "popularizing" implies a set of questionable assumptions: that level of complexity, degree of

Introduction

5

sincerity, capacity for sensitivity, etc. are somehow correlated — in either a parallel or an inverse way—with social class.22 Undoubtedly woman's songs as a type are marked by an appearance of simplicity and directness, but these qualities need not be regarded as especially popular. Nor is the sexual frankness which characterizes some of these lyrics any more popular than aristocratic. Clearly, too, woman's songs are not generically "popular" as distinct from "learned," since some of them are composed in medieval Latin and others show the influence of learned sources. Therefore, we suggest abandoning a distinction based ultimately on Romantic notions about the "folk" and involving unnecessary class implications, and defining woman's song as a femalevoice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by its simple language, its sexual candor, and its apparent artlessness. These criteria emphasize "textual" rather than "genetic" femininity (to use Bee's terminology, "Trobairitz" 235-36), permitting us to accommodate compositions that may be aristocratic in origin, complex in intent —and authored by either men or women. The mode of woman's song presents a gender stereotype, to be sure, but taken up in multifarious ways by different poets who work within the stereotype, transform it, or subvert it. Although Romantic critics saw at the basis of European lyric a tradition of oral woman's songs, they assumed that none of these ur-texts were actually preserved in writing. Probably because of the Continental bias of most studies, the heroic woman's songs of Anglo-Saxon England and of early Ireland and Scandinavia were left out of consideration. However, the theories of Jeanroy and Frings seemed to gain support from the publication by S. M. Stern in 1948 of a series of recently deciphered lyric fragments in early Spanish,23 some of which, going back to the first half of the eleventh century, antedated the troubadours and provided evidence for a native Iberian tradition of "popular" lyric. The kkarjas (literally, "exits"), lyric codas to longer and more elaborate poems, muwashshahas^ in Arabic and Hebrew, are usually, like the Fmuenlieder and cantigas de amigo^ passionate declarations of a woman's love. Their outspoken sensuality may be attributable in part to a performance context: if the muwashshahas were sung by young women for an audience of men, the kharjas would provide contrast to the male-voice poem that preceded them and link it to the physical presence of the singer. Although the songs bespeak a native tradition, they must also be, at least to some extent, the product of Middle Eastern influence, among the mixed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim population of early Spain. Earlier even than the kharjas^ and important for the history of woman's song, are the two Old English poems Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's La-

6

Introduction

ment, preserved in a late tenth-century manuscript, but probably at least a hundred years older.24 With the possible exception of one or two Irish poems, they are the earliest woman's songs in a medieval European vernacular. These two poems are enigmatic, but generally recognized as love-laments uttered by women.25 Unlike the other texts we are considering, they are not strophic in form — though their use of thematic repetition shows a strophic tendency. They are lyrics not in a formal sense but by virtue of their intensely personal emotion and their focus on the lyric moment. First recognized as Frauenlieder by Kemp Malone in 1962, they have subsequently been related to medieval Latin woman's songs, and to the woman's song more generally.26 Peter Dronke has seen in Wulf and Eadwacer one of those winileodas ("songs to a friend," i.e., lover) which nuns were forbidden to compose, in a well-known Carolingian edict of ySp.27 It is likely that both the Old English poems, but especially Wulf and Eadwacer^ which departs significantly from the vocabulary and metrics of Germanic heroic verse, were influenced by songs now lost. This poem mixes longer and shorter lines, at times with the effect of refrain: "They will take him if he comes into their troop / unalike are our lots" (lines 2-3, 7-8).28 The speaker longs for her lover and remembers an embrace (his or someone else's) that gave her both joy and pain. The natural setting, so genial in later medieval love-poetry, is here entirely forbidding: island fastnesses surrounded by fen, bloodthirsty men lying in wait, rainy weather, a wolf carrying off a young child. Wulf's background of tribal warfare links it with the laments of Deirdre (Irish) and Guthrun (Norse) rather than with the Continental woman's songs, but its physicality and its passionate tone are clearly within the same mode. Like the kharjas and the Old English poems, the medieval Latin woman's songs are also conditioned by a distinct social context, in this case, the clerics who formed an international educated elite. Their recreational verse was learned, sometimes passionate and sometimes frivolous, often ironic. It has been argued by Anne Schotter that many medieval Latin woman's songs put women down, making fun of them in a language they could not understand.29 This observation may well be true of Hue usque me miseram in the thirteenthcentury Carmina Burana^ a chanson de delaissee: Until now, poor wretched me, I'd concealed things well, And loved cunningly. Finally my secret's out, For my belly's swollen up Showing I'm pregnant and soon due.

Introduction

7

On one side my mother beats me, On the other my father yells at me, Both of them are hard on me. .............. If I go outdoors, Everybody looks at me As if I were a monster. When they see my abdomen, One nudges the other, And they're silent until I've gone past. (Hue usque, me miseram! / rem bene celaveram / et amavi callide. / Res mea tandem patuit, / nam venter intumuit, / partus instat gravide. / Hinc mater me verberat, / hinc pater improperat, / ambo tractant aspere. / . . . . ......../ Cum foris egredior, / a cunctis inspicior, / quasi monstrum fuerim. / Cum vident hunc uterum, / alter pulsat alterum, / silent, dum transierim.) (CE 126) 30 The use of the learned language here, and the detached clerical audience implied by it, certainly contributes to the ironizing of the girl's plight. Sometimes the woman's voice in medieval Latin lyric expresses an uninhibited sexuality, as in Veni dilectissime from the Cambridge Songs ^ an eleventhcentury collection: Come darling, To visit me, your pleasure. I'm dying of longing, I'm yearning for love. If you come with your key, You shall quickly enter. (Veni dilectissime / gratam me invisere. / In languore pereo, / venerem desidero. / Si cum clave / veneris, / mox intrare poteris.) (CC 49) 31 In the barcarole Nam languens, from the same manuscript, the woman's longing and vulnerability are evoked by the winter world through which she moves: For longing with love of you I arose at dawn, And went barefoot

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Introduction

Through the snow and cold, And scanned the waste sea, If perhaps your windblown Sails I might discern Or glimpse the prow of your ship. (Nam languens amore tuo, / consurrexi diluculo, / perrexique pedes nuda / per nives et frigora, / atque maria rimabar mesta, / si forte ventivola / vela cernerem / aut frontem navis conspicerem.) (CC I4A)32 The Song of Songs is clearly an influence here (see Klinck below), while the speaker's situation in Nam languens recalls the plight of various legendary abandoned women in Ovid's Heroides ("Heroines") .33 A significant body of poetry which has been studied as women's writing but not usually as woman's song is found in the songs of fin'amor by the trobairitz^ who composed in Provence between about 1170 and 1260. Although these poems, because of their aristocratic origins, have traditionally been excluded from the corpus of woman's songs,34 various scholars have noticed that these lyrics in fact participate in the mode of the chanson defemme. Frings saw the Comtessa de Dia's^l chantar m}er de so qu'ieu no volria ("It falls to me to sing of what I would not wish") as a development of the Fmuenlied under the influence of the canso^ the troubadour song of courtly love ("Frauenstrophen und Frauenlied," 26). Dronke comments on the passionate language and sexual boldness of the Comtessa's Estat ai eu engreu cossirier ("I've been in sore distress") in his discussion of woman's songs (MedievalLyric, 105-6). Bee regards the poems of the trobairitz as mediating between the "grand chant courtois" and the chanson defemme ("Trobairitz" 261). And Matilda Bruckner notes that the "incantatory quality" in Tibors's fragmentary canso "recalls with particular insistence the kinds of effects achieved in the cantigas de amijjo"35 The twbairitz combine the apparent artlessness and the sexual frankness of woman's song with the ceremony and the savoir faire of courtly canso. The Comtessa de Dia and Na Castelloza proclaim their right to woo, and they seek a lover whose accomplishments will be a credit to them. When the Comtessa speaks of her intelligence and her worth (A chantar myer 5), she speaks as the aristocratic lady, the domna^ but when she wants to be her lover's pillow and have him in her husband's place (Estat ai eu 12, 21-22) she is using the same frankly erotic language as the girl in an Italian woman's song who tells her mother she wants her lover to be "closer to me than my shift."36 The trobaimtz poems situate themselves both within and outside the boundaries of the male-

Introduction voice canso. They adopt the conventional values of ennoblement through the service of love, fidelity to the beloved, and secrecy in love, but they combine rather than invert the roles of favor-bestowing lady and wooing, striving lover. Also, they usually adopt a simpler diction and metrics,37 and, whereas the persona of male poet-lover often seems more preoccupied with displaying his talents than pursuing his love, the female persona, though conscious of her own worth, is more absorbed in the love-relationship.38 While the twbairitz poems make a substantial, though still very small, contribution to Provencal lyric,39 relatively few woman's songs of the kind traditionally called "popular" are preserved in Occitan,40 probably because of the dominance of courtly lyric in that language. Nevertheless, Occitan does offer some examples, mainly anonymous, of lively and often audacious poems in the mode of dance songs and chansons de malmariee^ notably Coindeta sui: si cum rfaigreu cossire ("I'm pretty — and Fve sore distress for it"), which is both.41 The famous A Pentmda del tens dew ("At the Beginning of the Fair Season"), celebrating the May Queen (in this case actually the April Queen), is a rare example of the spring songs by which Jeanroy and Frings set so much store: The king is coming from away—eya! To interrupt the dance — eya! For he's in a panic — eya! That someone might run away With the April Queen. Away, away with you, jealous ones! Leave us free, leave us free, To dance together, dance together. But she wants him not at all — eya! For she's no need of an old man — eya! But a lively bachelor — eya! Who knows well how to charm A sexy lady. Away, etc. (Lo reis i ven d'autra part, eya, / per la dansa destorbar, eya, / qu'el es en cremetar, eya, / que om no li voill'emblar / la regin'avrilloza. / A la vi', a la via, jelos, / laissaz nos, laissaz nos / ballar entre nos, entre nos. / Qu'ela n'a sonh de viellart, eya, / mais d'un leugier bachelar, eya, / qui ben sapcha solacar / la domna savoroza. / A la vi', etc. )42

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Introduction

A Pentrada seems to be designed to accompany a mimetic dance. This song, one of those for which a melody is preserved, is probably in an oral tradition, and may be derived from originally extemporaneous songs. Its escapism from the male-dominated order is significant: as an attack on jealous husbands it is merely playful, but it is associated with festivities which allow a kind of licence not normally tolerated — a sort of safety-valve, and reflective of the spirit of carnival in the Bakhtinian sense.43 A Ventrada, also shows affinities with the malmariee^ a type much better attested in the poetry of northern France. Typically, the genre features a pretty young woman married to an impotent old man, whom she delights in cuckolding, as in the rondeau Fi maris de vostre amour by Adam de la Halle in the thirteenth century: Fie, husband, on your love, For Fve a lover! He's handsome, cuts a fine figure. Fie, husband, on your love. He serves me night and day. That's why I love him so. Fie husband, on your love, For I've a lover! (Fi, maris, de vostre amour, / car j'ai ami! / Biaus est et de noble atour: / fi, maris, de vostre amour! / II me sert et nuit et jour, / pour che 1'aim si. / Fi, maris, de vostre amour, / car j'ai ami! ) M The chanson d'ami accommodates more sober tones, occasionally rising to a passionate intensity. Injherusalem, a young girl cries out against the city which has deprived her of her lover: Jerusalem, you do me great injury, For you've taken away the one I love most of all. Know this for sure: I'll never love you again, For there's nothing that so mars my joy; Very often I sigh and lament over it So much I nearly turn from God Who's driven me out from the great joy I had. (Jherusalem, grant damage me fais, / qui m'as tolu ce que je plus amoie. / Sachiez de voir ne vos amerai maiz, / quar c'est la rienz dont j'ai plus male

Introduction

11

joie, / et bien sovent en souspir et pantais, / si qu'a bien pou que vers Deii ne m'irais / qui m'a oste de grant joie ou j'estoie. ) 45 This subgenre of the chanson de cwisade may have been created by the Provencal Marcabru'syl lafontana^ where the speaker curses King Louis for the same reason.46 The chanson de toile assumes an archaizing simplicity, sometimes innocently, as in Bele Erembors^ where a maiden convinces her returned lover that she has not forgotten him, and sometimes ironically, as in Bele Tolanz^ where, after chastising her daughter for deceiving her husband with a lover, the mother finally says, "Suit yourself!"47 Romance influence is detectable in most German woman's songs, though certain typical motifs may have arisen independently—like the burgeoning of spring in the following short piece, dated around 1160: Nothing seems to me so fine and fit to praise As the bright rose and my man's love. The little birds That sing in the wood make many a heart light. But if my true love's away, summer's joy is nought. (Mich dunket niht so guotes noch so lobesam / so diu liehte rose und diu minne mins man. / diu kleinen vogellin / diu singent in dem walde, dest menegem herzen Hep. / mir enkome min holder geselle, ine han der sumerwunne niet.) (MF 3,17, p. 22) While retaining the directness and economy characteristic of the mode, some of the German Frauenlieder are in fact quite complex. In Der von Kurenberg's Ich zoch mir einen valken ("I trained me a falcon"), another very early poem, the far-ranging flight of the once tame bird becomes a metaphysical rather than an erotic symbol: Since then I've seen that falcon in splendid flight, Trailing silk ribbons from his feet, His feathers all bright red-gold. God reunite lovers who long to be at one! (Sit sach ich den valken schone vliegen, / er vuorte an sinem vuoze sidine riemen, / und was im sin gevidere alrot guldin. / got sende si zesamene, die gelieb wellen gerne sin!) (MF 8,33, p. 25)

12

Introduction

Has the lover died? Will the wished-for meeting be in another world? The vision of the apotheosized falcon expresses a yearning in which the gender of the speaker is almost forgotten.48 The Frauenlieder of poets like Reinmar der Alte and Walther von der Vogelweide — both discussed later in this volume — can be highly sophisticated. Wolfram von Eschenbach's Tagelieder are not always regarded as woman's songs. But, as Gale Sigal shows, poems of this type, like Sine klawen (see Klinck below) play an important role in developing the feminine perspective.49 Italian woman's songs first appear in the context of the poetry of the Sicilian school at the court of Frederick II, in the mid-thirteenth century. No distinctively Italian form emerges — except in the use of the sonnet for this purpose, but there are examples of the established types, especially the chanson d'ami. The anonymous sonnet Tapina in me ("Alas for me!") voices a woman's grief at the loss of her hawk, which has torn its jesses and flown away—a theme reminiscent of Der von Kurenberg's poem.50 Gia mai non mi conforta^ by Rinaldo d'Aquino, is a well-known chanson de croisade. The late thirteenthcentury Bolognese Mamma, lo temp e venuto ("Mother, the time has come") presents a spirited dialogue between a girl and her mother, the former demanding to be allowed to marry the boy with whom she is passionately in love. A la stasgion che'l mondofolglia efiora ("In the season when the world puts out leaves and flowers"), by the Compiuta Donzella of Florence, the Italian trobairitz^ uses the form of a love-sonnet to protest a betrothal arranged against her will. The largest body of medieval woman's song comes from Portugal and Galicia, where native traditions retained their prestige alongside the courtly genres from Occitania, and produced the cantiga de amigo^ contrasting with the male-voice cantiga de amor. Whereas the cantiga de amor is more influenced by the Occitan canso, and its language and meter tend to be more elaborate, the cantiga de amigo is characterized by its simple melodiousness, with frequent repetition, parallelistic structure, and refrain. Most of the cantigas de amigo are authored by known, male, poets — who also exercised their talents in the cantiga de amor. The female voice here is innocent and virginal, unlike the sexually experienced voice of many woman's songs. Nevertheless, there is a markedly sensual element. Thus, in the little cameo Cabelos, los meus cabelos^ by Johan Zorro, the beautiful long, loose hair which the king desires is a metonymy for the girl herself, and her virginity (see Corral below). Another common motif is the spring, to which the girl comes to wash clothing, or her hair, and where she encounters her lover. The shrine of a saint is also a typical locale, as is the seashore, where turbulent waves symbolize the girl's emotions. The two are

Introduction

13

combined in Mendinho's Sedia-m'eu na ermida de San Simion ("I was at the sanctuary of St. Simion"). The characteristics of the cantigas de amigo are continued in the Spanish villancicos^ preserved in manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but very possibly of earlier provenance.51 English woman's songs are for the most part later than their Romance and German analogues. The Middle English examples are remote from their Old English antecedents, and clearly influenced by Continental models. A favorite theme — discussed by Judith Bennett, below — is the girl who has been seduced by a clerk. One wonders whether, like the Latin poems of this type, texts like this were composed for and enjoyed by a clerical audience. But, though there may be the same knowing humor, the treatment is much more nuanced.52 The difference may be attributable to the poets' greater capacity for subtlety in their own vernacular, and at the same time to its greater naturalism and "sincerity." The poems range from the wittily wanton — Ser John ys taken in my mouse-trappe: Fayne wold I have hem bothe nyght and day. He gropith so nyslye a-bought my lape, I have no pore to say him nay! to the pathetic — Jankyn at the Angnus beryt JDC pax brede, He twynkelid, but sayd nowt, and on myn fot he trede. Benedicamus Domino, Cryst fro schame me schylde. Deo gracias j^erto — alas, I go with chylde!53 In this second example, the impersonal quotations from the Latin mass throw into relief the urgent English words that convey the girl's sharp fear for her future. The preceding survey should give some sense of both the variety and the coherence of medieval woman's song. In the analyses which follow, we offer a range of points of view. Anne Klinck looks at the manifestations of woman's song from ancient times on, showing how, though the mode may be ultimately attributable to male fantasy, in ancient Greece as in medieval Europe it could be adapted by sophisticated poets — male and female — for their own particular agendas. Pat Belanoff examines the two Old English poems, seeing in them an intensity of focus on the present moment, the impossibility of consolation, and a marginalized voice which cannot attain harmony because it

14

Introduction

is marginalized. Susan Boynton considers the question of whether medieval women actually composed music, and concludes that the distinction between women performing songs by men and women singing their own songs is a problematic binary that needs to be reexamined. Judith Cohen assesses women's roles in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain, tracing some parallels with contemporary oral tradition. Esther Corral offers a morphology of the femininity created by the male-authored Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo. Jane Burns sees love in the Old French chansons de toile as working like needles through cloth, pulling desirous partners into mutual embrace. Matilda Bruckner examines the individuality of the women troubadours, with particular reference to the Comtessa de Dia and Na Castelloza. Ingrid Kasten compares the assertiveness of the Comtessa with the timid womanhood depicted in the Fmuenlieder of the German Reinmar der Alte. Ann Marie Rasmussen focuses on Walther von der Vogelweide's construction of the discerning lofty lady. And, finally, Judith Bennett explores some anonymous Middle English lyrics to see whose interests are being served by their sexual admonitions. The geographical range covered by these chapters is wide, and their methods are not homogeneous. Separately and in combination, various perspectives appear —structuralist and poststructuralist, literary, historical, cultural, and musical. We believe that readers will appreciate these multiple views and the commitment to scholarly diversity they represent. In their very different ways, all of the essays can be situated within the framework of feminist scholarship, and all of them illuminate the central focus of this anthology: the creation of women's voices in medieval woman's song.

I Sappho and Her Daughters Some Parallels Between Ancient and Medieval Womatfs Son0 AnneL.KUnck

Although the idea of woman's song, that is, simple love-lyric in the female voice, was developed by German and French medievalists in the nineteenth century, it seems probable that this literary type, like love-lyric in general, is more than a medieval phenomenon.1 Thus, the question naturally arises whether the songs that emerged in Western Europe in the Middle Ages reflect cc a universal sector of the human heart," as Peter Dronke puts it,2 and whether they must have existed at all periods, from ancient times on.3 Hard evidence for continuity is lacking, because the earliest poetry in the European vernaculars is unrecorded. But there are plenty of references to the performance of songs during this unrecorded period, and some of them seem to have been woman's songs in the medievalists' sense.4 In the present paper, I want to pick out some poems and passages which show how the "simple" voice of the loving woman can be traced as an underlying mode in poetry of less or greater complexity from early Greece on. Parallels between medieval and ancient texts are sometimes the result of conscious borrowing, but often such borrowing is unlikely, and the similarities are more a matter of persisting or recurring customs and ways of thought. It seems to me that, in its construction of loving, longing womanhood, the mode of woman's song is ultimately attributable to male desires and fantasies.5 Yet, it can be used by accomplished poets, both men and women, for their own specific agendas. Although the history of woman's song in Western Europe appears to reflect an evolution in which the personal becomes separated from the ritual and communal, this development should not be regarded as a progress toward greater sophistication, but as a series of transformations of an

16

Chapter i

underlying mode whose artistic potential was as fully realized in the ancient world as at any later period. A very specific line of development was proposed by the Spanish classicist Elvira Gangutia Elicegui, in a long article which appeared nearly thirty years ago. Gangutia argues that a continuous tradition can be traced from Middle Eastern origins in the second millennium B.C., through archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece, into the western Mediterranean and Spain.6 In particular, she points out many parallels between Greek and early Hispanic poetry. Her theory is also reflected in her more recent collection of ancient Greek "cantos de mujeres."7 Gangutia's exploration is provocative, though now in its romantic "desire for origins"8 rather dated. It also shows certain biases and limitations. She privileges the position of Spain in the evolution of woman's song, and fails to make the important connection between poetry of a bluntly erotic, often rather crude, kind, and the work of cultivated poets using some of the same conventions. My own analysis both draws on and takes issue with Gangutia's, expanding her focus to Western Europe more generally — and to more challenging poetry. Woman's song as treated in the present study includes not merely the naive and sexually explicit lyrics which Greek sophisticates and medieval clerics looked down upon, but also the work of cultivated poets, identifiable or anonymous, women or men. Like medieval woman's songs, the yuvociKeux (ji^rj9 of early Greece constructed a female persona that was simple and sensuous. More distinctively, in the archaic period Greek woman's song is linked, directly or indirectly, to the life of the group and its ritual occasions. At this phase of its social evolution, woman's song seems to have fulfilled a double function, expressing and enacting both the affections of the individual and the rituals of the community. The lover's complaint has an early precursor in laments for the Middle Eastern Thammuz (Greek Adonis), the fertility god whose death was celebrated in annual women's rites. A fragment of Adonis-lament composed by Sappho survives; it appears to be a dialogue between a priestess, impersonating Aphrodite, and her attendants: " £He is dying, Cytherea, graceful Adonis. What shall we do?' / cBeat your breasts, maidens, and tear your garments'" (KccT0vdaK£i, K-oGsprj', appoq "A8(ovie mare, \>c ure maegen lytlaS." (312-13) ("Thought must be the harder, heart the keener, courage must be the greater, now that our strength decreases")

The Old English Female Lament

45

The woman of The Wife's Lament has been immobilized by sorrow; the woman of Wulf and Eadwaeer has been mobilized by her sorrow to look forward to violence. Nonetheless, however we read this enigmatic poem, its language is put in the service of much the same content as that evident in The Wife's Lament', a woman's desire for her beloved. Although my argument here focuses mainly on the language itself, we do need to keep in mind other implications latent within these poems. That the women's sorrow is reparable within the human world is the final irony of their situations. Since their laments are not directed against the ills of an unsatisfactory world — as the men's are — but against the ills of their specific situation, their fates could be altered by the actions of others, specifically by men's actions. The arms of a beadueafa in Wulf and Eadwaeer act "as a symbol of masculinity free of any particularities of identity"35; the "wife" reveals that she has been ordered by hlaford min "my lord" into her cave enveloped by briers and under a tree. The "wife" could be released from her confinement and reunited with her lord: the speaker of Wulf and Eadwaeer could be permanently reunited with Wulf if his difficulties with her people, whatever they might be, could be resolved and if she could be disentangled from Eadwaeer. The male exile's sorrow cannot be remedied by the actions of any human being; the women's can be.36 But it is just this potential for remedy that creates the greatest tension in both of these poems, for those who might have the power to remedy the women's sorrow are obviously not doing so. Neither of the women expresses any hope that others will ameliorate their situations; this realization intensifies the suffering and confirms the impossibility of consolation for the one, the necessity for violent action for the other. Joseph Harris in his analysis of the elegiac genre as manifested in early Germanic literature concludes that the two women's poems are the oldest representatives of the genre in Old English. He bases this conclusion on the degree of generalization evident in a given poem: the more prominent the elements of "individual biography" and the less "generalizing philosophy," the older; the greater the generalizing and the stronger the move toward allegory, the more recent.37 Such a conclusion assumes a natural literary development from specificity to generality. The opposite movement is, of course, just as natural —that is, if we can speak of either development as "natural." We must leave open the possibility that what Harris saw as traits of older poetry were, in reality, the traits of women's poetry: an intensity of what I call "hereness" and "nowness," the impossibility of consolation, and a marginalized voice which cannot attain generalization or generic harmony because it is marginalized. It is not just that these poems lack generalization; they are suffused by "present-

46

Chapter 2

ness55 and establish an identity which forces us to view the traditional world of Anglo-Saxon poetry a bit differently. Jane Chance notes in her introduction to the essays in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages that, "Women writers . . . disrupt and subvert the genres they appropriate by inserting themselves into their texts and dividing or doubling those literary forms. They do so either through a dramatic self-textuality or self-referentiality, or through feminizing by means of mimicry and mirroring.5538 In these two poems, the female narrators are able to distort what they reflect in such a way that an outsider5s point of view becomes a central focus. A society that banishes a woman into a cave or labels a male wandering outside organized society as a wolf may need to be reminded that the excommunicated suffer and that all ills need not be consigned to a heavenly cure. Having concluded, however, that these two poems represent the voices of outsiders, one an outsider to the elegiac tradition, the other an outsider to the heroic tradition, we need to recognize the textuality of the "outsider.53 This "outsider35 voice is only poetically "outside,55 for in a culture with strong roots in oral tradition, no actual outsider5s voice would be able to survive.39 Thus, these poems can allow us to conclude that there must have been a sizable awareness of the suffering of women victimized by wars and feuds and an equally sizable awareness that not all those exiled were bestial. And, finally, these two women5s voices render the present and thus move toward poetry which connects to an audience's present experience rather than to a reconstituted past or to a imagined heavenly future. A voice, whether male or female, which comes to us introduced by another voice, must struggle to create the sense of an emotion presently felt, of a direct expression of an emotion while it is being felt. Our women narrators speak to us directly of their present situations, emphasizing present emotions, presenting to us "a sense of the inner self that is aroused by face-to-face communication.5540 The voices of these women, the speakers of The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer^ are powerfully suggestive, making available to today's readers a richer appreciation of the variety possible in Anglo-Saxon literary art. And perhaps they are enabled to do so because they are not the typical exile of the period, because they are women.

3 Women's Performance of the Lyric Before 1500 Susan Boynton

The diverse evidence for the performance of lyric poetry by women before 1500 raises several questions related to the context and transmission of medieval music. Did women create the songs they performed? What kinds of women sang, what music, and in what settings? How did the gendered voice of a song affect its performance? In this essay, I will examine these questions in light of the evidence for women's performance of the lyric in various medieval societies. Both literary and historical accounts suggest that women played an important role in the creation, performance, and transmission of lyric poetry. Until recently, however, music historians have rarely addressed the place of gender in the composition and performance of secular song, thus eliding an important dimension of the production and reception of lyric poetry. Women's performance of the lyric is an elusive subject, both because of the fluidity of gender categories as they apply to performance, and because of the flexible relationship between the performance and composition of medieval music. Since composition was not entirely distinct from performance until the later Middle Ages, the existence of female performers automatically implies the existence of female composers. The creation of medieval music depended on a wide variety of skills and procedures in which performance, composition, and improvisation are not easily separated. Thus the fact that little surviving secular music from before 1500 is attributed to women does not mean that women did not create music. Like other medieval musicians, women performed their own music or adapted the music of others to their own taste and requirements. Every musical performance was inherently an act of composition or recomposition. The music that has survived in manuscript sources is only a small part of the larger tradition, which was usually transmitted orally and routinely included improvisation. Since the predominantly oral transmis-

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Chapter 3

sion of song caused the loss of most melodies in the medieval lyric corpus, the written record reflects a relatively small proportion of the songs that were actually performed. Given the limited survival of melodies for lyric poetry and the prevalence of anonymity among extant works, the lack of attested compositions firmly attributed to women is unsurprising. Investigating women's performance of the medieval lyric entails broadening the scope of the evidence beyond the musical score, rejecting the author function, and placing performance, and thus performers, at the center of the inquiry. Medieval song was first and foremost a performer's art. Working within a predominantly oral tradition, singers determined many aspects of their songs, including tempo and dynamics; these are among the elements which can be found in many modern scores, but which are not specified in medieval music manuscripts. Moreover, before the late thirteenth century, the rhythm of secular monophony was not clearly represented by musical notation, apparently because the oral tradition was sufficient. Sources vary widely on the role of instrumental accompaniment in song, implying that medieval practices were diverse and flexible. All the evidence suggests that singers learned songs orally and were free to appropriate and alter them for their own purposes; they were not expected to perform a song the same way twice, or to produce a version similar to that of another musician. Contrafacting (the practice of singing a song text to the melody of a different song) was a common procedure, as it is in performances of medieval music today. Mastery of improvisation and ornamentation was central to the craft of both singers and instrumentalists. Composition and performance were thus closely intertwined. Variants in the manuscript traditions of medieval song reflect the variation and adaptation that took place from performance to performance, and descriptions of performance in literary narrative corroborate the flexibility suggested by the patterns of written transmission. For instance, a group of aristocrats in Jean Renarfs early thirteenth-century romance Guillaume de Dole simultaneously create and perform a series of related songs by repeating the same verses in a different order and recombining standard formulas, showing "the fluidity of the oral medium, in which singers draw on a repertoire of lyric motifs and refrains that can be pieced together according to conventions of form and decorum."1 Two scenes near the beginning of the romance exemplify the informality, inventiveness, and playfulness of such musico-poetic exchanges between various singers. In the first passage, a group of men and women walk through the forest singing; three different ladies sing generic refrains and rondets de ctwole^ each beginning before the previous one has finished. Three more singers continue, two with short songs on a different subject

Women's Performance of the Lyric

49

(fair Aeliz); the third returns to the rondet genre.2 While these songs differ ostensibly in content, several of them share one or two verses, and the two about fair Aeliz are almost identical; the singing constitutes a game of invention and recombination in which singers use formulaic verses to create short new pieces. The second passage also describes a mixed group of individuals, but this time they sing songs to accompany a round-dance (carole}? In this scene, the singers do not interrupt one another, as those in the previous passage did; the contents of their songs are more closely related, as if they were listening carefully to one another in order to take up the thread of the previous song. Several of the verses used in Guillaume de Dole are transmitted within longer pieces of music in thirteenth-century manuscripts; the processes employed by the singers in the romance may reflect procedures of contemporary musicians.4 As the informal music-making in Guillaume de Dole shows, the creation of medieval music was more varied than is communicated by the modern word "composer,55 with its associated notions of artistic autonomy. The distinction between composer and performer, implying a division of labor into creation and interpretation, has only limited relevance to medieval music. Historians of music have often assumed that medieval women performed music created by others, resulting in a pervasive historiographic tendency to classify female musicians as "amateurs55 whose craft depends on the art of professional men. In this context, definitions of professionalism tend to conform to a model established by the careers of nineteenth-century male musicians; the enduring link between the idea of professionalism and Western cultural notions of musical creativity has led historians to deny agency in the creative process to women deemed nonprofessional, such as aristocratic patrons.5 In the case of medieval song, however, a radical separation of performer from composer makes little sense. Literary accounts of women singing abound in the Middle Ages, and extensive evidence indicates that they played an important role in their musical cultures. Female singers in the Middle Ages came from all classes, including slaves, rustic women, urban women, professional minstrels, and aristocratic girls and women. While there is little evidence for women's performance of secular poetry in Latin Europe during the early Middle Ages, an intriguing Carolingian decree from 789 forbids nuns to compose or send love-songs.6 Much more extensive information exists regarding women musicians in the early medieval Arab world. Female servant-musicians or courtesans are attested in the Iberian peninsula beginning in the eighth century; both Muslims and Mozarabs had dancing and singing slaves in their households. The prominence of women musicians in the Arab world was at its apex during the

5O

Chapter 3

'Abbasid period (750-1258 c.E.).7 The tradition of medieval Arabic lyric includes numerous women singers and poet-composers ranging across the social scale from slaves to princesses.8 Slave-singers were referred to as jwriywh or qaynat^jaqmyah were generally musicians, but could also be female slaves of any kind. A qayna was usually a talented slave who learned and memorized quickly; she was trained not only to sing and play instruments, but also to improvise poetry and generally to entertain guests.9 Some female singers were nculim, highly educated boon companions of the ruler. In the early Islamic period, some accomplished singers and instrumentalists were mawati (freemen) ; after being freed, several of the best-known female mawalthzd musical salons in their homes, and taught their repertoire to other musicians.10 Female singers were essential to the performance, creation, and transmission of medieval Arab music. Usually among the most prized musicians in a court, they participated in all types of performances, often singing behind a curtain.11 As in other traditions of medieval music, performers of Arab lyric were in some sense composers as well, because they made songs their own by means of ornamentation and other forms of alteration. In order to maintain a monopoly over their repertoire, musicians sometimes intentionally distorted songs so that rivals would be unable to recreate them exactly. Jariyah are known to have engaged in this practice, implying that they enjoyed a significant amount of control and authority over their musical repertoire.12 Women musicians in the Arab world were renowned as composers in the strict sense as well: both slaves and princesses are known to have composed their own songs.13 Women were also instrumental in passing music on to others: jany ah taught their repertoire to other jariyah, their owners, mawalt, or male musicians.14 They were valued for their ability to memorize large numbers of songs and thus to preserve musical traditions. As elsewhere in the Arab world, female musicians were central to the musical traditions of the Arab-dominated Iberian peninsula. Singing, dancing, and proficiency in instrumental performance were among the many accomplishments expected of the most valued female slaves, who were given an extensive education before being sold. According to contemporary accounts, innovations in Andalusian musical genres were accomplished with the aid of singing slave-girls.15 Arab music may have exercised significant influence in Occitania by the later eleventh century, when slave women captured in raids on Arab towns in the Iberian peninsula were present in Occitanian courts.16 At the same time, female poets flourished in Al-Andalus, leaving behind them a significant literary corpus.17 It may be no coincidence that the following century saw the emergence in

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51

Occitania of the trobairitz^ a group of women poet-composers unparalleled elsewhere outside the Arab world. The legacy of the twbairitz^ for all its richness, exemplifies the difficulties inherent in discussing the musical aspects of medieval women's song. For the entire corpus of Occitan lyric texts attributable to women or written in a woman's voice,18 only one melody survives, that of "A chantar" by the Comtessa de Dia. In order to reconstruct musical performances of other trobairitz lyrics, it is necessary to apply the technique of contrafact, singing a poem with a melody taken from a structurally similar poem.19 (The recordings oftmbaimtz songs listed in the appended discography employ this method.) Scattered textual references suggest that further melodies by twbairitz have been lost or that they survive without attribution. A prose vida states that the twbairitz Azalais de Porcairagues knew how to compose (sabet twbar) ,20 but this intriguing comment must be interpreted with caution, since it could refer to the composition of verse without implying the creation of music. The vidas were composed significantly later than the poetry of the troubadours and trobairitz^ and are based as much on fiction (in the form of the poetic corpus) as on fact.21 A reference to the son de n'Alam&nda in a poem by Bertran de Born may refer to a composition by Alamanda.22 Little information is available on the twbairitz* performance of their songs; their terse vidas ^ unlike those of the troubadours, do not refer to singing, but several Occitan poems by both men and women refer to women singing. Despite the meager written transmission of their melodies, the trobairitz seem to have played an important role in Occitan musical culture, as both performers and composers. Conduct literature such as the Ensenhamens of Garin le Brun, which recommends that women sing for their guests, supports this idea.23 Furthermore, the active participation of Occitan noblewomen in rule and conflict confirms that their voices were meant to be heard. In an important study, Fredric Cheyette and Margaret Switten argue that the well-documented political power of high-born women in Occitan society should be taken into account in evaluating the status of the woman's voice in Occitan lyric. Contrary to much recent criticism that assumes the exclusion of women from power in Occitan society, and thus from troubadour song, Cheyette and Switten demonstrate that" [i] n this society, women were expected to have a role and a voice."24 Women could also have performed the female voices in Occitan debate poems; the large proportion of debate poems in the trobairitz corpus is suggestive in this regard. Moreover, although the influence of Arabic lyric on that of Occitania is outside the scope of this essay, it is intriguing to speculate that literary dialogue between male and female poets in the Arab world could have

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Chapter 3

inspired similar interactions in Occitan poetry. The mid-eleventh-century exchange of love poems between Wallada and her lover, Ibn Zaidun, bears general comparison with the lively interchange between men and women in the tenso tradition a century later. Wallada and Ibn Zaidun carried on a poetic correspondence that can be likened to a debate,25 although their poems are separate units not exactly comparable to the exchanges ofcoblas between men and women in the Occitan lyric corpus. While this analogy might seem strained, given the universality of debate poetry in medieval literature, the Occitan tenso shares with the exchange between Wallada and Ibn Zaidun the presence of two autonomous voices. Some debates between a troubadour and a lady appear artificial; their dual voicing, which heightens the artifice, is brought out effectively in performance by two singers, such as the male-female tensos by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and Guiraut de Bornelh performed by two singers on the recordings Cansos de Trobairitz andL0 Gai Saber (see discography). Although the female interlocutors in these poems are fictional (a Genovese lady speaking in her dialect; Alamanda, the maidservant of Giraut's beloved), their colorful depictions of women's voices could lend themselves to female vocal performance.26 Cheyette and Switten point out that another fictional interlocutor, the vilanci in Marcabru's pastorela "L'autrier jost'una sebissa," "might indeed reflect a taste for works in which powerful women figure prominently."27 The effective representation of an articulate female subject in these maleauthored debate poems reminds us that the trobairitz themselves composed debate poems with men. One example is ccVos que.m semblatz dels corals amadors," an exchange of coblas between Garsenda and Gui de Cavaillon; another is a tenso between Maria de Ventadorn and Gui d'Ussel, "Gui d'Ussel, be.m pesa de vos."28 We can only speculate that male-female tensones were intended for performance by two people; as in all Occitan poetry, singers must decide how to perform songs without clear, consistent indications of their medieval performance practice.29 However, Angelica Rieger has pointed out the significance of a miniature representing the troubadour Gaucelm Faidit with his wife, the entertainer Guilelma Monja, standing with her hands on her hips as Gaucelm speaks; she seems to be waiting to respond to Gaucelm's speech with her own half of a dialogue. This image may depict a performance of one of the "mixed" tensos\ in any case, it represents two known singers at work together, which suggests collaborative performance practice.30 Guilelma Monja is the only Occitan female minstrel whose name is known to us; narrative sources refer to her as a soldadeim (or soudadeim)^ which scholars have often considered equivalent to "prostitute," but Rieger has shown that the

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53

term is synonymous with jqglaressa^ a female minstrel who usually worked with a male counterpart. The Occitan joglaressa had a distinctive role and image as a professional entertainer who danced, juggled, tumbled, and sang; manuscript illuminations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clearly differentiate between the aristocratic trobairitz and the lower-class jo^laressa.31 Guilelma Monja thus represents a larger class of female performers. Female minstrels and trouveres are also attested in northern France during the high and late Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, female singers and jugglers are mentioned among the entertainers of French and Castilian royalty. Documents from noble and royal households in the fourteenth century list female instrumentalists as well as singers, and several literary texts from this period mention traveling female minstrels.32 Two heroines, Nicolette (inAucassin etNicolette] and Fresne (in Galeran de Bretagne] ^ disguise themselves successfully as minstrels, perhaps suggesting that a female jongleur was not entirely out of the ordinary at the time. Extant songs attributed to female trouveres show that women could compose as well as perform in the high style associated with the male troubadours and trouveres.33 Although no significant group of aristocratic composer-poets analogous to the twbairitz seems to have flourished in northern France, both literary and didactic sources show that music was considered a desirable accomplishment for noblewomen. Heroines in Chretien de Troyes's Philomena and in Gerbert de MontreuiPs Roman de la Violette know how to sing, and conduct literature such as the Chastoiment des Dames of Robert de Blois instructs women to sing "in the company of worthy people."34 In the noble society depicted in romances, women sang as often as men.35 The lyric insertions in Jean Renart's Guillaume deDole represent a microcosm of lyric genres performed by women of diverse status. The heroine and her mother perform chansons de toile ^ a genre typically associated with women.36 Although the oldest surviving chansons de toile are actually from the early thirteenth century, the aura of antiquity surrounding these poems apparently enhanced the charm of the genre for medieval audiences. The ambiguous character of the chansons de toile, as a purportedly popular lyic genre preserved in a stylized form, makes them a paradigm for the association of woman's song with archaic lyric poetry.37 Guillaume de Dole contains one of the earliest appearances of the chanson de toile. The mother of the heroine introduces her song as an ancient genre performed by women in a domestic environment. She and her daughter, Lienor, present a "command performance" of chansons de toile, at the request of a family member, to entertain a visitor in their home. This public performance of a private genre is itself an antiquarian gesture reflecting a taste for old-

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fashioned song, as well as the kind of music-making for guests prescribed in contemporary conduct literature. While distancing the chanson de toile from the fictional present, the scene is constructed around the typical characters and situations associated with the genre. Throughout the romance, Jean Renart aligns Lienor with the popular genres of woman's songs, such as the chansons de toile, while the hero, Conrad, consistently sings trouvere lyrics; their marriage thus represents the union of woman's song and courtly song.38 The performance of the chanson de toile constitutes a self-conscious performance of womanhood itself. However, later in the romance a knight also sings a chanson de toile accompanied by a minstrel; thus a man performs for an audience a genre presented elsewhere in the romance as a song for women's private singing. This section of the text is remarkable for many reasons; it is the longest chanson de toile in the entire romance, and the presence of a minstrel implies an unexpected variety in performance practices of the genre.39 If, as Michel Zink argues, the knight's performance is a parody, it tells us little about medieval performance practice, but the disjunction between the protagonist of the song and the identity of the singer, typical of the lyric insertions in the romance, shows a flexible relationship between performer and author.40 Guillaume de Dole also contains numerous and varied descriptions of performances by minor characters. A jongleur's sister sings a section from a chanson degeste (62-64; lines 1332-67), the typical repertoire of minstrels and jongleurs.41 At the beginning of the romance, noblewomen as well as men sing refrains and rondets de caroles during dances. The rondet de carole crossed class lines, however; an innkeeper's daughter sings one to the accompaniment of a minstrel. As if to distinguish her from the other singers of rondets^ she is rewarded for her performance with a gift: The maiden received as a token his belt with the silver buckle to thank her for singing this new little song with Jouglet and his vielle: Down there in the little meadow — now I have a fine new love! — Perronelle was washing clothes. I should indeed be happy: now I have a fine new love just to my taste. (Ladamoisele ot paramor / Sa ceinture dargent ferree / Deloier carel a chantee / ovoec iouglet enla viele / Ceste chanconete novele. / Cest laius en la praele / orai bone amor novele / dras i gaoit perronele. Bien doi ioie avoir / orai bon amor novele a mon voloir) (86-87; lines 1841-51) Like the payment for the performance, the reference to washing clothes in the song seems to indicate the nonelite status of the singer. Perhaps it is this

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allusion to a practical aspect of everyday life, which contrasts with the pastoral conventions used in the other rondets^ that causes Jean Renart to describe the song as "new.'5 Later in the romance, two ladies sing a rondet together, and a character identified as Bele Doete de Troyes, apparently a female jongleur, sings zpastourelle.4"2 Thus the songs performed by women in the romance include a generic dance-song (rondet de carole}^ a popularizing trouvere form (thepastourelle], and an epic; the singers include noblewomen, a working-class woman, and a professional entertainer. If the music-making in Guillaume de Dole is realistic, as some scholars have asserted,43 the romance indicates what kind of woman performed what sort of song, and also shows the flexibility of the associations between social class and lyric genre. While both amateur and professional musicians performed courtly lyric, the carole was the predominant genre associated with singing by women of all classes in medieval Europe. The multiple genres grouped under the heading ccwoles were characterized by performance during a round-dance; they were "performed by a mixed company of men and women, or by women alone, and are especially associated with young girls."44 Although women's popular dance-songs were already an ancient custom in the Middle Ages, caroles became increasingly prevalent in both rural and urban settings during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, consequently occupying a significant place in French literature of the period.45 Theologians also concerned themselves with caroles, often condemning young women who danced in them. Christopher Page's suggestion that the carole was "the principal point of contact between the musical culture of the villages, towns, and courts" could explain the blending of elite and popular culture in the poetry of songs sung during caroles.46 While caroles are usually presented in a narrative framework as simple dance-songs, authors of romances often exploit their innocent surface to deliver a hidden message. For example, a passage from the thirteenth-century Old Occitan Roman de Flamenca describes girls performing a spring dancesong: "The maidens had already brought out may-garlands they had made the night before, and they sang their may-songs. They all passed right in front of Guillem singing a maying-song that goes: cMay the lady be rewarded who does not make her lover anguish.' "47 Even this apparently artless kalenda maia is carefully crafted to fit the narrative context of the romance, for it highlights the fact that Guillem, the hero, is in love with Flamenca, and hopes that she reciprocates his feelings. Similarly, the conventional opening of a rondet de carole in Sone deNansay is altered to reflect the name of the heroine; in another rondet^ the heroine conveys her emotions to her lover.48 Like the passage from

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Flamencn^ this episode cannot be regarded simply as direct evidence of women's music-making or of contemporary social practice. While fictional accounts of performance must be treated with caution as historical evidence, details in the descriptions they contain often provide an example of customary activities that were so common as to seem unremarkable to the writer. A passage in Chretien de Troyes's Chepalier au Lion provides an instructive example, demonstrating the flexibility of descriptions of musicmaking in medieval narrative. Seven different manuscript readings of these verses variously describe maidens dancing to the accompaniment of instruments.49 They may be playing or singing at the same time: "whether the maidens are singing, dancing, or playing instruments, scribes may have been inattentive to this distinction because it would be assumed that maidens would be doing all of these things."50 This example effectively evokes the flexibility of performance practice that seems to be behind the instability of some textual traditions. The medieval romances of Tristan and Iseut (in German, Isolde) provide numerous descriptions of performances by Isolde, whose musical accomplishment is an integral part of her character. The thirteenth-century Tristan romance by Thomas describes Iseut singing a lai\ "One day, she sat in her chamber and made a sad lay of love . . . the queen sings sweetly, fits her voice to the instrument; her hands are beautiful, the lay good, her voice sweet and her tone low."51 The word fait probably indicates that Iseut did not just perform the tat, but improvised or invented the text and music herself; the related Old Occitan verb far can signify both "to compose" and "to perform."52 In Guillaume de Dole, Renart establishes an equivalence between writing and composing (faire and trover) supporting the idea that fait in Thomas's Tristan refers to the creation of a text: "and it will seem to everyone that he who wrote the romance also composed all the words of the songs" ("Sest avis a chascun et samble / Q[ue] cil qui a fet les romans / Q[ui] 1 trovast toz les moz des chans," 2-3; lines 26-28). Unlike most descriptions of music-making in medieval narrative, this scene in Thomas's romance depicts a private performance, without any intended audience; Cariado's unannounced arrival while Iseut sings is all the more disruptive because he intrudes upon her privacy. Iseut is not restricted to performance alone in her chamber; on the contrary, she generally sings and plays for the court. Her performance of the l&i is particularly private because it expresses her secret feelings and is not intended to be heard by others; given the personal nature of the song, it is all the more likely that Iseut is supposed to have composed the lai herself. The idea of Iseut as composer of lais is made

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explicit in the later development of the legend, the Roman de Tristan en Prose•; in several manuscripts of this work, narrative lais of the type Iseut sings in Thomas's Tristan are transmitted with music and attributed to her as author.53 In the Roman de Tristan en Prose, several of the songs are in the form of letters, including one that Iseut composes and sings: "Then she begins to compose a letter as well and as cleverly as she could. She sang so well and so joyously that one could not find a lady who sang better than she" ("Lors conmence .i. brief a trouver au mieulz et au plus soutillement qu'elle onques pout. . . elle chantoit si bien et si envoisieement que 1'en ne pouist a celui point trouver nulle dame mieulz chantant de lui") ,54 One of the manuscripts of the Roman de Tristan en Prose containing musical notation contains the lai text corresponding to the passage above: To you, Tristan, true friend, Whom I love and will love All the days of my life, I send this letter that I have made with my heart. To you, Tristan, fair sweet friend, In place of my heart have I sent This letter, where I have put That you have wrongly made me your enemy. (A vous, Tristran, amis verai / Que je amai et amerai / Tous les jours que je duerrai, / Mant mon brief que fait de cuer ai. / Vous Tristran, biaus dous amis, / En lieu de mon cuer ai tramis / Mon brief, ou je ai dedens mis / Qu'a tort m'estes fais anemis.)55 In other parts of the prose Tristan^ lais are sung by several different characters, including young girls who perform lais composed by Tristan, at his request.56 The survival of music for the lais indicates that they were intended for performance, presumably by women. Gottfried von Strassburg's thirteenth-century German romance, Tristan^ describes Isolde's musical accomplishments in remarkable detail: She fiddled her "estampie," her lays, and her strange tunes in the French style, about Sanze and St. Denis (than which nothing could be rarer), and knew an extraordinary number. . . . She sang her "pastourelle," her "rotruenge" and "rondeau," "chanson," "refloit" and "folate" well, and well, and all too well. . . . Of love-songs she could make both the words and the airs and polish them beautifully. She was able to read and write. (Si videlte ir stampenie, / leiche und so vremediu notelin, / diu niemer vremeder kunden sin, / in franzoiser wise / von Sanze und San Dinise. / Der kunde s'uzer maze

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vil.... / Si sang ir pasturele, / ir rotruwange und ir rundate, / schanzune, refloit und folate / wol unde wol und alze wol. . . / Brieve und schanzune tihten, / ir getihte schone slihten, / si kunde schriben unde lesen.)57

This description of an ideal thirteenth-century courtly musician is informative on several levels. It shows that Gottfried's audience would be impressed by Isolde's mastery of several French vocal and instrumental genres. Gottfried presents the composition of love-songs as a particular accomplishment, and implicitly distinguishes between the creation of texts and melodies. It is significant that Isolde's literacy is mentioned after her ability to compose songs; most secular monody of the high Middle Ages was not written down by the composer, but rather transmitted orally and recorded in manuscripts long after the time of composition. Isolde is presented as both an interpreter and a creator of music, a skilled composer-performer who has reached the summit of artistic achievement. While the evidence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for women's performance of the lyric comes primarily from literary sources, we know significantly more about historical women musicians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first Italian text to address the education of women, Francesco da Barberino's Reggimento e costumi di donna, can be used as a source of information on the musical experience of women in the early Trecento, with the qualification that it is a prescriptive document.58 In this text, written in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, Barberino set down restrictions on musical performance by young women of various social classes, from princesses down to peasants. According to Barberino, the lower a woman's status, the more freedom she has to sing; girls and women of the lower classes have the greatest liberty to dance and sing. The daughter of an emperor or a king may perform for guests only at the request of a parent; she can sing songs when in her room with her teacher or with other women, and to pass the time, she may also be permitted to study an instrument. Barberino's treatise contains the earliest reference to singing for a private audience as camemle, "of the chamber"; music is thus presented as a form of discipline for women who were essentially confined to their rooms.59 As conduct literature, the Rgggimento presents an idealized schema of female socialization, but historical documents show that "most elite women of the fifteenth century had a musical education something like that prescribed by Barberino."60 Since a great deal of Italian fourteenth-century music was improvised or orally transmitted and was not written down, we know little of the music women performed, but, given the fluid boundary between composer and performer in this period, it is likely that women created at least some of the music they performed. Eleonora Beck

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remarks cautiously that "women, as described in Barberino's treatise, surely played, sang, and performed music; we can only hypothesize, however, that they did indeed compose music.5'61 In addition to amateur performers, professional women musicians (a category not mentioned by Barberino) performed secular music in northern Italian courts during the fifteenth century.62 Highly skilled female professional singers are known to have existed in northern Europe in this period as well. In a treatise written around 1400 (possibly in Hainaut), Arnulf of St. Ghislain praised female virtuosos for their vocal technique: "There is a second group among the fourth category, evidently of the favoured female sex, which is so much the more valuable the more it is rare; who in the epiglottis of the sweetsounding throat divide tones with equipose into semitones, and articulate semitones into indivisible microtones with an indescribable melody that you would think more angelic than human."63 This unusually specific passage emphasizes the rarity of highly skilled female singers and describes their agility in fast ornamentation. Since decoration of melodic lines was a form of improvisation cultivated by all medieval singers, Arnulf finds the singers remarkable not for the mere fact that they know how to ornament, but rather for their mastery of the art. In the fifteenth century, the musical literacy of elite women seems to have increased, to judge from the large number of music manuscripts intended for women.64 Several fifteenth-century women best known as patrons were both prolific poets and active musicians, making it probable that they composed music for their own performance. Margaret of Austria, a skilled poet and performer of music, probably created some of the musical settings of her poetry; Martin Picker argues that Margaret composed the lament for her brother, Philip the Fair.65 While no extant compositions are attributed to fifteenth-century women, the documented activities of noblewomen and their ladies-in-waiting suggests that they created music and poetry which is lost, or extant but anonymous. The question of voice is central: Paula Higgins argues that much fifteenth-century anonymous lyric poetry in a neutral voice may have been written by women.66 In addition to creating new works, much "invisible" compositional activity in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance took the form of arranging wellknown songs for instrumental performance. Thus Bianca de' Medici, who sang and played French chansons for the entourage of Pope Pius II at Florence in 1460, may herself have made the arrangements of the vocal works she performed on the organ.67 Patronage can be seen as another "invisible" musical activity; many noblewomen promoted the composition of works they

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could perform themselves, and received instruction in performance from musicians in their employ. It is possible that they also learned to improvise in the style of the compositions they commissioned, and thus were creators to some extent as well as performers. That their agency in musical composition took the form of patronage does not diminish their importance as female performers of lyric poetry. To cite one particularly well-known example, Isabella d'Este's patronage of Italian vocal music had a significant effect on music history, contributing to the "shift in taste away from the French chanson and toward native Italian forms and styles.5'68 This essay has tended to separate amateur (elite) from professional (nonelite) performances, dividing them into categories that correspond roughly to the modern designations of private and public. Recent work by ethnomusicologists shows how problematic this distinction is with regard to women's performance, however. Jennifer Post has revealed the ethnocentric bias in scholars' assumptions of a rigid division between public and private performance; in many cultures, such boundaries are not manifested clearly and do not correspond to the experience of the musicians within their society.69 In the effort to connect the corpus of woman's song to performers of the past, historical musicologists stand to benefit from ethnomusicologists' studies of women's performance traditions in diverse cultures. Peter Jeffery, in a study advocating the application of ethnomusicological methods to medieval Western chant, points out the relevance of cross-cultural study to women's laments, a universal oral tradition that must have influenced more formal liturgical laments in medieval Western music.70 Unlike a traditional musicological approach based on written works, an approach to woman's song drawing upon ideas from ethnomusicology has the advantage of treating the medieval lyric as a predominantly oral art in which women played a central role, despite their limited representation as "authors" in the written record. By focusing on the social roles of women musicians and on the social context of their performances, we may better understand the musical dimensions of these traditions while bracketing the problematic questions of authorship and attribution that play a major role in many discussions of woman's song. Pierre Bee has pointed out that, paradoxically, many of the known "woman's songs" were written by men, while the trobctiritz^ who were women, wrote poetry in the genres of the male-voiced troubadour tradition.71 Critics usually take as given that anonymous songs in a woman's voice were written by male court poets evoking an older tradition of popular poetry. Dance-songs and refrains are often considered to be man-made texts that preserve only a secondary impression of a woman's voice.72 For example, the

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following statement in a recent monograph on the alba radically separates voice from authorship: "The alba lady's voice is, presumably, w^w-made: all the albas for which authorship is known are by men. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that, in the case of the ten anonymous albas, anonymous was a woman, scholars have found no evidence to suggest that a significant number of anonymous vernacular lyrics were composed by women."73 Such an approach to the attribution of anonymous woman's songs does not take into account the dynamics of musical performance; the intersection of authorship and voice in the performance of medieval lyric significantly weakens the distinction between songs written by women and anonymous ones written in a woman's voice. The "authorship" of much medieval song can be seen as at least partly collective, since successive performers or copyists of works altered and adapted them; the transformations to which medieval songs were subject, in both written and oral transmission, thus lessen the extent to which a song's essence is purely a product of the author. A medieval singer essentially recreated a song in performance, and could take on the identity of its poetic "I." Some genres (such as the canso) could be performed by women or men, without any inherent link between the voice of the poem and the sex of the singer. Even genres closely associated with performance by women, such as the chanson de toile and the rondet de carole^ could apparently be sung by men or women, as seen above in Guillaume de Dole. The appropriation of a song's voice by a singer seems often to have been considered an integral part of the song, which was then interpreted as a personal statement by the performer. Literary sources suggest that medieval audiences perceived female singers both as interpreting preexisting music and as expressing their own emotions. The performance of well-known songs by characters in some French romances reminds us of medieval singers' readiness to adapt preexisting music to their purposes. In Gerbert de Montreuil's thirteenth-century Roman de la VioleUe the heroine, Euriaut, sings a stanza from a canso by Bernart de Ventadorn to express her defiance of the challenge to her love presented by an envious courtier.74 While Euriaut's choice of song may be a purely literary conceit, it is noteworthy that the narrative depicts a woman singing a song attributed to a male poet, while adapting it to her own situation. The second lyric Euriaut sings falls into the category of traditional woman's song (a chanson de malmariee)^ but while the song itself is about marital infidelity, Euriaut uses it to profess loyalty; she alters her songs to express her own feelings.75 Fresne, in the thirteenth-century romance Galeran deBretagne^ also communicates her emotions through song, but is able to conceal her message from everyone but her lover because she is disguised as a minstrel; minstrels, as professional enter-

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tainers, are not assumed to express their personal sentiments through their art.76 Descriptions of music-making in Boccaccio's Decameron also reflect a perception of multiple meanings embedded in songs performed by women. Each evening of the ten days they spend in the country outside Florence, the three men and seven women of the brigata dance and sing after dinner, and each of the characters sings one solo ballata. During most of the performances, the audience reflects on the meaning of the song, and often aligns the lyric "I" of the song with the persona of the singer, whether man or woman. On the sixth, seventh, and tenth day, the listeners attribute the emotions expressed in the songs to the female performers themselves. They assume that the ballot a sung by Elissa on the sixth day refers to rejection by her own unidentified lover: "Then, with a rather pitiful sigh, Elissa finished her song, and while all wondered at her words, no one could figure out who was the reason for such singing3' ("Poi che con un sospiro assai pietoso Elissa ebbe alia sua canzon fatta fine, ancor che tutti si maravigliasser di tali parole, niuno per cio ve n'ebbe che potesse awisare chi di cosi cantar le fosse cagione") 77 Likewise, the members of the brigata conclude from Filomena's ballata on the seventh day that she is enjoying a new love: "This song made the whole brigata think that Filomena was embracing a new and pleasing love, and since her words made it seem that she had experienced more than just the view of this love, some were envious of her, considering her luckier than they5' ("Estimar fece questa canzone a tutta la brigata che nuovo e piacevole amore Filomena strignesse; e per cio che per le parole di quella pareva che ella phi avanti che la vista sola n'avesse sentito, tenendonela phi felice, invidia per tali vi furono le ne fu avuta," Decameron^ 885-86). Finally, Dioneo explicitly links Fiammetta's song on the tenth day to her private feelings: "When Fiammetta had finished her song, Dioneo, who was next to her, said laughingly: my lady, you would do us a great kindness to tell everyone who he is, so that ownership of him is not accidentally taken away from you through ignorance, since it would make you so angry" ("Come la Fiammetta ebbe la sua canzon finita, cosi Dioneo, che allato 1'era, ridendo disse: — Madonna, voi fareste una gran cortesia a farlo cognoscere a tutte, accio che per ignoranzia non vi fosse tolta la possessione, poi che cosi ve ne dovete adirare," Decameron^ 1252-53). In each case, a woman's song is interpreted as a direct expression of her own experience, albeit stated in the form of a highly conventional poem. The brig Ota's literal interpretation of these songs suggests that the singers themselves are the composers, and indeed all the ballate are of unspecified authorship. The description of Lauretta's singing at the

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end of the third day, however, could indicate that the other singers had not all composed their own songs: "Filostrato . . . asked Lauretta to begin a dance and sing a song; she said, cMy lord, I don't know songs by other people, nor can I remember any of my own that would be fitting for such a happy group; if you want one of mine, I will willingly sing one'" ("Filostrato . . . comando che la Lauretta una danza prendesse e dicesse una canzone; la qual disse; — Signor mio, dell' altrui canzoni io non so, ne delle mie alcuna n'ho alia mente che sia assai convenevole a cosi lieta brigata; se voi di quelle che' io so volete, io ne diro volenticri" Decameron, 453). The distinction Lauretta makes between her own songs and "those by other people" may indicate, in addition to modesty, a concern for privacy; like the songs of the other women in the bri^ata, her sad song is closely analyzed by the audience: "noticed by all, it was understood differently by different people" (ccla quale notata da tutti, diversamente da diversi fu intesa," Decameron, 456). The fact that Lauretta's song is subject to interpretation by the other members of the brigata confirms that their collaborative music-making represents interrelationships within the group on both a literal and a figurative level. Nora Beck has aptly characterized the social and ethical function of music in the Decameron: "the inclusion of music serves as a multifaceted metaphor relating to the establishment of well-being and good government among the members of the brigatar7* The women dancing caroles in the Decameron, like those depicted in Lorenzetti's fresco of the Effects of Good Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, combine realism with symbolism; caroles were a feature of late-medieval town life, and they also represent the harmony established by good government.79 The metaphorical dimension of the carole can be extended to the ballate in the Decameron', Jeremy Yudkin has suggested that Boccaccio's depiction of the ballata as a simple dance-song, at a time when the genre had already developed into a more complex musical form, is intended to enhance the "idyllic nature of the cornice"80 The central place of music in the world of the Decameron shows the extent to which medieval song was an integral part of its social context and functioned as a metaphor for community. Given the documentary evidence available, it seems more productive to study women's performance of medieval song within its cultural and historical context than to pursue a traditional musicological approach based on the analysis of musical scores. Literary sources suggest that medieval singers consciously engaged in the interplay of different voices created by a performance of poetry, producing the interaction, so prominent in traditions of woman's song, between poetic artifice and the naturalism of the personal.81

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Selected Discography "A chantar": Lieder der Frauen-Minne im Mittelalter (Songs of Women — Courtly Love in the Middle Ages). Estampie. Christophorus, 1990. Christophorus 74583. [Comtessa de Dia, "A chantar"; an anonymous chanson de malmariee^ "For coi me bait mes maris," a chanson de toile, "Bele Ysabiauz."] Ave Eva: Chansons de Femmes, XIP et XIIIe siecles. Brigitte Lesne. Opus, 1995. OPS 30-134. [Secular songs include Cantigas de amigo, a lai, and chansons de malmariee. ] Bella Domna. The Medieval Woman: Lover, Poet, Patroness and Saint. Sinfonye. Hyperion, 1988. Hyperion CDA 66283. [Comtessa de Dia, "A chantar55; anonymous chanson de femme, "Lasse pour quoi refusai," and a tenso, "Domna, pos vos ay chausida," as well as some cantigas de amigo and "Onques n'amai" a song in a woman's voice by Richard de Fournival.] Calamus: Medieval Women's Songs. Eduardo Paniagua. Pneuma, 1995. Pneuma CD-PN 050. [Arabo-Andalusian songs and cantigas de amigo. ] Cansos de trobairitz. Hesperion XX. EMI, 1978, reissued 1990. EMI CDM 7 63417 2. [Performances of five trobairitz poems, as well as of a tenso by Giraut de Bornelh with Alamanda, and a canso in a woman's voice by Cadenet. ] "La chanson d'ami": Chansons de femme, XIP et XIIP siecles. Katia Care, voice, and Perceval. Arion, 1994. ARN 68290. [Several anonymous songs in a woman's voice, including a rondet de carole; "Molt m'abellist quant je voi revenir55 by the female trouvere Maroie de Diergnau.] Chansons de Toile au temps du Roman de la rose. Esther Lamandier. Alienor, 1983, reissued 1987. Alienor CD AL ion. [Several chansons de toile performed from thirteenth-century manuscripts. ] The Courts of Love: Music from the Time of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Sinfonye. Hyperion, 1990. Hyperion CDA66367. ["L5on dit q'amors est dolce chose," anonymous chanson de femme\ "S'anc fuy belha ni prezada,55 alba by Cadenet; "S5ie-us quier conseilh, belTami' Alamanda,5' tenso by Giraut de Bornelh. ] Lo Gai Saber: Troubadours et Jongleurs 1100-1300/Troubadours and Minstrels/Troubadoure und Spielmanner. Camerata Mediterranea. Erato, 1991. Erato 2292-45647-2. [Contrafacts of a canso by the Comtessa de Di^Abjoi et ab joven; and a tenso by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Domna, tant vos ai preiada, performed by a man and woman. ] Lejeu d'Amour: Chants courtois et a danser du Moyen-A0efran$ais. Anne Azema. Erato, 1997. Erato 0630-17072-2. [Chansons de malmariee^ dance songs, other chansons de femme.] Le manuscrit du Roi: Trouveres et troubadours. Gerard Zuchetto and Katia Care. Arion, 1993. ARN 68225. [Includes "Bele Emmelos,5' a chanson de toile.] The Romance of the Rose: Feminine Voices from Medieval France. Heliotrope. Koch International, 1995. Koch 3-7i03-2Hi. [Songs from Guillaume de Dole, trobairitz cansos^ chansons de toile\ anonymous chansons defemme. ] Sweet is the Son0. Catherine Bott. L5Oiseau-Lyre, Decca 448999-2 [A chanson de toile and "A chantar'5 of the Comtessa de Dia. ] "The sweet look and the loving manner": Trobairitz love lyrics and chansons de fcmmefrom

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medieval France. Sinfonye. Hyperion, 1993. Hyperion CDA 66625. [Monophony and polyphony, with several instrumental realizations. ] Le Tournoi des Dames: Lafemme dans la lyrique franfaise (XIP etXIIP) siecles. Perceval et Sanacore. Arion, 1997. Arion 68350. [Polyphonic and monophic songs, mostly written in a woman's voice. ] Tristan etlseult. The Boston Camerata. Erato, 1989. Erato CD 2292-45348-2. [Includes contrafact of Comtessa de Dia, "Estat en greu cossirier" and a lai sung by Iseut in the Roman de Tristan en prose. The lai is intended to illustrate the scene in Thomas5 Tristan where Isolde sings a lai\ this scene is discussed above. ] Trouveres a la cour de Champagne. Ensemble Venance Fortunat. Harmonia Mundi, 1995. ED 13045. [Two chansons de toile. ] The Unicorn: Chants medievaux franpais/Medieval French Songs. Anne Azema. Erato, 1994. Erato 4509-94830-2. [Includes "Bele Doette."]

4

Ca no soe joglaresa Women and Music in Medieval Spain's Three Cultures Judith R. Cohen

The three cultures of medieval Iberia — Christian, Jewish, Muslim —and the relations among them have occasioned considerable interest over the past decades.1 The role of women musicians in these three cultures has long been of interest to me, from both academic and performance-oriented viewpoints. From the perspective of ethnomusicology, much of my research has focused on Judeo-Spanish Sephardic song, largely a women's tradition with roots and influences going back to the three cultures of medieval Iberia. As a performing musician working with medieval music, as well as Judeo-Spanish and related Mediterranean traditions, I have found the role of women musicians in medieval Spain a natural and intriguing area of study. This essay is intended as a general overview of women's role in medieval Iberian and closely related song, exploring their own activities and attitudes as musicians and composers, as well as images of and attitudes toward them in contemporaneous poetry and other writing. The study of medieval women's music presents several challenges. First, and most difficult, is the general paucity of musical notation for woman's songs of the time.2 While within the music of medieval Christian society it is possible to apply the widespread practice of contmfactum? and set poems to contemporaneous melodies which fit their prosody, this is not possible for the Jewish and Muslim communities of the time, as they did not generally notate their music. Texts are problematic as well: even in the case of the Occitanian trobairitz^ the women troubadours of Provence, not all the women can be identified with certainty. The numerous poems in a woman's voice in GalicianPortuguese and in Old French, some of which do have musical notation, are not necessarily "woman's songs" in the sense of being composed by women

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and/or constituting a women's repertoire. On the other hand, documentation of medieval women's involvement in music, formal or informal, is fairly extensive, as are attitudes toward women musicians in public and private settings, in all three cultures of medieval Spain. As an ethnomusicologist, I add some speculation drawn from oral tradition to complement the available documentation, though with the caution which is obviously required. My work as a performer of medieval music and oral traditions gives me another perspective on the image of women in the songs and on what it means to a woman to sing them. While there are obvious pitfalls in applying a late twentieth-century sensibility to a medieval repertoire, this point of view also follows current anthropological ideas toward the scholar's involvement as a person in the culture s/he is studying. On a different, practical level, my performing activities enable me to apply the medieval technique of contrafactum^ in this case setting medieval women's poems without accompanying notation to appropriate contemporaneous melodies, and to try out these settings by performing them to audiences with various degrees of knowledge of the repertoire. Fortunately, voluntarily singing in public today doesn't raise the sort of malicious speculation about my possibly related professions as it did for my Iberian colleagues of eight centuries ago.4 On the other hand, there are several different kinds of publics, and women's musical roles varied according to the contexts in which they were expressed.

Women Singers and Their Roles References to women's active involvement in music and poetry go far back, to the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha; to ancient Greece; to writings by Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, St. John Chrysostom,5 and others. Besides such obvious and regularly cited sources as the poetry of Sappho, one can profitably comb chronicles, epics, narrative poems, exempla, and men's poetry; iconography yields further information; and there are several allusions — mostly negative — to women singers by religious authorities in all three communities. Women were instrumentalists as well as singers. In all three cultures, they were — and throughout the Mediterranean still are — associated with percussion instruments. This association has been continuous, from Myriam playing the tambourine at the parting of the Red Sea, through Juvenal's description of Spanish singing-girls with castanets, and Isidore of Seville's statement that women invented percussion. The celebrated Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X include several miniatures of women musicians of the three cultures,

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and the Archipreste of Hita not only refers to women musicians but even specifies certain of their instruments as being inappropriate for songs in "arabigo" style.6 In the Punic Wars a Galician woman is described as singing "strange songs,5' accompanying herself on a percussion instrument.7 Today, in Galicia, as well as in areas of Leon and Salamanca, and parts of Portugal, the double-skinned square frame drum has retained its function as a woman's instrument, and in Portugal its Arabic name (adufe^ from al-duf). Playing plucked and bowed stringed instruments could be valued accomplishments for medieval women musicians, but references to women playing wind instruments are rare, and even in oral tradition today often have negative social connotations related to phallic imagery.8 All three cultures, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, shared an ambivalence toward music itself, and also an ambivalence toward women; so, not surprisingly, an ambivalence toward women in music. The issue is not so much whether women sang as where and under what circumstances they did so. The title of Cristina Segura's essay "Public women / bad women, honest women / private women"9 neatly sums up the situation: the home and, for Christian women, the cloister were the only real private spaces, the only places where an honest woman would really be found. But even within these spaces the dichotomy between "public" and "private" was further refined. A wife and mother joining in singing hymns around the table, a woman fulfilling a religious duty by singing life cycle songs, a nobleman's daughter singing to the harp to charm his guests — all could be defined as "private," and permitted — even mandated — by men. These were very different propositions from a woman singing to a general public, especially to earn her living, where it was generally assumed that prostitution was her other profession. In the medieval romance Libro de Apolonio^ the noble-born Tarsiana makes sure everyone knows that singing in the market-place is only a temporary resort, and that she has not embraced other means of livelihood associated with it, i.e. prostitution: "no so joglaresa de las de buen mercado" ("I'm not one of those juglaresas who can be bought," line 490). Similarly, in the Libro de Alexandre^ Queen Calcetrix is at pains to specify that "non vin' ganar haberes, ca no soe joglaresa" ("I'm not here to earn any money; I'm no jotjlaresa" line 1723). Basically, men set the contexts in which women's music-making was legitimate — or, in certain cases, even mandatory. These judgments were, not surprisingly, influenced by the degree of benefit to the men themselves: for example, the prestige they gained by having an accomplished daughter or slave. Women adapted themselves to these limits with varying degrees of ere-

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ativity and compliance. Lower-class women musicians were another story: they did not enter the public/private dichotomy of the upper class, though there is some discussion of the songs of farmers, sailors, weavers, and other workers in early sources.

The Surviving Corpus Of music attributed to medieval women composers, very little has remained. For poetry in a woman's voice, though not necessarily demonstrably composed by women, we fare better: on the Peninsula,11 the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo (songs of the "friend," i.e., male beloved), Hispano-Arabic women's poetry, a couple of examples of Jewish women poets, and the Hispano-Hebraic and Hispano-Arabic kharjas, which are the envois to the longer muwashshahas.12 It is unclear whether the woman's voice poems are survivals of oral women's traditions, courtly adaptations by male poets, male poets' inventions, or some combination of the above.

Identifying Women Singers Who were these women musicians and poets? For Christian Iberia, we have very few names. Most of the actual names we have are those of soldadeims, lower-class women paid for their services, musical or otherwise (from soldado/soldada^ "salaried"); of these, the best known is Maria Balteira.13///^/^resas were also public women performers, the counterparts of the French jontjleresses.14 Christian women were sent as captives to Muslim Andalusia, to be trained as musicians, sometimes becoming part of courtly musical ensembles. One example was Qalam, known as the "Basque woman," whom the emir 'Abdal-Rahman II sent to be trained as a musician in Medina; on her return he was so pleased with her musicianship that he married her. King Mu'tammid of Seville wrote a poem extolling Christian women musicians, "and these Christian women (rumiyya-s} I so love / and who please (with their songs) even the birds on the high branches."15 So far, we have no names of women who would be the Iberian equivalent of the trobaimtz on the other side of the Pyrenees. However, later on more women's names do appear, notably Mayor Arias, and the "Queen of Mallorca," both discussed below. In Muslim Andalusia, there was a fascinating group of women poets from all three classes: noblewomen, upper middle class, and hired women musi-

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cians. The latter were divided into two main groups: the qiyan, the educated ones who played for their courtly patrons in the presence of guests, and the yawari, slaves who performed in lower-class settings and whose musical duties often included some level of prostitution.16 We know many of their names and, in some cases, a little about their characters. Probably the best known of the aristocratic women poets was Wallada, an Umayyad princess and somewhat of a social iconoclast, a leader in walking in public without her veil. Women slaves were divided into two main classes: domestic and recreational.17 The most attractive and accomplished slaves could instruct such famous poets as Ibn Hazm, and command spectacular prices. As Nadia Lachiri puts it, "singing was a requirement for the education of the female slaves, to satisfy men not only sexually but also aesthetically and intellectually."18 Slaves came from Christian Iberia, Calabria, Lombardy, France, or from North Africa; and a fair amount was written about their respective merits and disadvantages. For example, a late twelfth-/thirteenth-century ruler from Malaga recommends girls from Mecca for their singing, and from Ethiopia for their flute playing but not their diction. He also offers nonmusical advice: Berbers or Yemenites for voluptuousness, diligence, obedience, and health; Turks for strong children; Ethiopians for nursing; and Nubians for obedience and nursing (with the caution that they tended to thievery). Corsicans, he observed, knew how to regain their virginity: a useful skill which oral poetry tells us was shared by other groups as well.19 Jewish women poets are the most elusive of all. Qasmuna lived in twelfthcentury Granada, and was herself the daughter of a poet, probably the famous vizir Samuel ibn Nagrela HaNagid (993-1056); she wrote in Arabic.20 The unnamed wife of the famous tenth-century poet Dunash ibn Labrat left one poem, the only Hebrew poem by a Hispano-Hebraic woman —and even its authenticity as a woman's poem is far from certain. Much later, across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Moroccan Jewish Frekha Bat Avraham composed piyyutim, Hebrew hymns.21 Women, or rather young girl, musicians are delectably described in medieval Hispano-Hebraic men's poetry, but it is unlikely that these lute-plucking maidens among the wine and flowers were Jewish.

Women Poets and Their Points of View: The Christian World Though the twbairitz are from across the Pyrenees, the troubadours worked on both sides, and the lack of a documented parallel Iberian tradition for the

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trobairitz makes it important to comment briefly on the poetry of the latter. For similar reasons, the French chansons d}ami will also be mentioned. The trobairitz poems are neither oral tradition nor adaptations of it; they are deliberate compositions. For Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, the trobairitz — unlike the troubadours — "combine within a single female speaker the aristocratic and the popular female personae."22 Twbairitz poetry has often been characterized as being in a generally fresher, more direct voice than troubadour poetry. The trobairitz call their men into question — as, in fact, do the Muslim women poets; there is a certain sense of pride and control in much of their writing. False modesty was not among their character traits. The Comtessa de Dia, the only trobairitz for whom we have a manuscript melody, enumerates her own attractions: ccValer mi deu mos pretz e mos paratges / e ma beutatz e plus mos fins coratges" ("My worth, noble birth, beauty and lofty thoughts should carry some weight") ,23 Joan Ferrante has analyzed some concrete aspects ottwbairitz rhetoric.24 She finds that, compared to the troubadours, the women poets make more use of direct address to their lovers; they use more verb forms expressing the past and more negative expressions; they use more wordplay and rhymes; and sometimes attack the conventions of the courtly game. Bruckner cautions against "tendentious and naive ideas about the trobairitz' spontaneity and directness" ("Trobairitz," 201, n. i), calling for a subtler examination of the topos of sincerity in the trobairitz corpus. Referring to Jean-Marie d'Heur's observation that the same expressions which may seem "tiresomely conventional" in a troubadour poem may be interpreted by the same critics as "spontaneous" in a trobairitz composition, she points out that our own constructs of male and female voices influence our perception of sincerity in male and female poems ("Trobairitz," 222). Elsewhere, Bruckner also points out that both the male and female Occitanian courtly poets "operate in a lyric whose fiction would have us believe its claims to speak truthfully from the heart" (SWT, xlvi). The trouvere songs in a woman's voice25 vary from the lovelorn Chanterai por mon corage (Guiot de Dijon?), where the speaker holds on to her absent crusader's shirt at night like a security blanket,26 to a number of poems extolling the advantages of one's lover over one's husband. Maroie de Diergnau, a rare specific name given as a woman composer in Old French, states that a "bele pucele" should have a "joli cuer" in all seasons and weather.27 Children are barely mentioned in any medieval Romance language women's poetry. Among the trobairitz^ the only poem that does mention children does so negatively: "mas far infanz cuiz qu'es gran penitenza" ("I think making

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babies is harsh penance" SWT, 27.18; "Trobairitz," 204). The only other poems that mention children are both from Spain, and separated by five centuries. One is by the unnamed wife of the tenth-century poet Dunash Ibn Labrat; the other, dated 1403, is Mayor Arias's farewell poem to her husband. These are both discussed in more detail below. The corpus of Galician-Portuguese secular poetry has stimulated a good deal of discussion about what was and wasn't composed by women. The often "anemic" cantijjas de amor (songs of love)28 and the scathing cantigas dfacarnho e mat dizer (songs of satire and insults), with their politically incorrect insults to women and their insults to priests (the latter perhaps less politically incorrect today), are the work of male poets, but the authorship of the cantigas de amigo is not so easily established. Ria Lemaire suggests that in the cantigas de amigo corpus authorship moved from women to men, reflected in an increasingly passive outlook for the woman.29 There are six Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo with music, by Martin Codax, and several hundred without. Kathleen Ashley refers to the "widespread misapprehension" that the theme of most of these poems is a young girl yearning for an eternally absent beloved.30 Whether or not it appears in the majority of songs, it is certainly a central theme, and one that could as easily express a male poet's easy egotism as a woman's poetic creativity—or, as Luz Pozo Garza would have it, her "indissoluble, primordial,... cosmic . . . union with the sea, which becomes a conversation."31 This cosmic vision is rivaled by Hernani Cidade's, of the poems as "fresh and fragrant natural flowers surrounded by live sap of the national earth, amid a multitude of conventionally cut paper flowers."32 In comparison with the sophisticated observations of the trobairitz^ these lovelorn girls at first appear insipid and passive. Their mothers, however, whom they regularly address, often have more character: "Daughter, he's just leading you on, with his so-called songs, which are worthless" ("Sei, filha, que vos trag'enganada / con seus cantares, que non valen nada") ,33 A different sort of mother appears in a poem by Juiao Boleiro: this one is annoyed with her daughter because the latter has prevented her from taking a lover (MM me trqgedes, aifilha: "por vos perdi meu amigo," Nunes 400.4). Pero de Veer gives us another mother-daughter dialogue, which has a timeless ring about it: " 'Daughter, why do you look so miserable these days?' — T can't walk around singing ALL the time!'" (Vejo-vos, filha: "Non posseu, madre, sempr'andar cantando," Nunes 355, refrain). Not all the girls devote their time to moping. One, for example, takes her lover's amatory agonies with a grain of salt, saying that he goes on weeping and claiming to be dying of love, but nevertheless

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continues to show up in perfect health: £Cca nunca Ih'eu vejo morte prender, / nen o ar vejo nunca ensandecer" (Nunes 189, refrain). Although none of their poetry has survived, one should mention the notorious soldadeiras of Galicia, including Maria Balteira, who is the subject of several cantigas dfacarnho^and is mocked by Pero da Ponte for never "locking" her "trunk."34 No "fresh and fragrant flower" or "cosmic union with the sea" for her; on her deathbed, it appears that the only sin she would confess to, that which most weighed on her ("lo que mi mais pesa"), was that of being old.35 The adjective "old" is part of the "anti-retrato descortes" (uncourtly antiportrait).36 Even today, in many Galician and Portuguese villages a sort of charivari occurs when an older woman marries. In any event, La Balteira's own glint-in-the-eye sense of humor may be narrated here by a male poet, but it is no stranger to the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric: the comic elements identified by Roger Walker probably represent the tip of the iceberg.37 In fact, I have had ample occasion to observe during fieldwork over the past few years, that the women, especially the older women, of Galician and Portuguese villages, do not lag behind the men in singing, reciting or appreciating bawdy verses and stories. Later on, a number of poems in a woman's voice, "en boca femenina," appear in the fifteenth century. Jane Whetnall finds in this corpus characteristic elements of diction and style reminiscent of those discussed above with relation to the trobairitz^ and often in contrast to typical courtly lyrics which "seem always to be the mouthpiece of women as helpless victims of circumstance."38 Even though these lyrics are in all likelihood men's compositions, posits Whetnail, they may well reflect "a deeply felt traditional association between heightened colloquial diction and the female predicament." She outlines three main categories for early fifteenth-century feminine lyric: the despedida (leave-taking), the mal maridada (unhappily married), and "less specific complaints of forsaken women," adding up to an overall theme of abandonment and isolation.39 Whetnall also discusses Mayor Arias' poem Ay mar brava, esquiba^ mentioned above; its lyrics evoke the maritime loneliness of the cantigas de amigo^ but this time in a concrete setting of marriage and public identity.40 An unusual feature is its evocation of the couple's child: ". . . que lo trayria / a ber a Maria / que dexo pequeria" (". . . to bring him to see Maria, whom he left [when] so small").41 The context is Mayor's husband Rui Gonzalez' departure with Henry Ill's embassy to Samarkand (1403); Gonzalez writes a despedida for her as well, but, while his is in "the hybrid dialect that passes for Galician in Castilian literary circles,"42 Mayor's is in Castilian. Whetnall sug-

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gests that this reflects women writing in the vernacular, regardless of courtly literary trends, an observation which to me provides a link with traditional women's poetry, reflected in the maintenance of vernacular Judeo-Spanish by Sephardic women throughout centuries of diaspora in various countries. Deyermond's discussion of the poem adds other dimensions, including its ambivalent imagery, for example "tela" referring to a ship's sails or to the thread of the Fates, and the "changing moods of the sea . . . mirrored in the changing tones in which she addresses it" ("Patterns," 87). Miguel Angel Perez Priego discusses the element of marriage, rather than an extra-marital relationship, and the poem's religious elements, appropriate for this relationship.43 Whetnail's study of the poem as a contmfoctum also implies Mayor Alias's familiarity with the literature of her time.44 The Queen of Mallorca (La Reyna de Mallorques) is cited as the author of a fourteenth-century Catalan love poem. Martin de Riquer identifies her as one of the two wives of James III of Mallorca, either Constanca, who died in 1346, or Violant, whom he married soon after. In this poem, the Queen speaks of missing her lover not only for the passionate aspect of their relationship, but also "to speak with him of all kinds of things" ("El raysonar e tota res") ,45 Like the Comtessa de Dia, she has a satisfying sense of her own worth: "I am the best lover of all" ("sus totas, suy mils aman").

The Jewish World Medieval Jewish women poets are difficult to discuss because so little of their writing has come down to us. Qasmuna described herself in one poem as a garden ready for harvest without an attendant gardener; apparently when her father heard or read this he married her off without delay.46 In one of his own poems, he invites his friends to come to his garden "to pluck lilies perfumed like aromatic myrrh / surrounded by flowers . . . to sing of good times" ("A coger lirios que huelan a mirra aromatica / y rodeados de flores . . . para cantar el buen tiempo") ,47 seeming to suggest that he can use all the botanical metaphors he likes and just sing about good times, while she tries one and is immediately married off and silenced. Deyermond points out the similarity to other poems, including one attributed to the trobairitz Alamanda: "I want to prepare my meadow before someone else mows it for me" (£CVuoill pelar mon prat c'autre.l mi tonda") ,48 One of the very few poems to mention children, as noted earlier, is the one tentatively attributed to the wife of the tenth-century Hispano-Hebraic

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poet Dunash Ibn Labrat. As if foreshadowing Mayor Arias's poem almost half a millennium later, she alludes to her husband's departure: "will her lover remember the graceful doe / on the day of parting / as she held her only child in her arms" (cVsam khotam y'mino 'al s'mola / uvizro'o halo sama ts'mida"). As Deyermond points out, the two poems share the reference to a child, and, as well, clothing and accessories as part of the poetic message.49 The image of women in men's Hispano-Jewish poetry is also more elusive than in their Spanish or Arabic counterparts. In Hispano-Hebraic men's poetry, these images tend to be stylized;50 some have double meanings, representing the divine love between God and Israel. The Portuguese Jewish troubadour Vidal sighs for the "mui fremosinha d'Elvas," the lovely one of Elvas, who may or may not be Jewish; she is a "dona" ("lady," or perhaps the proper name "Dona"), whose "peyto branco" ("white breast") he has managed to glimpse.51 Todros Abulafia reminds us of the characterization by ethnicity mentioned earlier; he echoes the cantig&s d'escarnho when he writes that Spanish girls' "clothes are filled with crap and crud," but gives a backhanded compliment to Arab girls who have "charm and beauty" — and are "adept at lechery."52 Later on, the poet piously renounces the earthy perspectives of the poet who "claims that a gazelle stole his heart / when he is actually pierced in the testicles,"53 informing us that "my heart thought over my wicked deeds and shame nearly covered my face."54 Rosen posits that medieval Hebrew literature reflected "a tradition that idealized women in order to silence them; that mythologized women in order to maintain their inferiority."55 An unusual collection of Judeo-Catalan wedding poems from the late fourteenth century, though composed by men, may give us a somewhat more realistic glimpse into the women's world.56 Their main theme is advice to the newlyweds, and the poems incorporate Hebrew quotations from the Old Testament, especially the Song of Songs. To the groom, the rabbi's advice is "honor your lady, eat slowly, think of her well-being and—don't fall asleep — at least during the first year you're married."57 It recommends a playful approach to love, without any force, and offers practical remedies for impotence.58 For the bride, the advice includes to be "clean as crystal," to "make him play the drum," to spin, weave, and sew, to bear children, and not to wear too much makeup.59 Another poem, a twist on the malmctriee theme, quotes the Leviticus (19:29) prohibition against sending one's daughter into prostitution: marrying her to an old man will lead to this, says the song, so don't do it. The old man in the poem announces to his bride that of the legally required provisions he can offer her room and board, but not conjugal relations. She replies by expressing an earnest wish to become a widow swiftly, and he finally

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suggests providing her with a strong young man!60 The poem is more a warning, an exemplum, than a narrative of fact, as underlined by the admonitory refrain. On the one hand, one wonders whether a young Jewish bride would have had the temerity to speak her mind in this way; on the other, it is tempting to speculate on whether the poet's verses were inspired by complaints from his own wife.

The Muslim World For the Hispano-Arabic women poets, Cristina del Moral discusses differences in male and female Arabic poetry, concluding that the main differences are in content rather than style.61 The women's poetry contains fewer descriptions, and rather than focusing on horses or swords may describe the woman herself. War and wine, prevalent in men's poetry, make no appearances, but the women do use satire, and occasionally deal with religious, political or financial situations. There is also a tendency to affirm the woman as a person. In general, del Moral finds that the women's poems are more sincere and somewhat less conventional, draw less attention to the external and the physical, are less artificial, and use fewer rhetorical devices — findings which echo Ferrante's and others' observations on aristocratic women's poetry. Reflecting Bruckner's observations, del Moral also points out that the Hispano-Arabic women poets across the classes display a facility in their use of language, reflecting the existence of the highly educated Andalusian slave-girl musicians. Deyermond points out the differences in their choice of images, some, such as the gazelle, following logically from their surroundings, others, such as the moon, reflecting differences in taste ("Patterns," 88-89). If absence of false modesty is a feature of some trobairitz poems, selfesteem (that late twentieth-century desideratum) was even less of a problem in some of the Hispano-Arabic women's writings. Wallada bint Al-Mustakfi, the notorious Umayyad princess, had two verses embroidered on her sleeves: the right said, "I am made, by God, for glory, and I walk, with pride, along my own road" and the left, "I grant my lover power over my cheek . . . and offer my kisses to whoever desires them."62 The embroidered motto is echoed in the aristocratic Iberian world of the fifteenth century, in the invenciones a lady or a knight wore as a personal adornment, with a drawing and a brief, ingenious accompanying verse (mote or letm)^ or thcfuegos embroidered on a woman's sleeve (Perez Priego, 14-17). In a poem to her lover, Wallada cheerfully refers to him as "a pederast, a prostitute, an adulterer, a wittol, a cuckold and a thief"

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("Pederasta, puto, adiiltero, cabron, cornudo y ladron," Garulo, 145). Still, she did produce less eyebrow-raising sentiments, and remarked that Islam kept her from actual adultery—which did not stop her contemporary Muhya from making cattily poetic remarks about her sex life.63 Another woman poet, 'A'isha bint Ahmad, wrote in answer to a marriage offer, "I am a lioness and will never reply to a dog, I who have closed my ears to so many lions" ("Una leona soy... nunca contestant a un perro, yo que tantas veces los oidos cerre a leones," Garulo, 58). Hafsa bint Hamdun Al-Khiyariyya caps her lover's "have you ever laid eyes on my equal?" with "and have you ever found anyone who could overshadow me?" ("5 In the specific terms of this essay, it means arguing that, in Walther's courtly poetry, an ideal of rational, intellectual judgment — which in this paper will be called reason —is understood to be available to all members of a court, male and female; that this ideal of reason enters into a complex and ambivalent negotiation with a concept of female honor that is based on a notion of a sexualized female body; and that the debate poems featuring a female speaker make visible the fissures, problems, and contradictions attending this negotiation as well as the asymmetries of power it is ultimately used to underwrite. In general terms, thinking of culture as contradictory and as continually being formed means contesting the notion that any region or cultural group, much less the entire medieval world, was governed by a single, traditional system of gender that went virtually unchanged over centuries. There is no such thing as "the medieval mind,55 or "the medieval system of gender," or a single set of norms and ideals of femininity and masculinity expected and embodied universally by human beings with female bodies and those with male bodies.6 Medieval culture can be studied as a network of traditions and counter-traditions that are always in the making (if perhaps at a slower pace of change than in today's world), and that are replete with contradiction and ambiguity as they respond in multiple, historically specific ways to the pressures of change.7 The notions of femininity and gender in the texts examined here participate in constructing the self-understanding of a social estate (or class) — the nobility in central Europe around the year 1200. This essay reads the female-voiced verses of Walther von der Vogelweide as sites of debate, as places where gender is constructed and produced as a mode of aristocratic selffashioning, as a place where gender happens. It reads Walther's poems as though gender were not a fact, but a problem, and no less so in the past than today.

Reason and Female Honor in Walther's Poetry Like Reinmar's woman's song, many of Walther's female-voiced lyrics take as their starting point the ideal of the adored lofty lady (Minnedame] as she is

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characterized in male-voiced poems: beautiful, highborn, invulnerable to seduction, and honorable. There are early examples of German woman's stanzas in which the female speaker embodies the role of the proud, witty, and even erudite lofty lady who is, in Joan Ferrante's words, "a realist, a debunker of male fantasies,"8 and who is shown to possess considerable intellectual skills. In her essay in this volume, Kasten shows that Reinmar's woman's songs complicate this ideal, using the woman's voice to imagine a lofty lady's "inner" thoughts as she admits that she has, in fact, been seduced (in thought if not in deed) by the gifted male singer she has publicly rejected. Her honor and disdainful stance are a feigned but necessary social shroud hiding a deeper attachment. As Kasten points out, the image of the lofty lady who becomes enamored of the singer yet conforms to conventional norms of honorable, submissive femininity primarily serves an instrumental function in Reinmar's work: making visible the seductive powers of his song.9 Only two female speakers in Walther's oeuvre — in the only surviving Walther poems written entirely in a woman's voice — rehearse aspects of the poetic conventions of seduction through song. These two poems are Mir tuot einer slahte wille (L 113,31; Schweikle, 232-37),10 which might be best understood as a Reinmar parody, and what is arguably the most famous medieval poem in German culture today, Under der linden (L 39,11; Schweikle, 228-31), in which a female speaker celebrates erotic love.11 The place of these two female-voiced poems within Walther's larger framework of reason and female honor will be discussed at the end of this essay. As we shall see in three close readings of individual poems that follow, Walther's female-voiced verses also explore the role of the self-assertive and knowledgeable lofty lady who uses wit and differentiating judgment in her arguments. Walther's innovation is to place this role within the larger context played by intellectual and ethical thought in his courtly love poetry, which in the terms of his poetic universe can be understood as forms of reason, that is to say, as rational thought directed toward greater understanding in aesthetic and moral matters and requiring the exercise of judgment, discrimination, and differentiation.12 It can, at times, take the form of wit that pointedly upends the logic of the opposing argument. It answers back to and opposes the model of seduction (enticing words, bewitching ladies) that is conventional in much courtly love poetry. Introducing concepts of discernment and rational thought to the conceptual framework of minnesong may be seen as one of Walther's unique contributions, one that at times lends his work a didactic note, as Ingrid Kasten has argued: "His love poems often have a strong didactic element that is not as pronounced in the poetry of his contemporaries (or present

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there in a different manner) ,"13 In many of Walther's poems the poet's production and performance of courtly love poetry is explicitly tied to an ethical vision of a court bettered morally by the codes of courtly love. The chivalrous audience, the noble lofty lady, and the poet of minnesong alike are expected to use their intellectual faculties to distinguish between good and bad art and between virtue and vice. Thus, reason is a rm^-sexual ideal in Walther's poetry, and as such it is imagined being exercised and desired by women. The realm of rational inquiry is often represented in Walther's poetry by the following terms: sin, meaning reason, knowledge, common sense (i.e., practical reason), wisdom; erkennen^ to recognize and discriminate; and above all, by the word family around the verb scheiden, meaning to differentiate, to distinguish; the verb underscheiden^ meaning to discern, to judge, to evaluate; and the adjective and adverb bescheiden^ bescheidenliche^ meaning discerning, discerningly. In a woman's stanza from Ich lebte ie n&ch der liute sage (MF 152,25), attributed to both Reinmar and Walther in the manuscripts, the female speaker expresses a desire for guidance in learning to exercise reason because it will aid her quest for virtue: "If I had wisdom and reason, I would happily behave well" ("hxt ich wisheit unde sin, so txt ich gerne wo\"MF 152,32). In Walther's dialogue poem Ich horte iu so vil tugendejehen (L 43,9; Schweikle, 200-207), the importance of discrimination (erkennen) is expressed by the female speaker, who has promised to resolve through rational judgment (scheiden) the question put to her by the male speaker: how to behave well: You men ask what kind of man pleases us. It is he who can recognize good and evil and always says the best about women. We favor him if he is sincere. (Ir man fragent wer uns wol behage: / der iibel erkennen kan unde guot / und ie daz beste von uns sage, / dem sin wir holt, ob erz mit triuwen tuot.) (L 44, i -4; Schweikle, 206) The poems discussed below all imagine male and female speakers in debate with one another. The women's stanzas in these poems imagine women making distinctions on the basis of reason, rational judgments which are to aid them in choosing virtue over vice and good poetry over bad poetry. They show women using reason and wit to overturn the specious arguments of the male speakers. From a feminist perspective this is a critically important move because it claims space for women as thinking beings with the same intellectual

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abilities as men, the same capacity for aesthetic and ethical judgment arising out of rational inquiry. Yet as we shall see reason is a complex and contradictory place for women in Walther's poetry. Women's exercise of reason is bounded and situated within the framework of a notion of aristocratic female honor that is ultimately grounded in the norm of women's steadfastness in sexual matters, that is to say, in their sexual stability. This way of thinking about women's honor is analogous to ways of thinking in the world today that, in Martha Nussbaum's words, "construe control over female sexuality as a central aspect of cultural continuity."14 While norms of female honor that tightly link women's sexual stability to cultural stability might appear to cede considerable power and authority to the women who conform to those norms (and this is the case in Walther's poetry), that power comes at a considerable price. One might rather argue, with Nussbaum and other feminist thinkers, that power based on such norms of female honor is an ideological mystification, poor compensation for the fact that the real means of economic, intellectual, and political power are overwhelmingly in the hands of men. In the conceptual framework of Walther's moral-didactic courtly love poetry, womanly honor has a particularly weighty function: it is the foundation, the ground, for all virtue at court. The duty to uphold virtue at court not only obligates women to discriminate on the basis of rational thought, it also obligates the poet, in defense of his doctrine of courtly love, to make distinctions between those members of the courtly society—male and female —who act virtuously and those who do not. (The male speaker in these poems frequently refers to his own actions using the terminology ofscheiden, meaning to differentiate and judge.) Furthermore, if faced with evidence of moral and artistic decline, the poet must name the culprit, and in Walther's poetry, women are repeatedly taken to task. When women are virtuous, men are good. When men misbehave, women are to blame. Enormous value is attached to women's honor in Walther's poetry, and criticism of women is plentiful. Many poems express the view that the general decline in society's morals is due to changes in women's behavior and a lack of continuity with the standards of female honor they upheld (and embodied) in the past. Thus in a stanza from Ane Hep so manig kit (L 90,15; Schweikle, 312-17), women no longer exercise good but rather bad judgment by favoring those at court who misbehave and write bad poetry. That men behave so badly is women's fault. Alas, it's true. When in the past women strove for honor,

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the world hoped for their favor and rejoiced..... Now it is clear that their love is won through rudeness and bad art. (Daz die man als iibel tuont, / dast gar der wibe schult, dest lieder so. / hie vor do ir muot uf ere stuont, / do was diu werlt uf ir genade fro.... nu siht man wol, / daz man ir minne mit unfuoge erwerben sol.) (L 90,3134, 36-38; Schweikle, 314) In the above stanza, women are scolded for misusing their intellectual powers of differentiation and judgment, and for betraying the notion of female honor. Many poems revisit this complicated filiation of women's honor, courtly ideals, and the obligation to use reason to discriminate well. The "Minnedaktiker," the didactic poet of courtly love, discriminates repeatedly between women, who are imagined being angered by his reproaches, as can be seen in the two following examples. Has anyone ever spoken better of German women? Only I distinguish virtuous women from base women. You see, that angers them. (ob tiutschen wiben ieman ie gesprxche baz? / wan daz ich scheide / die guoten und die boesen. Seht, das ist ir haz.) (L 58,35-37; Schweikle, 320) They [the ladies] humiliate a well-bred man, all except the truly discriminating woman. (si swachent wol gezogenen lip, / ez ensi ein wol bescheiden wip) (L 91,5-6; Schweikle, 314) The woman of reason — the wol bescheiden wip — still exists, the male speaker claims, but she is a singular individual whose exemplarity represents a bygone era and who now stands alone in the crowd. Similarly, in the second stanza of the poem Hie vor do man so rehte minnediche warp (L 48,12; Schweikle, 328-35), the male speaker chastises courtly women for no longer exercising their rational abilities in the duty to differentiate. I will tell all of you what harms us the most, that women often think all men alike.

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If they love us whether we are good or bad, why such likeness robs us of joy and honor! If women would only differentiate among us as they did in the past, when they also permitted distinctions to be made between them, that would serve us all much better, men and women both. (Ich sage iuch, waz uns den meisten schaden tuot: / diu wip gelichent uns ein teil ze sere. / daz wir in also liep sin, libel alse guot, / seht, daz gelichen nimt uns froide und ere. / scheiden uns diu wip als e, / daz si sich ouch liezen scheiden, / daz gefrumt uns michels me, / mannen und wiben beiden.) (L48,25-32; Schweikle, 328-30) Yet Walther's female-voiced stanzas also imagine women using reason to differentiate and judge. The three poems by Walther von der Vogelweide discussed below employ contrasting male and female voices to explore the dilemmas of reconciling reason and female honor.

Reason and the Sexualization of Women: Ein man verbiutet tine pfliht (L 111,23; Schweikle, 168-69) Ein man verbiutet Ane pfliht (L 111,23) is a two-verse Wechsel, or exchange, the first stanza in a male voice and the second in a female voice. It is preserved in a single manuscript in an apparently defective copy. Both the female-voiced and the male-voiced stanzas attack the work of a third figure, an unnamed poet who can however be identified as the poet Reinmar because of a dense network of citations and allusions to his work.15 In the first stanza a male poet assertively rejects the notion — advanced by Reinmar in a surviving poem —that a rival poefs lofty lady outshines all other women. In the second stanza, a female speaker dismisses a poet-lover who has boasted that he would steal kisses from her and if caught return them again — a stock image of courtly love poetry which also appears in a Reinmar poem. Scholarship on this poem focuses on the male-voiced stanza. What little work there is on the female-voiced stanza has centered on the question of whether the speaker should be understood as being the fictive enactment of the lady adored by Walther, or the lady adored by Reinmar. The consensus is that the humor of the stanza is heightened if Reinmar is rejected by his own lady who is aligning herself with Walther's position. But there is more to be won from attending to the way gender works in this short polemical exercise.

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The poem is a vigorous attack, constructed around what is characterized as the artistic excess of the rival's courtly love poetry. For both speakers, the rival's transgression is rhetorical and consists of his hyperbolic metaphors. In the first stanza, the male speaker is compelled to object because the rival poet has praised a woman by singing that it is his "Easter Sunday" (i.e. a moment of spiritual rebirth) whenever he espies her. To the male speaker, this image violates the boundaries of good taste and courtly decorum. The female speaker focuses similarly on the inappropriateness of the "stolen kiss" image, its suggestion of an attempted seduction, and the attendant potential for damage to her reputation. She begins with an energetic assertion of her honor that is expressed precisely in terms of stability: "I have always been a woman entirely steadfast in her honor" ("ich bin ein wib daher gewesen / so stxte an eren," L 111,33-34). She then quick-wittedly dismisses and deflates the rival poet by remarking that stealing kisses only makes the culprit a thief, and not, as he would wish, her lover: "And even if he were to acquire one [a kiss], he will still be a thief in my eyes, and he can keep it and put it back somewhere else" ("ist daz ez im wirt e sa / er muoz sin iemer sin min dieb: und habe imz da / und lege ez anderswa!" L 111,38-112,2). Taking the conventional image of stealing and returning kisses, she wittily turns it against the rival poet. She downplays the implied meaning — that eager courtly poets wish to display their affection for noblewomen — and focuses instead on what she construes as the insulting image used to convey the message. By detaching the literal and figural spheres of meanings of the stolen kiss image from one another, she makes the poet nothing but a criminal. She, in contrast, shows herself to be self-aware, articulate, and ethically and artistically astute. Let us look again at the key images organizing, respectively, the malevoiced and the female-voiced stanzas, keeping in mind that both speakers are citing images used by the rival poet whom they criticize. The images appeal to different senses. The "Easter Sunday" image is one of sight —"He says that whenever his eye espies that one lady she becomes his Easter day" ("er giht, wenne ein wip ersiht / sin ouge, si si sin osterlicher tag," L 111,25-26). The "stolen kiss" image is one of touch — "No one can harm me by stealing kisses" ("daz mir mit stelne nieman keinen schaden tuot," L 111,35). In the first image, based on sight, the distance between the rival poet and the lofty lady is maintained. The rival poet's "male gaze" appropriates the lady into his framework of interpretation. However, she is simultaneously abstracted and made into a metaphor, an Easter Day. The appropriating and abstracting gaze fixes the rival poet and the lady into widely separate positions. The lady's body, her corporeality, is absent from this image. Similarly, the male speaker in the first

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stanza speaks with a disembodied voice. He casts himself as the representative for a larger group: "What would happen to the rest of us [i.e. all the other male poets] ?5' ("wie wxre uns andern liuten so geschehen55 L 111,27), he asks, and states, "I am the one who is going to speak out against this" ("ich bin der eine, derz versprechen muoz,55 L n 1,29). The male speaker is both solidly individual (CCJ am the one55) and resolutely corporate in the medieval sense of the word. He is an advocate for a community at court that seems to contain other poets and other male lovers. The rival's attempt to out-distance other poets, to establish an unbridgeable hierarchical space between himself and all others must be challenged and undone. The rival must be put in his place. Whether the rivaTs reintegration into or expulsion from the community should follow is not treated in the poem. Speaking as a poet for poets, the male speaker in the first stanza enacts simultaneously advocacy for a community and its own intellectual dissimilarity from any other male poetic voice. The evacuation of the physical from the male-voiced first stanza contrasts with the return of the corporeal in the second stanza's image of touch (the stolen kiss). The physical, sensual imagery of touch conjures up bodies for the female speaker and her unwanted suitor. The rival's body touches —or proposes to touch — the lady's body. The distance guaranteed by sight is breached and overcome. Furthermore, the image of the stolen kiss is one of erotic touch. It draws attention to the female speakers body as a woman's body, and sexualizes it. The female voice also speaks individually—she uses first-person pronouns five times — but she is not imagining herself as championing a cause or representing anyone else. She speaks, apparently, only for herself. This suggests that lofty ladies do not conceptualize themselves as a group of persons but only as distinct individuals. The contrast with the male speaker's assumption of a representative function suggests that lofty ladies lack the means or the ability to understand themselves as a community. If the woman's stanza does assert a representative function, then it does so indirectly, through the medium of the imagined female body and its potential endangerment by the stolen kiss. The reference to sexualized bodies implies that female honor is understood as women's steadfastness in sexual matters, and that this is the foundation of women's community. But the imagined female speaker's use of reason — her deployment of wit, ethical judgment, and artistic knowledge in skewering the rival poet — also complicates the category of female honor because it rejects the overt sexualization of women and insists on the lofty lady's right to reject a man who professes to adore her. The lofty lady does not draw attention to her corporeality

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on her own, but rather quotes someone else doing so. She cites the rival poet's image of touch that summons up the image of her own sexualized female body: she (the lofty lady) says that he (the rival poet) says that her female body comes first. This citational mode alludes to the common social practice of sexualizing women, but does not necessarily condone or affirm it.16 Thus, the lofty lady maintains distance between herself and the rival poet, and between the notion of female honor she affirmatively cites and the sexualization of women upon which it rests. She limits potential damage by breaking the cycle of erotic repetition suggested by the rival poet's image (if caught stealing kisses he will "return" them, i.e. kiss her again). The stolen kiss will remain a single, unique act, for the rival poet is enjoined to "return" it elsewhere. By turning the rival poet's imagery against him in a witty fashion (one is reminded of the female speakers in The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus), the lofty lady argues that this sexualization of her body is a violation, a crime that she forcefully and energetically rejects. The fictive female speaker is imagined as being secure in her self-knowledge and reputation, smart, and articulate. She is shown mobilizing ethical and intellectual defenses against the rival poet, arguing strongly against the overt sexualization of women and for a woman's right to reject an unwanted suitor. She is imagined using reason and rhetorical skill to somewhat loosen the tight bonds that link female honor with the sexualization of women. Yet the distance that remains in this construction of ideal aristocratic femininity— that between an honorable woman's right to reject and her right to choose — remains unbridged in this and other woman's stanzas by Walther.

Anger, Wit, and Bodies: Fwuwe, enl&tiuch niht verdriezen (L 85,34; Schweikle, 208-13) This dialogue poem creates a different filiation of reason, honor, and the female body by explicitly introducing into the dialogue the potential for anger. Anger —from rage to irritation — is a mood of self-assertion that abounds in courtly love poetry. It is well represented in Walther's poetry, where it is not necessarily viewed negatively, but rather as a force that can serve the program of ethical and artistic betterment to which his courtly love poetry aspires. It is often, in short, righteous anger.17 Many of the male-voiced lyrics cited earlier in this essay display this mood of righteous anger, a kind of moral indignation that is intended to serve as a wake-up call to an indifferent or lax court. Thus in the poem Die zwivchre sprechent, ez si Mez tot (L 58,21; Schweikle, 318-23),

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the male speaker presents himself as fearlessly speaking out against the decline of morals in courtly society. He is, in a sense, a judge. Shameless, dishonorable people speak critically to virtuous women about my songs, claiming that I speak ill of women. Let them all be merciless; it will be my pleasure! Only a coward would back down now. (Die losen scheltent guoten wiben minen sane / und jehent, daz ich ir iibel gedenke. / nu pflihten alle wider unde haben danc! / er si ein zage, der dawenke.) (L 58,30-34; Schweikle, 32o)18 Yet the situation is complex from which the speaker's anger is imagined to arise. In lines previously cited in this essay, the stanza above goes on to assert that the male speaker's angry defiance merely responds in kind to a prior angry reception of his claims for rational differentiation. The earlier angry dismissal of his work, which has provoked his indignation, is attributed to a female audience. "Has anyone ever spoken better of German women? / Only I distinguish / virtuous women from base women. You see, that angers them" (L 58,35-37; Schweikle, 320). These are not the only angry women alluded to in Walther's poetry,19 and in other poems male speakers attempt to mock or shame the angry or indifferent lady into compliance with their wishes.20 But if righteous anger can support the didactic work of reason (which is arguably the point being made by the male speaker in the above stanza), then for the purposes of this essay the question becomes: do the female voices in Walther von der Vogelweide's poetry ever speak angrily? Do they ever use a tone of righteous indignation similar to that employed by the fearless malevoiced social critic of Walther's poetry? They do not. Only in Fwuwe, lant iuck niht verdriezen (L 85,34; Schweikle, 208-13) are the threat of women's anger and a female speaker brought together, but instead of adopting a tone of righteous anger, the female speaker uses distancing self-assertion and wit to reject the male speaker. A male speaker opens the poem and addresses a lofty lady in a manner suggesting that he anticipates an angry response from her. "Lady, don't permit yourself to become bored and ill-tempered about my speech, if it is courteous" ("Frouwe, lant iuch niht verdriezen / miner rede ob si gefuge si," L85,34~35). The male speaker goes on to praise the lady in general terms. This cautious solicitation of attention seems carefully designed to anticipate and avoid the lady's angry dismissal. At the same time, it establishes a hierarchy between the

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male speaker, who claims a subservient position and the lady, whom he addresses as his superior. In the second stanza, the lady grants the male speaker permission to speak while keeping the potential for anger in the picture: "Say whatever you will, as if I were not angry5' ("sprechent swaz ir went, ob ich niht tobe," L 86,8) .21 She goes on to declare that she has no knowledge of her beauty and that she is but striving to maintain and protect ("behiiete," L 86,13) her virtue as a woman ("wibes giiete," L 86,12). She positions herself as the male speaker's student by asking him to instruct her, thus redefining — or in any case complicating — the hierarchy he has established. By refocusing the conversation from beauty to virtue, the lady establishes a detached, generalized, and didactic tone. She goes on to make explicit the grounds for shifting topics and introduces the concept of reason to her argument—"beauty is worthless without reason" ("schcener lip der touc niht ane sin," L 86,14). It is the search for sin (ethical discernment, reason) that guides the female speaker. In the third stanza, the male speaker hastens to obey the lady ("Frouwe, daz wil ich iuch leren," L 86,15) with a few lines of stereotypical courtly advice about honoring good people with winsome gestures and words. In his posture as teacher the male speaker introduces a standard motif of love service, an exchange of selves between lovers ("eime solt ir iuwern lip / geben fur eigen umb den sinen," L 86,19-20), and then — abandoning the role as teacher and resuming again the role of supplicant — proposes himself as a suitable partner for such an exchange: "Lady, if you desire my person, I would exchange it for that of such a beautiful woman" ("frouwe, woltent ir den minen, / den gebe ich umb ein so schoene wip," L 86,22-23). In the previous stanza the lofty lady has attempted to move the dialogue toward a discussion of ethical discernment (sin), but as this last line makes clear, the male speaker continues to focus on the lady's physical beauty and on the possibility of physical union to which the "exchange of persons" gestures. In the fourth stanza the lady thanks the male speaker, promises to follow his advice about courtly behavior, and then wittily refuses him. The rejection of the male speaker turns on a word play, or pun, the possibility of which was introduced into the poem by the lady's closing words in the second stanza: "beauty is worthless without reason" ("schcener lip der touc niht ane sin," L 86,14). The primary meaning of lip in the phrase schcener Up is "person, life," and so by this meaning the phrase would refer to lady's entire person ("a beautiful person is worthless without reason"). The secondary meaning of lip is "body," so in this light the phrase could refer to the lady's physical beauty alone. From the context it seems clear that the lady intends the first meaning.

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As we have seen, however, when the male speaker proposes the "exchange of selves" he has activated lip's second meaning, while leaving room for mildly erotic ambiguity—"Lady, if you desire my person/life/body, I would gladly give it in exchange for one as beautiful as yours." It is at this point that the lady reacts to the salient interpretive ambiguity of lip. In a manner similar to the female speaker in the previous poem, she returns to the "exchange of person/body/life" convention only to wittily fix the meaning of lip as life/body in order to reject the male speaker's petition. She would never, she claims, wish to take anyone's life — i.e., kill them — for it might cause them pain. A final, fifth stanza, which is split between the two voices, follows. The male speaker presses his suit by adopting the female speaker's reading of lip as body, proclaiming that he has often survived great danger, and were the worst to happen, she shouldn't worry: "such a death would certainly be a beautiful one" ("stirbe aber ich, so bin ich sanfte tot," L 86,34) «22 In her reply the lady maintains her detachment and conclusively rejects the male speaker: Sir, I would prefer to live on. Perhaps you are indifferent to life, but what need have I of such a burden? Why should I exchange my life with yours? (herre, ich wil noch langer leben, / liht ist iuch der lip unmxre, / waz bedorfte ich solher swxre, / solt ich minen lip umb iuwern geben.) (L 86,35-38; Schweikle, 212) This is a rebuff, and if it is not an angry one, it is certainly irritable. The poem comes full circle, as the lady's flash of ill-temper at the end of the poem might threaten precisely the irritation (verdriezen} that the male speaker had sought to avoid. The lady, on the other hand, has claimed to be on a quest, as it were, for reason (sin). Her use of wit — of reason — shows her to already possess a large portion of the virtue and intellectual skill she seeks. As "the debunker of male fantasy," she takes up and throws back the proposed life/ body exchange to good, witty effect. Her wit depends on much the same rhetorical technique as the female speaker's in Ein man verbiutet anepflicht^ deflating courtly rhetoric and turning it against the male speaker who has invoked it. But the link between women's honor and their physical bodies is also revisited in this poem, which in some ways enacts a struggle between the male and female speakers over the meaning of Up. The male speaker repeatedly hints at lip's physical —and by extension erotic — connotations, implying that the dispute between them involves bodies. Twice the female speaker wards off the

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sexual innuendo of the male speaker's proposed exchange, in which the beautiful (female) body offers the promise of sexual pleasure to the desiring (male) body. First she interprets the literary convention in a way that substitutes for the desiring (male) body one that only suffers physical pain. When the male speaker adeptly incorporates this into an eroticized understanding of lip^ the female speaker insists on understanding lip as person/life, interprets his new stance as despair, and dismisses the exchange outright, thereby ending the conversation. As in Bin man verbiutet fane pfliht, this female speaker uses her intellectual prowess, that is to say, her skill in reasoning and differentiation, to seek to sever female honor from the sexualization of women. The female speaker in this poem comes the closest of any in Walther's poetry to speaking angrily. Yet why does the poem pointedly introduce the concept of women's anger only to make it a threshold that its female speaker does not cross ? Perhaps it does so in order to suggest that the lady's wit, especially in her last, almost mocking words, exists on a continuum of selfassertion in which the next stage is righteous anger. The lady's detached, and ultimately lightly disdainful tone may then be signaling that as an honorable woman she chooses to act, not angrily, but with detachment and reason. Perhaps the point is to demonstrate that honorable women, women of reason, choose not to express righteous anger even when provoked, thereby indirectly denying to those phantom audiences of angry women who haunt Walther's poetry the approbation of honor.

A Woman of Reason: GenMe^frouwe! tuo also bescheidenliche (L 70,22; Schweikle, 196-99) This unusual poem dramatizes the conventional roles of the lover and the lofty lady (as understood within the genre of the courtly love lyric) as conflicting points of view that end in an impasse. For the purposes of this essay it is interesting because it imagines a woman using reason in action. The conventional literary understanding of the male lover as sincere, devoted, and faithful to his beloved is immediately called into question by the first stanza. The male speaker addresses an unusual request to the woman he worships: since she remains distant and undecided, would she please grant him permission to do "I won't name it, I mean 'you-know-what,' you know what it is" ("ich nennez niht, ich meine jenz, du weist es wol," L 70,28). His only fear, he confesses to her, is that he will get used to "it" again. In the second stanza the lady speaks a dramatic monologue in which she reveals in a tone of

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resignation and sorrow that she refuses the man whom she calls her "friunt" because he "loves other women" ("min friunt der minnet andriu wip" L 70,32). A similarly self-contained reflection in the man's voice follows in the third stanza. Attributing (interestingly enough in light of the above discussion) his dismissal to the lady's excessive anger — "The lovely woman is far too angry with me" (ccsi sadic wip, si ziirnet wider mich ze sere" L 71,1) —he says that she never instructed him to live according to her teachings, though he often begged her to do so. If he is to refuse other women, she should start liking his rede (songs/pleas/speeches) better, the term rede suggesting the lover might also be a poet. In the final stanza the lady addresses the male speaker directly, but only to again reject him. She ignored him in the past, she tells him, because she knew that he was saying the same thing to other women ("do wisse ich wol, daz du allenthalben also taste," L 71,12) and this unacceptable behavior distanced her from him. She repeats her refusal of his suit: she dare not love such an inconstant man.23 These would-be lovers share only an ironic mutuality of frustrated desire.24 The interpretive context developed in this essay suggests that the opening line, spoken by the male voice, is key: "Have mercy, Lady, and act with reason and good judgment" ("Genade frouwe, tuo also bescheidenliche," L 70,22). The term bescheidenliche brings into play the entire complex of beliefs and values about reason, virtue, and women's honor that have been previously discussed in this essay. The male speaker immediately defines what he thinks would be a proper ethical decision on her part: "Let me live for you alone forever" (L 70,23), meaning that she should accept his suit and treat him well. Using reason, he argues, would mean doing what he wants. This move encourages raising the question: does the lofty lady's ultimate refusal of the lover constitute rational, ethical behavior or not? It would be possible to make the argument within the context of Walther's courtly poetry that the lofty lady has failed in her duty to take this poet-lover in hand and make a better man of him, a standpoint expressed in the male-voiced poem Min frouwe 1st ein ungen&dic wip (L 52,23; Schweikle, 294-301). But equally, the female speaker in the poem clearly claims that taking the action suggested by the lover would not constitute sound and reasonable judgment on her part. She argues that a virtuous, discerning woman should listen skeptically to the petitions of a beloved who asks permission to sing for other ladies to "pass the time" ("ze kurzer wile," L 70,26) while waiting for her, and who appears already to be doing "that same thing everywhere else" before this permission has been given. One could argue that the poet-lover's infidelity leaves a discerning lofty lady little choice — she can and must differentiate between poet-lovers who are

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worthy of her favor and those who are not. The actions and motives of both characters remain open to interpretation, and the question of the extent to which the lofty lady acts bescheidenliche is thrown back, it seems to me, to the audience or reader for debate. Lofty ladies often articulate an inherent antagonism between love and virtue for women, and overrule the inclination towards the dangerous intimacy of love in favor of the safely high and distant ground of virtue. The female speakers of Reinmar's verse act in this manner, and to a certain extent the female speaker here joins their company. But while Reinmar's lofty ladies react to the seductive power of the poet's speeches and songs, this lofty lady has nothing to say on that topic. We do not learn what aroused her interest in the beloved, only why she has decided to refuse him. There are many reasons, chief among them his infidelity and his roaming, which causes him to be far away when she would welcome his company. She also employs commonplaces in support of her position. In stanza two, she argues that because infidelity causes hurt and harm to so many women, it cannot do her any good ("ez tuot so manigem wibe we, daz mir da von niht wol geschxhe," L 71,34). At the end of stanza four, summing up her arguments before refusing him, she begins by setting conditions for any further service, saying that if he wishes to win her favor, he must first abandon inconstancy to prove himself worthy of her. She then employs what is probably the central commonplace of courtly love poetry, "shared love is shared sorrow," with the implication that as long as the poet-lover seeks to evade the sorrow of committed love, he can hardly expect her to share its joys with him. He who desires me as his beloved, if he now wishes to win me, he must leave off all such inconstancy. Shared love is, it seems to me, shared sorrow. Now speak up, do you know any different? That is why I dare not love you. (Der min ze friunde ger, wil er mich nu gewinnen, / der laze alle solhe unstcetekeit. / gemeine lieb, daz dunket mich gemeinez leit. / nu sage, weist du anders iht? Da von getar ich dich niht geminnen.) (L 71,14-17; Schweikle 198) The female speaker's use of the commonplace "shared love is shared sorrow" supports her argument in two ways. It creates an ethical context for the demand that the poet-lover be faithful. But it also functions as pun. In stanza two, the lofty lady has already used the term gemeine (held in common,

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shared), saying that she is happy to hold in common many good things, except sharing her beloved. Reappearing in stanza four's commonplace, the word gcmeine alludes back to this stanza. "Shared love is shared sorrow3' refers not just to the ethical standard which the lofty lady upholds for herself and the poet-lover, it also refers to the dilemma of the ladies who "share" this roving fellow—they do indeed have a shared sorrow! This word play works because it is spoken in a female voice. The lady's replaying a commonplace of courtly love service in her own ethical frame and in direct speech makes the double meaning manifest. In the end, the lofty lady weighs the evidence against the poet-lover against the demanding ethical rules of courtly love lyric. She finds the poetlover lacking in fidelity, rejects him, and yet gives him the rule (lere) for which he claims in stanza three to have repeatedly asked: the man who wishes to win her must be constant. Honor and virtue impose obligations on both the male lover and the female beloved, a conventional argument that is fully in line with Walther's notion of the ethical basis for minnesong. The lofty lady is shown in the act of differentiation, of thinking through the dilemma of having an unfaithful poet-lover. Even as she refuses him, she gives him the rule he desires, leaving open the possibility that she might dare to love the virtuous man who follows it.

Seductive Song and Secret Love: mir tuot einer slahte wille (Lii3,3i) and under derlinden (L 39,11) The woman of reason is not the only kind of female speaker in Walther's woman's stanzas. The only two examples of woman's song in Walther's ouevre —perns spoken entirely in a female voice — operate in the mode of seduction. The poem^Mzr tuot einer slahte wille (L 113,31; Schweikle, 232-37) reprises both the topos of erotic seduction via artistic song and the wavering lofty lady role of Reinmar's woman's song. The female speaker's desire to "do her lover's bidding" wars with her concern for her reputation: "I am eager to do [his bidding] now / but I must refuse him / and follow the path of womanly honor" ("gerne het ichz nu getan, / wan daz ichz im muoz versagen / und wibes ere sol began," L 114,9-11). The irresolute female speaker does not show intellectual or ethical powers of judgment. She seems primarily indecisive, weak-minded, and confused. It is an open question whether this poem illustrates the power of love or the lofty lady's lack of character, for in both formal and thematic ways it enacts the speaker's equivocation and fickle-

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ness. So pointedly does the song dwell on these less flattering qualities that it has been understood as a parody of Reinmar's notion of the suffering lofty lady, an interpretation that is further supported by the poem's flat diction, colorless imagery, and numerous allusions to Reinmar's work.25 The speaker in Mir tuot represents the inverse of the discerning female voices discussed above. As parody, Mir tuot uses a woman's voice in order to "let" Reinmar's lofty lady unmask herself as a weak character whose selfexpression can only rehearse (and not wittily play with) trite platitudes. Does such a woman deserve the praise of poets? How much artistry is really necessary to win her over? Mir tuot makes cautious use of the misogynist trope of women's essential fickleness, thus counterpointing those female speakers who exercise reason and judgment. Under der linden is, as it were, the great exception, conforming to none of the patterns of Walther's poetry sketched out in the essay.26 The female speaker triumphs in the experience of shared sexual pleasure even as she insists on the affair's secrecy, and she "displays herself as a speaking trace of the sexual union."27 The female speaker is clearly sexualized. At the same time, she is imagined imagining herself as free to love, to choose her lover, and to rejoice in her pleasure. Where is woman's honor? Where are the discerning, differentiating men and women of the court? They are simply gone, banished from the moral and artistic universe of this poem, at best implied in the motif of secrecy as those from whom the speaker and her lover will guard the precious knowledge of their shared pleasure. Only in Under der linden does a female speaker in Walther's poetry set aside the categories of reason and honor (and the latter perhaps not entirely, if her desire to keep the affair a secret is interpreted as a desire to maintain honor). Under der linden succeeds brilliantly as art, as it creates "a seductive circuit of communication between the female voice in the poem and the reader."28 Perhaps the most haunting aspect of this poem is its transformation of a poet's longing for acceptance by the court, for the open celebration of his art, into the celebration of union and intimacy in a female voice.

Conclusions Walther's woman's stanzas often give voice to women of reason, honorable ladies who differentiate and pass moral and aesthetic judgment. We have seen that the woman of reason in Walther's poetry does polemical work. At times articulating or enacting the poet's ethical program for courtly culture, she is

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employed to criticize poets or the conventions of minnesong. Unlike male speakers, she is never imagined speaking on behalf of a group. Her power springs less from any position of authority than from the personal power29 that devolves from the charisma of her lofty status, her singularity, and womanly honor, all of which are enhanced by her rational, intellectual powers of discernment and differentiation. Walther's male-voiced poetry is replete with harsh criticisms of women, who are similarily imagined as harshly attacking him. Two female voices used by other poets or present in other ways within the conventions of minnesong are strikingly absent from Walther's poetry: a suffering woman imagined sympathetically, and the direct speech of a righteously angry woman. Walther's use of the woman's stanza is ultimately instrumental, serving the larger purpose of his moral-didactic enterprise. And yet, for all its limitations, this poetry at times imagines women as agents of reason, forcefully rejecting their overt sexualization and fully able to unmask seduction, vice, bad art, and bad arguments. Seeking to link female honor to a transsexual ideal of reason, Walther's poetry struggles with problems similar to those taken up some two hundred years later by Christine de Pizan, who "subsumes the narrow traditional question of sexual steadfastness within a much larger category of rational stability."30 Perhaps it could even be argued that the "transsexual ideal of rationality"31 promoted by Christine is in a small way anticipated in the woman's stanzas by Walther discussed here, insofar as these woman's stanzas might be understood as part of a larger tradition of debate about gender and reason upon which Christine later draws. Yet the knowledge of sexual difference displayed in Christine's work and Walther's work could hardly differ more. To give only one example: where Walther blames women for social decline, Christine scathingly criticizes men for holding women to a sexual standard which they themselves routinely ignore. In Walther's work, the ideal of reason can clear for women only a highly constrained range of action because it has been instramentalized in the service of an narrow ideal of female honor. The female voices in Walther's woman's stanzas point out this struggle even as they enact it, demonstrating that ultimately Walther's poetic universe can only partially, and with difficulty, accommodate the notion of a woman of reason it creates.

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Ventriloquisms When Maidens Speak in English Songs', c. 1300-1550 Judith M. Bennett

Sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, an Oxford student copied several songs into his exercise book. One is sung by a young maiden who begins with a refrain that stresses her supposed naivete: Alas, ales, the wyle! Thout Y on no gyle, So haue Y god chaunce Alas, ales, the wyle That ever Y cowde daunce! The maiden then relates her tale: she flirted and danced with a clerk on Midsummer's Day; he kissed her, swore her to secrecy, and promised her a pair of gloves; she went to his chamber to collect the gift; they made love in what she calls the "the murgust nyt [merriest night]" she had ever known; the next day her angry mistress harangued and beat her; and finally, as the young maiden notes, it is only a matter of time "Tyl my gurdul aros, my wombe wax out." Assessing the unhappy results of her own foolishness, she ends with a proverb women especially could understand, "Euel yspunne yern, euer it wole out." As a carol, this song was danced as well as sung. The main singer stood in the center of a circle; as she (or he) sang each stanza, others danced clockwise around her (or him); for the refrain, both singer and dancers stood still (or danced in place) and sang together. In other words, this song required its performer to lead a dance at the same time as she (or he) sang about the

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pleasures and dangers of leading a dance. In this doubled performance, this is the story the singer told: Ladd Y the daunce a Myssomur Day; Y made smale trippus, soth for to say. Jak, oure holy-watur clerk, com be the way, And he lokede me vpon; he thout that he [Y?] was gay. Thout yc on ne gyle. Jak, oure haly-watur clerk, the yonge strippelyng, For the chesoun [reason] of me he com to the ryng, And he trippede on my to and made a twynkelyng; Ever he cam ner; he sparet for no thynge. Thout Y on no gyle. Jak, ic wot, preyede in my fayre face; He thout me ful werly [attractive], so have Y god grace; As we turndun owre daunce in a narw place, Jak bed me the mouth; a cussynge ther was. Thout Y on no gyle. Jak tho began to rowne [whisper] in myn ere: "Loke that thou be priuey, and graunte that thou the bere [keep this secret]; A peyre wyth glouus [pair of white gloves] ic ha to thyn were." "Gramercy, Jacke!" that was myn answere. Thoute yc on no gyle. Sone after euensong Jak me mette: "Com horn aftur thy glouus that yc the byhette [promised]." Wan ic to his chambre com, doun he me sette; From hum mytte Y nat go wan we were mette. Thout Y on no gyle. Schetus and chalonus [blankets], ic wot, a were yspredde Forsothe tho Jack and yc wenten to bedde; He prikede and he pransede; nolde he neuer lynne [ceased]; Yt was the murgust nyt [merriest night] that euer Y cam ynne. Tout Y on no gyle. Wan Jak had don, tho he rong the bell; Al nyght ther he made me to dwelle; Of [t] y trewe we haddun yserued the reaggeth deuel of helle;

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Of othur smale burdus [sports] kep Y nout to telle. Thout Y on no gyle. The other day at prime Y com horn, as ic wene: Meth Y my dame, coppud [bad-tempered] and kene: "Sey, thou stronge strumpeth, ware hastu bene? Thy trippyng and they dauncyng, wel it wol be sene." Thout Y on no gyle. Ever bi on and by on [over and over again] my damme reched me clot [beat me heavily]; Ever Y ber it privey wyle that Y mouth [must], Tyl my gurdul aros, my wombe wax out; Euel yspunne yern, euer it wole out. Thout Y on no gyle.1 This simple carol is rich in complexities and contradictions. It both describes a story and provides an opportunity for its enactment, so that young women and men tripped, winked, and flirted as they danced a carol that told of the similar flirtation of a fictional maiden and her holy-water clerk. The gloves offered by the clerk could have reminded listeners of (a) the vagina, seen as a sheath for the penis, (b) the leader of a dance (who often wore gloves), (c) a common gift in courtship and marriage-making, or (d) all three. The bell rung by the clerk signified both his parochial duties and, as in U.S. slang today, the climax of his sexual pleasures. The dance of the song —as both told and performed — was itself a medieval colloquialism for sexual intercourse. And at the center of this song is a complicated female voice — a voice that only survives because a male student copied it out; a voice that is simultaneously charming and appalling, spunky and compliant; a voice that protests innocence while indicting itself; a voice that, although speaking, takes a passive place —in terms of both narrative and grammar —in relation to the more active Jack; and a voice that almost seems to celebrate its own downfall. The female voice of "Ladd Y the daunce" was common in late medieval song. Indeed, almost all the lyrics, ballads, and carols that touch on the lives of young women in late medieval England give voice — either wholly or in part — to their fictional maidens. These songs appear in so many different genres and so many different contexts that they must have particularly appealed to late medieval audiences. Some songs are related to Old FrenchpastoHrelks^ others are laments of forsaken maidens; still others are dialogues between women and men, or stories told in either ballads or carols. Some use Latin as well as

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English; others rely on the increasingly standard English of London and its region; still others use northern dialects or even Scots. Some were copied into books associated with the English court; others into monastic collections; still others (like "Ladd Y the daunce") into the notebooks of university students. The appeal of these songs seems to have embraced the merchant's wife as well as the dairymaid, the great lord as well as his lackey, the educated as well as the illiterate.2 These songs tell many different stories that can be interpreted in many different ways. Some dwell on maidens wronged by men, but others tell of maidens who were foolish or lusty or wily. Some are misogynous in tone; others quite sympathetic toward women. Some are fun and playful; others are mournfully sad. Even a single song has many possible meanings. The maiden in "Ladd Y the daunce" would probably have been differently understood by poor or well-off people, by those given to piety or those inclined toward premarital sex, by daughters or their mothers, and by peasants as opposed to townspeople or gentry. These songs could even evoke contradictory emotions in a one person: sympathy, disgust, admiration, amusement, and horror, all at the same time. Matters of performance also complicate possible readings. The saddest forsaken maiden could have been rendered ludicrous by a male singer affecting a high falsetto, just as the most culpable could have been somewhat redeemed by a sympathetic performance. From the range of possible meanings offered by these songs, this essay explores just one: the social meanings of their female voices. Feminist literary critics have recognized for some time the doubleness of female voices in medieval literature, voices that, in the words of Matilda Bruckner, "say something different" even while conforming to more general conventions. As a historian, I can appreciate how female voices simultaneously "repeat and do not repeat" the conventions of their literary genres, but I wish to hear these voices in their social as well as cultural contexts.3 In this essay, therefore, I explore the social work done by the maiden singers of these carols, lyrics, and ballads — or, more specifically, the interests that might speak through their words. Information about authorship is important to this issue, but not determinative. On the one hand, authors can express interests not their own, so that a female author can, for example, give voice to misogynist ideologies. On the other hand, very little is known and is likely ever to be known about the authors of most of these songs. Women perhaps wrote two of the extant songs; male clerics wrote several others; and the authors of the rest are entirely unknown (although both historical context and literary content suggest considerable male involvement) .4 Many of the songs are what Richard Greene has

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called "popular in origin" — that is, they were sung, danced, and enjoyed long before any version happened to be copied into a manuscript that has survived to this day.5 In such circumstances, we simply cannot know how women and men (or how many women and men) might have participated in the actual creation of a song. Instead of seeking authors, then, this essay seeks interests. When women speak in these songs, in whose interests are they speaking? Historical studies of medieval adolescence in general and adolescent women in particular are every bit as complex as studies of the songs in which medieval maidens speak. James Schultz has argued that adolescence was not a recognized part of medieval life, at least as portrayed in medieval German literature. But Barbara Hanawalt has found ample evidence of adolescence in the documentary records of late medieval London.6 David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber have shown that girls married so young that they moved, without interruption, from the homes of their parents into the homes of their husbands. But Richard Smith and others have data proving that many young women worked away from their parents' homes for five, ten, fifteen, or more years before they married.7 Jeremy Goldberg has argued that singlewomen's economic opportunities expanded in the late fourteenth-century England. But I have found that it was just at this time that singlewomen were pushed out of one of their most lucrative occupations — that is, commercial brewing.8 Some of these differences are source-based, as in the literary sources used by Schultz and the documents used by Hanawalt. Some reflect changes over time; it is likely no accident that our best evidence of medieval adolescence comes after the demographic traumas of the Great Plague of 1347-49. Some derive from class differences, for it seems clear that, among the wealthy, adolescence was a briefer and more restricted stage than was the case for peasants, laborers, artisans, and even modest merchant families. Some differences reflect very real regional distinctions — between pastoral regions and those of arable farming, between town and country, and, most broadly, between southern and northern Europe. In late medieval southern Europe, young women married by about eighteen years, if not earlier, to men usually ten years older. Almost all women married. In northern Europe, women married in their mid-twenties to men of roughly similar age, and significant but varying numbers of women — i o percent is the safest guess for fifteenth-century England — never married at all. And finally, some differences simply reflect unresolved disagreements among scholars. Jeremy Goldberg has argued that the labor-starved economy of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England encouraged young women to delay marriage or, indeed, to never marry at all. In Goldberg's view, in other

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words, singlewomen especially proliferated in England c. 1400. Mavis Mate, Mark Bailey, and others (including myself) remain skeptical that there was, in fact, a temporary bulge in the number of singlewomen at this time.9 In any case, singlewomen were an important part of the social landscape of late medieval England. In 1377, when the first poll tax provides a snapshot of the English population, roughly one-third of all women over age fourteen had not married. Perhaps there were slightly fewer before the Great Plague and slightly more c. 1400, but the data for other times are, at best, suggestive. There were slightly more singlewomen in towns than in villages, a phenomenon caused in part by the steady migration of young rural women, looking for work, into nearby towns and cities. Yet in both remote villages and bustling towns, many young women started, between the ages of twelve and fifteen years, to find employment as servants or, much more rarely, as apprentices; in both cases, they lived away from their parents, subject to the supervision of masters and mistresses. Others worked as wage-laborers who accepted jobs by the day or week; some of these lived with their parents but others traveled in search of work, especially during harvest-time, or even lived on their own in places distant from their families. Many young singlewomen also began to accumulate modest resources, owning goods or (more rarely) properties in their own right. Few married before they reached the age of twenty, and some (again, probably about 10 percent) never married at all. Living away from their parents, working on their own, and possessing their own goods or lands, these young women might seem to have been remarkably independent. But they were also constrained in important ways. Compared to their brothers, young women obtained jobs of lower status and lower pay; they received less wealth from their parents; they owned less property; they were more likely, if raised in the countryside, to have to take to the road in search of work; and they were much more vulnerable to sexual exploitation by masters, fellow workers, or mistresses. In addition, young women, thought to reach sexual maturity earlier than men and to be possessed of stronger sexual appetites, were especially closely monitored by their elders. At the other end of the social scale (among the mercantile elite, the gentry, and the aristocracy), female adolescence seems to have been a relatively briefer stage. Sometimes sent by their parents to be trained in the households of kin, friends, or patrons, privileged daughters were often married by eighteen, if not before. Elite daughters were more subject to parental supervision than working women of similar ages, but so too were their brothers, compared to laboring men. And like their less privileged counterparts, well-off singlewomen had fewer options than their brothers, who were more likely to

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be sent to school, placed in apprenticeships, or set on a career in the Church. For all classes of medieval society, it is a fair generalization that adolescent women in late medieval England enjoyed some autonomy, but in less favorable circumstances and to a lesser degree than did their brothers.10 This adolescent stage of semi-autonomy — with its associated practices of life-cycle service, relatively late marriage, and even considerable numbers of people who never married—created a problem for the patriarchal regime of late medieval England. Young girls were under the authority of their fathers, and adult wives were similarly overseen by their husbands, but adolescent women were somewhat independent — that is, somewhat outside the ideal by which each woman would be supervised by some man. Like widows (who were also viewed as problematic), singlewomen were anomalous; but unlike widows, they had not once married (and might never do so), and most had not borne children. With adolescence, therefore, the rule of men over women faced an important challenge. Women could live without the direct supervision or support of men, but they had to be persuaded not to do so forever. Some forms of persuasion were punitive. Singlewomen were disproportionately prosecuted in late medieval courts for the crime of scolding (that is, the crime of speaking in ways deemed disruptive to social order or otherwise inappropriate).11 Singlewomen also sometimes found themselves subject to fines, regulations, or even outright banishment. On the Lancashire manor of Singleton, it was reported in 1346 that, by ancient custom, a singlewoman who lived by herself had to pay an annual fine of three pence.12 In Coventry in 1492, singlewomen were ordered not to live on their own, but instead to "go to service till they be maried55 (where they would live under the daily supervision of a master or mistress) ,13 In late fifteenth-century Minehead, singlewomen accused of being "badly governed55 were banned from the town.14 And although out-of-wedlock pregnancy was more a difficulty than a disaster in most late medieval English communities, pregnant singlewomen could find themselves subject to both secular fine and ecclesiastical punishment. Some single mothers eventually married and others were, with their children, readily supported by kin, but the immediate fact of out-of-wedlock pregnancy often prompted forced payment of a manorial levy (variously called leyrwite or childwite) and punishment — usually whipping — administered by Church authorities. If known, fathers were sometimes also fined and punished, but not always.15 As a rule, however, singlewomen were more enticed toward marriage than compelled into it. Because men earned more than women and held more land more securely, marriage could improve a woman5s standard of living.

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Because the Church sanctioned reproduction for wives and husbands only, marriage provided a legitimate place for sexual pleasure and child-rearing. Because social and political structures relied so heavily on marital households, marriage brought a new "goodwife" more social approval than she had known as a mere "maiden" or "singlewoman." These incentives were further strengthened by the voices of maidens in late medieval songs which, among other things, scripted the proper passage of young women through adolescence and into marriage. Adolescent women might have briefly enjoyed exceptional opportunities to live, work, and travel on their own, but their social destiny was to marry. Late medieval songs — many of which were sung and danced at the very ales, saints5 feasts, and markets at which singlewomen were often led astray—helped to guide young women along this prescribed path. Some young singlewomen were poor and others well-off; some lived in isolated villages and others in towns or cities; some were more given to piety or lust or empathy than others. Yet all were young, female, and never-married, and all were probably attentive to models —both real and representational — that suggested what they could expect in the years ahead. What would their relations with men be like? Where might dangers lurk for them? How could they manage on their own? Who would help and advise them? Adolescents today are notoriously keen observers of cultural messages about how they should behave and what they might expect in adulthood; certainly much has changed in the last six hundred years, but we may reasonably expect that young women in late medieval England, poised between the securities of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood, might have attended to their world with a similar acuity. As they watched mothers, mistresses, neighbors, priests, and friends, they learned from real people doing real things. And as they listened, sang, and danced to songs, they learned from imagining women like themselves. Yet when young women heard these songs, sang them, and danced to them, they imagined fictional maidens whose lives were much more limited than their own. In late medieval England, young women were servants, laborers, spinsters, and hucksters; they were newcomers to towns and migrants who moved with the harvest; they were friends, daughters, sisters, and sometimes also mothers. In the worlds imagined by late medieval song, however, these many roles receded, and one role — maidens as objects of male sexual desire —predominated.16 These songs depicted young women first and foremost as sexual objects, objects at risk of being mishandled, abused and betrayed by men. They gave fictional life to three sorts of women who encoun-

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tered lustful men —to lusty maidens who welcomed the embraces of men, to abandoned maidens who foolishly loved and lost, and to maidens who were victims of rape. In creating these three characters, late medieval songs entertained in many ways — they told pretty stories; they cracked jokes; they devised prurient scenarios that might have appealed to some listeners — but they also admonished real maidens to avoid behaviors that so often left fictional maidens in unhappy circumstances. Like "Ladd Y the daunce," many late medieval songs feature desirous maidens eager for the pleasures of courtship and sex. In one carol, a maidservant tells of the joys provided by a holiday. She leaves her chores undone; she dresses up prettily; she dashes off with a fellow named Jack; she accepts from him not only a decorative pin but also enough good ale to get very drunk; and she then has sex with him (as detailed in two richly descriptive stanzas). By carol's end, the servant's womb is swelling, but she dares not confess her state to her mistress. The refrain encourages a good-humored response to the servant's tale. Adopting the voice of the happy maiden and speaking of some of the most dreary tasks assigned to young women, it runs "Rybbe ne rele ne spynne yc ne may / For joyghe that it ys holyday."17 The singer of another carol begins by exclaiming "O Lord, so swett Ser John dothe kys," and she then describes how her lover is so irresistible that when "He gropith so nyslye abought my lape, / I have no powre to say hym nay."18 In another carol, a woman sings in glowing terms of the serving men of London. As emphasized by her refrain "So well ys me begone, troly, lole," she considers herself fortunate to have the pick of such a excellent group of lovers: men with fine black hair; men dressed in impressive bonnets, doublets, shirts, coats, and hose; and, most of all, men from whom a single "kysse is worth a hundred pounde."19 (This last suggests that the singer appreciates the possessions of these men — and the economic security that marriage to one might offer —as much as their physical charms.) And for one last example, a song surviving in a mid-sixteenth-century minstrel's book is particularly explicit about a woman's need for sex. It starts as a riddle, describing a woman woefully searching for something that she could not identify but nevertheless desperately needed (for without this thing, as the song emphasizes, the searcher felt incomplete). What the woman found at last was the mandrake plant, a plant long associated with sexuality, reproduction, and, in this case, the penis. A long discussion about the powers of the mandrake then ensues, a discussion that is really, of course, about penises. Can the mandrake please all women? Does the mandrake really make women's bellies swell:1 Is the best mandrake the hardest or the quickest or the largest?20

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Emphasizing sexual playfulness, these songs and others like them imagine women —many explicitly identified as maidens —as energetic and delighted lovers. The lusty maidens of these songs gaze appreciatively at men; they like good kisses and good sex, and they know a fine penis when they see one. Indeed, throughout these songs, heterosexual intercourse is unequivocally represented as good fun. Some fictional maidens report merely that they allow a lover to "have his will,'5 but no maiden ever complains about disappointing sex, and no maiden includes among her reasons for refusing a would-be lover either an aversion to heterosexual intercourse or a desire for holy virginity.21 As the maidservant remembers her holiday, "In he pult [thrust], and out he drow, / And euer yc lay on hym y-low." As Sir John's lover recalls, "Fayne wold I haue hem bothe nyght and day." And as the mandrake poem emphasizes so carefully, a penis "wolde all women pleyes." In their unequivocal appreciation of men, these songs of maiden's lusty pleasures provide a striking contrast to other contemporary songs — also usually sung wholly or partly in a woman's voice — in which wives complain about sexual equipment and skills of their husbands.22 Always lustful and always satisfied, these maidens are also always marked by class; they are poor, working women, and, indeed, many are cast as servants. Elite maidens had their place in stories about such virgin martyrs as Katherine of Alexandria; ordinary women found their place in late medieval songs of wantons.23 For bourgeois and aristocratic audiences, these songs imagine lusty women in fields, streets, or kitchens, but not among women of their own rank. Since some of these passionate maidens dally with men more privileged than themselves (particularly clerics), their songs likely resonated for many listeners with cross-class tensions and eroticism. The earliest extant Middle English depiction of an abandoned maiden (c. 1300) begins with a mournful refrain that might refer to out-of-wedlock pregnancy: "Nou sprinkes the sprai; / Al for loue icche am so seek / That slepen I ne mai." Riding out for pleasure, the male narrator of this song encounters a sorrowful maiden who sings out her wish that her lover were in his grave; when the narrator stops to question her, she says that a man had made her a pledge of true love but later changed his mind, and she threatens "Yiif I mai, it shal him rewe / Bi this dai."24 A sadder carol about abandonment—fully sung in a woman's voice — begins with the regretful refrain "Were it vndo that is ydo / I wold be war." The verses tell her story: Y louede a child of this cuntre, And so Y wende he had do me;

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Now myself the sothe [truth] Y see; That he is far. He seyde to me he wolde be trewe And chaunge me for none othur newe; Now Y sykke and am pale of hewe, For he is far. He seide his sawus [promises] he wolde folfulle; Therfore Y lat him haue al his wille; Now Y sykke and mourne stille, For he is fare.25 And one mid-fifteenth-century carol tells of a maiden, left pregnant by a clerk, who ends her song with both short-term and long-term strategies: she resolves to tell everyone that she has been on pilgrimage (that is, she plans to withdraw in order to have her child in secret), and she swears that "for no qwrage [passion]" will she ever again have sex with a cleric.26 Whether cursing (as in the first example), crying (as in the second), or coping (as in the last), abandoned maidens abound in late medieval songs; their stories and laments are the most common of late medieval songs about never-married women.27 Many fewer in number but much more upsetting in content are several texts that tell stories of rape. A carol copied into a miscellany book in the second half of the fifteenth century relates a maiden's encounter with one Sir John at a festival. He grabbed her; he swore her to secrecy; he tore her clothes; and he took her maidenhead. Afterward, he came to her house for more sex (described, unlike the rape, in terms of her pleasure as well as his) and brought wonderful gifts. The carol ends with the singer proclaiming her pregnancy and her intention to curse the father unless he supports their child.28 A song extant in an early sixteenth-century copy tells an even unhappier story. Related to the Old French pastourelle^ it sings of a young man who encounters a maiden during his morning ride; he seeks her love; she refuses repeatedly; he rapes her; afterward he denies her request for marriage, then for compensation in goods, and finally simply for knowledge of his name; as he rides off she cries "Crystes curse goo wythe yow"; and finally, in the less fraught final stanza, she resolves to recover and get on with her life.29 Also from an early sixteenthcentury song book comes what is perhaps the most disturbing of these rape songs; it relates a dialogue between a resisting maiden — interrupted while working at home — and an insistent man. It opens with the startled maiden saying "By pes [peace], ye make me spille my ale." She admonishes the intruder to let her continue her work, to go away, and to fear her mother, but he

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persists. Then this dialogue: "Cum kys me!'5 he says. "Nay!" she says. "By God, ye shall!" he says. "Be Criste, Y nelle [will not]" she says. Then, he grabs her and when she complains of pain ("Ye herte my legge agenste the walle"), he retorts "Take to geve all, and be stille than!" The song ends with a double entendre, as the maiden ruefully wishes that she had "schytte the dore" against his entry.30 These songs of wanton joy, sad abandonment, and violent rape tell contradictory stories, at once warning young women to beware of men and excusing the wrongs of men. Songs of lusty maidens caution against foolish and heedless behavior — enjoyment of holidays, acceptance of gifts, private meetings with men, and (as also in laments of abandoned maidens) reliance on unfaithful men, among whom are an extraordinary number of clerics named John or Jack.31 Their presence is explained partly by anticlericalism, partly by social practices, and even partly by the amatory fantasies of the clerics who authored some songs of this sort. Yet as a man who could not marry his lover, a cleric — especially one with the most popular male forename of the time — also conveniently represented all men who loved and abandoned women. Such representations could work, then, to exculpate faithless male lovers and condemn their foolish female victims. In similar ways, although songs about abandoned or raped maidens warn about the ever-present hazard of predatory men, they also, as Kathryn Gravdal has shown so effectively for Old French pastourelles^ turn tragic events into palatable stories and even amusing entertainment.32 One rape song depicts the victim as later accepting her rapist as a lover, and another is told with considerable wit. The abandonments and rapes of these songs create spaces within which it was possible to think about women's powerlessness in matter-of-fact, humorous, and accepting terms. Indeed, these songs so normalize rape that many modern editors have elided their chilling stories. The first has been described as a tale of a "betrayed maiden," the second as a "merry example of the battle of the sexes," and the third as incapable of precise interpretation.33 It was in the vibrant social world of late medieval parishes that these songs were most often performed. Different sorts of audiences welcomed these songs and the minstrels who sometimes sang them, but it was the fundraising efforts of parishes that offered the most regular opportunity for their enjoyment. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English parishioners rebuilt their churches and, in some cases, raised entirely new ones; they stocked their churches with chalices, statues, and candles; they hired artists to paint fearful Dooms on the walls; they raised rood screens between the nave and the

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chancel; and they funded chapels for private worship within the greater walls of the church itself. They did all this, in part, through extraordinarily energetic fundraising at festivals —at May Day games, at Robin Hood plays, and at church-ales on Whitsun or midsummer or the saint's day of the parish (or all three). Parish guilds were often a critical part of this fundraising, even competing against each other to raise money, either for the general use of the parish or for the special lights they separately maintained. By the late fifteenth century, parish guilds were sometimes divided by gender, so that a single parish boasted separate guilds for women and men. And in some communities, singlewomen also formed their own "maidens' guilds," organizations which were carefully supervised by their elders and which seem to have provided, in the words of Katherine French, "certain socializing functions deemed necessary for unmarried women.5'34 These maidens' guilds raised money as did other guilds — through contributions, through collections, cmA through hosting dances. So, "Ladd Y the daunce" might have been sung at an alehouse by the students of Oxford or performed by a minstrel employed by the Duke of Norfolk, but it likely was most often danced at parish festivals, perhaps sometimes at parish festivals hosted by singlewomen themselves. In the second half of the fifteenth century, whenever the maidens of St. Ewen's parish in Bristol hosted their annual dance for the pious purpose of maintaining a light for the Virgin, they themselves might have sung and danced this song of a maiden made pregnant in the aftermath of a dance.35 When they did so, in whose interests did the maiden voice of this song speak? As Felicity Riddy has argued for the contemporary advice poem known today as "What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter," it is possible to hear in these songs the hidden interests of men, especially clerics, as channeled through the voices of women. In fact, the warnings of this poem (and the analogous "The Good Wyf Wold a Pylgremage") so prefigure the missteps of maidens in some songs that the two genres seem to speak to a single purpose.36 First, in both advice poems and songs, holidays are dangerous. One Goodwife warns her daughter to keep herself properly dressed when she "witt thy fellowys pley" on a holiday; the other admonishes "And when the haliday is come, wise schalt thou be / the haliday to wurschip." When fictional maidens in songs ignore such advice, they encounter amorous (and sometimes predatory) men — as, for example, in the narrative of the maiden in "Ladd Y the daunce."37 Second, in both genres, gifts are also dangerous, for as one Goodwife warns her daughter, "Bounden he is that gifte takith, / My dere childe." When maidens in songs accept gifts from desirous men (such as the gloves promised the maiden in

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"Ladd Y the daunce"), they place themselves in compromising positions from which they often emerge pregnant, abandoned, or both.38 And third, privacy is also dangerous, for as one goodwife warns, "Syt not witt no man aloune, for oft in trust ys tressoun." When maidens in late medieval songs meet privately with men (as, again, did the maiden in "Ladd Y the daunce55), they quickly fall into wantonness.39 In short, just as the Goodwife poems use female voices to express male concerns, so too might these carols, lyrics, and ballads express the interests of men through the voices of women. In creating stories of heedless maidens whose innocent pleasures led them to lusty abandon or even out-of-wedlock pregnancy, these songs could work, as Kiddy's argument suggests, to constrain the choices of young women —to direct them away from unregulated sexual pleasure and toward the marital bed. In this sense, then, the voices of singing maidens can certainly be a ventriloquized trick of the men whose moral interests might have been served by these songs — that is, righteous clerics, protective fathers, and would-be husbands. As E. Jane Burns has found in another medieval genre, it is also possible to hear female resistance to male authority in these songs — to hear that, when women speak, they speak in disruptive and rebellious ways. This interpretation produces another sort of ventriloquism, as modern readers "choose to hear55 in these stories a voice of female defiance that might have often eluded medieval audiences.40 In late medieval song, some maidens dismiss men, others ridicule men, and still others cleverly talk back to men. One fictional maiden impatiently dismisses her would-be lover, "Wher gospelleth al thy speche? / Thou findest hir nought here the sot that thu seche55 and she quickly sends him off after more gullible women, "Wend fort there ye wenen / better for to spede.5541 Another dismisses her suitor "Do wey, thou clerk, thou art a fol.5542 And another maiden ridicules her suitor as "full weyke & feble of corage,5' endowed with legs "small be-nethe the kne,55 and worthy of only the work of a shepherd or a page.43 Still other maidens face difficult circumstances with remarkable courage, determining to make fathers pay for the upkeep of their illegitimate children,44 or planning to hide their pregnancies,45 or demanding marriage from their suitors,46 or roundly cursing unfaithful lovers.47 Raped, pregnant, and abandoned they might be, but these young women speak with pluck and confidence. As one intrepid maiden puts it, "Thoughe a knave hathe by me leyne, / Yet am I noder dede nor sleyne / I trust to recouer my harte agayne.5548 Of course, this female assertiveness is double-edged. At the same time that a plucky victim might inspire confidence or admiration among female listeners, her courage could also mitigate some of the horror of her story. And

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although resisting maidens insult lustful men, they also serve — by providing useful lessons on how to parry male wiles — the interests of moralizing men who would have had young women stay chaste. Even with these provisos, however, it is certainly plausible to examine in these songs a feminist ventriloquism in which women's fictional voices introduce disorder and generally upset male complacency. Yet, to my ears, the voices of fictional maidens in these songs express both male authority and female resistance — and more. The maidenly voices of these songs sometimes excuse men or even serve male interests; they sometimes utter complaints familiar to feminist ears; and they also speak in ways that had real meaning to the women who negotiated the contradictions and complexities of late medieval patriarchy. As Deniz Kandiyoti has shown so well, patriarchal regimes can benefit women as well as control them, and these songs seem to contain what Kandiyoti has called the "implicit scripts" through which women accommodate to, cope with, and, indeed, benefit from patriarchal rules.49 In other words, conformity and compliance had their rewards for late medieval women, and in these songs, women might have spoken to women about how best to strike what Kandiyoti has called a "patriarchal bargain."50 In late medieval England, it was, in fact, reasonable advice — which might be offered by a maidservant or mother as well as a cleric or master—that a young woman should avoid the amorous embraces of faithless men and beware of rapists everywhere. It was also reasonable advice that a young woman should aspire to marriage and motherhood, for therein lay the fullest adulthood a woman might achieve. Although these songs are creative fantasies, bound as firmly by the conventions of literature as by reality, they speak very directly to the circumstances of ordinary maidens in late medieval England. Fictional maidens sing of faithless lovers; real maidens knew that, thanks to the uncertainties of clandestine marriage, men could renege on even seemingly firm promises.51 Fictional maidens turn to mothers for guidance during courtship; real maidens were also guided by their mothers — not only privately but also through the women's guilds of late medieval parishes —to develop into "proper Christian women and Christian wives."52 Fictional maidens speak of the gifts brought to them by men; real maidens also took gloves, rings, and clothes from would-be lovers.53 Fictional maidens relate horrible tales of rape; so too did real maidens suffer such violence.54 The maidens in these songs might speak about only one aspect of singlewomen's lives in late medieval England —that is, sexuality and courtship — but they speak with a powerful verisimilitude. This power was enhanced, of course, by voice, for young women might

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have especially responded to a maiden^s song when, as was often the case, fictional maidens particularly sought the attention of singlewomen in their audiences. One sings, "But, all medons, be-ware be-rewe, / & lett no man downe you throwe; / For & yoo doo ye wyll ytt rewe."55 Another complains, "By such wanton men as youe be younge maydes are sometymes begyled5556 And yet another begins, "I pray yow, maydens euerychone .. 5557 Other maidenly voices are less direct, but they nevertheless speak in ways that might have drawn singlewomen to them. Some use images particularly associated with women's work, such as the final observation of the maiden who led the dance at midsummer that "Euel yspunne yern, euer it wole out.55 Some pass on their hard-learned lessons, reflecting, as did the abandoned maiden whose song is reproduced above, "Were it vndo that is ydo / I wolde be war55 And still others, by expressing anxiety about pregnancy or fear of angry mistresses (or both), speak directly about the unhappy results of unguarded joys. When the maidservant who enjoyed her holiday with too much abandon exclaims, "Durst I not my dame tell!55 she speaks in a way that might have particularly resonated for young women who could so easily find themselves in similar circumstances.58 In short, the fictional maidens of these songs speak both plausibly and powerfully as actual maidens. But it might be women speaking as mothers whose interests are more powerfully represented in these songs. Given the hard realities of women5s choices in late medieval patriarchy, mothers might have, indeed, known best—or at least credibly thought they knew best. After all, mothers were the earliest teachers of their children, expected to inculcate good morality in their progeny and especially their daughters. After all, mothers had themselves negotiated the difficult passage that their daughters now faced and could speak from hard experience about the risks and pleasures of maidenhood and courtship. And after all, mothers themselves had struck a particular "patriarchal bargain55 (ceding the independence of the single life for the security of a wife), and most probably thought that their daughters should do the same. From these maternal interests might come a third ventriloquism in these songs — a mothers worries speaking in a daughter5s voice.59 Indeed, throughout these songs, mothers are a girPs best friend. In one early sixteenth-century song (one of the few for which the music survives), a dairymaid resists the advances of a man who accosts her as she walks to the fields for milking. Her response, successful after much repetition, is "Nay, God forbid, that may not be, I wis my mother shall us see.5560 Another maiden, trapped by a man while out collecting flowers, cautions (in her case, unsuccessfully) "My moder can the howres tell / whyle I am here, soo doeth my

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fader."61 Other maidens similarly speak of nearby mothers (and sometimes nearby fathers), or caution about parents who disapprove of their lovers or actions.62 Aside from mothers and, less commonly, fathers, the maidens imagined in these songs are protected by few others. Friends are virtually never mentioned, and mistresses of serving maids appear occasionally, but their role is more punishing than protective (as in "Ladd Y the daunce"). Since many young women lived distant from their parents and had, as we know, to rely much more on friends and mistresses than on mothers or fathers, representations of maternal benevolence might have negotiated between an ideal of parental guidance (which for daughters, usually meant maternal guidance) and a reality of children who often were, by their mid-teens, off on their own.63 More importantly, however, these representations contrasted imperiled maidens against their strong mothers, showing singlewomen what they might gain if they accommodated to patriarchal norms. In both explicit advice and implicit representation, then, a mother's concerns seem to be as plausible a part of these songs as the interests of men or the rebellious resistance of maidens. The "patriarchal bargain" mothers had struck is pitched in these songs as a good bargain for their daughters. In representing the lives of young women, these songs are fraught with contradiction. They tell horrible stories about rape and abandonment, but tell these stories with wit and humor. They give voice to strong and lustful women who caution real women to be meek and pure. They grow out of the very activities — singing and dancing on holidays — that they script as dangerous for young women. These contradictions were paralleled in the real world of late medieval patriarchy. Medieval gender rules derived from the normative roles of wives and husbands; to be female was to be a wife and helpmate, to be male was to be a husband and householder. But many women and men were not married —nuns and monks, lifelong singlewomen and bachelors, widows and widowers, and, most important for our understanding of these particular songs, adolescent women and men who were caught between the dependency of childhood and the full adulthood of marriage. In an "ideal" patriarchy, all women would have been always under the proper control of men, always governed by fathers, masters, husbands, or sons. But the numerous singlewomen of late medieval England confounded gender norms and undermined the proper governance of women by men. The voices of maidens in contemporary songs both reflect these contradictions and seek to negotiate through them. It is, therefore, not surprising that these voices should embody contradiction, speaking to male interests and female interests, espousing both social

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conservatism and resistance. In her study of "What the Goodwife Taught her Daughter," Riddy ended by contrasting the bourgeois values she found expressed in this poem against a subculture of "spirited and daring girls" whom those values sought to control. Stern patriarchs on one side; rebellious girls on the other.64 For me, this contrast is reassuringly sharp, politically appealing, and historically implausible. There were stern patriarchs and rebellious girls in late medieval England, to be sure, but the power of late medieval patriarchy lay in the obfuscation of their conflict and the elision of their interests. Yes, the interests of clerics are expressed in these songs and so too are the forthright words of resisting maidens. But the interests of maidens and clerks were not always contradictory, nor did they preclude the simultaneous expression of the additional interests of both mothers and their daughters. All coexisted — sometimes in conflict, sometimes in harmony—in both the society of late medieval England and its songs.

Notes

Introduction Some of the following material has been drawn from Anne L. Klinck, "Lyric Voice and the Feminine in Some Ancient and Mediaeval Frauenlieder" Florilegium 13 (1994): 13-36. 1. See FF; also Plummer's essay, "The Woman's Song in Middle English and Its European Backgrounds," in FF, 135-54. 2. But see Songs of the Troubadours and Trouveres: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg, Margaret Switten, and Gerard Le Vot (New York: Garland, 1998), a selection of Occitan and Old French lyrics which emphasises their musical rendering. 3. Cf. Riidiger Schnell, who regards the German Frauenlied as a "Liedtyp" rather than a "Gattung," "Frauenlied, Manneslied und Wechsel im deutschen Minnesang," ZfdA 128 (1999): 127-84, esp. 130, n. 15. 4. Cf. Paul Zumthor: "Toute origine s'efface, la voix s'etouffe dans un texte composite, neutre, oblique, destructeur des identites personnelles," Essai de poetique medievale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 69. 5. "Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution a la connaissance du lyrisme feminin au moyen age," CCM 22, 3 (1979): 235-62, esp. 261. 6. Interestingly, Roland Barthes opened his well-known essay "La mort de 1'auteur" (Manteia 5 [1968]: 12-17) with the construction of the feminine —in a comment by a character in Balzac's Sarrasine that a castrate impersonating a woman is truly woman. "Qui park ainsi?" Barthes asks — and replies that we cannot know. 7. A major concern of the work edited by William Paden, FT, for example. Three of the eleven essays in this collection examine evidence for the authorship of women poets: Proven9al (Francois Zufferey, "Toward a Delimitation of the Trobairitz Corpus," 31-43, and Frank M. Chambers, "Las trobairitz soiseubudas" 45-60) and Italian (Paolo Cherchi, "The Troubled Existence of Three Women Poets," 197-209). Carol Nappholz's Unsung Women: The Anonymous Voice in Troubadour Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) is also very concerned with the question of female authorship. 8. Thus Marilynn Desmond: "the gender of the author becomes insignificant..., the gender of the speaker... all important," Critical Enquiry \ 6 (1990): 572-90, esp. 583. 9. See, for example, Patricia BelanofT, "Women's Songs, Women's Language," in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193-203, esp. 200. 10. For the history of the term Frauenlied, see Ulrich Molk, "Die friihen romanischen Frauenlieder. Uberlegungen und Anregungen" in Idee, Gestalt, Geschichte: Festschrift Klaus von See (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988), 63-88, esp. 64-67;

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Notes to Pages 3-4

reprinted as the Introduction to his Romanische Frauenlieder (Munich: Fink, 1989), 13-47. See also Molk's "Chansons de femme, trobairitz et la theorie romantique de la genese de la poesie lyrique romane," Lingua e stile 25 (1990): 135-46. 11. A theory first stated in an 1864 letter to Karl Miillenhoff. See Albert Leitzmann, Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Miillenhojf und Wilhelm Scherer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1937), 70 and 72. 12. Les origines de la poesie lyrique en France au Moyen Age^ 3rd ed. (1889; Paris: Champion, 1925), 158. 13. In response to this theory, Joseph Bedier argued that the fetes de mai were a source only for the "petits genres pastoraux au moyen age," "Les fetes de mai et les commencements de la poesie lyrique au Moyen Age," Revue des deux mondes 135 (May 1896): 146-72, esp. 172. 14. Described, for example, in the medieval romance Flamenca^ probably composed in the late thirteenth century (lines 3234-47). 15. Leo Spitzer and Alan D. Deyermond may also be correct in associating the strophes of the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo with particular dance patterns. See Spitzer, "The Mozarabic Lyric and Theodor Frings' Theories," CL 4 (1952): 1-22, esp. 19-20, and Deyermond,"The Earliest Lyric and Its Descendants"^! Literary History of Spain^ vol. i, The Middle Ages (London: Benn, 1971), 1-30, esp. 24-25. 16. (Berlin: Akademie, 1949). See also "Frauenstrophen und Frauenlied in der friihen deutschen Lyrik," in Gestaltung Umgestaltung: Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Hermann August Korjf^ ed. Joachim Miiller (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1957), and DieAnfangedereuropaischenLiebes-Dichtungimii. undiz.Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1960). 17. A distinction first made in "Quelques reflexions sur la poesie medievale. Problemes et essai de caracterisation" (inMelanges ojferts a Rita Lejeune, 2 vols. [Gernbloux: Duculot, 1969], 2:1309-29), and maintained in Chants d'amour desfemmes-troubadours (Paris: Stock, 1995), 46, n. 3. See also La lyrique fran^aise au Moyen Age., Xlle-XIIIe siecles^ 2 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1977-78), 1:59. Bee's opposition of genres is seriously questioned in Joan Grimbert's "Songs by Women and Women's Songs: How Useful Is the Concept of Register?" in The Court Reconvenes: Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Triennial Congress of the 7CLS, ed. Chantal Phan, Barbara Altman, and Carleton Carroll (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001). 18. The terms and their definitions are found in the fragmentary Poetica attached to the Biblioteca Nacional Ms. collection of lyrics; the date of the Poetica is uncertain; probably some time in the fourteenth century according to Frede Jensen. See The Earliest Portuguese Lyrics (Odense: Odense University Press, 1978), 229-30, andMedieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry (New York: Garland, i992),xxxii. 19. For example, Kasten disagrees with Bee's inclusion of the alba as a subtype, although she does include a "popular" French aube, no. 62 in her Frauenlieder des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), as well as a "popular"pastourelle^ no. 65. She does not include the famous^! lafontana ("By the fountain") by Marcabru, which is an early variant ofthcpastourelle — although Angelica Rieger describes this poem as "allgemein als Frauenlied charakterisiert," Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen hofischen Lyrik: Edition des Gesamtkorpus (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 75. 20. Cf. Pilar Lorenzo Gradin's observation that insistence on monologue form

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does not fit the facts, La cancion de mujer en la Urica medieval (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago, 1990), 119. 21. See Anne L. Klinck, "The Oldest Folk Poetry? Medieval Woman's Song as 'Popular' Lyric," in FromArabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour ofMahmoudManzalaoui on his 7$th Birthday^ ed. A. E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), 229-52. Kathleen Ashley notes that the cantigas de amigo are often peopled with figures at court ("Voice and Audience: The Emotional World of the cantigas de amigo" in FF, 35-45, esp. 39). Even when the characters are from humble life, they may still be created for an aristocratic public. Plummer compares women's songs with fabliaux in this respect ("Woman's Song in Middle English," 136). 22. Cf. Erich Auerbach's criticism of Frings's notion of the popular. Auerbach notes that the conception prevailing among "the Romantic philologists" arises from a reaction against French neoclassicism when a large minority of educated and wealthy persons formed a literary public, whereas in the Middle Ages relations between elite minorities and the "people" (Auerbach's quotation marks) were of a very different kind. See his review of Frings's Minnesinger und Troubadours, EP 4 (1950-51): 65-67. 23. "Les vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwassahas hispano-hebrai'ques," AlAndalus 13 (1948): 299-346. The proportion of Romance to Arabic words in the kharjas varies, and recent scholarship has tended to stress the latter. See Klinck, this volume, nn.26, 27; Cohen, this volume, n.i2. 24. On the dating of these poems, see Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), 20-21. 25. The occasional voice continues to be raised in disagreement. In particular, the poems have been linked to the Old English Riddles, or claimed to be laments of a nonerotic kind. Interpretations vary widely. See Klinck, Elegies, 47-54. 26. See Malone, "Two English Frauenlieder," CL 14 (1962): 106-17; Clifford Davidson, "Erotic 'Women's Songs' in Anglo-Saxon England," Neophilologus 59 (1975): 451-62; Belanoff, this volume, and "Women's Songs, Women's Language." 27. See The Medieval Lyric, 3rd ed. (1968; Woodbridge: Brewer, 1996), 91; Dronke provides a rather free translation, which breaks the poem into strophes. For the Carolingian source, see Klinck, this volume, n.52. 28. "Willad hy hine a^ecgan gif he on J?reat cymecX / Ungelic(e) is us." Text as in Klinck, Elegies. 29. "Woman's Song in Medieval Latin," in FF, 19-33. 30. Stanzas 1-3 and 5-6 quoted. Text as in CE, ed. Hilka and Schumann. 31. The poem has been damaged by a medieval censor who attempted to erase it. Quoted here from Dronke's reconstruction, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-66), i: 274; refrain omitted. 32. Text as in CC, ed. Strecker. The poem, printed in Strecker's apparatus, is an interpolation in CC 14. See also Jan Ziolkowski, The Cambridge Songs (New York: Garland, 1994), with his translation. 33. Schotter sees here a more refined strain of learned influence ("Woman's Song in Medieval Latin," 20-21). 34. For example, Plummer explicitly excludes "the songs of aristocratic women poets" (FF, Introduction, v). In his Chants d'amour desfemmes-troubadours, Bee adds a

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section of chansons defemme, evidently feeling a need to bring the two kinds of poetry together, although he regards them as distinct. 35.SJFT,xxv. 36.Mamma, lo temple venuto 39. See below. 37. But see Sarah Kay's essay on derived rhyme in the Comtessa de Dia's^4& ioi et ab ioven and Lombarda's tenso with Bernart Arnaut d'Armagnac. Kay notes that this is "an unusually elaborate technique in a body of poetry [by the trobairitz] which elsewhere cultivates an air of unaffected simplicity" "Derivation, Derived Rhyme, and the Trobairitz," in FT, 157-82, esp. 165. 38. The greater directness and relative metrical simplicity ottrobairitz poetry are analyzed by Joan M. Ferrante, "Notes Toward the Study of a Female Rhetoric in the Trobairitz," in FT, 63-72. See also Sophie Marnette, who finds the women's cansos characterized by Texpression de volonte (ordres, verbe vouloir)," while the women's parts in tensos (poetic debates about love), show a greater cooperation (absence of rhetorical questions, less manipulation of the other's discourse) relative to the men's parts, "L'expression feminine dans la poesie lyrique occitane," RP n (1997): 170-93, esp. 188-89. And cf. Riidiger Schnell's comment onMinnesanpf that the woman's voice focuses on love rather than on discussion of love ("die weibliche Stimme . . . nur die Liebe thematisiert, nicht aber das Reden iiber die Liebe," "Frauenlieder," 151). 39. There are approximately 20 surviving love-lyrics attributed to named aristocratic women (including the male-female tensos}, plus a political polemic (Gormonda's Greu m'es a durar}. By contrast, the corpus of male-voice troubadour lyric, in various genres, numbers about 2,500. 40. Molk recognizes only four: Quan vei lespraz verdesir, Oy alt as undas que venez suz la mar, Quant logilos erfora, Coindeta sui', this seems a bit too restrictive. See "Quan vei lespraz verdesir" in Melanges de langue et de litterature occitanes en homma0e a Pierre Bee (Poitiers: Universite de Poitiers Centre d'Etudes Superieures de Civilisation Medievale, 1991), 377-84, esp. 384. 41. See no. 33 in SIFT for text, and their translation, of this anonymous poem. 42. Stanzas 3-4 quoted. Text as in Karl Bartsch, Chrestomathieprovenpale, 6th ed., ed. Eduard Koschwitz (1904; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1973). Bartsch prints refrain after first and last stanzas only. It is possible that this linguistically mixed text should be regarded as Occitanized French rather than the reverse. See Hendrik van der Werf, "Music," in A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 125; Bee, Chants d'amour, 52. 43. On carnival humor and its ritual elements, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 412. 44. Poem quoted entire. Text as in no.74, Rondeaux et refrains. Du Xlle siecle au debut duXWe, ed. Nico H. J. van den Boogarde (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969). 45. First stanza quoted. Text as in no. 26, Les chansons de croisade, ed. Joseph Bedier and Pierre Aubry (1909; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). 46. Marcabru's poem does not fit neatly into the usual classifications. See n. 19 above. 47. "Covegne t'en, bele Yolanz" 6.30 in Les chansons de toile, ed. Michel Zink (Paris: Champion, 1977).

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48. Though there are parallels elsewhere for falcon as (male) lover, the gender of the speaker is not indicated in an obvious way. See Kasten, Frauenlieder, 212. 49. On Wolfram, see Gale Si^^Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 180-83. Kasten excludes albas from her collection. Seen. 19, above. 50. Carl von Kraus doubts influence. See^MF, vol. 3.1, 29. 51. Jose Maria Aim hypothesises that the lack of early examples may be attributable to the disesteem in which "popular" poetry was held, an attitude that changed in the second half of the fifteenth century, Cancionero tradicional (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), 25-26. 52. Neil Cartlidge would disagree: "None of the Middle English lyrics is so eloquently provocative [as Hue usque me miseram}. They tend to caricature both the maiden and her lover," ES 79 (1998): 395-414, esp. 402. 53. Nos. 26 and 27 in Secular Lyrics oftheXIVth andXVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Orthography slightly modernized here from Robbins's texts. Stanza 4 (of five) quoted in 26. Final two stanzas (6 and 7) quoted in 27, omitting refrain.

Chapter i This paper is based on a presentation to the Canadian Society of Medievalists, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, 1995.1 use the term "daughters" to suggest Sappho's poetic progeny in later ages. Margaret Williamson's Sappho's Immortal Daughters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) takes its title from Dioscorides, who refers to Sappho's own poems by these words. Translations of foreign quotations are my own throughout unless otherwise indicated. 1. For the history of the terms chanson defemme and Erauenlied, see the Introduction to this volume. 2. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric^ 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-66), i:xvii, translating Marrou's words. 3. F. J. E. Raby, for example, prefers to think of a sudden burgeoning of lyric, rather than a continuing growth from ancient roots, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1:305-6. 4. Claude Charles Fauriel, in the mid-nineteenth century, saw in the women's songs and dances of early medieval southern France a continuation of Graeco-Roman festivities, Histoire de la poesie proven$ale, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Engelman; Paris: Duprat, 1847), 1:166-67. Dronke, in the Introduction to his influential The Medieval Lyric, 3rd ed. (1968; Woodbridge: Brewer, 1996), quotes a sermon of John Chrysostom (c. A.D. 400) describing the performance of various kinds of songs, and comments: "This was the living reality of popular lyric in the fourth century, and a number of later allusions indicate that such traditions lived on in the early Middle Ages" (p. 15). Dronke adds that "many scholars today [ 1968] are so sceptical about this that... [someone suggesting it] would be dismissed as a naive, incurable romantic. But the testimony of St. John . . . cannot be refuted or ignored." 5. Cf. Leo Spitzer, "The Mozarabic Lyric and Theodor Frings's Theories," CL 4

210

Notes to Pages 15-18

(1952): 1-22, esp. 22. Riidiger Schnell attributes the open sexuality of the feminine utterance to the private space in which it is voiced, more than to male "Wunschphantasien." See "Frauenlieder, Manneslied und Wechsel im deutschen Minnesang," ZfdA 128 (1999): 127-84, esp. 145,156,165. 6. "Habria que considerar un eje arcaicisimo Proximo Oriente (Fenicia)- sur de Italia- Espana . . . " "Poesia griega 'de amigo5 y poesia arabigo-espafiola" Emerita 40 (1972): 329-96, esp. 392. See also the same article, passim. 7. Cantos deMujeres en Grecia (Madrid: Ediciones Clasicas, 1994). 8. See Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990): "The search for origins is never disinterested; those wishing to trace an idea or tradition to its historical, linguistic, and textual beginnings have always done so with a thesis in mind, and the origin they have found has often been an origin they have produced" (Preface, xii). 9. Critias applies this term to a genre cultivated by Anacreon. See Frag. Bi, inDie Fragmente der Vorsokratiker^ 6th ed., ed. Hermann Diels, rev. Walther Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1952), 2:375. 10. Citations of Sappho from Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, eds., Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). 11. Quoted from David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen, cds^Iliadis librixxiv^ 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920). 12. Beowulf 3i5off. Quoted from Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed., ed. Friedrich Klaeber (Boston: Heath, 1950). See his note, p. 230. 13. For traces of pagan religion in Wife, see Peter Orton, "The Wife^s Lament and Skirnismdl: Some Parallels," in Ur Dolum til Dala: Gubbrandur Vigfusson Centenary Essays, ed. Rory McTurk and Andrew Wawn, Leeds Texts and Monographs n.s. n (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1989), 205-37; Robert Luyster, "The Wife's Lament in the Context of Scandinavian Myth and Ritual," PQ 77 (1998): 243-70; Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), 49-50. 14. 'ApiOTO^evoq 8e ev TeTotpTco Tiepi Mo\)aiKrjamin (Jerusalem) 55 (1986): 84-93; for a counterpart in late twentieth-century Morocco, see Norman and Yedida Stillman, "The Art of a Moroccan Folk Poetess," Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 128, i (1978): 65-89. 22. "The Trobairitz," in A Handbook of the Troubadours^ ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 201-33, esp. 223. 23. 2.29-30 in SWT. See xxxv on identification of the Comtessa. 24. "Notes Toward the Study of a Female Rhetoric in the Trobairitz^ in FT, 6372. 25. For an early still valuable study, see Yvonne Rokseth, "Les femmes-musiciennes du Xlle au XlVe siecle," Romania 61 (1935): 464-80. 26. "Sa chemise qu'ot vestue / M'envoia por embracier. / La nuit, quant s'amor m'argue, / La met delez moi couchier, / Toute nuit a ma char nue, / Por mes malz assoagier" ("The tunic he had worn / He sent for me to embrace. / At night, when his love spurs me, / I lay it down beside me, / All night, against my naked skin, / To sooth my pain," 27.51-56) in Songs of the Women Trouveres^ ed. and trans. Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 144. 27. "Mout m'abelist quant je voi revenir / Yver . . . , / Car en toz tans se doit ben resjoi'r / Bele pucele, et joli cuer avoir" 15.1-4 in Doss-Quinby et al., 116. 28. See Roger Walker, "Possible Comic Elements in the Cantigas de Amigo," in Medieval, Renaissance and Folklore Studies in Honor of John Esten Keller^ ed. Joseph R. Jones (Newark, Del.: De la Cuesta, 1980), 77-88, esp. 77. 29. "Explaining Away the Female Subject: The Case of Medieval Lyric," Poetics Today 7,4 (1986): 729-43. 30. "Voice and Audience: The Emotional World of the cantigas de amigo" in FF, 36-46, esp. 36. 31. "Hai entre esta muller e o mar unha unidade primordial indisoluble. Unha unidade cosmica que deriva en conversa" Ondos do Mar de Vigo (Corunna: Espiral Maior, 1996), 23-24. 32. "Frescas e fragrantes flores naturais circuladas de viva seiva do humus nacional, entre multidao de flores de papel, de convencional recorte"; cited in Walker, 79, n. 9. 33- 340.6-7 in Cantigas dyamigo dos trovadoresgalego-portugueses^ ed. Jose Joaquim Nunes, 3 vols. (1926-28; New York: Kraus, Reprints 1971). 34. Maria Perez, a nossa cruzada: "mais ela non a maeta ferrada," in M. Rodrigues Lapa, Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer (1965; Lisbon: da Costa, 1995), 358.9. 35. "Direi-vos ora o que confessava / -Soo velh', ai, capelan!" (Maria Leve, u se maenfestava), in Lapa, 247. See Cohen, "Women Musicians," 45; Corral, 176. On the identification of the various Marias, see Lapa, 46, n. 9. On Maria Balteira, see also Denise K. Filios, "Jokes on Soldadeiras in the Cantigas de Escarnio e Mal Dizer," La Coroniea 26, 2 (1998): 29-40.

226

Notes to Pages 73-75

36. See Lapa, Cantigas^ 54-56; Corral, 173-180. 37. Walker, "Possible Comic Elements." 38. "Lirica Feminina in the Early Manuscript Cancioneros," in Whafs Past Is Prologue, ed. Salvador Bacarisse et al. (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1984), 138-50,171-75, esp. 140. 39. Whetnall, "Lirica Feminina," 147. 40. See also Alan Deyermond, "Patterns of Imagery in Strophic and NonStrophic Court Love Lyric," in Corriente, 79-92, esp. 85-88. 41. Deyermond, "Patterns," 87; also Whetnall, "Lirica Feminina," 138,171; for full text see Francisco Lopez Estrada, Embajada a Tamorldn (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1943), Ixx-lxxv. 42. Whetnall, "Lirica Feminina," 150. 43. Poesiafeminine en los cancioneros (Madrid: Castalia, 1989), 10. Several aspects of this short poem are analyzed by Maria-Jose Sanchez Romaic at perhaps exaggerated length in "Dona Mayor Arias: historia y poesia," in La voz de Silencio^ vol. i, Fuentes direct as para la historia des mujeres (siglos VIII-XVIII)^ ed. Cristina Segura (MadridParla: Al-Mudayna, 1992), 99-110. 44. "Mayor Arias's Poem and the Early Spanish Contrafactum," in The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. Ian MacPherson and Ralph Penney (London: Tamesis, 1997), 535-52. 45. See Historia de la literatura catalana (1964; Barcelona: Ariel, 1982), 519-20. 46. "O garden whose harvest time has come / no harvester can be seen to extend a hand to you" ("Aya rawdatan qad hana min-ha qatafu-ha / wa-laisa yura hanin yamuddu la-ha yada"); no. 3, in Nichols. 47. In Jesus Pelaez del Rosal, Los judios en Cordoba (ss. x-xii) (Cordoba: Almendro, 1988), 95. 48. 13.28 in SWT. See also Deyermond, "Patterns," 89-90. 49. See Deyermond, "Patterns" 83-88, esp. 87; and, for the Hebrew text, Ezra Fleischer, "Al Dunash ben Labrat v'ishto uv'no,"'Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 5 (1984): 189-201. For recorded versions of my contrafacta for this poem and for the two by Vidal of Elvas cited below, see Judith R. Cohen et al., Canciones de Sefarad (Madrid: Pneuma Compact Disc PN 270, 2000). 50. See Edna Aizenberg, "Una judia muy formosa: The Jewess as Sex Object in Medieval Spanish Literature and Lore," La Coronica 12, 2 (1984): 187-94; and Tova Rosen, "Women in Medieval Hebrew Literature," Prooftexts 8, i (1988): 67-88. Si.Moirtfafo dereito, in Cantigas d^amor dos trovadoresgalego-portugueses^ ed. Jose Joaquim Nunes (1932; Lisbon: Brasileiro, 1973), 265.2. Also see Corral, 62; Roy Rosenstein, "The Voiced and the Voiceless in the Cancioneiros: The Muslim, the Jew and the Sexual Heretic as Exclusus Amator,"Z# Coronica 26, 2 (1998): 70-72. 52. "There's no sin or guilt in loving a lass," in Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 145; his translations. 53. "A poet speaks not except for deception," Brann, 154. 54. "In my desire for her," Brann, 148. 55. Rosen, "Women in Medieval Hebrew Literature," 83. 56. For a discussion of my experiments in setting several of these poems to music as contrafacta (the Judeo-Catalan series, Dunash's supposed wife's poem, and the

Notes to Pages 75-78

227

poems by the Portuguese Vidal), see Judith R. Cohen, "New Life for Old Songs: The Ethnomusicologist as Applied Contrafactotum"HispaniajudaicaBulletin 2 (1999) : 3542. For Judeo-Spanish eontrafacta^ see Cohen, "Musical Bridges." 57. "De tota res vulau amor / e de la dona ja millor," stanza 9; "menges . . . no am tenco," stanza 8; "el nuvi el primer an / lo yanum we-lo yshan," stanza 10; "a la nuit.. . ianglant, rient," stanza 13; poem 2 in Jaume Riera i Sans, Cunts de Noces dels Jueus Catalans (Barcelona: Curial, 1974). 58. "O Groom, if you can't do it, eat sturgeon or brain of sparrows, lemon confit o r . . . [illegible word]; perhaps these will clear it up" ("En nuvi: Si no podeu fer asso / menjats austurio o cervel de moxo, confit de toronja o [d'estonfo], / ulai ukal nakke bo," stanza 9; poem 4 in Riera i Sans). 59."... neta pus que cristal ne or," stanza 3; "fets-li tocar lo tanbor," stanza 4;"... a filar, a teixir, o a cosir hajau la ma," "... fills savis ahureu," stanza 9; "... no. us metats blanquet ne [vergi]," stanza 8; poem 5 in Riera i Sans. 60. The Aged Husband (PiyyutNaeh]: "Sheer we-kesut n'hauras, mas no pas cona," line 2; "io prec en Deu que en breu ne sia almana," line 3; "mas io vos portare un bon bakhur gibbor," line 6; poem i in Riera i Sans. 61. "Poesia de mujer, poesia de hombre: la diferencia del genero en la lirica andalusia," in del Moral, Arabes, judias y cristianas^ 172-93. 62. From Teresa Garulo's Spanish rendition of the Arabic: "Estoy hecha, por Dios, para la gloria / y camino, orgullosa, por mi propio camino"; "Doy poder a mi amante sobre mi mejilla / y mis besos ofrezco a quien los desea"; Diwan de laspoetisas de al-Andalus (Madrid: Hiperion, 1986), 143. 63. "Wallada has given birth and has no husband . . . imitated Mary, but the Virgin's palm-tree was for Wallada an erect penis" ("Wallada ha dado a luz y no tiene marido . . . ha imitado a Maria, mas la palmera que la Virgen sacudiera para Wallada es un pene erecto"). See Garulo, 106, n. 148 for comment on the Qur'anic allusion; and note Rosen's succinct observation: "Pen and penis were identified as instruments and symbols of male fertility" (68). For fiither remarks on medieval Andalusian Muslim women's poetry see Maria-Jesus Rubiera Matos, "La voz de la las poetisas de AlAndalus y la problematica de la voz femenina literaria medieval," in La voz del Silencio, ed. Segura, 65-71. 64. "Virgins Misconceived: Poetic Voice in the Mozarabic Kharjas," La Coronica 19, 2 (1991): 1-23, here 19. 65. Mishael Caspi, Daughters of Yemen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),566. Johanna Spector, "Bridal Songs and Ceremonies from the Yemen," Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore (New York: Haskell House, 1973), 255-84, here 261. 67. Mishael Caspi and Julia Blessing, Weavers of the Songs: The Oral Poetry of Arab Women in Israel and the West Bank (Washington D.C.: Three Continents, 1991), 64. 68. See Cohen, "Women Musicians," 103, and cf. remarks quoted on Corsican women, above. 69. Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 187. 70. See Manuel Alvar, Cantos de boda judeo-espanolas (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1971): ". . . en ca de mi novio . . . me desmiro en su faldriquera / y en sus buenos dineros / . . . que buena es la manana . . . mejor es el que la

228

Notes to Pages 78-82

manda" ("In my fiance's house . . . I look in his wallet and at his money . . . how fine is the morning . . . finer still is the Creator who sends it," Alvar, 318); "Ashuar nuevo delante vo lo pondre, suegra y cunada no tengas que dezir" ("My new trousseau I'll set out before you; mother-in-law and sister-in-law, you can find no fault [have nothing to say]," Alvar, 215); "sonaba un sueno .. . con amor me ire a folgar" (Alvar 220-21). Alvar gives these texts as separate items; however, in my fieldwork recordings of Moroccan Sephardic women, they are usually sung sequentially. Preceding the "I dreamed" (sonaba) is the phrase "con amor, madre, con amor me ire a dormir" ("with love, Mother, with love I will go to sleep"), echoing a song centuries earlier from the Cancionero Musical del Palacio, "con amores, mi madre, con amores me adormi" ("with love, my Mother, with love I went to sleep"), cited in Margit Frenk Alatorre, Estudios sobre Urica anti0ua (Madrid: Castalia, 1978), 107. 71. Rosen, "Women in Medieval Hebrew Literature," 77. 72. For discussions of Sephardic contrafacta^ see Cohen, "Bridges." Also Israel J. Katz, "Contrafacta and the Judeo-Spanish Romancero: A Musicological View," in Hispanic Studies in Honor of Joseph H. Silverman^ ed. Joseph Ricapito (Newark, Del.: de la Cuesta, 1988), 169-87; Edwin Seroussi and Shoshana Weich-Shahak, "Judeo-Spanish Contrafacts and Musical Adaptations: The Oral Tradition" Orbis Musicae 10 (199091): 164-94. There are too many other studies to list here; the central ones are cited in the above. 73. Hesperion XX, dir. Jordi Savall, notes by Francisco Noy (1977; London: EMI/Virgin Classics, Veritas 7243 56131026,1996). 74. See, for example, Joyce Todd and the Ensemble Heliotrope, The Romance of the Rose (New York: Koch Compact Disc 3~7io3-2Hi, 1995). 75. Cohen, "Bridges."

Chapters We would like to express our gratitude to Joseph Snow for rescuing us from error and smoothing over some rough spots. Any defects which remain are, of course, our own. JC, ALK. 1. To cite only some of the most representative books, see Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., Historia de las mujeres, vol. 2, La edad media (Madrid: Taurus, 1992); in the Galician context, M. Carmen Pallares, A vida das mulleres na Galicia medieval (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago, 1993); Esther Corral Diaz, As mulleres nas canti0as medievais (Sada: Do Castro, 1996). For an analysis of the genre, see, among others, Giuseppe Tavani, A poesia Urica galego-portuguesa^ 2nd ed. (Vigo: Galaxia, 1988); Vicente Beltran, Camion de mujer: Cantiga de ami0o (Barcelona: PPU, 1982); Mercedes Brea Lopez and Pilar Lorenzo Gradin, A cantiga de amigo (Vigo: Xerais, 1989); Esther Corral Diaz, "Las cantigas de amigo," mLiteratura gallega medieval y le Galicia Literatura Proyecto Galicia (Corunna: Hercules, 2000), 1:118-71. 2. In the kharjas, for example, another of the genres related to the Hispanic woman's song, a very similar image is transmitted. See Klinck and Cohen in this volume.

Notes to Pages 82-84

229

3. For citing and numbering the texts, I follow Mercedes Brea Lopez, ed., Lirica profanagalego-portuguesa^ 2 vols. (Santiago de Compostela: Centro de Investigations Literarias Ramon Pineiro, Xunta de Galicia, 1996). For editions of the cantigas^ see also Giuseppe Tavani, Repertorio metrico delta limcagalego-portogkese (Rome: Ateneo, 1967); and Jose Joaquim Nunes, ed., Cantigas d^amigo dos twvadoresgalego-portiigueses^ 3 vols. (1926-28; reprint New York: Kraus, Reprints 1971). 4. Gon^al'Eanes do Vinhal refers, in two of his cantigas de amigo, to two specific people: Don Enrique, Alfonso X's brother, and Alfonso's stepmother, Jeanne de Pointhieu, widow of King Ferdinand III (60.3 and 60.16). 5. See Tavani,Apoesia, 144, and Corral,Ar mulleres, 142-56. 6. There is no lack of odd and daring interpretations; for example, Francisco Nodar Manso, La narratividad de la poesia galaico-portuguesa: Antolqgia narrativa^ 2 vols. (Kassel: Reichenberg, 1985), sees in the senhor ("lady," literally "lord"; see n. 24, below) of the cantiga de amor and the amiga of the cantiga de amigo two stages of carnal love, which according to him, are implied subliminally in the texts of love poetry (i: 201). 7. See, for example, the following sections from two poems by Loure^o: Tres mofas cantavan d'amor, mui fremosinhas^tfom, mui coytadas dus amores ("Three girls sang of love / very beautiful shepherdesses / very lovesick all three with love" 88.16.1-3); A mofa ben parecia, e en ssa voz mansselia cantou e diss'a menia (The young girl [mofa, menia] was lovely / and in her sweet voice / sang and said. .. "88.17.7-9). Also, Pero Viviaez, 136.4. For meninhas, cf. 88.17, above, and 136.4. Pastor is one of the key words for classifying the composition within the genre ofthcpastorela, and is found in Airas Nunez, 14.9; J. Perez dAboim, 75.3; PedrAmigo, 116.29; J. Airas, 63.58; D. Dinis, 25.128, 25.129, and 25.135; Lourenco, 88.16. Donzela in Afonso Sanchez, 9.10; Garcia de Guilhade, 70.21; Portocarreiro, 128.4. Virgo in J. Zorro, 83.5. Dona-virgo in 83.8, above; Portocarreiro, 128.3; Airas Nunez, 14.9. 8. See also Ria Lemaire, Passions et positions: Contribut a une semiotique du sujet dans lapoesie lyrique medievale en langues romanes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 96. 9. See Jean-Marie d'Heur, Recherches internes sur la lyrique des troubadours galiciens-portugais, XII-XIII siecles (Liege: Universite de Liege, 1975), 439-69; Segismundo Spina, Do formalismo estetico trovadoresco (Sao Paulo: Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1966), 105-31; Gow^Asmulleres^ 285-303. 10. Beta also appears in the refrain "e chor'eu, bela," "and I, lovely me, am weeping," Portocarreiro, 128.3. n. The cantigas d^escarnho ("songs of mockery") mention women's bodies ex-

230

Notes to Pages 84-88

plicitly and in detail (cf. Pero dArmea, 121.8) and introduce a new semantic element with the idea offealdad ("fealty"). See Jose Luis Rodriguez, "A mulher nos cancioneiros. Notas para um anti-retrato descortes," Simposio International M.ulher e Cutturn (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago, 1993), 43-67. 12. See Pilar Lorenzo Gradin, ccVoces de mujer y mujeres con voz en las tradiciones hispanicas medievales," in Breve historic feminists de la literatura espanola (en lenguacastellana)^vo\s. (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1996), 4:36-37. 13. Corpo velido / corpo delgado function as alternating synonyms in poems of the parallelistic type. These combinations are very frequent, and characteristic of the cantiga de amigo^ as are the pairs lou$aa / delgada, lou$aa / velida, bonparecer / bon semelhar. The erotic effect of the dance is clearly seen in Bailade, oje aifilla, queprazer vejades by Airas Nunez, in which the mother makes her daughter dance before the amigo^ to which the daughter replies, "de viver el pouco gran sabor avedes" ("y°u have very little desire that he live"). Also in a cantiga by Pero Viviaez, in which the namorada and her friends go to dance in the courtyard of the church, "fremosas, en cos" (136.4.9). 14. The latter is the only song which corresponds to the chanson de toile or cantiga de tear ("spinning song" or "weaving song") in this school of poetry. The first strophe says: Sedia la fremosa seu sirgo torcendo, sa voz manselinha fremoso dizendo cantigas d'amigo ("The lovely one sat spinning her silk, / her sweet voice singing beautifully / cantigas de amigo "). 15. The motif of green eyes is also used in a cantiga de amor: "Os olhos verdes que eu vi / me fazen ora andar assi" ("The green eyes I saw / make me walk like this," 70.9, refrain). On this motif, see Leif Sletsjoe, "Sobre el topico de los ojos verdes" Strenae: Estudios defilologia e historia dedicados alProf.JManuel Garcia Blanco, (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1962), 445-59; and Beltran, A cantiga de amor (Vigo: Xerais, 1995), 32. 16. In the first two stanzas outryamor ("another love" line 2) and outro ben ("another good," line 6) are used instead of outro rostro ("another face"). 17. Pilar Lorenzo Gradin, La cancion de mujer en la lirica medieval (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago, 1990), 215-16; Maria Luisa Indini, "Pero Gon9alvez de Portocarreiro," inDLMGP, 546. 18. For example, in De que morredes by King Dinis, Quand'eu sobi by Eanes do Vinhal, Arnicas o meu amigo by Garcia de Guilhade. 19. Lorenzo, La cancion de mujer, 2i7ff. 20. See A. H. de Oliveira Marques,^! sociedade medievalportuguesa (Lisbon: Sa da Costa, I97i),49ff. 21. Pero Viviaez's chronology is uncertain; see Pietro G. Beltrami, "Pero Viviaez," inDLMGP, 552-5322. Fust an is repeated in each stanza of the poem, using the technique of dobre^ "doubling" (lines 7 and 14). Jose Luis Rodriguez, El cancionero de Job an Airas de

Notes to Pages 88-95

231

Santiago. Editiony estudio, Verba, Anexo 12 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago, 1980), says offustan^ "in general it refers to a type of fabric, and occasionally to a woman's garment"; the usage here corresponds to the latter meaning. "It can be a type oisaia ... especially useful for looking striking en cos" (162). 23. Guilhade, 70.21, Afonso Sanchez, 9.10, and Portocarreiro, 128.3. 24. The condition of the woman in the cantiga de amor is not very clear, as she has inherited the models of the Provencal canso, where the female protagonist is always married, so one would assume that the Galician-Portuguese senhor would be married as well (like the Occitan midons^ senhor is a masculine term applied by the lover to his lady as social superior). However, the social situation was very different, and times would have changed from Occitanian to Galician-Portuguese society of the thirteenth century, so that marriage was less essential. See Maria da Conceicao Vilhena, "A amada das cantigas de amor: casada ou solteira?" in Estudios Portugueses. Homenagem a Luciano, Stegagno Picchio (Lisbon: Difel, 1991), 209-21; and Esther Corral Diaz, "A donzela na lirica profana galego-portuguesa," in Actas do W Congresso das Associac-ao de Literatura Hispanica (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1993), 2: 349-56. 25. Corral, Asmulleres^ 273-77. 26. In three cantigas using dona-virgo, see above. With dona dyal0o^ cf. hidalgo^ "noble" (from hijo d'alpjo, lit. "son of something"). 27.Note the reiteration ofpoder (as the verb "to be able" and the noun "power") and its lexical derivatives. See ^v&m^Apoesia lirica, 161. 28. This figure is somewhat controversial. Richard Hitchcock, "Sobre la mama en las jarchas "/HP 2 (1977-78): i -9, and Keith Whinnom, "The Mamma of the Kharjas, or Some Doubts concerning Arabists and Romanists" La Coronica n, 2 (1982): u17, question whether "mamma" really refers to the mother; Peter Dronke, "Nuevas observaciones sobre las jaryas mozarabes," El Crotalon i (1984): 99-114, refutes this identification with new documentation on designations of women. 29. On the mother figure, see Maria de Fatima Antunes-Rambaud, "Mere et fille dans les chansons d'ami galiciennes-portugaises: Les relations de parente dans le monde medieval," Senefiance 26 (1989): 133-41; and Corral, As mulleres^ 181. 30. According to Manuel Rodrigues Lapa, Lifoes de literatura portuguesa: Epoca medieval', loth ed. (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1981), the way in which the mother acquiesces in her daughter's love affairs and even sometimes acts as a go-between indicates that the cantiga de amigo reflected the realities of bourgeois life at the time, with the mother helping her daughter find a husband (174-75). 31. Only in Hispanic lyric does this positive attitude develop, and this complicity in the daughter's love affair, so it is not surprising that different interpretations arise to explain this aspect of the Hispanic corpus. Penny Newman, "'Mia madre velida': a figura da nai nas cantigas de amigo e nas 'jarchas'," Grial 55 (1977) •' 64-70, considers her a foreshadowing of the "Celestina," ("procuress"), a Renaissance figure who, as is well known, has a long tradition in Hispanic literature. Newman even wonders whether the mothers in the cantigas and the Mozarabic poems correspond to birth mothers, or whether they are a cover for a girlfriend or another person involved (64). 32. Critics have emphasized this point. Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos affirms that "behind the unmarried girls are the mothers, rigorous by obligation and tradition. Their job is to guard, advise, admonish, and punish when their daughters tarry at the

232

Notes to Pages 95-101

fountain or at the church, are too eager to go on the romaria (pilgrimage), or come home from the dance with their brial (bodice) torn. They are compassionate and lenient toward the lover only on calculation of the rewards to be expected" (Cancioneiro daAjuda, 2 vols. [ 1904; reprint Casa da Moeda: Imprensa Nacional,i99o], 2:894). 33. Both the favorable and the hostile mother are explained in a very strange way by Nodar Manso. She symbolizes the "cruel aspect of nature," the "indifference toward human suffering" when she prevents the arnica from satisfying her sexual instinct; she is the symbol of the "collective unconscious, the left, nocturnal side of life, the fountain of the water of life," when she incites the girl to enjoy being united with her beloved (La narratividad^ 203). 34. Irmana (-s) (or the variant irmaa) appears in nine texts by eight authors: Airas Paez, 15.3 and 15.4; Bernal de Bonaval, 22.15; Fernan do Lago, 39.1; Fernand'Esquio, 38.8; Martin Codax, 91.5 (mm irmanafremosa}\ Martin de Caldas, 92.7; Vasco Gil, 152.3; Airas Nunez, 14.5 (where it alternates with velidas^ ku$anas and amigas). Fremosas in Bernal de Bonaval, 22.9, Soarez Coelho, 79.24 and Pero Viviaez, 136.4. Velidas in J. Zorro, 8 3. i (alternating with loadas) and Pero Meogo, 134. i. 35. The confidante figure, mother or friend, is explained by Alfred Jeanroy as mere literary artifice. See Origines de lapoesie lyrique en France au Moyen-Age^ 4th ed. (1889; Paris: Champion, 1965), 207. But for Lapa her appearance is due to the conditions of contemporary bourgeois family life: "to whom could the young girl confide her problems with love, who could be her go-between to take messages to her enamorado^... In most cases, it was a friend and neighbour, the messenger and love confidante" (Licoes, i??). Chapter 6 1. In Pierre Bee's classification, women's songs include compositions of the Provencal trobairitz — both the canso in which they alone speak and the tenso or debate poems in which women's voices alternate with men's —and Old French songs that feature female speakers: chanson d'ami and chanson de malmariee. The definition of women's songs is also sometimes extended to include lyric pieces in which the female protagonists, different from the silent lady of the Occitan canso, actually speak: the Qccitznpastorela and alba, for example and their northern counterparts, the Old French pastourelle and aube. See Bee, La Lyrique fran$aise au Moyen Age, Xlle-XIIIe siecles, i (Poitiers: Picard, 1977), i: 57-136; and his "Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution a la connaissance du lyrisme feminin au moyen age" CCM 22, 3 (1979): 23562. 2. Unless otherwise noted, texts of the chansons de toile are from Michel Zink, ed., Les Chansons de toile (Paris: Champion, 1977). Hereafter line and page references to Zink are cited immediately following the text. Translations are mine. The corpus of songs is generally dated between 1228 and 1250 (Zink, 23). l.Essaidepoetiquemedievale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 212-17, esp. 215; "Onpourrait se demander si en effet le semantisme aimer (refere au sujet de la chanson) n'est pas simplement inclus dans celui de chanter? 4. The chansons de toile which allude to women sewing, spinning, or embroider-

Notes to Pages 101-102

233

ing include Bele IColanz en ses chambres seoit^ Bele IColanz en chambre koie^ Quant vient en mai (Erembors}, BeleAmelot soule an chambre feloit^ An chambre a or se siet la bele Beatris, Fille et la mere se sieent a I'orfrois, Siet soi bele Aye aspiez sa male maistre, Bele Aiglentine en roial chamberine. In addition, the narrative context for Siet soi biele Euriaus, seule est enclose describes her working cloth, although the song itself does not indicate it. Songs that stage an unhappy marriage (chansons de malmariee}^ whether present or future, narrated from the woman's point of view, include Oriolanz en hautsolier^ En un vergier^ Bele IColanz en chambre koie, Bele Tdoine se siet desous la verde olive, Bele Amelot soule an chambre feloit, An chambre a or se siet la Bele Beatris^ Au novel tanspascour que florist Paube espine, Bele Argentine^ Bele Emmelos espres desouz I'arbroie. Only three songs in the twenty-two-song corpus generally designated as chansons de toile do not exhibit the otherwise prevalent feature of women's work: Bele Ysabiauz^ a lament staged wholly from the male lover's point of view, although it contains a scenario of the mal mariee^ Or vienent Pasques les beles en avril^ actually a reverdie classed as a chanson de toile because its refrain cites Aigline and Guis as mutually satisfied lovers; and Lou Samedi a soir fat la semaine (Gaiete et Oriour), marked similarly by a refrain that records sweet sleep between lovers. 5. Edmond Faral, "Les Chansons de toile ou chansons d'histoire," Romania 69 (1946-47): 461-62; and Pierre Jonin, "Les Types feminins dans les chansons de toile," Romania 91 (1970): 464. 6. "De leur heroine, les chansons anonymes disent qu'elle est belle, qu'elle est assise dans sa chambre, qu'elle est malheureuse, qu'elle est amoureuse," Zink, Les Chansons^ 26. 7. Bee, La Lyrique fran^aise^ 109; and Zink, Les Chansons^ 25: "L'amant ou la nouvelle viennent a la rencontre de la jeune fille assise, qui alors, si 1'on ose dire, ne se leve que pour se coucher (Belle Erembourg, Belle Yolande) ou don't 1'activite se borne a descendre quelques marches (Belle Doette), a aller, par un effort extreme, jusqu'a la maison de son ami (Belle Aiglentine)." Bee describes the chansons de toile as a genre "centre autour d'une jeune femme qui exhale sa douleur," 109. 8. "C'est done 1'amour et Famour seul qui donne son sens a 1'existence de la jeune femme," Jonin, "Les Types," 447. 9. In the Occitan tradition, the issue is addressed directly by woman singers such as Na Castelloza, "Eu sai ben c'a mi esta gen, / si be.is dizon tuich que mout descove / que dompna prei a cavallier de se / ni que.l teigna totz temps tan loncpressic^ mas eel q'o ditz non sap ges ben gauzir," ("I know this is a fitting thing for me, / though everybody says it isn't proper / for a lady to plead her case with a knight, / or to make such long speeches to him; / he who says this has no knowledge of true joy") in SWT^ 18-19. Bruckner considers this attention to the difficulties that result from breaking with conventional notions of conduct proper for a noblewoman to be a unique feature of Castelloza's voice ("Na Castelloza, Trobairitz^ and Troubadour Lyric," RN 25, 3 (1985): 239-53. In the introduction to SWT (xi-xxxii, xl), Bruckner explains further how these woman's songs play off against standard male troubadour lyric, speaking both within and against established literary conventions. See also Bruckner's contribution to this volume, and her "Debatable Fictions: The Tensos of the Trobairitz" in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm Maddox (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994): 19-28; along with Simon Gaunt's discussion of how the

234

Notes to Pages 102-105

trobairitz effectively disrupt the homosocial discourse of the troubadour canso in his Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102. At issue in particular are the dialogue or debate poems (tensos] staged between male and female voices. See Marianne Shapiro, "Tenson' et 'partimen': La 'tenson' fictive" in XIV Con0resso internazionale di linguisticd efilologia romanza: Atti V, ed. Alberto Varvaro, 5 vols. (Naples: Macchiaroli, 1981), 287-301 and her "The ProvencalTrobairitz and the Limits of Courtly Love," Signs 3, 2 (1978): 560-71; Angelica Rieger, "En conselh no deu horn voler femna: Les dialogues mixtes dans la lyrique troubadouresque," Perspectives medievales 16 (1990): 47-57; against Sarah Kay, who argues for a more thorough assimilation of female subjectivity into the male gender system in Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 96-111, esp. 102; and further, Jean-Charles Huchet, for whom the putative voices of the trobairitz remain a literary fiction deriving wholly from male psychic fantasy, "Les Femmes troubadours et la voix critique," Litterature 51 (1983): 59-90. Debates concerning what constitutes a "woman's song" in the corpus of the trobairitz can be found in Frank M. Chambers, "Las trobairitz soisebudas," in FT, 45-60, and in Francois Zufferey, "Toward a Delimitation of the Trobairitz Corpus," also in FT, 31-43. 10. See Zink, Les Chansons, 183-84. 11. For the terms of the debate see Bee's definition of woman's song as a lyric "placed in the mouth of a woman," who represents a hypothetical female composer (La Lyriquefranpaise, i: 57-62) against Edmond Faral ("Les Chansons de toile ou chansons d'histoire") who had argued that the sometimes lascivious woman's songs could only have been composed and sung by men. More recently Zink has read the chanson de toile as a complex rhetorical cover deployed by accomplished male poets (2, 9, 33-35). For a feminist reconsideration and analysis of these approaches see E. Jane Burns, Sarah Kay, Roberta Krueger, and Helen Solterer, "Feminism and the Discipline of Old French Studies: Une Bele Disjointure" in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 238-43. For the terms of a similar debate regarding the trobairitz see Bee's distinction between feminite genetique and feminite textuelle ("Trobairitz" 235-36) and Bruckner's reassessment of these categories in this volume, especially where she explains how the trobairitz can take up the positions of femna, domna, and poet simultaneously. 12. For possible meanings of a third term, chanson a istoire, used for women's songs in Guillaume deDole, see Faral, "Les Chansons de toile," 438. 13. Faral, 45514. "Chansons d'amour, elles celebrent, dans le metre a chanter armes, les amours des autres, des amours a la troisieme personne, des amours feminines, alors que le poete est un homme et, une fois Pavoue," Zink, Les Chansons, 38. 15. Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 150. 16. Young, Throwing, 150. 17. Le Roman de la Violette ou de Gerard de Nevers par Gerbert de Montreuil, ed. Douglas Labaree Buffum (Paris: Champion, 1928). 18. Le Lai d'Aristote d^Henri dAndeli publie d'apres tous les manuscrits, ed. Maurice Delbouille (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1951), v. 381.

Notes to Pages 105-106

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19. Maureen Boulton has shown how an ironic effect results from the insertion of both these women's songs into a romance context. In the Lai d'Aristote the young woman singing the chanson de toile appears to pine for the aging Aristotle whom she later saddles and rides, when in fact her lament refers to her own young lover, The Song in the Story: LyrieInsertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 125; and Euriaus in the Roman de la Violette appropriates a chanson de malmariee to express her rejection of a villain's lecherous advances. Whereas the song rejects marriage in favor of infidelity, Euriaus uses it to declare fidelity (Boulton, Song in the Story, 279). Bee classifies women's songs that begin with "Bele" and the heroine's name as chansons de toile even when they include the lament of a married woman. Other songs critiquing unjust husbands and loveless marriages but lacking an opening signature of something like "Bele Yolanz" are classed as chansons de malmariee (LaLyriquefran^aise^ i: 62, 69-90). 20. "£My dear son,' she said, 'ladies and queens of days gone by were always singing spinning songs as they embroidered,'" The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole^ trans. Patricia Terry and Nancy Vine Durling (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 33; "Biaus filz, ce fu ca en arriers / que les dames et les roines / soloient fere lor cortines / et chanter les chansons d'istoire!" Felix Lecoy, Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (Paris: Champion, 1962), w. 1148-51. 21. For Bee's typology see La Lyrique fran$aise^ i: 109-11 and for Jonin's, "Les types feminins." Several of the songs regularly classed as chansons de toile do not display any of these features: Gaiete et Oriour^ Bele Ysabiauz, Bele Doette^ and its shorter version, Bele Doe. Or vienent Pasques is a reverdie which resembles the chanson de toile only in its refrain. Although the chansons de toile are preserved in several types of manuscripts, their archival distribution does not correlate with thematic differences. For a detailed account of the manuscript tradition see Zink, 20-24. 22. Bee, i: 107. 23. Zink, 3-8; 38-50. The complexity of possible relationships between lyric insertions and narrative development in Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole in particular is treated in articles by Jones, Boulton, Zink, and Psaki mjean Renart and the Art of Romance, ed. Nancy Vine Durling (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). 24. In reference to Guillaume de Dole, Sylvia Huot notes for example that the "chanson de toile offers a possible model for resolution of the narrative dilemma," From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 113. 25. Zink, 40-41. 26. Although the chansons de toile must be understood to a significant degree in relation to lyrics of the troubadours and trouveres, the male protagonists, who appear only minimally here, bear little resemblance to the courtly ^w amant. They are more often professional warriors, mercenary soldiers, and strangers from afar (Zink, 64). If the female protagonists, whose presence dominates these songs, resemble the trobairitz in their status as high-born aristocrats (Jonin, 434), their function as historical composer-singers is often called into doubt, as we have seen. Euriaus provides a striking exception to this general rule since she is a bourgeoise (Zink, 14). 27. Zink, 23. It is not necessary to conclude however, along with Faral and Zink,

236

Notes to Pages 106-111

that the intrusion of a male narrator's comments in the closing stanza of Oriolanz^ for example, constitutes proof that the "poet is not a woman." FaraTs fundamental reason for assuming that women could not possibly have sung these songs, however, is moralistic: "Imagine-t-on que pareil theme ait servi aux chansons chantees par des 'dames' ou par des creines5 devant les femmes de leur service? Imagine-t-on pareille chanson chantee par une mere devant safiller1Quel exemple! Quelle lecon!" (456,459). See also Zink, 4528. As in the case of Eek Aleis^ it is often the male suitor of the beloved just described who speaks the refrain: "Main se levoit Aaliz ( . . . ) / Bien se para et vesti / soz la roche Guion. / -Cui lairai ge mes amors, / amie, s'a vos non?" (w. 532-37). See Zink, 8. 29. Boulton, The Song in the Story, 37. 30. In Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, trans. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 78-103. 31. Cixous, Trancredi Continues, here 96-97. 32. Burns et al., "Feminism and the Discipline," 239. 3 3. "Escoutes moi, franc baron / cil d'aval et cil d'amont; / plairoit vos oi'r un son / d'Aucassin, un franc baron, / et de Nicholete la prous? / Tant durerent lor amors / qu'il le quist u gaut parfont" (Aucassin etNicolette, ed. Mario Roques [Paris: Champion, 1977], w. 14-20; 36-37). 34. The trobairitz often express discontent with the established conventions of courtly love and provide pointed critiques of the system, but they do not typically offer material solutions comparable to those figured in the chansons de toile. 35. Whereas Zink aptly observes in his introduction that these examples of woman's song might be called chansons degeste because love is expressed here less in words (the modus operandi of troubadour and trouvere lyric) than in deeds or gestures (51-60), he grants little significance to this key difference and tends to depict the female protagonists of the chansons de toile reductively, as passive complainers: "C'est que ces femmes, confinees dans leur jardin, sont condamnees par leur sexe et par leur rang a la passivite et ne peuvent que se plaindre en attendant un seducteur qui tarde a les rejoindre" (64). lonin details more accurately how these heroines are assertive in love, displaying a distinctive "hardiesse" (444). More recently, Nancy Jones reads allusions to Lienors's embroidery in Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole as traditional markers of female passivity ("The Uses of Embroidery in the Romances of Jean Renart," in Terry and Durling,/mw Renart, 26-27), whereas Matilda Bruckner shows how a number of the lyric insertions in this text prepare for Lienors's own "vigorous movement into the narrative" at subsequent moments ("Romancing History and Rewriting the Game of Fiction," in The World and Its Rival: Essays on Literary Imagination in Honor ofPerNykrog, ed. Kathryn Karczewska and Tom Conley [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999], 105). 36. The additional issue of pregnancy, which complicates this song, will be discussed below. 37. My reading of this song differs substantially from Sarah Kay's view that Eele Aiglentine emblematizes, along with the other chansons de toile inserted into Guillaume deDole, a misogynous "male-authored female voice" (Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry ^

Notes to Pages iii-n6

237

197-98). Reading BeleAi0lentine within the wider corpus of chansons de toile suggests, I think, other possibilities for female subjectivity. 38. See E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 109-13. 39. Terry and Dwlingjean Renart^ 21; Lecoy, w. 200-209. The song about lovely Marguerite inserted within the Guillaume de Dole reiterates and underwrites the paradigm of the beautiful, well-dressed lady (Lecoy, w. 3422-30; Terry and Durling, p. 65), which reoccurs in another lyric insertion in the same romance, Or vienent Pasques les beles en awil (Lecoy, w. 15-17; and earlier w. 9-14; Terry and Durling, p. 165). See also the independent chanson de toile Eele ICsabiauz (Zink, w. 52-53, 55-57; p. 109). This song combines two lines of mutual embrace, "they embraced so tenderly that they fell together on the grass" ("Si s'entrebaisent par dolour / qu'andui cheirent en 1'erbour," w. 64, 65; p. 109) with more stereotypical indications of Ysabiauz being taken into marriage, possessed by her lover, "With the Church sacrament, Gerard made his lady his wife" ("Gerars par sainte Eglise / a fait de sa dame s'oissour" w. 75-76; p. 110). And in the end, joy, love and the lady belong to Gerard alone as the long-repeated refrain "Gerard awaits his joy/love/beloved" ("Et joie atent Gerars") modulates into "Gerard has his joy/love/beloved" ("Or a joie Gerars"). Although we have witnessed a similar tension between amorous hierarchy and mutual exchange in songs such as Eele Aiglentine and Bele Beatris^ the women's work figured in those songs, which mitigates the final icon of male dominance, is crucially absent from Bele Ysabiauz. 40. We even find standard lines of trouvere lyric echoed in the chanson de toile as in Bele Aiglentine, when the phrase, "Take off your clothes, I want to see your comely body" (w. 12-13; p. 161) is articulated by the heroine's mother, not her lover, and the comely body in question is in fact a pregnant body. Similarly, when the daughter admits "je ai ame" (v. 20; p. 162) her words refer to the act of having slept with her lover and thus become pregnant, in stark contrast to the trouvere for whom the repeated lament "j'ai aime" typically connotes unfulfilled desire. 41. For an example of this convention see the song sung by Conrad each morning (Lecoy, w. 3403-6; Terry and Durling, 65). 42. A few brief references elsewhere in the corpus record the lady lover's emotional distress — rather than signaling her hope for union — specifically through articles of clothing. When Belle Doette receives news of her lover's death she vows to keep sumptuous garments from touching her skin and wear only a bristling hairshirt (w. 28-29; p. 90). The distress of Belle Ysabel, trapped in a loveless marriage, is emblematized by tears that moisten the edge of her cloak (w. 2-3; p. 98). Ydoine, by contrast, performs the traditional courtly gesture of giving her lover a sleeve to display as he jousts in a tournament (w. 149-50; p. 119). 43. SccAu novel tans pascor que florist Paube espine (v. 3; p. 143), and the mother's comment in Guillaume de Dole (Lecoy, w. 1148-50; p. 36). 44. The song is distinctive in its inclusion of a brief scene where the lady and the audience along with her observe the comely and attractive male beloved who functions as the coveted object of desire: "Count Renaud climbed the steps / with wide shoulders and narrow hips. / His hair was blond and curly. / There was no man more handsome in the land" ("Li cuens Rfaynaut] en monta lo degre, / gros par espaules, greles par lo

238

Notes to Pages 116-125

baudre, / blond ot lo poll, menu recercle: / en mile terre n'ot si biau bacheler" w. 2528; p. 93). 45. Burns, Bodytalk^ 116-45. 46. Burns, 132-47. 47. An even more extreme reversal of gendered roles occurs in Bele Ysabiauz, pucele bien aprise^ where a tale of a mal mariee is recounted throughout from the male lover Gerard's point of view (Zink, 107-9). 48. Line 52, in which Oriolanz says "now you have attained / taken possession of me" ("estes vos or de moi saisiz," p. 82) reverts to a more traditional model of amorous interaction creating the kind of tension we have seen in Bele Aiglentine and Eele Beatris between the ravished ladylove and the working beauty. 49. Bele Doette resembles in this regard the short lyric insertions, Bele Aye and Bele Doe (both in Guillaume de Dole] and Bele Euriaus (in the Roman de la Violette] and one exception from the longer, narrativized songs, Lou Samedi a soir, which stage a love lament without resolution. 50. For a different view, see Stephen G. Nichols, "Medieval Women Writers: Aiesthesis and the Powers of Marginality," Tale French Studies 75 (Fall 1988): 77-94. 51. The Old French tainte indicates a change in color, either becoming more intense or more pale. In this instance, an increase in skin coloration is indicated by the initial term^m^, suggesting that the woman has been beaten black and blue. Tainte is paired elsewhere with vermeil. The belt used to beat women red and blue should be read in contrast to the embroidered ceintures that women decorate, wear, send, and receive as love tokens. See especially Lienor's belt described in Guillaume deDole as "embroidered with a design offish and birds worked in gold thread" ("El estoit de fin or broudee / a poissonnez et a oisiaus," Lecoy, w. 4826-27; Terry and Durling, 83.) 52. Although this is the only specific indication of colored fabric in the chanson de toile^ gold brocade and embroidery used typically to decorate colored silks appear in Fille et la mere and Bele TColanz. References to samiz and pailes denote richly colored fabrics common in Old French romance narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 53. It is unclear in this instance who is responsible for administering the beating; no husband is mentioned here. The male maistre indicated in line one seems a remote possibility, since no models for women beating other women exist in this corpus, although Bele Emmelos's mother drags her off by the hair to be beaten by her father (w. 63-66; p. 116). It is also important to note here that whereas Ydoine begins by sitting under an olive tree, she is soon locked inside a high tower. In En un vergier^ however, the heroine is beaten in the garden (w. 14-15, p. 86) and no indication is provided as to whether Emmelos remains "in the garden" (v. i; p. 154) where the song begins. 54. Indeed, the "work" undertaken by the heroine in this chanson de toile resides in her repeated and concerted efforts to sustain her husband's abusive blows, attesting to a resolve and determination in pursuing her choice in love that is reminiscent of Amelot and Aude. 55. Nancy A. Jones, "The Daughter's Text and the Thread of Lineage in the Old FrenchPhilomena" in manuscript.

Notes to Pages 125-128

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56. Luce Irigaray,y4w Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 5. 57. Cixous, Trancredi Continues, 97. Chapter 7 An earlier version of this essay was published in Speculum 67 (1992): 865-91; reprinted by permission. 1. Editions used in the original article were Gabrielle Kussler-Ratye, "Les chansons de la comtesse Beatrice de Dic"Archivum Romanicum i (1917): 161-82, for the text of the Comtessa de Dia's songs; William D. Paden, Jr. et al., eds., "The Poems of the Trobairitz Na Castelloza," RP 35,1 (1981): 158-82, for the texts and translations of Castelloza's songs: and Jules Veran, Les poetesses proven^ales du moyen age et de nos jours (Paris: A. Quillet, 1946), for citations from Coindeta sui. For the present publication, unless otherwise indicated, the texts and translations of the songs are taken from S WT. Compared with over four hundred named troubadours, the number of women poets identified may seem slight, but the existence of twenty or more trobairitz (as female troubadours are called in Flamenca, a thirteenth-century Occitan romance) looms large in comparison with the almost complete absence of women poets in the countries throughout Europe where troubadour lyric played such a key role. Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer and Elizabeth Aubrey, eds., Songs of the Women Trouveres (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), argue for the existence and production of women poets in the northern French tradition. 2. Two books on the trobairitz include the term "voice" in their titles: William D. Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (VT) and Doris Earnshaw, The Female Voice in Medieval Romance Lyric, Romance Languages and Literature 68 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), a study that situates the female troubadours with respect to the tradition of woman's song. 3. Concerts, cassettes, and publications attest nevertheless to a renaissance of interest, both popular and academic, in the aural delights of troubadour song. See, for example, The Medieval Lyric, ed. Howell Chickering and Margaret Switten, 3 vols. with 3 tapes (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke College, 1987-88); Vincent Pollina, "Troubadours dans le nord: Observations sur la transmission des melodies occitanes dans les manuscrits septentrionaux,"Romanistische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte 3, 4 (1985): 263-78. 4. Paul Zumthor, Lapoesie et la voix dans la civilisation medievale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), and Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). 5. R. Howard Bloch, "The Voice of the Dead Nightingale: Orality in the Tomb of Old French Literature," Culture and History 3 (1988): 63-78. 6. Frances Hueffer, The Troubadours: A History of Provencal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (1878; New York: AMS, 1977), 282-87. 7. Meg Bogin, The Women Troubadours (New York: Paddington, 1976).

240

Notes to Pages 128-130

8. While there is evidence that some women performed as professional jqglaressas (see, for example, Angelica Rieger, ed., Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen hofischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus [Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991], 105-8, on the joglaressct Guillelma Monja), all the women troubadours who can be documented historically belong to the aristocracy; they are addressed in song or identified in manuscript rubrics as "Na" ("lady"). For a brief overview of historical information, see, for example, the notes on specific trobairitz in SWT. 9. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (+203) to Marguerite Porete (fiBio) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 106. 10. "Les femmes troubadours ou la voix critique," Litterature 51 (1983): 59-90. Huchet seems to have embarked on a systematic elimination of women from the medieval corpus, attacking Heloise, Marie de France, and the trobairitz in turn. 11. "Lombarda's Reluctant Mirror: Speculum of Another Poet," in FT, 183-93 (quotation from Kristeva, 184). 12. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986). While both of these works raise questions about the extent to which their analyses describe patterns which are genetically female or culturally feminine, they both insist on the importance of adding real women speakers, subjects, and data to the cases on which we build any general models of the human. This seems to me to be no less true in the field of literature. 13. Bogin, Women Troubadours, 20-36; David Herlihy, "Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200" Traditio 18 (1962): 89-120. 14. Herlihy, "Land," 108. 15. "La deterioration du statut de la femme aristocratique en Provence (Xe-XIIIe siecles)," Le Moyen Age 91 (1977): 105-29. 16. In VT Paden offers a useful introduction to work by historians like Aurell i Cardona, David Herlihy, Sharon Farmer ("Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives," Speculum 61 [1986]: 517-43), and Joan Kelly ("Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History', ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977]; repr. in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 19-50), who have raised questions, at least as far as the position of women is concerned, about the traditional periodization of Western culture and the standard view of the Renaissance as a step forward. These studies show a general decline in women's status from the early Middle Ages to 1500, but they also indicate certain areas that appear as exceptions within the overall decrease in women's power, especially at the highest and lowest levels of society—e.g., the role of women as charismatic saints, analyzed by David Herlihy, "Did Women Have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration," Mediaevalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 13 (1985): 1-22. Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), brings together a number of articles on outstanding women who entered the political arena in the Middle Ages. See in that volume especially Fredric L. Cheyette, "Women, Poets, and Politics in Occitania," 138-77.

Notes to Pages 130-132

241

17. John F. Benton, "Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love" in The Meaning of'Courtly Love, ed. F. X. Newman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972),19-42. 18. Peter Haidu, "Text and History: The Semiosis of Twelfth-Century Lyric as Sociohistorical Phenomenon (Chretien de Troyes: 'D'Amor qui m'a tolu')," Semiotica 33, 1-2 (1981): 1-62; and E. Jane Burns, "The Man Behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric,"RN 25, 3 (1985): 254-70. 19. In some sense, to consider the trobairitz as a group already represents an interpretation of their poetry as a kind of feminist project, inasmuch as the poems and poets themselves, as well as most of the manuscripts that include their songs, do not segregate them or treat them as a group to be differentiated from the male troubadours. In their poems and in the vidas (biographies) and razos (commentaries) which introduce them in a number of manuscripts, the women poets are fully integrated into the network of associations that connected the producers and consumers of troubadour lyric in the Occitan society of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet the tendency to treat the trobairitz as a separate group already appears in some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts, especially Italian and Catalan ones, which group together all the poems of the trobairitz. See Pierre Bee, "Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution a la connaissance du lyrisme feminin au moyen age" CCM 22, 3 (1979): 235-62; William D. Paden, Jr. et al., "The Poems of the Trobairitz Na Castelloza," 163; Angelica Rieger, "clns e.l cor port, dona, vostra faisso': Image et imaginaire de la femme a travers I'enluminure dans les chansonniers de troubadours" CCM 28 (1985): 389-91. It is as if, as soon as we leave the contemporary culture of the trobairitz themselves, their existence as a group asserts itself and proclaims the anomaly of their appearance as female poets singing in a male-dominated world. Michel-Andre Bossy and Nancy A. Jones speculate on the way one scribe uses songs by Guilhem IX to frame a group of songs by the Comtessa de Dia, Azalais de Porcairagues and Castelloza ("Gender and Compilational Patterns in Troubadour Lyric: The Case of Manuscript N," French Forum 21,3 [1996]: 261-80). 20. Jean Boutiere and A. H. Schutz, eds., Biographies des troubadours: Textes provenfaux desXIIIe etXIVe siecles, 2nd ed, rev. J. Boutiere and Irenee-Marcel Cluzel (Paris: Nizet, 1964), 380. 21. On Gormonda's sirventes^ see Angelica Rieger, "Un sirventes feminin —la trobairitz Gormonda de Monpeslier," mActes du Premier Congres International de ^Association Internationale d^Etudes Occitanes, ed. Peter T. Ricketts (London: A.I.E.O.,i987), 423-55, and Katherina Stadtler, "The Sirventes by Gormonda de Monpeslier," in FT, 129-55. 22. V Crescini, "Azalais dAltier," Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 14 (1890): 128-32. 23. Marianne Shapiro, C£CTenson' et 'partimen': La ctenson? fictive," mXIV Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filohgia Romanza: Atti^ ed. Alberto Varvaro (Naples: Macchiaroli, 1981), 292-93, 293 n. 10, 299 n. 30. 24. Frank M. Chambers, "Las trobairitzsoiseubudas" in FT, 45~6o. 25. Rieger5s edition opts for inclusiveness and gives forty-six poems, including numerous tensos which many scholars have identified as fictional debates. She does not include some anonymous poems published by Veran, Les poetesses provenfales ^ in which

242

Notes to Pages 132-135

the speaker is a woman (Coindeta sui and En un vernier sotzfuelha d'albespi]. See also Francois Zufferey's assessment of the trobairitz corpus: "Toward a Delimitation of the Trobairitz Corpus," in FT, 31 -43. 26. Antoine Tavera, "A la recherche des troubadours maudits," Senefiance 5 (1978):146. 27. Earnshaw, The Female Voice, 137-41, and in general chapters i and 2. 28. Cf. Huchet, "Les femmes troubadours." In "Male Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature," Women's Studies u (1984): 67-97, Joan Ferrante examines the way male authors frequently invent the figure of "woman as realist, as debunker of male fantasies" (67). Her analysis of the male/female debates inpastorelas from Marcabru to Guiraut Riquier (69-76) and her description of the sample debates in Andreas Capellanus (78-84) are particularly interesting in relation to the tensos between male and female speakers, whether fictional or real (although Ferrante specifically limits her focus to characters invented by men). 29. "Trobairitz" 252-59. See also Merrit R. Blakeslee, "La chanson de femme, les Hewides, et la canso occitane a voix de femme: Considerations sur 1'originalite des trobairitz" in Hommage a Jean-Charles Pay en: "Farai chansoneta novelet Essais sur la liberte creatrice au moyen age (Caen: University of Caen, 1989), 67-75. Given the basic narrative pattern (a love already consummated in the past, a rupture, etc.) inscribed in what he calls the "canso feminine" (68), Blakeslee suggests that the alba and \hzpastorela, because of their emphasis on the narrative aspects of lyric, were especially influential for the trobairitz (73, n. 37). 30. Earnshaw, The Female Voice, 155-59. 31. We might also speculate that the lively female persona created in troubadour poetry by male and female poets reflects the presence of real women in Occitan courts, their conversation, games, etc. Given the forcefulness of women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Ermengarde of Narbonne, evoked above, this is not unlikely. Cf. Ferrante, "Male Fantasy," 68-69. On the other hand, it is the sort of thing that escapes documentation and, in the context of such a highly conventionalized poetic system, remains subject to the play of formal elements encoded in the lyric traditions. 32. Bee, "Trobairitz" 235-36. 3 3. The number of debate poems to be included in the trobairitz corpus is particularly difficult to determine: Rieger includes twenty-six tensos andpartimens in her edition; Zufferey inventories sixteen tensos, three partimens, and seven exchanges of coblas ("Toward a Delimitation," 34-39); Chambers discusses twenty-two debates between a man and a woman, one between two women, among which he considers sixteen to be fictions composed by a male poet ("Las trobairitz soiseubudas"}. 34. Rieger includes three sirventes in her edition: a fragmentary sirventes spoken in a woman's voice, Abgreu cossire-, No.m pose mudar, a moral sirventes in defense of women calumniated by antic trobador like Marcabru; and Gormonda's Greu m'es a durar. Zufferey ("Toward a Delimitation," 34) mentions Gormonda's sirventes and No.m pose mudar. 35. Zufferey ("Toward a Delimitation," 39-41) identifies two or three baladas (dance songs), including Coindeta sui and Quant logilos erfora. 36. Bee, "Trobairitz" 237. 37. Aimo Sakari, "A propos dAzalais de Porcairagues" in Melanges de philolqgie

Notes to Pages 135-139

243

romane dedies a la memoir dejean Boutiere^ ed. Irenee Cluzel and Francois Pirot, 2 vols. (Liege: Soledi, 1971), i -.517-28; "Azalais de Porcairagues, le Joglar de Raimbaut d'Orange," NM 50 (1949): 180-81. Rieger's edition includes anotherplanh composed in a woman's voice, Ab lo cor trist environat dismay. Zufferey includes it among the sirventes in his inventory ("Toward a Delimitation," 33). 38. La poesie lyrique destroubadours ^ 2 vols. (Toulouse: Privat/Paris: Didier, 1934), 1:31539. The poet may, of course, take on a number of personae in which he develops different voices over the course of a single song or in moving from one song to another. See Frederick Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres: An Anthology and a History (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1973), on Guilhem IX's different masks as boastful lord, submissive lover, etc. (15-19); on performance and Bernart de Ventadorn (11221). See also my discussion in "Jaufre Rudel and Lyric Reception: The Problem of Abusive Generalization," Style 20 (1986): 203-19. The game with voices is not, however, the same when two different speakers are posited as the source of the voices, especially if one of them is identified as the woman who usually remains silent as the implicit addressee of the male poet's song. 40. Bee, "Twbairitz" 252. 41. Clifford Davidson, "Erotic 'Women's Songs' in Anglo-Saxon England," Neophilologus 59 (1975): 456. 42. Burns, "The Man Behind the Lady," 254-70. 43. Paden, "Utrum copularentur: Of Cors" L'espnt createur 19, 4 (1979): 79-82. See also Blakeslee, "La chanson de femme," 71-73, where he sets up a model of the narrative structure common to all the "cansos feminines," with the exception of two by the Comtessa de Dia (Ab ioi and Fin ioi). Based on the model of the abandoned woman, this narrative structure connects the trobairitz with an important literary tradition represented by Ovid's Heroides (74-75). 44. Marianne Shapiro, "The Provencal Trobairitz and the Limits of Courtly Love," Signs 3,2 (1978): 562. 45. Bee, "Twbairitz" 243-44. 46. For the poems of the Comtessa de Dia, see SWT, 2-13. In line 4, the same set of adjectives appears in the anonymous balada Quant logilas erfora: "Balada cointa e gaia / faz" (quoted by Zufferey, "Toward a Delimitation," 40). Cf. the opening words of the anonymous Coindeta sui^ subsequently repeated three times in each of the five stanzas as a kind of refrain (SWT, 130- 3 3). In "Medieval Women Writers: Aisthesis and the Powers of Marginality," Tale French Studies 75 (1988): 90-91, Stephen G. Nichols points out that only the Comtessa de Dia uses the expression conhd^egai transposed into the feminine to describe both "the poet as lover and the woman as love object" (91). 47. For further analysis of the rhymes and their effects, see Sarah Kay, "Derivation, Derived Rhyme, and the Trobairitz," in FT, 157-73, and Laurie A. Finke, "The Rhetoric of Desire," in Feminist Theory, Women's Writing (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 48. We should recall here the special connotations associated with jot in troubadour lyric. The lovers' joy and mutual fidelity represented here are particularly noteworthy and constitute the only exception (along with Fin ioi) in the trobairitz corpus to the basic narrative structure of the "cansos feminines" analyzed by Blakeslee ("La chan-

244

Notes to Pages 139-145

son de femme," 72). In this respect, the Comtessa's exuberance may recall that of Guilhem IX and his expression of joy in a poem \ikcMoutjauzens meprenc en amar. 49. In her edition (591), Rieger compares the senhal (or code name) Floris (33) to the name of the hero in the romance Floire el Blancheflor. This choice of name is particularly interesting inasmuch as it echoes in fact both the male and female names, the lover and the beloved. Cf. the use and transposition of romance names in^l chantar (discussed below) and in Estat ai, where the Comtessa compares herself to Floris, her lover to Blanchaflor (14). See Huchet's comments on the wordplay suggested in her repetition offlvr and the dual character of the Comtessa de Dia's name ("Les femmes troubadours," 82). 50. "The Provencal Trobairitz" 562. 51. Cf. Kussler-Ratye's notes in "Les chansons de la comtessa Beatrice de Die," 176-82 (see note i), where comparisons of the Comtessa's phrases, motifs, etc., with those of the troubadours show to what extent her poetic vocabulary and concepts are shared with the male poets, even as she makes them her own. Note similar findings in Bee's analysis of vocabulary ("Trobairitz" 242-43). 52. Pollina, "Troubadours dans le nord," 264-68. There is also music extant for the tenso between Alamanda and Guiraut, though as the initiator he would be the composer of the music. 53. N.B. "s'aizina" (22), a verb whose rich and complex resonances have been studied by Roger Dragonerti in both Guilhem IX and Jaufre Rudel: "Aizi et aizimen chez les plus anciens troubadours," in Melanges de linguistique romane et de philologie medievale offerts aM. Maurice Delbouille, ed. J. Renson and M. Tyssens, 2 vols. (Gembloux: Duculot, 1964), 2:127-53. 54. The variant "partimen" (a kind of debate poem), given by Bartsch and reprinted by Bogin, has been seen as one of the "clues" pointing to the tenso between a lady and Raimbaut d'Aurenga, but it does not appear in any of the manuscripts according to Rieger (Trobairitz^ 598). Walter T. Pattison, the most recent editor of Raimbaut's works, disputes the identification of the lady with the Comtessa de Dia: The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d'Orange (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1952), 15755. Cf. Estatai, where the first line's description of her suffering quickly gives way to the analysis of her desire. Both Finke (Feminist Theory', 52-58) and Kay (Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 103-4) offer useful commentary on Castelloza's self-image in this poem. 56. The use of a longer verse form in^4 chantar accords with the deeper notes of the Comtessa's complaint (cf. the decasyllabics here and the octosyllabic line used in her other three poems). 57. Following MS N, here, rather than MS A as in SWT. For the variants, see Bruckner, SWT, 149, note. 58. Peter Dronke, "The Provencal Trobairitz Castelloza," in Medieval Women Writers^ ed. Katharina Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 131-52, at 132,14359- See Bruckner, "Jaufre Rudel." 60. Paden et al., eds., "The Poems of the Trobairitz Na Castelloza," 165-70; Dronke, "The Provencal Trobairitz Castelloza." I agree with Dronke's preference for a

Notes to Pages 145-151

245

text based on MS A with some emendations (144), since MS N often gives a quite different reading of certain verses (for specific examples, see below). Rieger bases her text on MS A and gives variants from the other manuscripts. Paden's edition also gives us access to all manuscript versions; his introduction includes a valuable discussion of Castelloza's historical identity and her canon of poems (including the problems posed by both of these). Two essays in Paden, FT—Amelia E. Van Vleck," 'Tost me trobaretz fenida': Reciprocating Composition in the Songs of Castelloza," 95-111; and H. Jay Siskin and Julie A. Storme, "Suffering Love: The Reversed Order in the Poetry of Na Castelloza," 113-27 —focus exclusively on Castelloza's songs, also including in her corpus the anonymous Per ioi of MS N. Both of these readings stress the negative aspects of Castelloza's persona and tend to neglect the positive thrust of her joy, remembered, hoped for or experienced already in the act of singing and dreaming. 61. See, for example, "The Provencal Trobairitz Castelloza," 137,144. 62. Boutiere and Schutz, Biographies^ 333. 63. MS N has "preiar" ("to pray, plead") in line 22. Castelloza does repeat the verb preiar a number of times in this stanza, as she develops the motif of the lady courting (19, 23, 24), but the verb "to prove" seems to fit particularly well with the argumentative tone of the stanza as a whole and accords with the vigor of Castelloza's humble stance: like the troubadour lover, she is not really going to let herself die, but she does want to use that threat as a tool of persuasion with her lover (cf. 46-48). 64. It does not appear at all inP^r ioi, which explores a most "unsuitable" tolerance on the lady's part, since she is willing to share her lover with another lady: hardly fitting conduct for the troubadour lady, but not unknown for the troubadour lover —see Bernart de Ventadorn's Era.m cosselkatz, senkor. 65. See Bruckner, "Na Castelloza, Trobairitz^ and Troubadour Lyric," RN 25, 3 (1985): 239-5366. Cf. the medical language of Mout avetz: "garida" (25), "car per pauc de malananssa / mor dompna s'om tot no.il lanssa" (39-40: "for a lady all but dies of her sickness if no man treats it." MS N's version gives "C'ab petit de malananssa / Mor dompna, s'om no cal lansa" (Paden, 178), which Paden translates, "if no man applies a lancet" (179). While the term^arida is a commonplace of troubadour poetry, where love (or the lady) is the only doctor who can heal the lover's wounds, the image of the lancet (if we are convinced by Paden's reading) adds an unusually realistic detail to the common set of motifs. 67. For "alegrar e gauzir" (37), MS N gives "per plain e lais jausir": its "lamentation and lays" give a more somber tone, which seems generally characteristic of any number of small changes made by the scribe of MS N. 68. Text and translation of 45-48 follow MS N, as in Paden, 173. Here it is MS A that tones down the thrust of Castelloza's final lines, though it retains the religious overtones: "you'll commit a sin, I'll be in torment, and you'll be vilely blamed" ("faretz pechat, e serai n'en tormen, / e seretz ne blasmatz vilanamen"). 69. See Dronke's comments on these lines: "The Provencal Trobairitz Castelloza," 138-39. 70. Alfred Jeanroy, Lapoesie lyrique des troubadours^ 1:316.

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Notes to Pages 153-154 Chapter 8

1. Fortunately, Reinmar and the Comtessa de Dia flourished as poets during approximately the time period, perhaps even at the same time. Reinmar's period of literary production is usually dated to around 1200, while that of the Comtessa de Dia varies according to the speculations about her historical identity, either in the third quarter of the twelfth century, or around 1200. See Martin de Riquer, Los trovadores, historic literariay textos, 3 vols. (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975), 2:791-93. For an anthology of medieval European woman's song, with original texts and German translations see IngridKastcn,ed.,FmuenliederdesMittelalters (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). 2. See Ingrid Kasten, Frauendienst bei Trobadors und Minnesan0er im iz.Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter 1986), 267-70. 3. Theodor Frings, "Frauenstrophe und Frauenlied in der friihen deutschen Lyrik," in Gestaltung - Umgestaltung: Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Hermann August Korff, ed. Joachim Muller (Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1957), 13-28, here 26. In terms of chronology nothing speaks against Frings' hypothesis, and if the thesis were provable that Raimon d'Agout was the husband of the Comtessa de Dia, as is argued by de Riquer (Los trovadores, 792) then there is a plausible means of contact, because Raimon d'Agout was often in close contacts with the Staufer dynasty. On this see Stanislas Stronski, "Notes sur quelques troubadours et protecteurs des troubadours celebres par Elias de Barjols," Revue des langues romances 50 (1907): 5-44. For arguments against Frings's thesis see Kasten, Frauendienst, 278-84. In any case, the usefulness of a comparative analysis does not lie in ascertaining literary influences; it can also sharpen the eye for the developmental possibilities of particular themes and genres, which can in turn lead to a better understanding of texts in their relativity. 4. The discussion of woman's song has only played a role in scholarly discussions of the origins of minnesong. On German woman's song see Erika Mergell, Die Frauenrede im deutschen Minnesan0 (Limburg: n.p., 1940) and Heinz Fischer, Die Frauenrede der deutschen hofischen Lyrik (dissertation, Universitat Marburg, 1934). 5. See Pierre Bee, La lyrique fran$aise au moyen age, XIP-XIIP siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1977-78); also his "Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution a la connaissance du lyrisme feminin au moyen age," CCM 22, 3 (1979): 235-62. See also IT. 6. William E. Jackson, Reinmar's Women: A Study of the Woman's Son0 ('Frauenlied' and 'Frauenstrophe') of Reinmar der Alte, German Language and Literature 9 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1981). 7. See Arthur Henkel, "Rilke zu den cLiebesgedichten' Ricarda Huchs: Ein ungedruckter Brief," in Der Zeiten Eildersaal: Studien und Vortrage, Kleine Schriften 2 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 2:223-36, here 234-35. See also the novel by Irmtraud Morgner, Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1976), now in English translation, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura: A Novel in Thirteen Books and Seven Intermezzos, trans. Jeanette Clausen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 8. See Alfred Jeanroy, La poesie lyrique des troubadours, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Didier/Toulouse: E. Privat, 1934) • On the (male) trobadours: "le poete exprime (ou est

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cense d'exprimer) ses propres sentiments" (2: 282), but on the female trobairitz: "J'avoue, tout en admirant la simplicite et le naturel du style, que fai bien de la peine a croire a cette sincerite" (i: 316); "Je me figure que nos trobairitz, esclaves de la tradition, incapables d'un effort d'analyse, se sont bornees a exploiter des themes connus, a user d'un formulaire courant, en invertissant simplement les roles. II n'y aurait la que des exercises litteraires, au reste non denues de merit. Hypothese pour hypothese, il me parait plus naturel de preter a ces femmes nobles et bien enseignees une certaine paresse d'esprit, une faute evidente de gout, que ce choquant oubli de toute pudeur et de toute convenance" (i: 316-17). 9. For further scholarly discussion of this topic see Sarah Kay, "La notion de personnalite chez les troubadours: encore la question de sincerite," mMittelalterbilder aus neuerPerspektive^ Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie des Mittelalters 14 (Munich: W. Fink, 1985), 166-82. 10. MegBogin, The Woman Troubadours (London: Paddington, 1976), 68-69. 11. Bee, "Trobairitz." 12. Paul Zumthor.Essaidepoetique medieval (Paris: Seuil, 1972), andLangue, texte, enigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 13. Translator's note: Reinmar is cited from the standard edition, MF, 36th ed. Poems are cited asMF 177,10. These numbers refer to page and line numbers in the original, nineteenth-century edition and are found in small print in the right margin beside each stanza in all editions. This standard scholarly practice permits one to quickly locate the primary texts using any edition ofTHF, which is currently in its 39th edition. It also allows one to locate quickly in any recent edition the textual references for 150 years of philological and interpretive scholarship on German courtly love poetry. All four Reinmar poems can also be found in medieval German, accompanied by a modern German translation, in Ingrid Kasten, Frauenlieder des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 84-98. English translations of Reinmar's poems by Ann Marie Rasmussen. 14. Examples of significant older scholarship on Reinmar are Erich Schmidt, Reinmar von Hagenau und Heinrich von Rug$e: Eine litterarhistorische Untersuchung^ Quellen und Forschungen 4 (Strassburg and London: Trubner, 1874). See also Carl von Kraus, Die Lieder Reinmars desAlten^ 3 vols. in i, Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenchaften, philosophisch-philologische und historische Klasse 30, parts 4, 6, 7 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1919). 15. Kraus, Die Lieder Reinmars^ i: 60-61. 16. Contra Jackson, Reinmar's Women, 262, the allusion in the last line probably refers not to God but to the Fall of Man. 17. Older scholarship disputed the authenticity of this poem. However, their objections were shown to be invalid by Friedrich Maurer, Die Pseudoreinmare: Fragen der Echtheit, der Chronolqgie und des Zyklus im Liedereorpus Reinmars desAlten (Heidelberg: Winter, 1966), 71-72. The poem's thematic correspondences with the songs previously discussed also support the argument for its authenticity. See also Jackson, Reinmar's Women, 274-77. 18. The remarkable literary "feud" that can be traced in the surviving works of Walther and Reinmar is meant. As Kraus shows in volume 3 of Die Lieder Reinmars, Reinmar's poems may well contain allusions to Walther's work.

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Notes to Pages 160-165

19. My conclusions refute Jackson's positive assessment of Reinmar's woman's song: "Reinmar depicts the woman in moments of distress and pressure. He approaches these situations from the woman's point of view, thereby revealing considerable understanding of and sensitivity to the woman's position. His treatment of women is complex but, I think, clearly sympathetic and designed, in addition, to solicit the sympathy of others" (Reinmar's Women, 337). Jackson's evaluation neglects to take into account the poetological function of woman's song and its constraining influence on the female speaker's conception of her role. 20. The poem not considered here is a tenso which is also transmitted among the works of Raimbaut d'Orange. See Walter T. Pattison, The Life and Works of the Twubadour Raimbaut d'Orange (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), 2730. 21. Bee notes allusions to the songs of Bernhard of Ventadorn ("Trobairitz"). The question awaits further investigation. 22. This aspect of the Comtessa's work is misunderstood if it is treated as a "separation of roles" as does Dietmar Rieger, "Die 'trobairitz' in Italien: Zu den altprovenzalischen Dichterinnen," CulturaNeolatina 31 (1971): 205-23, here 218. 23. Unless otherwise noted, Occitan citations and English translations are from SWT. 24. See for example the Burggraf von Rietenburg,MF 18, i. 25. "la dame altiere qu'elle etait, devient 1'humble servante (mais dans quelle mesure?) De celui qu'elle aime et qu'elle chante" (Bee, "'Trobairitz' et chanson," 239). 26. See also Bogin, The Woman Troubadours•, 24. 27. Kasten's punctuation and interpretation of stanzas 2 and 3 ofEstat ai engreu cossirier differ slightly from Bruckner's. For this reason, the Occitan text stanzas 2 and 3 follows Kasten, Frauenlieder desMittelalters^ 172; translations by Kasten and Rasmussen. Bruckner's text and translation of stanzas 2 and 3 follow here. "I'd like to hold my knight / in my arms one evening, naked, / for he'd be overjoyed / were I only serving as his pillow, / and he makes me more radiant / than Floris his Blanchaflor. / To him I grant my heart, my love, / my mind, my eyes, my life. / / Fair, agreeable, good friend, / when will I have you in my power, / lie beside you for an evening, / and kiss you amorously? / Be sure I'd feel a strong desire / to have you in my husband's place / provided that you had promised me / to do everything I wished." ("Ben volria mon cavallier / tener un ser en mos bratz nut, / q'el sen tengra per ereubut / sol q'a lui fezes cosseillier; / car plus m'en sui abellida / no fetz Floris de Blanchaflor: / eu 1'autrei mon cor e m'amor / mon sen, mos huoills e ma vida. / / Bels amics, avinens e bos, / cora.us tenrai en mon poder, / e que iagues ab vos un ser, / e qe.us des un bais amoros? / Sapchatz gran talan n'auria / qe.us tengues en luoc del marit / ab so que m'aguessetz plevit / de far tot so qu'eu volria," SWT, 10-11). 28. Note that when alluding to this famous pair of lovers the female speaker aligns herself with the man, not the woman. 29. See also Bee, "Trobairitz" 249. 30. Compare stanza 1.6: "car eu non li donei m'amor." 31. For further examples of this erotic practice in medieval literature as well as references to secondary literature, see Kasten, Frauendienst^ 280-81.

Notes to Pages 166-169

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32. It is significant that the female speaker uses a model of equality to orient her argument for legitimizing her love socially, but changes to a model of superiority (with inverted gender roles) when her love is endangered for interpersonal reasons. On discursive models of femininity in general see the short sketch by Friederike HassauerRoos, "Das Weib und die Idee der Menschheit," in Der Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie: Wissenshaftsgeschichte als Innovationsvorgabe, ed. Bernard Cerquiglini and HansUlrichGumbrecht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 421-45. 33. Although, as one would expect, Gottfried proceeds from (and does not question) a Christian anthropological model, he does attempt, as it were, to reverse the Fall of Man. See Ingrid Hahn, "daz lebende paradis (Tristan 17858-18114)," ZfdA 92 (1963): 184-95. See also Tomas Tomasek, Die Utopie im "Tristan" Gotfrids von Strafiburg^ Hermaea, neue Folge, 49 (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1985), 187-95. Chapter 9 This essay was presented at the conference Nature and Nurture: art and lere in Medieval and Early Modern Germany, held at Cornell University September 29-October i, 2000, and is warmly dedicated to the American and German colleagues assembled there in gratitude for a weekend of stimulating intellectual debate. I also wish to thank Helen Solterer, Sumie Song, Peter Gilgen, and E. Jane Burns for their astute comments on the written version, and the Arts and Science Research Council of Duke University for a research grant. A portion of this paper was read to the Canadian Society of Medievalists, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, in 1995. 1. While this understanding of culture now has a long intellectual history, my thinking on culture and femininity in this essay is influenced by Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), here p. 4. Her study advances a philosophical argument linking justice and gender to support international feminism, and draws heavily on her knowledge of contemporary India. 2. Nussbaum, Women, 32. 3.Ale} Beer, andBrewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 154. 4. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2. 5. In this essay, female-voiced verse is defined as any stanza, verse, or strophe in Walther's accepted oeuvre that is spoken in a female voice. This definition, based solely on the sex of speaker, deliberately brings together female-voiced stanzas from many related lyric genres and/or sub-genres: woman's song, a multi-stanza poem solely in a female voice of which there are only two examples in Walther's oeuvre; dialogue and debate poems, in which male-voiced and female-voiced speakers address one another; and the Wechsel or exchange (male and female voice monologues linked formally and thematically), a genre in which each stanza is spoken alternately by a female and male speaker who address the same topic, but not one another. The capacious approach used here refuses a strict fixation on genre limitations that is, in any case, continually overturned in Walther's oeuvre, which in its inclusion of a wide range of genres — religous

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Notes to Pages 169-170

sequence, political and gnomic verse (Spruckdichtung], courtly love poetry —was somewhat unusual for its times. There are clear signs of "cross-fertilization" between genres in his work, in particular as we shall see in the influence of moral-didactic Spruekdicktung on the courtly love lyric. 6. On India, for example, Nussbaum writes: "Any story that attributes to India only a single set of cultural norms, even for women, is bound to be bizarrely inadequate" (Women, 47). Equally bizarre and inadequate, to my mind, is any story that attributes to medieval culture a single set of cultural norms about masculinity and femininity. Thus my fundamental disagreement with Rudiger SchnelTs analysis in "Frauenlied, Manneslied und Wechsel im deutschen Minnesang," ZfdA (128) 1999: 127-75. His misunderstanding of gender as a category of analysis and his mistranslations of "Geschlecht" as gender when his usage implies that he must mean sex provide an example of the current philosophical confusion about the sex/gender distinction that is usefully sorted out by Toril Moi in What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-120, here especially 10-59. 7. On the cultural construction of tradition see Clare A. Lees, Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Recently Ingrid Bennewitz has argued persuasively that the medieval world also had multiple, competing concepts of love, " 'Ein kurze rede von guoten minnen': Liebes-Wahrnehmungen und Liebes-Konzeptionen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters und der Friihen Neuzeit," in Die Spracken der Liebe^ ed. Walter Lenschen (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 155-85. 8. "Male Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature," Women's Studies u (1984): 67-97, here 68. For early examples see Albrecht von Johansdorf's dialogue poem Ich vant si ane huote (MF 93,12), and Friedrich von Hausen's Ich muoz von sckulden sin unfro (MF 42,1), in which the poet laments that his erudite beloved has told him that even if he were Aeneas, she would never be his Dido. 9. The seminal essay on the instrumental function of women in medieval German literature is Trude Ehlert, "Die Frau als Arznei: Zum Bild der Frau in hochmittelalterlicher deutscher Lehrdichmng," Z^ 105 (1986): 4262. For a philosophical discussion on "the capabilities approach" which thinks about women in terms of what they can do and be, as opposed to thinking of women instrumentally in terms of how they can best serve the needs of others, see Nussbaum, Women. 10. All poems are quoted from Giinther Schweikle, ed., Waltker von der Vogelweide: Liedlyrik^ vol. 2 ofWerke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998). This new edition provides fine modern German translations, erudite commentaries, and an excellent bibliography, making it far and away the best edition for medievalists in fields other than German and modernists to use. For secondary literature on Walther's poetry the reader is referred to Schweikle's edition. I wish also to acknowledge the intellectual debt this essay owes to the thematic clusters created in Schweikle's edition, which were of enormous aid in bringing my arguments into sharp focus. This essay follows the standard practice of identifying Walther's poems by their line numbers like this (L 39,11). This practice ultimately derives from Karl Lachmann's editions of the poems and allows readers to consult any one of the many, many editions of Walther's poetry. The most recent edition of the standard edition is Christoph

Notes to Pages 170-174

251

Cormeau, ed., Walther von der Vogelweide, Leich, Lieder, Sangspriiche^ i4th completely revised edition of Karl Lachmann's edition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996). Schweikle's edition provides keys for finding poems in his edition by means of the first line (Walther', 818-27) and by means of Lachmann's numbering system for the first verse (82832). MF refers to the standard edition of early German courtly love poetry, DesMinnesangs Fruhling, ed. Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren, 37th ed. (1982). 11. Here follows a list of Walther's poems that use the female voice. It is ordered by Lachmann numbers. Each poem's formal structure is indicated. Under der linden (L 39,11; Schweikle, 228-31), monologue; Ich hoere iu so vil tugendejehen (L 43,9; Schweikle, 200-207), dialogue; Gendde,frouwe! tuoalso bescheidenliche (L 70,22; Schweikle, 196-99), dialogue; Ich hare ime maniger eren jehen (L 71,19; Schweikle, 182-83), Wechsel; Mich hat ein wunniclicher wan (L 71,35; Schweikle, 188-91), dialogue/ Wechsel^ Frouwe, lant inch niht verdriezen (L 85,34; Schweikle, 208-213), dialogue; Friuntliche lac (L 88,9; Schweikle, 238-45), dawn song; Fro Welt, irsultdem wirtesagen (L 100,24; Schweikle, 224-27), dialogue; Ein man verbiutet dnepfliht (L 111,22; Schweikle, 166-67), Wechsel; Frowe vernemt durchgot von mir diz mare (L 112,35; Schweikle, 214-17), dialogue; Mir tuot einer slahte wille (L 113,31; Schweikle, 232-37), monologue; Gotgebe ir iemerguoten tac (L 119,17; Schweikle, 192-95), Wechsel, Ich lebte ie nach der liute sage (MF 152,25; Schweikle, 184-87), Wechsel attributed to both Reinmar and Walther; Dir hat enboten, frouwe guot (MF 214,34; Schweikle, 218-21), dialogue attributed to both Hartmann von Aue and Walther. 12. On the concept of reason in secular medieval literature see, for example, John V Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), and Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). On the symbolic maleness of reason in Western thought, see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy', 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), which "seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the male-female distinction operates as a symbol in traditional philosophical texts, and of its interactions with explicit philosophical views of reason" (ix). 13. "Seine Liebeslieder haben auch haufig einen starken didaktischen Einschlag, der im zeitgenossischen Minnesang sonst nicht so deutlich (oder anders) ausgepragt ist," Ingrid Kasten, "Der Begriff der herzeliebe in den Liedern Walthers," in Walther von der Vogelweide: Eeitrage zurLeben und Werk, ed. Hans-Dieter Muck (Stuttgart: StofHer und Schiitz, 1989), 253-67, here 266. To describe this aspect of Walther's lyric persona, Kasten coins the phrase "didactician of love" ("Minnedidaktiker"). 14. Women, 46. 15. The most obvious connection is established in the manuscript, which heads this Walther poem with the line "In the melody of CI strive for everything that a man,'" alluding to a surviving Reinmar text. Many poems by Reinmar and Walther are linked through a rich network of formal and thematic allusions, citations, and acerbic nearrepetitions. Some poems and verses are collected in manuscripts under both their names. Nineteenth-century scholars stylized this complex instance of intertextuality, which includes some of the finest poetry written in Middle High German, into a biographical event known as the "Reinmar-Walther feud." Reams of scholarship were devoted to determining the compositional sequence of the poems in order to deter-

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Notes to Pages 174-182

mine an "inner development5' that could in turn fix interpretive parameters. On this piece of disciplinary history and a careful and thorough revision of the thesis see Gunther Schweikle, "Die Fehde zwischen Reinmar und Walther: Ein Beispiel germanistischer Legendenbildung," ZfdA 97 (1986): 364-89. 16. For a discussion of such citational practice in the context of Luce Irigary's concept of mimicry, see E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), esp. 15-18. 17. On anger in the medieval world see the essays in Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). The classic example of the angry male voice is found in Reinmar's famous rebuttal of his critics: Swaz ich nu niuwer maere sage (MF 165,10). In other Walther poems the male speaker hints that he has been chastized for immoderation (a different perspective on righteous anger?), for example mMir ist min rede nu enmittenzweigeslagen (L 61,32; Schweikle, 356). 18. This poem criticizes all of society, not just women, because they no longer differentiate ethically and artistically. See alsoAne liep so manic leit (L 90,31) and/& vor do man so rehte minnecliche warp (L 48,12). 19. See also for example Frouwe, vernemt durchgot von mir diz m&re (L112,3 5) and also Ich lebte ie ndch der liute sage (MF 152,34). 20. On shaming the lady see Die herren jehent, man sul den frouwen / wizen, daz diu werlt so ste (L 44,35), a title which translates as "The lords say that women are to blame for the state of the world." In the poem, the male speaker has harsh words for his lady, calling her assertion that his singing days are over "overbold mockery" ("frevelliche schimpfen," L 45,7-8) and adding that she is either "ignorant or raving mad" ("si tumbet, obe si niht entobet," L 45,9). This poem also claims that clerics harm themselves by refusing to allow distinctions to be made among them ("Sich krenket frouwen unde pfaffen / daz si sich niht scheiden Ian," L 45,27-28). See also the poems Min frouwe ist ein ungen&dic wip (L 52,23; Schweikle, 294-301), and Lange swigen des hat ich geddht (L 72,31; Schweikle, 168-75) 5 in which the poet closes by asking the young men in the audience to avenge his lady's rejection of him by beating her. 21. The phrase "ob ich niht tobe" is difficult. One might also translate: "go ahead and say whatever you want provided it doesn't make me mad" or "no matter if I were angry." Schweikle translates this line into modern German as "I am not unreasonable" ("Ich bin nicht unverstandig," 209). The tone is in any case mocking and distant. 22. This common motif is given a different spin in Lange swigen des hat ichgeddht (L 72,31; Schweikle, 168-75) when the poet boasts that if he stops singing, the lofty lady stops existing: "Her life depends on my prestige: if she kills me then she is dead" ("ir leben hat mines lebens ere; sterbet si mich, so ist si tot" L 73,16). 23. The poet complains of being forgotten by his lofty lady in Ichgesprach nie wol vonguotenwiben (L 100,17; Schweikle, 292-93) andTkfw frouwe ist ein ungenadicwip (L 52,23; Schweikle, 294-301), in the fifth stanza of which the male speaker admonishes his lady not to be wounded if he "rides out asking about highborn, dignified women" (L 55,17; Schweikle, 296-97). The lady rejects the suitor in Frouwe, vernemt durchgot von mir daz maere (L 112,35; Schweikle, 214-17) and mDir hat enboten, frouwe guot (MF2I5, 34; Schweikle, 218-21). 24. For an astute analysis of the problems of courtly speech enacted in this and

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Walther's other dialogue poems see Ingrid Kasten, "Das Dialoglied bei Walther von der Vogelweide," in Walther von der Vogelweide. Hamburger Kolkquium zum 6s. Geburtstag von Karl-Heinz Eorck, ed. Jan-Dirk Miiller and Franz Josef Worstbrock (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1989), 81-93. Kasten contrasts the periphastic, or indirect, speech of the dialogues in this poem with frank speech in the monologues, showing how the embedded monologues shed an ironic light on the framing genre, the courtly dialogue itself. The monologues suggest that miscommunication is a possible result—indeed perhaps the only possible result—of courtly speech. 25. IngndKasten,FmuenliederdesMittelalters (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), 262. 26. Ann Marie Rasmussen, "Representing Woman's Desire: Walther's Woman's Stanzas in'Ichhoereiuso viltugendejehen' (L43,9),cUnderderlinden' (L 39,11) and Tro Welt' (L 100,24)," in Women as Protagonists and Poets in the German Middle Ages: An Anthology of Feminist Approaches to Middle High German Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 528 (Goppingen: Kummerle, 1991), 69-85, here 75-81. Appearing too late to be incorporated into this essay, but developing a context which might well be illuminating for the interpretation of this is Ingrid Bennewitz, "Die obszone weibliche Stimme: Erotik und Obszonitat in den Frauenstrophen der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters," in Frauenlieder/Cantigas de amigo, ed. Thomas Cramer, John Greenfield, Ingrid Kasten and Erwin Koller (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2000), 69-84. 27. Rasmussen, "Representing," 79. 28. Ibid., 80. 29. On the gendering of power and authority, see Judith Bennett, "Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside," in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 18-36. 30. Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 144. 31. Blamires, Casefor Women, 150. Chapter 10 I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for a short-term fellowship in 1997 that allowed me to begin investigating this subject and to audiences who offered thoughtful critiques of this work at Texas A&M University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Western Australia, and the University of Connecticut. I also thank Sandy Bardsley, Jane Burns, Cynthia Herrup, Jean Howard, Roberta Krueger, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Beth Robertson, and the members of the North Carolina Research Group on Medieval and Early Modern Women for their thoughtful readings and critiques. Finally, thanks also to Kate Crassons, Cara Hersh, and Beth Robertson for sharing their insightful readings of "Ladd Y the daunce." i. IMEV1849.1 have used the edition found in Richard Leighton Greene, ed., EEC, item 453, pp. 276-77 (with some emendations taken from the version given in Neil Cartlidge, "Alas, I go with Chylde': Representations of Extra-Marital Pregnancy in the Middle English Lyric," English Studies 5 [1998]: 395-414).

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Notes to Pages 189-191

2. These songs seem to have developed within conventions that were distinct but not entirely separate from both the Latinate culture of the clerical elite and the highly literate culture of vernacular court poets such as Chaucer and Lydgate. Distinctions between popular and elite cultures have led to complex controversies in both literary and historical studies that I cannot resolve here. But nothing in the manuscript provenance, dialects, and content of these songs can justify labeling them either purely courtly or purely folkloric. For the problematic opposition of "popular" and "aristocratic" see Anne L. Klinck, "The Oldest Folk Poetry? Medieval Woman's Song as 'Popular' Lyric" in From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour ofMahmoud Manzalaqui on His y$th Birthday, ed. A. E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), 229-49. Instead of being either "popular" or "aristocratic" these songs were enjoyed by many people at many levels of society. Clerks sang them as well as lay people (see Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics of theXIVth andXVtk Centuries [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952], xxxv-xxxvi), and they were sung in castles and townhouses as well as cottages. In this judgment, I differ from John Plummer, "The Woman's Song in Middle English and Its European Backgrounds," in FF, 135-54, and I agree with Tim Harris, "Problematising Popular Culture," in Popular Culture in England, c.isoo-i8$o, ed. Tim Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 1-27. On a related matter, the dissemination of these songs —most of which survive in only one version — is impossible to assess. Some might have been sung in many places for many years; others might have attracted only limited use. In most cases, we cannot know. I have tried to offset this conundrum by examining a wide range of songs rather than focusing on just a few. 3. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, "Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours," this volume. See also Doris Earnshaw, The Female Voice in Medieval Romance Lyric (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). 4 . For songs possibly authored by women, see IMEV 2279 and 3832.5, but see the skepticism of Julia Boffey in "Women Authors and Women's Literacy in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England," in Women and Literature in Britain 1150-1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159-82. Songs that include substantial use of Latin were probably often written by men in clerical orders; for an example, see IMEV 3832.5. Many songs include representations that suggest male authorship (for example, misogynous images and sexualization of women) and exclude other features (such as anxiety about pregnancy, discussion of women's work, or description of female social networks) that might suggest female subjectivity. 5. EEC, cxviii-cxxxviii. 6. James A. Schultz, "Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Silence of German Narrative," Speculum 66 (1991): 519-39; also his The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100-1350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); R. M. Smith, "Some Reflections on the Evidence for the Origins of the 'European Marriage Pattern' in England," in The Sociology of the Family, ed. Chris Harris (Totowa,

Notes to Pages 191-193

255

N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 74-112; L. R. Poos, A Rural SocietyAfterthe Black Death: Essex 1350-1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in Tork and Torkshire c, 1300-1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 8. Goldberg, Women, Work', Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing Work, 1300-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). In late medieval English, singlewoman^ like maiden^ usually denoted a never-married woman. Maiden was especially common in literary texts, and it often (but not invariably) denoted a virgin as well as a never-married woman. Singlewoman was more common in documents, such as wills, town records, and tax rolls, and, as best I can yet tell, it was free of associations with virginity. Widows were also sometimes called "single," but with few exceptions the term "singlewoman" was reserved for the never-married. 9. Goldberg, Women, Work; Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 56-61; Mark Bailey, "Demographic Decline in Late Medieval England: Some Thoughts on Recent Research," Economic History Review 49 (1996): 1-19. 10. These paragraphs summarize a growing historical literature on youth in late medieval England. For an introductory survey of the status of singlewomen, see Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, "A Singular Past," in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, ed. Bennett and Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1-37, and for demographic information, see Maryanne Kowaleski, "Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective," 38-81, 325-44 in the same volume. For daughters and sons among the peasantry, see my Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. 65-99. For urban adolescents, see Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London. For youth in elite families, see Jennifer C. Ward, English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages (London: Longman, 1992). 11. Sandy Bardsley, "Trading Insults: Gender, Troublesome Speech, and Scolding in Late Medieval English Communities," and Maryanne Kowaleski, "A Prosopography of Scolds in a Medieval English Town," both presented at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1999. 12. William Farrer and J. Brownbill, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster (London: Constable and Company, 1912), 7:184. 13. M.D. Harris, ed., The Coventry LeetBook, EETS OS 135 (1908), 545. 14.1 am grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski who has shared with me this information, which she found in Somerset Record Office, DD/L/P/28/13 and 15. 15.1 am undertaking a study of leyrwite and childwite (both of which were levied with less frequency after the Great Plague), but for a brief introduction to the extant materials, see Tim North, "Legerwite in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," Past andPresent 106 (1986): 3-16. For examples of ecclesiastical punishments, see Frank S. Pearson, ed., "Records of a Ruridecanal Court of 1300," in Collectanea, ed. Sidney Graves Hamilton, Worcestershire Historical Society 29 (1912): 69-80. Zvi Razi found that many single mothers in Halesowen subsequently married and that their children were well treated by the community, even being allowed to inherit land (despite legal prohibitions on inheritance by bastards). Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a

256

Notes to Pages 193-197

Medieval Parish: Economy., Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 64-71. But, of course, the poorest single mothers did not fare so well, especially if they were itinerant laborers. Elaine Clark found that among the strangers expelled from Horsham between 1282 and 1290 were six men and nine women, including four women who were supporting small children. See Elaine Clark, "Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside," Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 381-406, here 398. 16. Sex and love were, of course, common themes of dance and song (then, as well as now), but young women were sexualized in these media much more than young men. Men were certainly imagined as would-be or actual lovers, but they were also imagined as schoolboys, apprentices, knights, merchants, scholars, blacksmiths, and the like. For examples, seeZMEF596, 2082, 3227, 3895. 17. IMEV 225 (EEC, item 452, pp. 275-76). Although the maid's pregnancy might suggest considerable trouble to modern readers, I agree with Neil Cartlidge that the thrust of this song is more humorous than worrisome. Cartlidge, "Alas, I go with Chylde,"402-3. 18. IMEV 2494 (EEC, item 456.1, p. 278). In this carol, as in IMEV 2654, the single status of the singer is implied, but not explicitly stated. 19. IMEV2654 (EEC, 446, p. 272). 20. "In an arber of honor, set full quadrant," attributed to John Wallis. Thomas Wright, ed., Songs and Ballads with other short poems chiefly of the reign of Philip and Mary (London: Nichols & Sons, 1860), 136-39. The youth and sexual inexperience of the protagonist of this song (who speaks briefly, but is usually figured in the third person) is implied in her unknowing search for the mandrake-penis. See also IMEV ^3^,1344.5, 1641.5, 1824.8; two songs that imply prostitution, IMEV 1269.5, 3863.5; a riddle that similarly uses the mandrake, "Be chance bot evin this vther day," in W. Tod Ritchie, ed., TheBannatyneManuscript (Edinburgh: William Blackwood 8c Sons, 1928), 2:336-39 (found in a Scottish manuscript, but noted as written by an Englishman); the enigmatic IMEV 1286.5; and the related maidens inlMEV 150, 377, 2236,4020.3. 21. For examples of "have his will" seeZMEF 1330, 3594. For examples of refusals, see 1286.5, 2236. 22. See, for example, IMEV 1852. 23. Kim M. Phillips, "Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman's Life," and Katherine J. Lewis, "Model Girls? Virgin-Martyrs and the Training of Young Women in Late Medieval England," in Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis, Noel James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1-24, 25-46; Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997). 24. IMEV 360 (EEC, item 450, p. 274). The opening phrase might also be a reference to spring (as was common in chansons d'aventure). 25. IMEV1330 (EEC, item 455, p. 277). 26. IMEV 3594 (EEC, item 454, p. 277). Cartlidge ("Alas, I go with Chylde," 395-97) suggests that "Now wyll I not lete for no qwage / With me a clerk for to play" has a double meaning —both the singer's determination not to have sex and her willingness to do so. I think the first reading is by far the more plausible. I do, however, agree with Cartlidge that the refrain of the song suggests that the singer has resolved

Notes to Pages 197-199

257

her situation and is happy to have regained her maidenly status. See IMEV 1589.5 for a similar regaining of what might be called "social maidenhood." 27. Among other songs and poems that touch on the abandonment of women are IMEV&9I, 1589.5, 3409, 3418, 3635.5, 3713.5, 3832.5, 3820.5, and "Child Waters" in Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: Folklore Press, 1957), item 63, 83-100. See also IMEV 154 (apoembyLydgate), 2279, 3917.5; Isabella Whitney's mid-sixteenth-century development of this theme in STC 25439; "The Maydens Crosse Rewe" STC 17192; and "The lady forsaken of her lover," in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., TottePs Miscellany (1557-1587) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:172-73. 28. IMEV 3409 (EEC, item 456, p. 278). 29. IMEV 3713.5. I have used the edition of Frederick Morgan Padelford, "Liedersammlungen des XVI Jahrhunderts, besonders aus der Zeit Henrichs VTII, IV 7. The Songs in Manuscript Rawlinson C. 813," Anglia 31 (1908): 309-97 at 374-76. 30. IMEV 474.5.1 have used the edition of John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), 229-340. See also IMEV 642.5 and "A Cruell Tiger all with teeth bebled," in John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and a Female Complaint" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 127. 31. For examples, seeIMEF377,1849, 2236, 2494, 34O9, 3594, 3832.5. 32. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). IMEV 3713.5 is cast in the form of 2ipastourelle. 33. Robbins, Secular Lyrics, 19; David C. Fowler, "XV Ballads" in A Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, vol. 6, ed. Albert E. Hartung (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 1753-1808, here 1773; Stevens,Music and Poetry, 340. 34. Katherine L. French, "Maidens' Lights and Wives' Stores: Women's Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England," Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 399-425, here 411. 35. For the late medieval English parish, see especially Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1500 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Beat Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish., c. 1400-1560 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996); and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For roles of women in parish activities, see the work of Katherine L. French, especially, "cTo Free Them from Binding': Women in the Late Medieval English Parish," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1997): 387-412 and "Maidens' Lights" (see 412 for the dances hosted by the maidens' guild of St. Ewen's, Bristol). 36. Felicity Riddy, "Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text," Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86. IMEV 671 and 3363. For both texts, I have used editions found in Tauno F. Mustanoja, ed., The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, and The Thewis of Gud Women, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae B 61:2 (Helsinki, 1948). 37. IMEV 3363, stanza 4, p. 172 in Mustanoja; IMEV 671, stanza 17, p. 165 in Mustanoja. In another song (IMEV 3409), the singing maiden tells both of enjoying a holiday and of her regret about so doing.

258

Notes to Pages 200-201

38. IMEV671, stanza 13, p. 163 in Mustanoja. As one fictional maiden in an early fourteenth-century song retorts when she declines a gift of new clothes, it is better to wear threadbare clothes "then syde [ample] robes ant synke into synne." IMEV 1449.1 have used the edition found in G. L. Brook, The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of Ms. Harley 2253 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 39-40. As another maiden notes when she rejects her would-be lover's gift of a gold ring and velvet purse, it would damage her reputation to take gifts from someone whom she did not know (7MEF37I3-5). 39. IMEV 3363, stanza 7, p. 174 in Mustanoja. 40. E. Jane Burns, Eodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 741. IMEV 371. I have used the edition found in Thomas G. Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics, 1200-1400 (London: Penguin, 1995), 28-29. Following largely on Duncan's translation, I would roughly render these passages as: "What is the point of all your talk? / You do not find here the idiot that you seek," and "Move on where you may expect better to succeed." Another mournfully wishes, in the presence of her wily suitor, that she could find just one trustworthy man: "Leef me were / gome but gyle" (Dear to me / would be a man without guile). IMEV 1449, in Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics', 25-27. 42. IMEV 2235, in Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics^ 29-31. 43. LMEV 4020.3, in Padelford, "Liedersammlungen," 380-81. For further examples of maidens talking back or otherwise resisting men, see also IMEV 150, 474.5, 642.5,1214.5,1286.5,1449, 2034.5, 2236, 3713-5. 44. IMEV 3409. 45. IMEV359446. IMEV 3713-5. 47-IMEV 360, 3409, 37I3.5. 48. IMEV 3713.5, in Padelford, "Liedersammlungen," 376. 49. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Bargaining with Patriarchy," Gender and Society 2 (1988): 274-90, here 285. 50. Kandiyoti uses "bargain" for its implied fluidity, but she stresses that it should not imply symmetry between negotiating parties. Nor it is meant to indicate, as is often the case with "bargain" in modern speech, that the arrangements are particularly advantageous to women. In Kandiyoti's usage, women bargain "from a weaker position" and achieve an "asymmetrical exchange." See Kandiyoti, "Bargaining," 286. 51. See, for example, cases in P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Women in England c. 1275-1525 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 117 (William Trumpour and Joan de Lydesum), and 121 (John Denton and Alice Fulmer). Women also sometimes denied marriage contracts (see 119, John Blakhed and Alice Jakeman), but women more often sought to enforce a marriage contract than to deny one. See Charles Donaghue, Jr., "Female Plaintiffs in Marriage Cases in the Court of York in the Later Middle Ages: What Can We Learn from the Numbers?" in Sue Sheridan Walker, ed., Wife and Widow in Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 183-214. For uncertainties about marriage contracts, see especially R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

Notes to Pages 2Oi-204

259

52. Katherine L. French, "Maidens' Lights" 420. For a private example, see Shannon McSherfrey, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 37-40. 53. See, for example, McSheffrey, Love and Marriage, 42-43. 54. See, for example, Goldberg, Women in England, 252-56. 55. LMEV3713.5, in Padelford, "Liedersammlungen" 376. 56. LMEV 1286.5, as printed in Bernard M. Wagner, ed., "New Songs of the Reign of Henry VIII," MLN 50 (1935): 452-55, here 452. 57.ZMEFi344.5, in£EC, item 460.1, p. 280. 58. ZMEF225, in EEC, item 452, pp. 275-76. 59. See especially Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Ann Marie Rasmussen, Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 60. IMEF2O34.5. Edition from John Stevens, ed., Music atthe Court of Henry VIII (London: Stainer and Bell, 1962), 95-97. 61. ZMEF642.5, in Padelford, "Liedersammlungen," 377-80. 62. See, for examples, IMEV474-5, LMEV467, 1286.5, 2236, 3713.5, and "Child Waters." For further mentions of the interests of parents, sec IMEV 3832.5, 1449, and "In a sartayn place apoyntyd for pleasur," in Wright, Songs and Ballads, 133-36. 63. As Riddy puts it, mothers might have played a "symbolic role in the representation of domesticity." "Mother Knows," 76. 64. Riddy, "Mother Knows," 86.

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Contributors

PAT BELANOFF is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her papers on the women of Old English poetry have appeared in PMLA, and in the two essay collections New Readings on Women in Old English Literature^ and Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Papers in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger. JUDITH M. BENNETT is Martha Nell Hardy Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Women in the Mediepal English Countryside: Gender and Household in Medieval Brigstock Before the Plague, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344, and has edited with Amy Froide, Singlewomen in the European Past., 1250-1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press). SUSAN BOYNTON is Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University, with a doctorate in musicology and a joint MA in women's studies and music. She has published articles on medieval liturgy and music and is working on a book on medieval hymn commentary. MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER is Professor of French at Boston College. She has published extensively on troubadour lyric, especially that composed by women. She has edited, with Laurie Shepard and Sarah White, Songs of the Women Troubadours. E. JANE BURNS is L. M. Slifkin Distinguished Term Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her many publications on medieval French literature include Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle and Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press). JUDITH R. COHEN is an ethnomusicologist and Adjunct Graduate Faculty at York University, Toronto. She has published numerous articles on JudeoSpanish songs. She also performs medieval, Sephardic, and related music, and carries out extensive fieldwork in Spain and Portugal. ESTHER CORRAL is Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago, Spain. Her book As mulleres nas cantigas medievais is a lexical and literary study of terms referring to women.

262

Contributors

INGRID KASTEN is Professor of Germanistik at the Freie Universitat, Berlin. Her extensive publications on medieval French and medieval German literature include the anthologies Frauenlieder des Mittelalters and Deutsche Lyrik desfriihen und hohen Mittelalters. She is currently working on gender studies and medieval studies, and on cultural exchange in the medieval world. ANNE L. KLINCK is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. Her publications include "Anglo-Saxon Women and the Law" (Journal of Medieval History), The Old English Elegies and, with Laurence Eldredge, the fifth and final volume of the Middle English CursorMundi in its southern version. She is now working on a collection and translation of woman's songs. ANN MARIE RASMUSSEN is Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of articles on medieval studies and gender studies, courtly love poetry, medieval German romances, andM0rf/m and Daughters in Medieval German Literature. She is currently working on fifteenth-century German literature.

Index

Along with authors, titles, and proper names, the Index includes significant concepts and common motifs discussed in this book. Ancient and medieval works are entered by title and also under author where known. Medieval authors are usually entered under first name unless known by last name (e.g., Boccaccio, Chaucer). Modern works of criticism and scholarship are entered by author or editor, not by tide. Citations to contributors to this volume are to other publications mentioned here. The Index was prepared by Elizabeth Craig, with assistance from Eric Barstad and Maryanne Lewell, under my direction. A.L.K. A chantar m'er de so qu'ieu no volria (Comtessa de Dia), 8, 51, 64, 77, 140-43, 163-64 A lafontana del verpfier (Marcabru), 11, 2o6n. 19 A la stasgion che'l mondofolglia eflora (La CompiutaDonzella), 12 A I'entrada del tens clar^ 9-10, 25 Ab ioi et ab ioven m'apais (Comtessa de Dia), 64, 138-40,162, 2o8n. 37, 24311. 43 Abgreu cossire, 2420. 34 Ab lo cor trist environat d'esmay, 242-4311. 37 abandonment: mHeroides^ 8, 243n. 43; and laments, 189, 199, 200; in late medieval English song, 195, 196-97,199, 200; in medieval Latin song, 8; in medieval Spanish song, 73 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 227n. 69 abuse, of women. See beating Adam de la Halle, 10 adolescence, 191-94, 255n. 10. See also singlewomen advice poems: in late medieval English song, 199-200; in Walther von der Vogelweide, 170,172, 173, 178-79, 25in. 13 Aeneid (Virgil), 26 Afonso Sanchez, 229n. 7, 23in. 23 Airas Nunez, 94, 229n. 7, 23on. 13, 232n. 34 Airas Paez, 232n. 34

A'isha bint Ahmad, 77 Aizenberg, Edna, 226n. 50 Alais, 131 Alamanda, 51, 64, 74,131,132, 22on. 22, 244n. 52 Alas, ales, the wyle. SccLadd Tthe daunce alba: andaube^ 232n. i; authorship of, 61, 133; and jealous husband, 23; andLocrian Song, 23; and passionate women, 149; recordings of, 64; and Sine klawen^ 27; and Tagelieder^ 12, 2O9n. 49; in trobairitz corpus, 134; as woman's song, 3, 22, 134, 232n. i, 242n.29 Albrecht von Johansdorf, 2son. 8 Alcman, 18-19, 28, 210-1 in. 18 Alfonso X, 67, 88, 224n. 13, 229n. 4 Aim, Jose Maria, 209n. 51 Almucs de Castelnau, 131 Alvar, Manuel, 227n. 70 amic^ 140,141-42, 144,146,162 Amies, s'ie.us trobes avinen (Castelloza), 143, 145-49 amigaIamigo, in cantigas de amigo, 82-83, 8688, 89-93, 95-98 Arnicas o meu amigo (Garcia de Guilhade), 23on. 18 An chambre a or se siet la bele Beatris. See Eele Eeatris

264

Index

Anacreon, 23, 2ion. 9 Andalusia, 19-20, 66, 69-70, 76-77, 77-?8 Anderson, James E., 2i7n. 29 Andreas, 42 Andreas Capellanus, 177, 242n. 28 JW /^ #? manic leit (Walther von der Vogelweide), 172-73, 252n. 18 Anglo-Saxon. See Old English Antunes-Rambaud, Maria de Fatima, 23in. 29 April Queen lyric (A Ventrada del tens clar), 910, 25 Arabic literature: characteristics of, 76-77; and erotic songs, 24; and female musicians, 49-50, 52; influence of, 24-25, and love poetry, 19-20; wedding songs of, modern, 7778; women poets of, 69-70. See also kharjas; and under names Archipreste of Hita, 68 Arie, Rachel, 224n.i7 Aristophanes, 19, 21-22 Arnulf of St. Ghislain, 59 Art of Courtly Love (Andreas Capellanus), 177, 242n. 28 Ashley, Kathleen, 72, 77, 2O7n. 21 Athenaeus, 23, 2ion.i4, 2i2n.3o Atkinson, Clarissa W., 259n. 59 Au novel tanspascour que florist Vaube espine, 232-3311.4,23711.43 aube. See alba Aubrey, Elizabeth, 22on. 29, 22inn. 47, 52, 222-23n. 81, 239n. i AucassinetNicolette, 53, io8,236n. 33 Audefroi le Batard, 102, 106 Auerbach, Erich, 2O7n. 22 Augustine (of Hippo), St., 24, 213n. 43 Aurell i Cardona, Marti, 130, 24on. 16 authorship: anonymous, 61,134; of chansons de toile, 106; female, 3, 2osn. 7; of late medieval English song, 190-91, 254n. 4; and performance, 61; and textual femininity, 2, 5, 103, 205n. 6; of trobairitz poetry, 131-32, 133 Aymarbrava, esquiba (Mayor Arias), 73-74 Azalais d'Altier, 131,132 Azalais de Porcairagues, 51,131, 134, 24in. 19, a, 85, 88, 242n. 35, 243n. 46 Ballade, ojeaifilla, queprazervejades (Airas Nunez), 94, 23on. 13

Bailey, Mark, 192 Baker, Peter, 2i8n. 32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10,133, 2o8n. 43 ballata, 62-63 Bambas, Rudolf C., 2i5n. 2 bara$a, 87 Barberino, Francesco da, 58-59 barcarola, 4 Bardsley, Sandy, 255n. u Barthes, Roland, 2O5n. 6 Bartsch, Karl, 2o8n. 42, 244n. 54 Baudri of Bourgueil, 26 Baumgartner, Emmanuele, 22in. 38 beating, of women, 105,121-23,193, 238n. 53, 252n. 20 Bee, Pierre: on authorship, 60, 2O7~8n. 34, 234n. n; on chansons de toile, 102, 233n. 7, 235n. 22; on classification of songs, 235nn. 19, 21, 24in. 19; onfeminitegenetique and feminitetextuelle, 5,134; on "registre popularisant," 3; onsirventes andplanh, 134; on trobairitz, 8, 134,137,154, 24in. 19, 248n. 21; on woman's song, 2, 3,133,136,153, 232n. i Beck, Eleonora, 58-59, 63, 22in. 59, 222nn. 78,79 Bedier, Joseph, 2o6n. 13 Beech, George T., 213n. 47 Belanoff, Patricia, 2O5n. 9, 2O7n. 26 Eele Aiglentine en roial chamberine-. as chanson de toile, 232-33n. 4; performance of, 106; sewing and desire in, 99-100,118; speaker in, 107-8; subject/object position in, 103, no—n, 121, 237nn. 39, 40, 238n. 48 BeleAleis, 106, 236n. 28 Bele Amelot soule an chambrefeloit, 105,11315,121-22, 232-33^ 4, 238n. 54 Bele Argentine, 119-20,122, 232-3311. 4, BeleAude (Fille et la mere), 101,103,105,113, 114, 232-33^ 4, 238nn. 52, 54 Bele Aye, 101,103,115,123, 232-33^ 4, 238n. 49 BeleBeatris, no, 111-12,115,118, 121,23233n. 4, 237n. 39, 238n. 48 Bele Doe, 235n. 21, 238n. 49 BeleDoette, 65, 120,122, 235n. 21, 237n. 42 Bele Emmelos espres desouz I'arbroie, 64,122-24,

232-33n.4,238n. 53

Bele Erembors (Quant vient en mai), n, 115, 116, 232-33n. 4, 237n. 44

Index BeleEuriaus, 105,106, 232-3311. 4, 2351111. 19, 26, 23811. 49 Eele TCdoine se siet desous la verde olive, 118,12123, 232-3311. 4, 23711. 42, 23811. 53 $£/£ Tolanz en chambre koie: as chanson de mat mariee, 232-3311. 4; as chanson de toile, 11; defiance of husband in, 121; desiring subject in, 112-13,118,119,125; fabric in, 115, 238n. 52; fainting in, 122; sewing in, 99, 103,112-13, 118-19, 125, 232-33n. 4; themes in, 105; voice in, 108 Bele Tolanz en ses chambres seoit, 100-101,1067, 109-10, in, 116, 232-33^ 4 BeleTsabel, 119,121, 237n. 42 Bele Tsabiauz, pucele bien aprise, 64, 232-33^ 4, 235n. 21, 237n. 39, 238n. 47 Belenky, Mary, 24on. 12 Bellamy, James, 225n. 20 belle dame sans merci, 145 Beltrami, Pietro G., 23on. 21 Beltran, Vincente, 228n. i, 23on. 15 Bennett, Judith M., 168, 191, 192, 253n. 29, 255nn. 8, 10, 15 Bennewitz, Ingrid, 2i4n. 59, 25on. 7, 253n. 26 Benton, John R, 241 n. 17 Beowulf, 17, 40, 42, 44, 2i4n. i, 2i7n. 30 Bernal de Bonaval, 232n. 34 Bernart de Ventadorn, 61,138, 143, 144, 243n. 39, 245n. 64; 248n. 21 Bertran de Born, 51 bescheiden, bescheidenliche, 171,182-83. See also scheiden Bianca de' Medici, 59 Bible: hair in, 84; Jewish music in, 223-24n. 5; malmariee theme in, 75; Song of Songs, 7— 8, 19, 75, 21 in. 23; women musicians in, 67; and WulfandEadwacer, 41 Bieris de Romans, 131 Blakeslee, Merritt, 26, 242n. 29, 243nn. 43, 48 Blamires, Alcuin, 253nn. 30, 31 Bloch, Howard, 128 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 62-63, 222n. 78 body, woman's, 84-86, 115-16, 179-80, 2293on. n, 237n. 40 BorTey, Julia, 254n. 4 Bogin, Meg, 128, 131-33, 151,154, 24on. 13, 244n.54, 248n. 26 Bolton, Whitney R, 2i7n. 22 Bonse, Billee, 22on. 22

265

Bossy, Michel-Andre, 24in. 19 Boulton, Maureen, 106, 22inn. 40,48, 54, 56, 222nn. 75-76, 235nn. 19, 23 Boutiere, Jean, 24in. 20, 245n. 62 Bowra, Maurice, 23 Bradley, Henry, 2i7n. 29 Bragg, Lois Maria, 2i7n. 26, 2i8n. 36 Brann, Ross, 226nn. 52-54 Brea Lopez, Mercedes, 228n. i, 229n. 3 brial, 88 Brook, G. L., 258n. 38 Brown, Howard Mayer, 222nn. 62, 68 Brownbill, J., 255n. 12 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn: on Castelloza, 245n. 65; on chansons de toile, 236n. 35; on Comtessa de Dia, 248n. 27; on female voice, 190, 243n. 39; on lyric, 233n. 9, 244n. 59; on the trobairitz, 8, 71, 77 Burggraf von Rietenburg, 248n. 24 Burnett, Ann, 17 Burns, E. Jane, 200, 234n. n, 236n. 32, 237n. 38, 243n. 42, 252n. 16 Cabelos, los meus cabelos (Johan Zorro), 12, 21, 84 Cadenet, 64 Cadiz, girls of, 24-25 Cambridge Son0s (Carmina Cantabripfiensia), 7-8,19, 207nn. 31, 32, 21 in. 24 Cameron, A., 2ion. 16 camisa, 87-88 Can vei la lauteza mover (Bernart de Ventadorn), 138 Canitz, Christa, 2i2n. 35 cansos: and Castelloza, 145-49; and Comtessa de Dia, 140-43; and female voice, 61,137; thegilos in, 23; and tensos, 135-36; and the trobairitz, 8-9, 138, 2o8n. 38, 243n. 48; as woman's song, 134, 137, 232n. i Cansos de Trobairitz (recording), 52, 64, 79 cantigas de ami0o: vs. cantigas de amor, 12, 8182; characteristics of, 4, 12-13, 72, 81-82, 98, 23on. 13; clothing in, 86-88; confidantes in, 95-98; depiction of female in, 72-73, 81-86, 89-93; andkharjas, 21, 77; and male desire, 72; mothers in, 21, 72, 9395; origin of, 24; recordings of, 64; and Sappho, 21; vs. trobairitz, 72-73; as woman's song, 4, 69, 72, 81 cantigas de amor: and canso, 12; depiction of

266

Index

women in, 81-82, 89, 23 in. 24; green eyes in, 23on. 15; voice in, 81 cantigas d'escamho e maldizer, 72, 73, 75, 89, 229-3on. n, Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso X), 67-68 cantigas de tear, 23on. 14 Capitulare Generate Anni 789. See Carolingian edict of a.d. 789 Carenza, 131 Carmina Burana, 6-7, 2O7n. 31 Carmina Cantabrigiensia. See Cambridge Songs caroles. See rondets de carole Carolingian edict of A.D. 789, 6, 25, 49, 2i4n. 52 carols, 187-89 Cartlidge, Neil, 2O9n. 52, 253n. i, 256nn. 17, 26 Caspi, Mishael, 78, 227nn. 65, 67 Castelloza: in Bogin's edition, 132; and the canso, 8; and Comtessa de Dia, 137-38,143, 150; corpus of, 244-45^ 60; discussion of, 143-50, 244n. 55; and Guilhem IX, 24in. 19; as trobairitz, 131; and women singers, 233n. 9, 245n. 63. Works: Amies, s'ie.us trobes avinen, 143,145-49; la de ehantar non degra avertalan, 143,144, i^9',Mout avetzfaich loncestatge, 144,147,149, 245n. 66; Perioi que d'amor m^avegna, 145, 245n. 64 Catullus, 26 cauda, 144,146 cavallier, 137,140,162 censorship, 25, 49, 55, 207n. 31 Chambers, Frank, 132, 2osn. 7, 233-34^ 9, 242n.33 Chance, Jane, 46 Chansonnier de Saint-Germain-des-Pres, 102 chansonniers, 133 chansons d*ami, 3,4,10,133,134, 232n. i chansons d'aventure, 256n. 24 chansons de croisade, 11-12 chansons de delaissee, 4, 6 chansons de departie, 4 chansons defemme\ definition of, i, 3-4; and gender, 134,136,137,141; history of term, 2O9n. i; recordings of, 64 chansons degeste, 54,128, 236n. 35 chansons de malmariee: A Ventrada as, 9-10; and chansons de toile, 232-33n. 4; emotions in, 61; examples of, 9-10; and fidelity, 235n.

19; recordings of, 64; and trobairitz corpus, *33, !34; variants of, 75, 238n. 47; as woman's song, 3, 133, 232n. i chansons de toile: active/passive women in, 109-12,117-20,125-26, 238n. 48; characteristics of, 4, n, 102-3,105,106, 119-20; clothes in, 115-16; depiction of women in, 99-126; in Guillaume deDole, 53-54; mothers and daughters in, 112-15; physical abuse in, 120-25; recordings of, 64; speaker in, 106-8; vs. trouvere lyric, 101,109, 235n. 26; vs. trobairitz, 23611. 34; as woman's song, 3,4,53-54,101-3, 133; work and desire in, 100,117. See also under poem titles Chanteraipor mon corage, 71 Chastoiment des Dames, 53 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 22, 254n. 2 Cherchi, Paolo, 2O5n. 7 Chetrit, Yosef, 225n. 21 Chevalier au Lion (Chretien de Troyes), 56 Cheyette, Fredric L., 24on. 16; and Margaret Switten, 51, 52, 22onn. 20, 23, 26, 34 Chickering, Howell, 239n. 3 Child, Francis James, 257n. 27 children, 71-72, 73, 74, 255n. 15 Chretien de Troyes, 53, 56 Christine de Pisan, 28, 81, 186, 2i4n. 62 Chrysostom, St. John, 67, 209n. 4 Cidade, Hernani, 72 cinta, 86-87 Citron, Marcia, 2i9n. 5 City of God (St. Augustine), 24, 2i2n. 43 Cixous, Helene, 106,126 Clara d'Anduza, 131 Clark, Elaine, 255-56^ 15 class, social, 4-5, 54-55, 58-60, 88-89, 19293, 194, 196 Clemoes, Peter, 39, 2i8nn. 35, 39 clerks: as authors, 190; as elite, 254n. 2; interests of, 199, 204; as John or Jack, 198, 257n. 31; in Ladd Tthe daunce, 187; resistance to, 200; as seducers, 189,197; and women, 6-7 Clinchy, Blythe, 24on. 12 clothing, women's, 86-88,115, 122-23, 201, 238nn. 51-52 coblas, 52; doblas, 138; singulars, 142 Coello, Pilar, 224-25n. 19 Cohen, Judith R., 223n. 4, 224n. 8, 225n. 35, 226-27n. 56, 227n. 68, 228nn. 72, 75 Coindetasui, 9,241-42n. 25,242n. 35,243n. 46

Index Coldwell, Maria, 21911. 7, 22onn. 33, 35, 22in. 43 Compiuta Donzella of Florence, 12 composers, of music, 50, 59-60, 60-61, 62, 69 Comtessa de Dia: in Bogin's edition, 132; and thccanso, 8; and Castelloza, 137-38,143; critical discussion of, 154; and depiction of female, 71, 74, 77,162-63, 163-64, 165, 249n. 32; and Guilhem IX, 24in. 19; and Heroides, 26; identification of, 225n. 23; and love service, 153; and musical notation, 223n. 2; names in, 244n. 49; and Raimbaut d'Aurenga, 244n. 54; and Raimon d'Agout, 246n. 3; recordings of, 64-65; vs. Reinmar, 160,161-62,165,166-67; subject/object position in, 138-43, 243n. 46; and/mftv, 132; as a trobairitz, 131; and troubadour poetry, 160-61, 162; vocabulary, analysis of, 244n. 51. Works: A chantar m'er de so qu'ieu novolria, 8, 51, 77,140-43,163-64.', Abioi etab ioven m'apais, 64,138-40,162, 2o8n. 37, 243n.