Abstract
Love, in the music and literature of late medieval France, was often depicted as a game.1 Its portrayal was at times pastoral and openly sexual, often secretive and painful; it was a game seldom won. In motet 267 of the Montpellier Codex (henceforth abbreviated to mo), for example, we find the life of a deceitful lover described as being “like a well-stocked game preserve: one can hunt there, but catch nothing at all;”2 in Mo101, Love is described as having taught the lover his games, while in Mo119 the “game of love” is a metaphor for lovemaking. Indeed, French literary culture in broader terms was itself rooted in the idea of games and play, since the authors of literature and music existed in a milieu of debate and exchange.
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Notes
The Montpellier Codex, ed. H. Tischler, 4 vols. (Madison: A-R Editions, 1978). Montpellier motets will henceforth be designated by “Mo” plus their number in Tischler. Translations from the Montpellier Codex are by Susan Stakel in The Montpellier Codex, vol. 4.
For a deeper analysis of the development of the medieval motet, see Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts, “Motet I,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn., 29 vols. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 17:190-202
Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Sylvia Huot. Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 10-11.
Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 52
Lawrence Earp, “Lyrics for Reading and Lyrics for Singing in Late Medieval France: The Development of the Dance Lyric from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut,” in The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, ed. Rebecca A. Baltzer, Thomas Cable, and James I. Wimsatt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p.102.
Christopher Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2:1 (1993): 36 [17-41].
See, for example, Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Benjamin Albritton, “Citation and Allusion in the Lays of Guillaume de Machaut,” PhD diss. (University of Washington, 2009)
Tamsyn Rose-Steel, “French Ars Nova Motets and Their Manuscripts: Citational Play and Material Context,” PhD diss. (University of Exeter, 2011).
See, for example, Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. Fritz Hopman (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2009), p. 68.
Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 51.
Jane Taylor also explores the public nature of poetic exchange: “Unfamiliar though the concept may seem in our society, in which poetry is still figured as the inward and intensely personal exploration of the self, late-medieval poetry… operates in a participatory culture of mutually reinforcing rhetorics, existing in a particular social and ideological milieu.” The Poetry of François Villon. Text and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 7.
Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, and Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1950), pp. 179-80.
See Andrew Cowell, At Play in the Tavern. Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 14-53, where he discusses the culture of hospitality, which dictated that nobles were duty bound to provide lodging for each other. The church was also a key provider of free hospitality for travellers. As these traditional systems became strained, taverns, which operated for profit rather than out of charity or tradition, began to spring up.
This motet appears as a three-part piece in the Bamberg MS without the triplum line and with the tenor retaining its liturgical designation. Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 115 (olim Ed. IV. 6.), ed. Gordon A. Anderson, trans. R. E. Smith, (Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, 1977). There is also a version in MS W2 that is lacking the quadruplum line and has a different triplum text and the French-texted tenor.
This became particularly in vogue as a poetic trope in the fifteenth century but was a technique already known to the troubadours in the twelfth- and thirteenth centuries. For an account of the later development of the technique, see Stanford University’s “Renaissance Body Project,” Renaissance Body Project, accessed August 9, 2012, http://www.Stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/cgi-bin/rbp/?q=image/term/49.
Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 107-50.
For a more detailed discussion on Gautier de Coinci’s use of the chess queen and how the metaphor is able to conflate “Mary’s active and passive roles in God’s Providence,” see Steven M. Taylor, “God’s Queen: Chess Imagery in the Poetry of Gautier de Coinci,” Fifteenth Century Studies 17 (1990): 403-19.
See Rose-Steel, “French Ars Nova Motets,” pp. 62-3, and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990).
See, for example, Evrart de Conty’s Les Eschez Amoureux, in which he depicts two lovers playing chess in the Garden of Pleasure. Les Eschéz d’Amours: A Critical Edition of the Poem and Its Latin Glosses, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan and Gregory Heyworth (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Stanley Galpin, “Les eschez amoureux: A complete synopsis with unpublished extracts,” Romanic Review 11 (1920): 283-307.
Chess also becomes an allegory for life and a tool for preaching: at the end of the thirteenth century, Jacobus de Cessolis gave a number of sermons based on chess. He drew moral lessons from a fictionalised account of the game’s invention, the status and hierarchy of the pieces, and the way in which they moved. Jacques de Cessoles, Le Jeu des Eschaz Moralisé, ed. Alain Collet, trans. Jean Ferron (Paris: Champion, 1999).
For a discussion linking this lady to Agnès of Navarre, see Alice V. Clark, “Concordare cum Materia: The Tenor in the Fourteenth-Century Motet” PhD diss. (Princeton University, 1996). See also, Rose-Steel, “French Ars Nova Motets,” pp. 215-23.
See, for example, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), ll.527-50.
Mark Everist, “Motets, French Tenors, and the Polyphonic Chanson ca. 1300,” The Journal of Musicology 24.3 (2007): 365-406
Christopher Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation,” in Plainsong and Medieval Music 2 (1993): 17-41.
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “Compositional Procedure in the Four-Part Isorhythmic Works of Philippe de Vitry and his Contemporaries,” PhD Diss. (Churchill College, Cambridge, 1982), p. 22.
Page, Discarding Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Chapters 2 and 3.
See Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100-1300 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1987), pp. 12-17.
Jacques Bretel, Le Tournoi de Chauvency, ed. Maurice Delbouille (Paris: Libraire E. Droz, 1932).
Jacques Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and Their Function in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 20 (2001): 36 [1-86].
See, for example, Carolyn L. Dinshaw, “Dice Games and Other Games in Le Jeu de saint Nicolas,” PMLA, 95.5 (1980): 804 [802-11].
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© 2015 Serina Patterson
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Rose-Steel, T. (2015). Church, Court, and Tavern: Games and Social Hierarchy in Some Medieval Motets. In: Patterson, S. (eds) Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_6
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