Abstract
The Miracles de Nostre Dame (1214–1236) by Gautier de Coinci, a Benedictine monk from Northern France,1 is one of the most celebrated collections of medieval Marian miracle tales in a vernacular language. It is unusual because it contains songs, that is, musical compositions, as well as stories.2 Both a lyric and a narrative poet, Gautier draws upon several rich traditions. The position he stakes out with reference to these traditions determines his authorial stance and the nature of his enterprise. As is well known, Gautier’s attitude toward these traditions is both favorable and critical: he writes with Latin miracle stories, hymns, and chants and against “courtly” narrative and lyric genres, demonstrating extensive knowledge of secular and sacred works and a determined effort to “convert” secular sources to sacred use. I focus here on basic techniques Gautier uses to achieve his goals. Foremost among these are borrowing and citation. Borrowing has often been mentioned with respect to Gautier, frequently with negative undertones, particularly with regard to the music. But Gautier does not merely borrow. He takes material at hand and boldly transforms it into something else: he transfers Latin into the vernacular; he cleverly manipulates the melodic borrowing known as contrafactum; he develops his arguments by citation and allusion. By reevaluating these techniques of transformation, I hope to provide a better understanding not only of how Gautier reaches his goal of “conversion,” but also of how he uses borrowing and citation to define authorship within his text.3
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Notes
Gautier de Coinci was born in 1177 or 1178. When he was fifteen or sixteen years old, he became a monk in Saint Médard, a royal Benedictine abbey in Soissons, in northeastern France. In 1214 he become prior of Vic-sur-Aisne, a tiny priory established in 1194. Ten years later he left to become grand prior of Saint Médard, where he died in 1236. See Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci, ed. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1966–70), introduction, pp. xviii–xxx for the life of Gautier.
I will be emphasizing particularly the textual construction of an author, a concept that cannot be treated in full here. For general consideration of authorship in contexts not wholly unlike Gautier’s, see David Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 25–64;
Emma Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the “Roman de Fauvel” (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 3; and the article by Kevin Brownlee also on the Roman de Fauvel, a text which, though later, also combines lyric and narrative, “Authorial Self-Representation and Literary Models in the Roman de Fauvel,” in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 73–103.
The vividness of Gautier’s poetic persona is brought out in David A. Flory, Marian Representations in the Miracle Tales of Thirteenth-Century Spain and France (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), ch. 3; and the lyric persona (with no significant reference to music) is characterized by Anna Drzewicka, “Le Livre ou la voix: le moi poétique dans les Miracles de Notre Dame de Gautier de Coinci,” Le Moyen Age 96 (1990): 33–51.
The most complete study of Gautier’s work including some aspects of borrowing and citation in the songs is Kathryn A. Duys, “Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in the ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame’ of Gautier de Coinci” (PhD diss., New York University, 1997).
Several studies have addressed the question of borrowing and conversion, particularly from “courtly” to sacred, but they do not specifically examine borrowing as a technique of authorial representation: Paule V. Bétérous, Les Collections de miracles de la Vierge en gallo et ihéro-roman au XIIIe siècle. Etude comparée: thèmes et structures, Marian Library Studies 13–14, (Dayton, Ohio: University of Dayton, 1983–1984), pp. 347–74 and 408–421;
Anna Drzewicka, “La Fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci,” Le Moyen Age 91 (1985): 33–51 and 179–200;
William Calin, “On the Nature of Christian Poetry: From the Courtly to the Sacred and the Functioning of Contrafactum in Gautier de Coinci,” in Studia in honorem prof. M. de Riquer, 4 vols. (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1988) 3: 385–394;
Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch 6;
Tony Hunt, “‘Monachus curialis’. Gautier de Coinci and courtoisie,” in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, ed. Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 2002), pp. 121–135;
Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris: PUF, 2003), pp. 219–227.
Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci, ed. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1966–1970). All references to Gautier’s Miracles will be to that edition. Translation of medieval texts into English have been made by Virginie Greene and Margaret Switten. Koenig lists the parts of the Miracles using three criteria: Roman numerals I and II refer to Gautier’s books I and II; abbreviations such as “Pr,” “Ch,” or “Mir” refer to the type of composition; and the Arabic numerals list all items of one book in sequential order. Thus I Pr 1 is the first Prologue of the first book; I ch. 3 is a song, the third item of book I; I Mir 11 is a miracle story, the eleventh item of book I.
The music has been edited by Jacques Chailley, Les chansons à la Vierge de Gautier de Coinci (Paris: Heugel, 1959). Chailley discusses the various manuscript traditions for the music.
The basic study of Gautier manuscripts remains that of Ariette P. Ducrot-Granderye, Etude sur les miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci (Ann. Acad. Scient. Fenn., B-XXV, 1932, repr. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1980). A detailed review of all of the Gautier manuscripts and a detailed study of the structure of the Miracles may be found in Duys, “Books Shaped by Song.”
Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, traduction et présentation par Emmanuèle Baumgartner (Paris: Union générale d’éditions [10/18], 1987).
On the image of the writer in Benoît de Sainte-Maure, see Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Sur quelques constantes et variations de l’image de l’écrivain (XIIe–XIIIe siècle),” in Auctor & Auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, Actes du colloque de Saint-Quentin-en Yvelines (14–16 June, 1990), ed. Michel Zimmerman (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 2001), p. 395 [391–401].
Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Charles Méla and Olivier Collet (Paris: Livre de poche “Lettres gothiques,” 1994).
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du graal, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de poche “Lettres gothiques,” 1990).
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette ou Le Roman de Lancelot, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de poche “Lettres gothiques,” 1992).
Michel Zink, “La dédicace du Chevalier de la charrette et les transferts de l’inspiration,” in “Ce est li fruis selonc la letre,” Mélanges offerts à Charles Méla, ed. Olivier Collet, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Sylviane Messerli (Paris: Champion, 2002), pp. 591–600.
Zink, “La dédicace,” p. 600. The religious work dedicated to Marie de Champagne, a French commentary on Psalm 44 (Eructavit), is analyzed in Morgan Powell, “Translating Scripture for Ma Dame de Champagne: The Old French Paraphrase of Psalm 44 (Eructavit),” in The Vernacular Spirit, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 83–103.
Le Roman de Renart, ed. Jean Dufournet et Andrée Méline, 2 vols. (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1985), 1:308.
Carl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn, Seine Lieder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1915), p. 208, “Pois preyatz me seignor,” ll. 50–51.
See Uberto Malazia, “Gautier de Coinci e la chanson medievale,” Quaderni de filologia e lingue romanze 3:2 (1987): 64 [61–75].
The specific meaning of the term contrafactum is difficult to pin down. The article on contrafactum in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians points out that the difference between “strict” and “free” contrafactum is not always entirely clear (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 2nd edition [London: Macmillan, 2001]). Nevertheless, the statement that Gautier’s poems are set to pre-existent melodies always seems to suggest mere borrowing on his part. For example, Tony Hunt writes: “… [Gautier] seems not to have been the composer of his own melodies, all the transmitted melodies with his chansons being contrafacta of existing melodies” (“‘Monachus curialis,’“ in Courtly Literature, p. 124). In his New Grove article on Gautier, Robert Falck, while fully recognizing the borrowing, does assert that Gautier composed some melodies: “Gautier was, however, no mere musical parodist: a number of the songs that are certainly by him are set to melodies elsewhere unknown;
most notable, perhaps, is the very beautiful strophic lai Roine celestre” (Robert Falck, “Gautier de Coincy” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy [Accessed November 27, 2003], http://www.grovemusic.com). It is my argument that the very act of borrowing can be considered “original composition” in medieval terms.
John W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. xii. Baldwin’s dating is based on historical and political contexts.
In his edition of Renart’s Rose, Félix Lecoy argues for a later date, ca. 1228 (Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy Paris: Champion, 1979], p. viii). For this question and fuller comparison of Jean Renart and Gautier de Coinci, see Duys, “Books Shaped by Song,”p. 74 and Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France, pp. 105–106. All references to Jean Renart in this essay will be to the Lecoy edition.
Although the idea of “new song” can be found in many contexts from the Psalms to our own day, it is a concept that particularly defines a new burst of song activity at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century in both secular (troubadours) and sacred (a new type of Latin song frequently designated “versus” in Aquitanian sources) domains. The versus are monastic songs that deal frequently with the Virgin. It has been argued that these versus also “provided opportunities for individual expression” and bespoke, already in the twelfth century, a new worldliness, characteristics not wholly unlike Gautier’s thirteenth-century undertaking (see James Grier, “A New Voice in the Monastery: Tropes and Versus from Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Aquitaine,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1069 [1023–1069]). Jacques Chailley has noted that before Gautier, “comme chansons mariales on ne connaissait que les versus et les conduits latins,” (Les Chansons, p. 20). Gautier certainly knew the conductus; whether he knew the earlier Marian monastic songs cannot be ascertained, but it is tempting to think that, as a monastic writer himself, he might have been aware of an effort so like his own to create new songs from within the monastery. For a discussion of how Gautier might have renewed the Chant,
see Uberto Malazia, “Gautier de Coinci: la voluntá di rinnovare la musica lirica ne ‘Les Miracles de Nostre Dame,’” in La Lengua y la literatura en tiempos de Alfonso X, ed. Fernanco Carmona and Francisco J. Flores (Múrcia: Universidad de Múrcia, 1985), pp. 319–332, and “Intorno al lessico tecnico-musicale ne Les Miracles de Nostre Dame di Gautier de Coinci,” Actes du XVIIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, ed. Dieter Kremer, 7 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 6: 408 [405–417], as well as
Dominique Colombani, “La Liturgie dans les Miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci,” Mosaic 12 (1979): 41 [33–54].
“Lai” here and elsewhere in Gautier means “song” in general. Olivier Collet, Glossaire et Index critique des oeuvres d’attribution certaine de Gautier de Coinci (Geneva: Droz, 2000), p. 297.
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Switten, M. (2006). Borrowing, Citation, and Authorship in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame. In: Greene, V. (eds) The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983459_3
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