By Joseph W. Mason

What can modern performance tell us about medieval music? The answer: quite a lot, but not in the ways we might expect.

Musicologists have been arguing on and off for several decades about how music sounded in the Middle Ages, and how we should perform medieval music today. In the second half of the twentieth century, performers of early music grew increasingly interested in what musicologists call ‘historically informed performance’. HIP, as it is often informally called, is an umbrella term for performance practices that try to reconstruct (or, even, recreate) the way that music sounded in the past.

Much excellent scholarship and performances is being carried out today in the field of HIP, yielding rich and interesting insights into the musical past. But since the 1990s, some musicologists have voiced their scepticism about HIP. The basic problem shared by performers and musicologists is the ephemerality of sound: we can never really know how music sounded in the past because the sound of medieval music has not persisted to the modern day. We have notated manuscripts for medieval music, historical instruments, and written accounts of musical performances from the past, but all of these sources require a modern person, a mediator, to create sound from them. There can be no direct access to past sounds: there are always several layers of mediation. This problem forms the starting point for Richard Taruskin’s provocative claim that historical performance ‘is in fact the most modern style around’ (Taruskin, ‘The pastness of the present’, p. 102).

All of this leaves modern performers and scholars on very shaky ground indeed. Of course, there is nothing wrong with performing medieval music however we want. Performers are beholden to no one and certainly do not need to feel obliged to follow the supposed intentions of a long-dead composer or the imagined experience of past listeners. However, if modern performances of medieval music have little to do with the way that music sounded in the past, modern performance cannot be used as a reliable basis for the study of medieval music. For this reason, historical musicologists have tended to use written documents as the foundation for their work.

The modern performance of medieval music does have its uses, though. Apart from the fact that modern audiences might gain pleasure from listening to performances of medieval music, the act of performance can stimulate new questions and discussion. As Christopher Page puts it, ‘innovative or challenging performances can… disturb a wide range of preconceptions that we may unwittingly hold about the interest and scope of a repertory’ (Page, Discarding Images, p. xx). With the aim of stimulating fresh discussion about medieval music, a group of musicologists gathered in June 2019 to investigate some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century songs and motets by experimenting with different approaches to performance. The workshop culminated in a public lecture-recital in New College antechapel. (The full performance can be viewed here.)

For all of the songs that we discussed, the written sources leave many aspects of performance to be decided by the performer. In the following song, for example, the manuscript tells us the pitches of the melody and the order in which to sing them. We’re also shown the words for the first verse, and which syllables go with which notes.

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Français 846. (A facsimile of the whole source can be found here.)

But performers are faced with a host of other questions. What rhythm does this melody have? Should the rhythm follow a fixed pattern of alternating long and short notes (what theorists described as rhythmic modes) or should the rhythm be freer and related to the emphasis patterns of the text? The source also tells us nothing about the number of singers who should sing this. Was this song intended for a solo voice (the text is in the first person) or could we imagine more than one singer performing this melody? Was there some kind of accompaniment, either by other singers or by instruments such as the vielle or gittern? What should such an accompaniment consist of, should it stay the same for every verse, and how might the accompaniment be used to reflect the meaning of the song’s poetry? The presence or absence of an accompaniment might also affect whether certain notes need to be raised or lowered (what performers colloquially and sometimes inaccurately refer to as ‘ficta’). All of these questions offer opportunities for investigating medieval song, to challenge our assumptions about these repertories and to think afresh about how they might have been conceived and received.

Blondel de Nesle, Mes cuer me fait conmencier (RS 1269)

Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach introduces Mes cuer me fait conmencier.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=utlMbi65Yvo%3Fstart%3D30

Most trouvère love songs have only one poetic voice, who sings in the first person. Most performances of trouvère love songs therefore involve a single singer, who might perform unaccompanied or with the accompaniment of a string instrument. Mes cuer me fait conmencier is unusual because the song speaks back to the poet in the third stanza. Should there be more than one singer in this song, given that there is more than one poetic voice? Things get more complicated in the fourth stanza, where the tone of the poetry becomes moralising and proverbial. Is this the poet’s voice, or the song’s? Or perhaps this is the true voice of the poet, and the previous stanzas were the poet ventriloquising a lover and a song?

To think about these different possibilities, we tried out two ways of performing the song. In the first version, Dr Matthew P. Thomson sings the words of the poet to accompaniment on the fiddle by Jacob Mariani. Thomson sings an English translation of the song, provided by Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach. When Thomson sends the song to the Lady, Mariani continues to play his accompaniment, as if surprised that the song is over so soon. Thomson looks angrily at Mariani, asking him (as the representation of the song) why he has not gone to the Lady yet. Mariani sings the song’s response to Thomson and then stops playing. Thomson sings the rest of the verse without accompaniment. The effect of this stanza is one of fragmentation. At the start of the song, there was a coherent musical unit consisting of poet-singer with accompaniment. We suspend our disbelief at the start of the song, since the poet speaks in the first-person singular, referring only to himself and not to a second performer. But as soon as the poet turns to his song, this illusion is fractured. The invisible presence of the accompanist becomes visible as Mariani sings and then stops playing. There is a sudden shift in the sound of the song in this third stanza, mirroring the sudden multiplication of poetic voices.

In the second version of Mes cuer me fait conmencier, Thomson sings the original Old French lyrics without instrumental accompaniment. Thomson sings the entire song himself, and to represent the different poetic voices, stages a conversation with himself. In the video below, you can see this as Thomson moves from one side (labelled ‘lover’s voice’) to the other (labelled ‘song’s voice’). Thomson sings the final stanza, where the moral message of the song is explained, in the voice of the song. I think what is particularly interesting about this performance is the way that the rhythm of the song is interrupted. I don’t mean whether notes are sung long or short—in both versions of the song, every syllable has the same duration. In the first version, Mariani replies without any delay. Compare that to Thomson’s performance in the second version: whenever Thomson takes on a different voice, there is a delay, a break in the flow of the song. Even though there is not the dramatic change of performer or instrumentation, there is a fragmentation of the melody.

You can find versions of the song in manuscripts M, T, C and P.

Gautier de Coinci, Pour mon chief reconforter (RS 885)

Dr Meghan P. Quinlan introduces Gautier de Coinci’s Pour mon chief reconforter here.

In our discussion of Gautier’s song we considered several aspects. Each stanza ends with a refrain in which the Blessed Virgin Mary is addressed directly. We decided that it might work well for the refrain to be sung by everyone present, not just the solo singer. This means that for listeners, the very long song (nine stanzas!) is periodically broken up by singing. In the video below, we all sang the refrain from written copies, but I think that after two or three times of hearing the refrain, we probably could have learned it well enough to join in at the end of each stanza. In between each version of the refrain, we listened to Gautier’s poetry, which is colourful in its use of metaphors and allegories. The refrain became a moment of gathering together, a return to something familiar as new layers of meaning and knowledge were added stanza by stanza. It was tempting to imagine that this is how the song could have been performed in the Middle Ages. We know that silent listening to music only became a widespread phenomenon in nineteenth-century concert culture; it is possible that medieval listeners joined in, called out or spoke during musical performances like Pour mon chief reconforter. In this performance, Quinlan sings the melody with a flexible triple-time meter, alternating between long and short units for each syllable. Jacob Mariani accompanies the song on the gittern, introducing each stanza with a short snippet of the melody.

Gautier liked to make his devotional songs from the melodies of pre-existent songs in a process known as contrafacture (literally ‘making (facere) against (contra)’). Two songs share their melody with Pour mon chief. The first is the anonymous conductus, Sol sub nube latuit. Conductus are Latin songs that were composed as early as the twelfth century. They can be monophonic (a single melodic line), or polyphonic, as in Sol sub nube latuit in the video below. Dr Anne Adele Levitsky sings the melody shared with Pour mon chief, while Quinlan sings in discant (note-against-note). The sources for Sol sub nube latuit do not specify the relative rhythmic values of pitches. Quinlan and Levitsky decided to realise the notation in a triple meter by alternating between long and short durations, deviating from this pattern where the text stress demanded it.

The third song in this melody group is Thibaut de Blaison’s Chanter et renvoisier sueil. In this performance, I sing the song in a conventional manner, without accompaniment and in free declamatory rhythm. This reflects the notation of the sources for the song, which gives information about the pitches of the melody, but not its rhythm. However, if Sol sub nube latuit was sung with a particular rhythm, does this mean that Chanter et renvoisier sueil should be too? The songs share a melody, and any singer who knew Sol sub nube latuit might find it difficult to imagine Chanter et renvoisier without rhythm. These questions can only be speculative however, as none of the sources for these songs indicates the rhythmic duration of pitches.

You can find the manuscript source for Pour mon chief here, manuscript versions of Sol sub nube in W1 and F (f. 354v), and versions of Chanter et renvoisier in K, N, O, P, V and X.

Gherardello da Firenze, Per non far lieto

Dr Mikhail Lopatin introduces Per non far lieto.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kUVgccvCxZ0

As Lopatin explains, Per non far lieto is an unusual ballata. Most ballatas are transmitted in songbooks with more than one voice, but for Per non far lieto the manuscript presents a single voice. Does this mean that the ballata was only ever performed monophonically, or was a second line added to it? Could a second line have been improvised to fit the surviving texted vocal line? These questions are unanswerable, but have a significant effect on the raising or lowering of certain pitches in the melody. In the fourteenth century, there were rules that governed the procedures for making two or more pitches sound together. Consonance was preferred, while dissonance could only be used in certain circumstances. Furthermore, points of harmonic closure had to be approached by particular intervals, which Sarah Fuller describes as the procedure of the ‘directed progression’ (Fuller, ‘On sonority in fourteenth-century polyphony’, p. 51). During our discussion of this song, we considered how a second line might be constructed for Per non far. We looked closely at the surviving melody, asking what tonal tendencies it seemed to suggest. We had a lively discussion about which notes might need to be altered in performance; the version performed by Lachlan Hughes (voice) and Jacob Mariani (lute) is just one possible solution (see video above).

Adam de la Halle Fi, mari, de vostre amour

Dr Catherine A. Bradley introduces Adam de la Halle’s rondeau Fi, mari, de vostre amour and its related motet.

As Bradley explains, the motet quotes one of the lines of Fi, mari in two places: this is relatively easy to see by comparing scores of the two pieces, since the text Fi, mari opens both the rondeau and the motet. In our discussions about these pieces, we asked whether the quotation went deeper than this. When we heard the motet and the rondeau being performed, certain sonic parallels between the pieces emerged. Listening to performances of the motet and rondeau provoked us to investigate in greater depth the way that the motet composer seemed to be referencing Adam’s rondeau. We considered the extent to which the motet composer quoted from the other lines in the rondeau, and whether they had also drawn inspiration from the harmonic language of the rondeau. We also asked ourselves how audible the quotation of the Fi, mari refrain was in the motet: while the quotation was clearly visible on the page, in the sonic context it became more difficult to identify. In the performance of the two pieces in the video above, I sing the rondeau melody on its own first, and am then joined by Dr Matthew P. Thomson and Lachlan Hughes for Adam’s full polyphonic setting. We then sing the motet. The source for Fi, mari can be found here; the source for Dame bele/Fi, mari/NUS N’IERT JA JOLIS can be viewed here and here.

The importance of performance

Throughout this workshop on the performance of medieval song, it was clear that the act of performing the repertories that we study made us think about them in different ways. By experimenting with different performance options, we had to challenge our assumptions about how these repertories work. Performance did not allow us to get under the skin of medieval musicians, whose experience of music we can never fully recover. But performing these songs did enable us to start thinking about the affective knowledge that medieval musicians might have experienced when singing or playing music. This workshop has shown the importance of performance in studying the music and literature of the Middle Ages. There is much that we do not and cannot know about medieval song, but performing such music enables us to look afresh at these rich and fascinating repertoires.

I extend special thanks to all of those who enabled this event: TORCH and the Ludwig Fund for their generous financial support; Nancy Jane-Rucker, Misha Brazier-Tope and Michael Burden for their assistance in organising the event; and the team at TORCH for help with publicity.

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Further reading

Fuller, Sarah. ‘On sonority in fourteenth-century polyphony: some preliminary reflections’. Journal of Music Theory 20/1 (1986): 35–70.

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

McGee, Timothy. Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

Page, Christopher. ‘Around the performance of a thirteenth-century motet’. Early Music 28/3 (2000): 343–357.

———. Discarding Images: Reflections on Medieval Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Taruskin, Richard. ‘The pastness of the present and the presence of the past’. In Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 90–154.

By Rebecca Menmuir and Eleanor Baker

Did you know that Magpie Lane in Oxford was originally called, excuse our language, Gropecunt Lane? Or that in 1355, a whopping sixty three scholars were killed by townspeople in a row that started over ale? How about the medieval anchoress (religious recluse) who lived in a small cell in a church off the beaten track in Iffley?

All of this and more was covered in the inaugural Oxford Medieval Church Crawl on Saturday 1st December – a tour of some of the medieval churches and holy spaces around the city of Oxford and surrounding villages. We are two DPhil English students – Rebecca, working on classical reception in late medieval poetry, and Eleanor, working on textual materiality in late medieval literature. In early Michaelmas term we floated the idea of a medieval church excursion to some interested medievalists, initially only half seriously (the promise of a mulled wine conclusion was a focal point), but the idea and event gained traction and took shape. We took to Twitter, mailing lists, TORCH, and eventually the tour was born – and on Saturday 1st December a small group visited five medieval churches, beginning in the city centre and then moving further afield.

The Crawl began at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, a church which arguably represents a genesis for the University of Oxford. Despite the light drizzle, spirits were high and we set off into St Mary’s, where a church has stood since 1086. The building of the congregation house, built around 1320, was used as a centre for university governance, teaching and graduations. The Old Library, too, was built to support the university’s teaching in 1320, but in 1488 these books were moved to Duke Humphrey’s Library – now part of the Bodleian Library. The space was used concurrently for academic lectures and church services until as late as 1420. Eleanor noted a consecration cross in the Chancel, and throughout the Church Crawl we saw many similar symbols.

The University Church’s website has a great page on the history and heritage of the Church: 

We visited St Edmund Hall next, where Professor Henrike Lӓhnemann gave a spectacular tour of the Norman crypt and church-turned-library (now deconsecrated, although the crypt remains consecrated). The crypt is still used for special events today such as Compline. The crypt is suffused with the weight of its medieval history, with its chilly stone atmosphere and crumbling carved symbols, the meaning of which we could only guess at in some cases. We were especially fortunate for Professor Lӓhnemann’s involvement, as she concluded the ‘Teddy Hall’ stop with warm mulled wine and homemade, festively spiced biscuits (described as an ‘absolute treat and delight’ by one of the attendees!).

From St Edmund Hall we walked to Christ Church, pausing at Magpie Lane, where Eleanor explained the history of the passage. The road was formerly called Grope, or Gropecunt Lane, and is listed as such in John Speed’s 1605 map. Its name denotes their use by female sex workers.  Many cities including York, London, Norwich, Bristol and Warwick had similarly named streets, most of which can still be found today. The names of these lanes were gradually erased and many now bear the name ‘Grove’ or ‘Grape’ lane.

Christ Church was equally interesting: a volunteer at the Cathedral, Christa Menmuir, gave us a tour of the medieval significance of the Cathedral. Just as the University Church of St Mary represents the genesis of the University, the site of Christ Church Cathedral can be seen as the starting point of life and worship in the city of Oxford. The Cathedral stands on the site of Frideswide’s Priory, the patron saint of Oxford. The Priory that Frideswide founded no longer exists, but Christ Church Cathedral contains many exemplary medieval features. Frideswide is thought to be buried somewhere beneath the Cathedral, and her tomb stands within the structure. The cloisters outside the Cathedral are part of the original Priory – and when the central plot was excavated, human remains from the eighth century were found. Christa also showed us the famous Becket window, which tells the story of Archbishop (and later Saint) Thomas Becket’s assassination within his own Cathedral, on a tumultuous night on 29^th December 1170. Becket’s face was removed so that the window might be spared King Henry VIII’s destruction, but in 1981 the clear pane of glass was replaced with a pink pane to refer to skin.

Christ Church has a webpage detailing the Becket window.

Our journey was then helped by a fleet of taxis, which bore us to St Mary’s Church in Iffley. The church here is a fascinating example of medieval architecture and a monument of life in the Middle Ages. An anchoress (religious recluse) named Annora, a high born widow, lived at St Mary’s between at least 1232 and 1241, and a thirteenth century grave slab still sits along the wall at the place where her cell would have been, between the yew tree and the chancel.

Visit the Church’s webpage for a detailed history of the Church and its architecture

From Iffley the taxis took us to our final stop: St Margaret’s Church, Binsey. The present church has a Norman foundation, although the majority of the church which stands today dates from the twelfth century. The most striking medieval feature is outside the church, in the form of Frideswide’s Well. In Frideswide’s hagiography, she flees a King who is pursuing her romantically, but is then struck blind for his sins. Frideswide’s prayers brought forth a healing spring, whose waters cured his blindness, and this spring became Frideswide’s Well at Binsey. This well also became a focus for local pilgrimage, and King Henry VIII is known to have visited.

Then finally – to the Perch pub, where we enjoyed a warm mulled cider, snacks and a well-deserved rest.

We were struck, both in our preparatory research and on the day, by the narrative threads which wound their way through our Medieval Church Crawl: Frideswide, the seventh century saint who founded a Priory at Christ Church and fled to Binsey; architectural echoes at St Edmund Hall and Iffley; and the sheer number of connections between churches in the form of fonts that moved home,  recurring medieval figures, and stained glass motifs.

The churches that we visited constitute a very small number of the medieval spaces around Oxford. Those that we could not visit we have incorporated into an interactive trail map, hosted by TORCH. Oxford Stories is an online, open access platform for exploring Oxford – watch this space for the Medieval Church Crawl map! You can see other fantastic trails here. 

The feedback from the event was extremely lovely – two attendees wrote:

“A short note to say a very big thank you for an absolutely splendid Medieval Church Crawl. We discovered the event on the TORCH website – and were delighted to find that it was open to all. Your brilliantly master-minded event was first class, whisking us back to medieval Oxford via perfectly selected buildings – encompassing the intertwined story of Town and Gown.

We appreciated the different ‘voices’, and the opportunity to see places not normally accessible to the public. We thought the thread of association with Frideswide a brilliant means of keeping all the information together. We shall keep the splendid trail hand-out as a wonderful souvenir of a special day. We are all very lucky that you created such a fabulous morning, so generous and thoughtful. Count us as your groupies, and converts to Medieval Oxford.”

Thank you to everyone who came! Further, thank you to the Oxford Medieval Society for kindly sponsoring the event, and TORCH for their support.

rebecca.menmuir@jesus.ox.ac.uk

eleanor.baker@sjc.ox.ac.uk

Week 1 MT Medieval Seminars

As a way to diversify both the contents of this blog and my interests, I attended professor Daron Burrows’ seminar on anthropomorphic genitalia in medieval French literature, back in first week of Michaelmas.

What?

Exactly that. Genitalia that are, if you may, well-endowed with human characteristics.

Dr Burrows’ discussion began with a reminder that the anthropomorphising of human sexual organs goes much further back than we’d think. In the famous sixteenth-century treaty of witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, for instance, witches are said to have detached penises, which then became animated on their own accord and had adventures of some kind. Instead of behaving like people, however, these loose members were rather more like pets; they even nested and were fed oats.

The subjects of Dr Burrows’ discussion, in addition to resembling archetypal characters of medieval romance to an uncomfortable degree, were a couple of centuries older; they belong in the Old French fabliaux, or short comic narratives written mostly by anonymous authors within the 12^thand 14^th centuries. One of their distinguishing and most remarkable features is their frank treatment of sex, which one wouldn’t find in courtly and (especially!) religious literature – but their obsession with sexual organs reaches such lengths that Dr Burrows referred to another academic’s suggestion that male genitalia, at least, is “treated like meat on display at a butchers.”

The texts to which Dr Burrows introduced us subvert that by turning the genitalia itself into their protagonists, becoming detached from the human body in five alternative ways.

The first one, “gaze”, refers to the narratorial focus on one of the characters’ genitalia, rather than on the character themselves. In Le Fevre de Creeil, for instance, the smith Gautier’s penis is spoken about in precise detail throughout an impressive twenty-nine lines, and receives more attention than both its bearer and the other protagonists. It is, if you may, described at great length. “Metaphor”, the second degree, occurs when the text uses metaphor and euphemism to separate the characters from their genitalia, as in La Damoisele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre. The third degree, “uncontrollability”, applies to texts where characters lose control of their sexual organs, as though possessing of their own. Priapism, Dr Burrows adds, “is the order of the day.” After uncontrollability comes “detachment”, a self-explanatory turn of events which is known to occur frequently to priests who have been castrated. The final degree of separation is “autonomy”, in which the sexual organs live autonomously as anthropomorphic entities, without anyone even suggesting that they were once—if ever—attached to someone.

Now that we know the five degrees of genital separation, Dr Burrows introduces his two case studies: Du vit et de la coille, and Do con, do vet et de la soriz; “Vit” and “Con” respectively. In Vit, a verse narrative consisting of 80 lines, a proudly sitting penis rides to a vagina’s rescue after she has been stolen away by two Bretons. Meanwhile, she is tossing hay in a field. The penis is eager to rescue her, but the testicles—who seem like a part of the sexual organ independent of the sexual organ itself!—give him a hard time and refuse. A storm begins to break and the penis asks the vagina to shelter him under the hay, which they’ve set aside in a pile, but she is reluctant to let the balls in because they were unhelpful earlier. This, Dr Burrows concludes, is sort of a twisted lesson that explains why the testicles cannot enter the vagina during intercourse. Con, of 124 lines, describes the adventure of an “impressively sized” penis, a very proud vagina, and their mouse companion. Like the previous protagonist, both penis and vagina engage in various agricultural and military activities; the vagina in particular is noted to be uncharacteristically chivalrous. They make their merry way into a town and are given jobs based on their respective skills by one of its inhabitants; somehow, the penis ends up thrusting the mouse and a handful of grapes inside the vagina. Luckily, the mouse quickly makes its way out: as it turns out, the bottom of the vagina is open. What these disparate narratives leave us with is ultimate genital autonomy.

How could we make sense of these stories? Dr Burrows suggests a number of readings:

• Comic: perhaps the first one to come to mind, since—unless you’re the prudish type—our immediate reaction is to laugh without thinking of what anything could mean. The comedic aspect of these narratives comes from the transgressive sexual content and language, and the disruptions of conditions of the human body. But could it point towards a more disturbing idea? Burrows suggests the possibility that they might reflect underlying anxieties about social change and sexual desire in their period of composition, as detailed by Peter Lombard and Augustine. Perhaps, for instance, the fanny acting like a knight in the presence of a brave cock reflected fears about women expressing their sexual thoughts.
• Genre: how were these fabliaux categorised in their period of composition, and how do we categorise them today? Because Vit and Con were not published until 1995 and 2001 respectively, it is an unfortunately likely possibility that scholars may have chosen to ignore them in fear of changing the way we currently understand and define the literary genre of the fabliaux. The consequences for scholars today are, for starters, that there is little material to support our study of these texts. The neglect these texts have suffered teaches scholars of all disciplines that it is crucial to examine primary sources carefully, even when we may assume everything about them has already been said.
• Intergeneric play with genre: what both the texts do by alluding to Brittany is parodying the matière de Bretagne—that is, material belonging to the Arthurian tradition. In Vit, the cock is modelled on the archetypal romance hero in search for adventures, with the balls dangling from his neck as both his shield and companion; the vagina plays the exquisitely shaped, desperate damsel in distress. The storm could be easily overlooked, but it provides an even more interesting example of intertextual play as its description is almost directly lifted from Chretien’sYvain. In Con, the role of the knight is inverted and played by the assertive vagina. The second genre being targeted here is the fable: “parodic engagement is underlined by misappropriation of the didactic structure of the fable”, Dr Burrows explains, clarifying thus the relationship between the vagina and the testicles. Finally, two contemporary genres are subjected to parody, albeit subtly: the epic—as evidenced by the siege mentality characteristic of both texts, as well as the vagina’s aforementioned knightly behaviour in Con—and the courtly, which actively avoids any mention of genitals in favour of politeness and elevated expressions of love.
• Generational: one of the benefits of featuring detached sexual organs as protagonists is that pregnancy cannot happen, regardless of how intimately they engage with each other. Fertility and fecundity, however, are still written into the tales in two forms: the penis’ tiredness once he comes out of the vagina is a clear allusion to ejaculation, and the agricultural setting—the tossing of hay by both the penis and vagina—are symbolic with the fertile outcome of the sowing of seed.
• Linguistic interest: The tossing of hay, as well as the shoving of hay into a pile, are both contemporary euphemisms for sex; in Vit, they provide the basis for the whole narrative. Normally, euphemisms and metaphor would allow speakers to refer to sex without using explicit language, but both narratives mock that need for discretion by having sexual organs as protagonists of stories that make literal use of said euphemisms.
• Gender: one might be tempted to call Con a “proto-feminist” tale—the vagina, after all, is the braver and more headstrong one in the unlikely trio—but it is much more likely portraying male anxieties about female sexuality than giving women some semblance of empowerment. The bottom of the vagina, Burrows paraphrased from Con, is said to be “so wide and deep that there is nothing in the whole world that if it fell would not perish as though in the salty sea”; the female body is as dangerous as it is alluring. But in addition to performing behaviour that one might consider [more] masculine, the vagina is formally addressed as “sire fanny”, which assuages rather than intensifies any male anxieties since the protagonist is engaging in a recognisably masculine role. In a parodical narrative where genitalia are doing as they please, detached from any men or women, they are no longer signifiers of gender; thus, the knightly vagina does not have to be interpreted as a symbol of feminine empowerment.

Besides having heard the words “cock” and “fanny” more than I ever have in my whole life, this fantastic seminar gave me the opportunity to think about how the way we decide to explore a text may affect the way future generations of scholars choose to work on them; and how, likewise, our curiosity about what we research should not be restricted to nor dictated by the secondary sources available to us. This seminar also reminded me of the importance of paying very careful attention to language, and to consider that in any text I research, there could be expressions or other complex forms of linguistic play that might enhance my understanding should I be savvy enough to spot them. I am thankful to Dr Burrows for the suggested strategies for readings of the two texts—of any text, whether they might be as disparate as these fabliaux or not—and for the many laughs shared from beginning to end of the seminar.

The Medieval French Research Seminar meets at the Maison Française on Tuesdays in odd weeks (refreshments from 17:00; papers starting at 17:15). The programme for MT2018 was as follows:

9 October 2018 (Week 1):      Daron Burrows (Oxford): ‘Une coille et un vit s’esmurent…: genital anthropomorphism and the aesthetics of transgression’

23 October 2018 (Week 3):    Miriam Cabré (Girona): ‘Wit, slander, flattery, propaganda: what’s behind troubadour moral poetry?’

6 November 2018 (Week 5): Rebecca Dixon (Liverpool)