Traditional arguments for oral performance of Old French narrative have generally been based either on indications within the texts themselves or on pictorial representations of reading scenes in miniatures which show a reader with a book in front of a listening audience. It would be perverse indeed to deny that the recitation, from memory or from the manuscript page, of Chrétien de Troyes's romances or the chansons de geste was a primary form of communication for the texts, although I believe that even at a very early stage individual reading was more common than is usually thought.

If it is true that the manufacture of illuminated manuscripts of vernacular narrative with miniature, rubric, and a growing complexity of mise en page (I am here thinking of such elements as tituli or rubrics and sub-division headings, tables of contents, etc.) argues forcefully for individual reading as an increasingly important mode of reception from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, this does not mean that the oral mode immediately became extinct when the first illuminated manuscript appeared. Nor—and this is more important—does it mean that the illuminated manuscript was used only for individual reading. As texts are copied for centuries after their date of composition, so manuscripts change hands and can be put to different uses by subsequent owners.

Scholars have an endearing and irritating tendency to oversimplify such matters and discard what little commonsense they might have. It is, crudely put, most implausible to assume that individual reading put oral performers out of regular gigs overnight or indeed that the rise of the vernacular manuscript sent the improvisers of oral verse running to the dole queue, as it were. I have no desire here to revive the old debate about the “manuscrit de jongleur” or the minstrel-manuscript as it is called in English, although I shall try to argue shortly that certain aspects of certain manuscripts may indicate initial possession in the ranks of professional readers. What is indubitably true, however, is that not all smallformat, unillustrated manuscripts of vernacular verse, made of poor-quality materials (the type in fact usually called “manuscrits de jongleur”), are early copies. On the contrary, some are as late as the mid-fourteenth century and continue to be produced well after various more luxurious formats become established.