In two remarkable images in London, BL MS Harley 4431, the manuscript Christine de Pizan produced between 1410 and 1415 for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of the French king Charles VI, Christine depicts two circles of women readers: one real and one ideal.

Although Christine de Pizan often describes herself as a solitary reader, in the frontispiece to Harley 4431, fol. 3r, we see her in the Queen's bedchamber, kneeling in a deeply respectful attitude before her intended readers, Isabeau of France and her circle of six ladies, whose relative status is indicated by their position, size, coifs, and the degree of luxury of their clothing (fig. 1).

The Queen's chamber itself is fully depicted, from the red and green rafters that frame the gold barrel-vaulted ceiling to the wall-hangings of tapestries adorned with the royal fleur de lys, to the open windows where lattices show sunlight and suggest a breeze, to the heraldic bedcover and tester of the splendid bed to the right, and finally to the figured carpet that lies along the lower margin of the image.

Reading has not yet begun in the frontispiece. In the center foreground, Christine is recognizable in her “uniform,” a blue houppelande [long gown]and white cornette [two-horned headdress]. She holds out her large, gilt-edged book whose clasps hold a richly decorated velvet binding. Before her, the Queen, wearing a crown-like bourrelet [a padded, heart-shaped headdress] and an embroidered houppelande with flowing, ermine-lined sleeves, is seated on a long couch, her little dog perched on its arm. A greyhound, lying to the lower right with his muzzle on his front paws, completes the atmosphere of quiet stillness. The moment is important. the ceremony of book presentation is fully realized, yet intimate. Reading has begun in the second image under consideration (fig. 2), an illustration of chapter 23 of Christine's Epistre Othea copied in Harley 4431,4 a book-length letter of moral advice and spiritual teachings for knights, addressed to the young prince Hector of Troy. Against the richly diapered background of a space that is both more abstract and even more exalted than that of the frontispiece, the goddess Diana leans comfortably over her cloud as she reads with seven women.

It has been my extraordinary good fortune to have been Timmie Vitz's partner in medieval studies throughout our entire career at New York University, starting in 1968. It was my privilege to follow her leadership in our many shared enterprises including the NYU College of Arts and Science Medieval and R enaissance Studies Program (where I served as Director after she stepped down in 1992), our ongoing Colloquium in Orality, Writing, and Culture (started in 1987), and our two-year series of workshops on Storytelling in Performance in history, law, literature, music and medicine (2004–06). Together, we worked with remarkable students, including the three editors of this volume, Kathryn Duys, Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate.

Villon and storytelling have been constants in the wonderful collegiality we have shared. Timmie led the way with her landmark book, The Crossroad of Intentions; my last course was the exciting Villon seminar we co-taught in 2009. I offer Timmie one more round of Villon and storytelling with deep affection and appreciation.

Voice is central to poetry: it establishes tone, style, theme and often genre through a poetic speaker, who may not necessarily have a particular social identity and who may tell stories but not necessarily have a story. Story, in contrast, requires characterization and action. Story clothes speakers in a social garb and engages them in encounters and conflicts. In story, features of a speaker's voice become an attribute of character.

Medieval authors and readers were fascinated by the relation between poetry and stories. From the thirteenth century on, lyrics were often compiled in narrative settings: songs were inserted into romances; short biographical fictions were invented to account for troubadour songs; Dante, Froissart and Machaut wrote first-person stories to frame out their own lyrics. Villon, however, did not create a narrative setting for the nineteen ballades and rondeaux he set into his Testament, a discursive poem or dit of 186 huitains (eight-line stanzas) dated to 1461. Moreover, unlike Dante's Vita Nuova or Machaut's Livre du Voir Dit, Villon's framing poem makes no attempt to account for the composition or form of the inserted lyric pieces. They are simply ‘there’ as lines that continue the speaker's thoughts or as objects that he ‘gives’ in this mock will, such as Villon's ballades for his mother (ll. 873–909), for his cruel lady love (ll. 942–69), or for Grosse Margot in her whorehouse (ll. 1591–627).

It is a pleasure to offer Matilda Bruckner this article on Richard de Fournival's delightful Bestiaire d'amours, to honor our forty-year friendship, and to reflect her own interest in animal/human connections expressed in her “Of Men and Beasts in Bisclavret” (1991), continued with her piece on “Beasts” for the 2005 Boston College exhibit Secular/Sacred, and most recently made manifest in the series of events that she organized at Boston College in the fall of 2011 under the rubric, “Animals and the Medieval Imagination.”

Courtliness

Courtliness is a style defined initially in the latter part of the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century by literary works and associated social practices and performances (the rise of heraldry and tournaments, the production of illustrated manuscripts of vernacular literature). It emerges first in particular aristocratic milieux such as the royal court of Anglo-Norman England, the aristocratic courts of Occitania, Champagne, and Flanders, and then spreads to Paris and France (as well as Italy, Spain, Germany, and Crusader kingdoms to the East) – spectacularly in thirteenth-century Arras – and eventually also to wealthy cities such as Metz in Lorraine, an independent Francophone city within the German Empire during the later Middle Ages.

Among the questions raised by the title, Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, I have chosen one: how could the formal features of medieval French love lyrics and their contextualization in a material book be used to shape knowledge for a particular community of readers? One of the primary functions of verse in the vernacular works of the French Middle Ages (beyond the representation of the speaking voice) is to present knowledge, information and learning as moral wisdom. Paradoxically, medieval French love lyrics are not governed by the signifying practices of verse. Although they express moral judgments about their particular subject – opposing bone amor to felonie – medieval French love lyrics are courtly performance pieces most deeply expressive of technê, of knowledge as art rather than as learning, political wisdom, or spiritual truth. There are, of course, citations in vernacular motets which dig deep into written learning, yielding ‘seemingly endless layers of meaning’. But the impact of monophonic French love lyrics depends principally on their intense effect of psychological sincerity and their flaunting of poetic form rather than on allusions to learned, religious or classical traditions of knowledge.

As the courtly lyric enters into writing in the later thirteenth and the fourteenth century, however, the material book serves as a powerful technology for remotivating the vernacular lyric in new contexts through patterns of compilation that open the way for the love lyric to express high visions of knowledge as moral wisdom. Book compilation provides a change of footing for vernacular song, a shift of frame that could alter its significance. This is a period of extraordinary experimentation in ways poets and compilers could arrange lyrics in books in order to express moral knowledge. Notable examples include Dante's Convivio (c.1307) where the poet's love lyrics are embedded in philosophical commentary in Italian prose. Teodolinda Barolini shows how in Petrarch's Rime sparse (1327) the spiritual themes in the lyrics themselves are sustained by the compilational order of the canzioniere so that the material sequence of love lyrics marks out a moral progression towards conversion. Anne Walters Robertson uncovers the ‘schemes and patterns’ of Machaut's cycle of motets 1–19 (composed in the 1320s), where the interplay of citation and sequential order leads to a mystical scens.

This scene, which opens Chrétien de Troyes's romance Le chevalier au lion (Yvain), is a striking medieval depiction of a narrative in performance. It tells us much about the content and purpose of this moment of storytelling. It displays a courtly entertainment performed here by one member of an elegant group of knights and ladies; the story is intended to touch the valiant heart of its hearers. Yet the artist who illustrated the key episodes of Le chevalier au lion so richly in Paris, BnF MS Fr. 1433 passes over Calogrenant's performance before the assembly of knights and ladies, beginning rather with his combat with Esclados. These miniatures show not the telling, but the tale.

In like manner, modern critics have often yielded to the illusion of direct access to medieval narrative. They have tended to look right through evidence of medieval and contemporary performances of narrative to focus on the texts of the tales themselves as they were transmitted in writing. It is true that scholars have long recognized the significance of certain types of narrative performance. Medieval epics in Britain, Scandinavia, France, and elsewhere, are known to have been sung from memory by professional performers who accompanied themselves on a stringed instrument such as a harp or a vielle.

The experience of performance

The essays in this book inspire new appreciation of the art of the medieval storyteller. They show how stories are brought into performance from manuscripts, and from a common fund of narrative motifs and storytelling practices. While several of the articles encourage readers to imagine performance of works now received in writing, the essays by contemporary performers go even further. They show how live performances can be reconstructed from manuscripts, from surviving narrative and musical practices, and from instruments depicted in medieval images or long buried underground; they bring us into the world of professional artists as they tell a tale before an audience. These essays awaken the desire for the experience of performance itself.

To enable readers to view medieval narratives in actual performance, we have created a website—Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase. The website illustrates and complements the essays in this volume with video clips of recent performances by students, scholars, and professional artists (including Azéma, Bagby, and Zaerr, contributors to this book). The clips provide examples of many works discussed in these pages, such as Beowulf, Celtic stories, chivalric romances, pious tales, stories of Renart, and fabliaux. They represent several genres, periods, and languages, and demonstrate a broad range of performance styles and strategies. The website also offers clips of performances of narratives that are analogous to medieval works (such as contemporary epics from Egypt and Turkey); these clips, recorded by anthropologists and historians of performance, suggest how similar medieval narratives might have been performed.

Readers of the essays in this volume may use its companion website to further their appreciation of medieval narrative in performance. Experiencing narratives through performance enables readers to consider these works through different faculties and senses: to see performers’ bodies in motion, hear their voices and instruments, and witness audience response. As the studies in this book demonstrate, medieval narratives were not conceived to be read only privately and silently, which is our norm today; they invited and were intended for performance.

Evelyn Birge Vitz

Nancy Freeman Regalado

Marilyn Lawrence

Although Arthurian romances were popular in the Middle Ages, few records depict actual circumstances of their performance. Le roman du Hem, which presents itself as an eyewitness account of a tournament at Le Hem in 1278, is therefore an invaluable document, for it describes five interludes based on characters and motifs of Arthurian romance. These interludes are entertainments presented during the festive banquet and at intervals between the jousts. In them, storytelling shifts towards dramatic enactments where those attending the tournament play scenes derived from Arthurian romance. There are allusions to Arthurian themes in tournaments beginning in the early thirteenth century. Le roman du Hem, however, provides that which we lack for much of medieval performance of narrative: a richly detailed description of circumstances and contents of performance and the responses of participants and spectators.

Le roman du Hem is a romance-length poem of some 4600 verses composed in 1278 by a poet named Sarrasin. Sarrasin says his book was commissioned by “la roïne Genievre” (line 373) [Queen Guinevere], referring to the sister of Aubert de Longueval, the lord whose domains lay near Le Hem and who organized the tournament with his neighbor Huart de Bazentin. It is one of the first known examples of the French festival books written to commemorate courtly celebrations in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also (with Jacques Bretel's Tournoi de Chauvency of 1285) one of the earliest extended accounts of a historical chivalric festivity in France, although descriptions of tournaments are common features of romances.

Le roman du Hem narrates the events of a tournament which included jousting (running courses to break lances) but not the kind of open-field mêlée encounter between two sword-wielding teams that was prohibited at that time by the French king. It was held on the feast of Saint Denis, 8–10 October, 1278 at Le Hem in Picardy, a tiny village on the Somme River, which was the scene of fierce fighting in the First World War. Now fishermen sit quietly along a bend in the river next to fields which must have been filled with the tents, horses, wagons, and households of the hundreds of persons who rode across northeastern France and Flanders to participate in three days of jousting and feasting.