Three—
Song Sheets and Song Books

Arnaut, Gioglaret, and Individual Song Sheets

The troubadours' own comments have given us a picture of the first phase of transmission that differs sharply from Gustav Gröber's hypothesis that troubadour songs were first "published" in the form of Liederblätter —individual song sheets. In order to reevaluate this traditional theory of written transmission, I would like to return to the story (razo ) that recounts how Arnaut Daniel "got possession of" the song "Anc yeu non l'aic . . ." (see above, pp. 47–48) and to examine Gröber's analysis of it (1887, 337–338).

This razo has long been considered key evidence to be accounted for in any hypothesis on how the troubadours composed, learned, and performed their works. It is central to Gröber's theory of transmission, too, since for him it verifies the use of writing in composition and so substantiates his idea of autograph Liederblätter as the original components of later anthologies. Since this theory still shapes modern scholars' assumptions, both in editing troubadour "texts" and in interpreting them, his treatment of the razo is well worth examining in some depth.

Gröber concludes, in his discussion of the razo, that Arnaut and the jongleur were expected to write their poems on a carta . Weak links in his argument, however, reveal that the evidence in fact favors the opposite inference. First, Gröber asks what would be the good of locking the poets into separate rooms, if they meant to compose in their heads. More pertinent, I think, is to ask what would be the good of separate rooms if they meant to compose silently. One can conceal "little strips of parchment covered over" more easily than one can muffle a voice that tests its rhymes aloud. 

Second, Gröber claims that the song could not have been "given" to Arnaut, unless we assume that the king "gave" some tangible object, namely "a sheet of parchment" (em Pergamentblatt ). Yet the inclusion of the song in Arnaut's canon suggests that, for the author of the razo at least, Arnaut was awarded authorship of the poem and was not merely given a copy. He had no need of a parchment copy in any case, since he knew the song by heart already.

Third, and most important, we should reexamine the anonymous stanza Gröber adduces to show the troubadours' awareness of the usefulness of writing. Actually preserved in two stanzas, the song "Gioglaret, when you pass by" (P.-C. 461, 142) tends to sabotage rather than corroborate the idea of poets' reliance on written records. I cite both preserved coblas, which are found only in MS P:

Gioglaret quant passarez
Garda no moill ta cappa uerz
Qe fols fora si noi lai derz
Ceu darre un moi descle
Sen carta qen teregle
Poi scriver una tal cobla
Sun daqist moti non si dubla.

Ben es sauis e sel e serz
Qe son castel bast dinz e derz
Sqe dedinz nol prenda en grez
El sera belle el dintegle
Si qe nuils non lintegle
Qieu non prez una carobla
Terra qi dauol genz pobla.
        (Stengel 1872, 282)

Gioglaret, when you pass by, be careful not to get your green
cape wet, for you would be crazy not to elevate it in that place;
I would give a barrel [muid;  dry measure, 1,872 livres] of rye
if, on a page which in you I rule, I could write such a stanza
that not one of these rhymes is duplicated.

That man is very wise and discreet and certain who builds
his castle thick and strong so that the violent do not capture
him within, and [builds] the buttresses beautifully, and the bat-
tlements, so that no one may carve into it. For I do not think it

is worth a carob bean, a piece of land which is populated with
poor society.

The carta (page) mentioned here may have been brought into the literal from the metaphorical realm by Gröber's emendation alone. Line 5, "S'en carta q'en te regle," makes sense as it stands in the manuscript; Gröber's "S'en carta qu'eu te regle" (on the page which I rule for you ) implies that the jongleur, despite his difficulties in keeping his cape out of the mud, can carry safely with him on his travels a sheet of neatly lined parchment from which to read during his performances. I see no reason to reject the line in the manuscript, which means with its context, "if I can write, on a page which in you I mark with lines, such a cobla that not one of these rhymes will be duplicated." It makes sense as a conceit, the jongleur's memory being compared to a blank page, freshly ruled and ready for a neat "inscription." If writing alone sufficed to prevent "doubling," then why "such a cobla" (tal cobla )? It would make no difference qualis est, unless some danger that the jongleur might "double the rhymes" lay in certain kinds of composition. The monumentalist metaphor of the second stanza, then—describing the poem as a fortress—specifies a program for "tal cobla": he envisions a kind of verse that can, through inherently sturdy "construction," withstand the assaults of the common throng.

The poet's doubt of his ability to write such a cobla in the carta of the jongleur's mind may be justified by the topos of the jongleur's ineptitude as a diplomat, representing the poet: he gets his clothes dirty, abuses the host's hospitality by eating and drinking too much, and then, when the time comes for him to perform, he bungles his lines.^[1]Carta is also a measure of capacity, and the poet may be hinting at the jongleur's prodigious thirst, with all his talk of barrels and quarts (moi, Fr. muid, v. 3; carta, v. 4).

Neither the metaphorical carta of Gioglaret nor the "transfer of ownership" of a song to Arnaut Daniel provides very substantial evidence for the existence of the autograph parchment song sheets that Gröber supposed to be the original components from which derive all copies preserved in the anthologies. The next step in Gröber's theory maintains that some poets collected these Liederblätter containing their own individual poems and compiled autograph songbooks, the better to preserve their work for posterity. Again, the evidence for these individual authors' manuscripts should be reevaluated in the light of new knowledge about the transmission of troubadour poetry. 

At least one poet made a private collection of his own works. Giraut Riquer, significantly the "last of the troubadours," left a "book" of poems recorded in chronological order, noting the dates of their composition—perhaps even the explanatory notes are his own. Even in such a book, the written record bows to the sung performance: there are detailed instructions for joining the words to the tune when the poet's plan departs from normal practice.

Canson redonda & encadenada de motz e de son d'en Gr.' Riquier, facha
l'an m.cc.lxxx.ij. en abril. E·1 sos de la segonda cobla pren se el mieg de la
primeira e sec tro en la fin, pueys torna la comensamen de la primeira e
fenis en la mieija de la primeira aissi quon es senhat; pueys tota la cansos
canta se aissij: la primeira e la tersa e la quinta d'una maneira, e la quarta e
la sexta d'autra maneira. Ez  aquesta cansos es la xxiiij. (MS  C )^[2]

A song by En Giraut Riquer that is both round and enchained both in
words and in music, composed in the year 1282 in April. And the music of
the second stanza takes up in the middle of the first stanza and follows
through to the end, then returns to the beginning of the first and ends in
the middle of the first, just as it is notated; then the whole song is sung
thus: the first and the third and the fifth in one way, and the fourth and the
sixth another way. And this song is number twenty-four.

We also have evidence of poets making anthologies of the works of others—Ferrari de Ferrara, Uc de St-Circ, and Miquel de la Tor all at least tried their hand at composing original verse. But all of these writers lived in the second half of the thirteenth century, and efforts to trace "authors' manuscripts" for poets composing before 1250 have relied heavily on Gröber's theoretical model for the compilation of anthologies, for lack of more straightforward evidence.

Raimbaut d'Aurenga makes one allusion to "his book," assuring us at least that a collection of poetry like his was not inconceivable:

Mas aura ni plueja ni gel
no·m tengran plus que·l gen temps nou
s'auzes desplejar mos libres
de fagz d'amor ab digz escurs.
        (R d'Aur 10, 10–14)

But neither wind nor rain nor ice will hold me more than the
fine spring weather, if I dared unfold my book of deeds of love
in obscure language.^[3 ]

In the context of the poem, the passage serves as an announcement that Raimbaut does not intend to sing of love. To "unfold his book" would be to bring out his repertory of the topoi suited to love, the furled book holding in storage the resources of his artistic imagination. Since "digz escurs" is a stylistic term from a poetics Raimbaut sometimes supported, its presence lessens the likelihood that the poet meant us to imagine a "book of amorous deeds" in another genre—a romance, for example, or "the book that never lies," Ovid's Ars amatoria .^[4] Rather, in "desplejar mos libres / de fagz d'amor ab digz escurs " Raimbaut envisions an alternative, erotic development for this poem: its Natureingang, full of dreary weather, does not preclude a love poem. A libres would be a scroll, like the ones on which the poets wrote in the miniatures, and it is remarkable that Raimbaut conceives of the déroulement of a song as analogous to the unrolling of a scroll: the metaphor makes a striking identification of the verse itself and its parchment record. Nevertheless, Walter T. Pattison (1969), Raimbaut's modern editor, shows that even when one uses Gustav Gröber's method to analyze the sequence of Raimbaut's poetry in the chansonniers, one finds no trace of an author's collection.

Because it would be so exciting to discover traces of an "author's manuscript," more than one claim has been put forward that does not hold up. For example, François Zufferey (1987, 232–233) deflates the hypothesis offered by Martín de Riquer that chansonnier V included an authorial Liederbuch assembled by Pons de la Guardia. The Catalan manuscript contains a section copied by R. de Capellades, whose name designates a place only three kilometers from where Pons's patroness made her home at Cabrera.

Peire Vidal's "Book": Sequence by Chance or by Design?

D'Arco Silvio Avalle (1960) has concluded that for Peire Vidal's surviving works, one branch of the manuscript tradition derives from the author's own collection. To reach this theory, Avalle analyzes the relationships among manuscripts largely by the method invented by Gröber: by comparing the sequences of songs in the chansonniers, one finds series and pairs of songs grouped in similar or "scrambled" order in two or more manuscripts. Such similarities among pairs of manuscripts form networks of latent "similarities" among several manuscripts; on this basis, Gröber's method permits Avalle to speculate about the written descent of 

song collections and to reconstruct an "original" grouping of Peire's poems. Avalle then brings evidence from textual criticism, the comparison of variants, to support his reconstruction.

One problem with this method is that the groups of manuscripts found to present the poems in similar orders do not correspond to the stemmata constructed for individual poems; furthermore, the stemmata vary from poem to poem within a single poet's work.

If Avalle is right, then writing offered little safety from the transposition of stanzas in transmission: 56 percent of Peire Vidal's songs show stanzaic transposition. But the evidence for Peire's songbook is much more subtle than the evidence for Giraut Riquer's, and can be elicited only by means of very complicated editorial procedures.^[5] Traditional textual criticism presupposes a single original, which the editor must try to reconstruct as nearly as possible; in effect, the method itself assumes that an author's manuscript once existed.^[6] Since no geometry can prove its own postulates, we should examine the validity of using textual criticism to reconstruct and then attest the existence of "il libro del Vidal."

Available methods for identifying Liederbücher take too much for granted. To accept the use of Gröber's method to "reconstruct" an individual songbook, we must assume a high degree of literalism in copying. Surely a literalist principle strong enough to leave clear marks of manuscript filiation should have tended to stabilize the works of poets who compiled their own collections. Medieval scribes knew how to copy one word after the other; they generally maintained verbatim fidelity to sacred texts. If they could just as reverently preserve a sequence of vernacular poems, why not a sequence of stanzas or of lines?

The traces of an "authorized collection" discovered by Avalle in the works of Peire Vidal do not correspond to outstanding textual stability. If we assume a purely written transmission, so literal that nineteen of Peire's poems were copied mechanically enough to mark the lineage not only of individual texts but of sequences from an authorized canon as well, then how do we explain the high rate of version production in Peire's corpus?^[7] Why would the codice antico contain two poems not by Peire Vidal (P.-C. 344,4 and 70,3)?^[8] Would an "authorized" source of written descent give immunity from stanzaic transposition to the nineteen poems of the codice antico? If writing were viewed as a way to stabilize one's poems, why would Peire, seeing the opportunity to immortalize his words and desiring to do so, limit his selection to sixteen poems in the archetype? Could he, if he collected fewer than half of the surviving songs at- 

tributed to him, have intended to monumentalize one group of poems and still allow others to be transferred during his lifetime?

A count of the variations among manuscripts in their order of strophes, for the sixteen poems of the "archetipo" (i–xvi in Avalle's edition), shows that fewer than half resisted stanzaic transposition, and only one escaped both transposition and abridgment:

The "author's manuscript," if one existed, clearly failed to stabilize the order of stanzas. Still less did it guarantee that all of the stanzas of a given poem would be included in all manuscript versions (nor did it control which stanzas would be omitted in abridgments).

Several branches of Avalle's stemma must have gone back much earlier than the codice antico,^[9] and rival versions may have been known to Peire Vidal; the poet died sometime after 1204, his late travels taking him to some of the countries where manuscripts were made (i.e., Italy and Spain). Avalle's stemma postulates five written "editions" prior to MSS I and K, copied in the mid-thirteenth century.^[10] Yet there may not have been time for Peire's "authorized text" to erode gradually through the inadvertent errors of the scriptorium. We may conjecture about the time it took to prepare and execute an anthology (analogous to the modern book's time "in press") from the making of the Catalan chansonnier of Venice (V ): the original collection contains no poem composed much later than 1200, since the compiler includes nothing newer than Arnaut Daniel's works, and yet the explicit is dated May 31, 1268 (Frank 1949, 234–237). If the compiler had been interested in updating the texts of the poems he had selected, he would probably also have updated the selection itself, including more recent work. 

The five "manuscripts" predating I and K in Avalle's stemmata might easily have been people and not Liederblätter or Liedersammlungen: a jongleur with his repertory is much more mobile, more susceptible to local influence and style, freer to experiment with the interplay of words and music, than is the sedentary scribe with his quill and ink and issemple .

The system Avalle uses for tracking down "il libro del Vidal" places great faith in coincidence. When one compares even random selections of poems, the laws of probability strongly favor the occurrence of matching pairs, triplets, and longer series—particularly if series with gaps or substitutions are considered to "match."^[11] This fact tends to discount the method invented by Gustav Gröber for establishing genetic relationships among manuscripts that share such sequences: although two long, identical series of numbers will rarely be drawn by chance from a limited pool, the chances are extremely high for "scrambled series" or groups sharing several inverted pairs.

Avalle's application of textual criticism to describe the manuscript tradition of Peire Vidal's poetry and to guess its history is so cohesive and minutely detailed that it can be extremely convincing: the evidence from Gröber's method supports the evidence from Lachmann's, and vice versa. Still, even with such an impressive work of scholarship, we should be cautious. In order to demonstrate the applicability of this type of textual criticism, Avalle must apply it extensively, and along with this circular reasoning there is also great danger of selecting the evidence to fit the model.

For example, Avalle's principal reason for believing that Peire Vidal himself compiled the original book from which the archetype would derive is that the manuscripts' sequences tend to suggest a chronological order of presentation for poems in the archetype. Textual criticism had isolated several common errors which indicated that the archetype was copied from a copy "contraddistinto in alcum luoghi da un ductus fortemente individualizzato, non calligrafico" (counterdistinguished in certain places by a strongly individualized, noncalligraphic ductus; p. xxxvii). One may well ask what Avalle means by "a noncalligraphic ductus"—a written source such as a jongleur's copy, or "foul papers" of some sort, or an oral source? Avalle continues:

For this reason one may justly ask oneself if this copy were not in fact edited by the poet himself with the intention of grouping in chronological order a part of his production. How else can one explain the indisputably 

exceptional fact that a lover of Provençal poetry was capable of arranging, with such chronological exactness, such a substantial number of songs, especially when we consider that the medieval lyric anthologies were put together on the basis of criteria of a strictly formal type. (p. xxxvii)

Avalle's Table VI (p. xxxvi) shows that of the first sixteen poems in his edition, MS A presents ten in the roughly chronological order chosen by the editor—though not without intermediate poems that disrupt the chronology. If we discount the undatable poems from the sequence, A has only seven poems in this chronological order:^[12]

The main Peire Vidal collection in chansonnier A, nos. 268–292, could easily have placed certain of its poems in chronological order simply by chance. But Avalle sees strong circumstantial evidence: "Obvious is the conclusion that the results which obtain impose themselves, so to speak, in a peremptory manner: the original order in which these songs were arranged in the 'archetype' is that, well or badly preserved, of A " (pp. xxxvi–xxxvii). The conclusion that A reflects even dimly an original order is not so obvious if we consider not only the tenuous basis on which these poems are dated but also the fact that other chansonniers may give the poems in orders that, by coincidence, are also well within the bounds of establishable chronological order and yet contradict the chronology A would lead us to suppose. Compare, for example, the placement of poems viii and iv in A and in N:^[13]

We look for authenticity of all kinds in MS A because it is an "excellent" manuscript: it is old, neat, and ample, and Karl Bartsch (who first assigned the sigla ) had cause to give it primacy in his alphabetical rating. But is its chronology really more "exact" and "conspicuous" than that of N? We find coincidence where we seek it. The above table shows that N may be credited with having preserved a chronological sequence that could not have derived from the hypothetical codice antico . Since its sequence includes poems outside the sixteen singled out by Avalle as an "author's book," the chronology in N challenges two of Avalle's assumptions. First, it must make us doubt that only an author could be "capable of arranging, with such chronological exactness, such a substantial number of songs." Second, it must make us doubt that A 's superior chronology can lend support to Avalle's reconstruction of a manuscript lineage descending from an autograph copy that consisted only of poems numbered i–xvi in his edition.

The evidence for Thibaut de Champagne having compiled his own author's anthology includes the fact that his songs "appear in almost exactly the same order in nearly every manuscript" (Huot 1987, 66). This trouvère, as king of Navarre and a descendent of Guilhem IX, had both the resources and the motivation from "family pride" to preserve his poems in a book. We are a long way from this degree of stability with Peire Vidal.

The Songbook as Literary Property

When Walter T. Pattison determined that there was no trace of an autograph songbook in the manuscript sequences of Raimbaut d'Aurenga's poetry, he took Gröber's method as a point of departure. In his view, his findings support Gröber's theory of the individual songbook by helping to establish a terminus a quo for the presumed chronological trend toward writing. Pattison also suggests that Raimbaut's neglect of writing may reflect on the probable social standing and wealth, as well as on the literary self-consciousness and "carefulness," of poets who would be likely to collect their own works:

Gröber believes that the custom of preparing individual songbooks was prevalent toward the end of the period in which the troubadour art flourished, when the poets had become more self-conscious with respect to their fame. The first two generations of troubadours, especially those of noble 

rank, were much more careless about their literary reputation and the preservation of their works. The evidence from Raimbaut's works seems to prove that there was no individual songbook in his case. (1969, 232)

For several reasons, the default of evidence for Raimbaut's writing a songbook does not work constructively to show that later, poorer, or more "careful" poets did write songbooks. That prestige and wealth make people "careless," like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy, is a novelistic rather than a historical principle. Nor can we safely conclude that the failure to make an autograph songbook, as evidenced by the diversity of the manuscript tradition, reflects disregard for "their literary reputation and the preservation of their works." Few poets were more self-conscious than Raimbaut, and he seems if anything to exercise closer control over the distribution of his songs than did his humbler contemporaries.^[14] Finally, as the evidence discussed in the next chapter will indicate, it is not true that the poets gradually became more successful in preserving their works.

To associate the author's proprietary interest in his creation with the manufacture of books is too modern an impulse: must Raimbaut, as a "man of property," therefore have had no need to secure "literary property"? Raimbaut's castles were almost all pawned, in any case. Most troubadours were not men of property (Köhler 1962); moreover, the persona of the poet/lover in troubadour poetry identifies itself strongly with the artisan rather than with the landlord.

And what might the troubadours' conception of literary property have been? Could the written document alone have constituted a "product" convertible into income for the literary artisan, as Gröber's analysis of Arnaut Daniel's razo suggests? We might also ask seriously to what type of landed property the troubadours might have compared "literary property," should the analogy occur to them at all: was a poem a fief or an allodium? Was it an inalienable possession or merely an honor entrusted to one's temporary care? The symbolic "territory" of authorship seems to have been as transferable as a fief, or even more so, since the troubadours witnessed a rapid expansion in the use of money, "the mobile form of property par excellence " (R. H. Bloch 1981, 956). The poets' comparison of poetry with currency becomes explicit in discussions of trobar clus (see Chapter 6).

Whether or not they made literary castles for lack of the real thing, poets of humble rank are even less likely than noblemen to have made songbooks; even having acquired the luxury of an alphabet and the lei- 

sure to apply it, poor poets would still face the high cost of parchment. Granted, among "the first two generations of troubadours," Marcabru did succeed in leaving a large body of work compared with the small poetic legacy of the Counts of Poitou and Blaye. Yet his contemporary, Cercamon, who must also have depended on his literary reputation to make a living (if we can trust the vida and speculate on his use of a professional name), seems to have been no more "careful" than titled poets: only seven poems remain to attest to any reputation at all.^[15]

Rigaut de Berbezilh had no noble title: he belonged to a family of overseers during the decline of its prestige and fortune (Lejeune 1957, 1962). If he tried to preserve his songs by making a book, then writing did him little good—six of his nine surviving songs show transposition of stanzas. Further, in the case of the song "Si co·l solilhs per sa nobla clardat . . ." (337,1), imitation shades into adaptation so subtly that one wonders whether a transfer of literary property took place. Attributed by C and a to Peire de Cols, and by f to Rigaut, the poem is so like Rigaut's work that the best argument against his authorship is the improbability of self-imitation. Várvaro speculates that perhaps a song of Rigaut's, "with a few modifications, might have been made the property of some jongleur, who might have been Peire de Cols" (1960, 244). It is conceivable that Rigaut made the song and then gave it away—perhaps not as finished verse but in its "skeletal form": a conception, a scheme, rhymed ideas and images recognizable as Rigaut's, a few perfect lines, the rest perfectible. The very idea is unsettling to modern readers accustomed to copyright and the sanctity of the poet's original text. But whether the song was given, sold, or stolen, the "deed and title" to it appear to have changed hands.

As I have shown, the theory of the writing troubadour has its firmest adherents among modern scholars. The troubadours themselves discuss composition and circulation as a matter for the memory, the intelligence, and the voice. When they speak of writing, they treat it as a curiosity or as a metaphor, not as a necessity for the transmission of their songs.

The evidence I have brought forth thus far, both from the transmitters and from the poets, depends on the interpretation of the poets' own words—texts made doubtful by the very process of transmission they describe. The poets' statements about poetry also have to be considered within their rhetorical contexts: when a poet commends his song to a jongleur, for example, there is always the possibility that said jongleur is there for fictive or conventional reasons and not because, at the historical moment of composition, the poet needed a jongleur. Bernart de Ven- 

tadorn's tornada beginning "Garsio, now sing my song for me . . ." could even, conceivably, have been the jongleur's own "signature" to his performance, rather than the poet's "original" instructions to him. The modern reader will feel the need for some way of gauging the degree to which the transmitters, singing or writing, changed songs. How much of a given song, as the text(s) come down to us, can be attributed to "the poet"? Unfortunately, performers and scribes masquerading as "the poet" can easily blur the distinction between their contributions and the "original." Even the painstaking discernment of various dialect traits in a work can be misleading: once we have discovered several contributors, which one is the poet? Is it not typical of medieval scribes (and perhaps of performers as well) to mix dialectal variants within a single work? By throwing out variants from dialects not the poet's own, we risk throwing out the poet's "original" words as preserved in another dialect in favor of "revisions" created by someone else in the poet's own dialect. Furthermore, the poets' own frequent acceptance of variants created by performers other than themselves helps to defeat, by rendering pointless within a twelfth-century context, the search for "the original."

In Part Two of this book I will approach the questions treated here from a very different perspective, to see what can be learned from the external "facts" about the way songs have actually come down to us. How many copies? Attributed to whom? In what metrical form? In what variety of stanzaic sequences? These are the physical results, the circumstantial evidence in which the mode of transmission has left its traces. The conclusions reached here—that twelfth-century troubadours did not produce "author's manuscripts"; that their songs were reproduced and circulated in performance rather than on "parchment leaves"; and that if some troubadours were more likely than others to regard their work as "literary property" or as "fixed texts," it was neither their social class nor their ability to write that made them so—can thus be tested against an objective analysis of the "end products" of transmission.