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The Old French Ballette: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 (review)

Editions of medieval French poetry are like buses. For years there was no complete edition of Machaut’s masterpiece, theVoir Dit, then two came along within months of each other. As I started writing this review of an edition and translation of the balletes from Bodleian Library Douce 308, my earlier review of Mary Atchison’s diplomatic transcription of the complete lyrics from the same manuscript had recently appeared in Music & Letters (87 (2006), 416^20). Important in the context of the present review, therefore, will be a comparison between these two books, although the somewhat different remit of this collaborative edition will also be treated on its own terms. Atchison’s book contained all the lyrics from the so-called chansonnier section of the manuscript; The Old French Ballette has only the balletes, although these are arguably the most interesting genre section within the lyrics. Atchison’s expensive hardback was a diplomatic transcription with introductory essays about the manuscript’s scribes and copying.The Old French Ballette is a fat paperback and the work of three scholars: Eglal Doss-Quinby and Samuel N. Rosenberg have edited and translated the texts and provide the introduction; Elizabeth Aubrey has provided music and commentary, even though the manuscript itself contains no musical notation. The few songs that are given (partial) melodies have been supplied from concordances and will be discussed further below. For the poetry, the visual layout in accordance with an analysis of poetic structure, the inclusion of facing-page English translations, and a listing of variant readings from other sources makes The Old French Ballette, for the balletes at least, the more preferable edition of the two. But this volume is more than just an edition of these poems. The full introduction raises pertinent questions and offers new, up-to-date information. The manuscript itself was originally five books, bound together by a member of the Le Gournaix family in the fifteenth century. All parts of the whole originated in Lorraine, probably in Metz. Only ten songs have full text concordances elsewhere, and five of these are anomalous in form. Although this would seem to point to an isolated local repertory, there is much evidence that some of these songs were widely known (see below). Balletes’ refrains, whose musical aspects I will discuss later, occur in many other contexts, especially in the motets in the seventh fascicle of Montpellier and other works from the 1280s and the first two decades of the fourteenth century. The uncertain issue of dating is tackled in a very welcome manner (pp. liii^liv). The copying of all five books is placed in the first decade of the fourteenth century. The date 1309 is advanced as a terminus post quem for the chansonnier, or at least the jeux-partis, on the basis of historical evidence concerning some of their named protagonists. This proposal ties in with the composition of theVows of the Peacock around 1310 and an approximate dating for the miniatures in the manuscript in a forthcoming essay by Alison Stones, cited here in the footnotes (p. liii n. 44). The introduction contains a useful discussion of the problems of the lyric forms in the manuscript. Defining forms before the full elaboration of the so-called formes fixes much later in the century is problematic. Although they choose to spell it differently, the word ‘ballette’ (spelt ‘ballete’ in the source and most modern scholarship) is, as the editors point out,‘a hapax legomenon, attested only in the rubrics of the Oxford chansonnier, where it is applied, without definition or explanation, to a large and uncomfortably varied poetic corpus’ (p. xxvi). In particular, the placement of refrain repeats leaves some room for doubt when the scribes do not always cue each repetition in full, or, in certain cases, at all. To view this repertory without compensating for the distortions of hindsight is to understand these songs as prototypes of later kinds of lyrics. Too little understanding of their structure, however, results in a failure to analyse their structural types and an insensitivity to errors or underprescription in the scribal presentation of their repeating structures (as in Atchison’s transcriptions). The range and variety of forms is well summarized here by the editors (pp. xxvii^xxviii, and the extremely informative set of tables on pp. xci^cxxv). The balletes have one to six stanzas, with or without opening refrain. Where a refrain is present this is either a single repeated refrain or a set of variable post-strophic refrains, which can optionally be linked by rhyme or metre (p. xxvii). There are five of such latter chansons avec des refrains here, in all of which the refrains, which are syntactically independent of the stanza, tend to be announced at least once