294 Page
enjoyed by French speakers. Like other fundamentally “northern” sources of
troubadour material, then, the Chansonnier uses a lyric language for the trou-
badour material that has aspects of both French and Occitan but is truly nei-
ther: the original Occitan has been heavily Gallicised, while preserving original
elements, and even just “flavour”. In this way, these songs were made intelli-
gible to the French-speaking knights of the Morea. They would have been able
to follow most, though not all, of the lyrics of these songs while at the same
time the particular language used perhaps also conveyed to them a quality of
exotic strangeness.16
More unusually, the Chansonnier also includes a rich repertoire of two-
and three-voice motets and three lais. In this remarkable variety, then, the
Chansonnier presents as a rich summation of the dominant and (in the widest
sense) French lyric culture that had flowered over the previous two and a half
centuries. Moreover, with regard to its core content—the monophonic sung
repertoire of the troubadours and trouvères—the Chansonnier, like all of its
fellows, comes at the end of the culture that it celebrates and memorialises.17
Li Princes
In tune with the new individualism so much a part of the monophonic lyri-
cal tradition, most of the trouvère pieces in the Chansonnier are ascribed to
an author, and the contents are largely divided by author.18 Over 80 named
16 Manfred Raupach and Margaret Raupach, Franzősierte Trobadorlyrik (Tűbingen, 1979),
pp. 113–56, and see review by John H. Marshall, Romance Philology 30 (1982), 83–93;
William Paden, “Old Occitan as a Lyric Language: The Insertion from Occitan in Three
13th-Century French Romances,” Speculum 68 (1993), 36–53; Christopher Callahan,
“Troubadour Songs in Trouvère Codices: Mouvance in the Transmission of Courtly
Lyric,” Variants 9 (2012), 31–48; my thanks to Professor Callahan for an early view of this
article. See also Ruth Harvey, “Languages, Lyrics and the Knightly Classes,” in Medieval
Knighthood: Papers from the Sixth Strawberry Hill Conference 1994, ed. Stephen Church and
Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 208–16.
17 John Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity
of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 7–8, and 14; Christopher Page, Voices and
Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300
(London, 1987), p. 51.
18 There are some exceptions: Jean Erars and Guiot de Dijon are featured repeatedly rather
than in the more usual single section per author. The lais and motets are all anonymous
and the troubadour section is only loosely attributed, reflecting its source in an existing
collection: see Haines, “Songbook,” p. 63.