Fallows, David. “Binchois, Gilles de Bins.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
ed. Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980, Vol. 2, pp. 709–22.
Kemp, Walter H. Burgundian Court Song in the Time of Binchois: The Anonymous Chansons of El
Escorial MS V. III.24. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Slavin, Dennis. Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment, and the Two Layers of Escorial A. Diss.
Princeton, 1987.
——. “Some Distinctive Features of Songs by Binchois.” Journal of Musicology 10(1992):342–61.
BIOGRAPHY
. In contrast to classical and medieval Greco-Latin tradition and to subsequent
development of the genre from the Renaissance on, French medieval secular biography is
relatively poor. It appears as if the luxuriant growth of hagiography has stifled the urge to
describe nonsaintly lives. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish, particularly in the
earlier period, between the specifically biographic and the more general historical,
didactic, and moral writing that might include biographical accounts of heroes who, today
at least, are not considered saints. It can be said that until the end of the 14th century
collections of the lives of famous persons belonged chiefly if not exclusively to the
clerical—i.e., Latin—tradition. The beginning of this medieval, christianized tradition
probably can be traced back to St. Jerome’s De viris illustribus (ca. 342–420).
The same applies to individual biographies. There is hardly anything in French
literature of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries that could be compared with the properly
biographical Vita Karoli magni imperatoris by Einhard (ca. 770–840). But many
elements of this monument of secular biography, with its conscious imitation of
Suetonius and wealth of details about both the public and private life of the emperor,
were either directly or indirectly “borrowed” in such immensely popular works as the
Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Latin version ca. 1140; seven Old French translations in the
course of the 13th c.). Pseudo-Turpin’s account was incorporated into the Grandes
chroniques de France by the monks of Saint-Denis. By 1274, most of this great historical
compilation was translated into French. Philippe Mouskés’s Chronique rimée (continued
to 1243) devotes almost a third of its 31,256 lines to the life and deeds of Charlemagne.
He takes his material from an Old French version of Pseudo-Turpin, as well as from the
less authentic chansons de geste. Dealing with these forms of Charlemagne’s biography,
we must be mindful that there might have been an important hagiographic element
contributing to its popularity, for Charlemagne was formally canonized.
Similar problems of genre are encountered in another work that, from a modern point
of view, should certainly be qualified as biographical Jean de Joinville’s Histoire (or Vie)
de saint Louis. Asked (ca. 1309) to write a memorandum on the life of the saintly king to
serve in the canonization process, Joinville (1225–1317) composed a lively account of his
companion, which is also the first serious autobiography in French, since Jean talks
interestingly and abundantly about his own life.
In the Occitan domain, there is a curious biographical subgenre. The 13th-century
vidas are usually brief prose notes on troubadours’ lives preceding the poems of a given
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