ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is the torrential anthologies of late medieval French lyrics which proliferate at the end of the Middle Ages. I use the word ‘torrential’ deliberately; these anthologies consist of hundreds upon hundreds of fi xed-form lyrics, copied consecutively: more than 500 of them in BnF français 1719,1 200 or so in BnF français 9223,2 around 600 in Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale 4023 – and well over 600, again, in Vérard’s Jardin de Plaisance.4 For many of them, there exist meticulous, accurate, informative modern editions – and yet what is curious about these latter is that they seem to have provoked so very little in terms of literary and critical reactions. It is true that even the editors of court lyrics – who one would expect to be their natural defenders – can sound dismissive, not to say contemptuous: ‘boringly repetitive,’ they say; ‘stereotyped’; ‘conventional’; ‘excessive reliance upon a basic vocabulary’.5 It is not that I want to argue that lyric lexicon is, on the contrary, astoundingly rich – though it is richer than some critics imply; it is not that I want to argue that its themes are not conventional – though if that was really what we insisted on, then much lyric poetry could surely be dismissed. Rather, I want to argue, in the wake of course of
1 On which see Françoise Fery-Huë, ed., Au grey d’amours … (Pièces inédites du manuscrit Paris, Bibl. nat., fr. 1719) (Montreal: SEDES, 1991), which completes Marcel Schwob’s anthology, Le Parnasse satyrique du quinz ième siècle. Anthologie de pièces libres (Paris: Welter, 1905).
