A poet in a muddle: How to make sense of a medieval romance

Im Rahmen seines Gastaufenthalts an der GMPU hält Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (Emeritus Professor of Music am King’s College London) zusätzlich zu seinem Vortrag im Forschungsforum einen Gastvortrag über Guillaume de Machaut, der gemeinsam von der GMPU und dem Institut für Romanistik der AAU organisiert wird.

Ort:
Raum N.0.67 am Institut für Romanistik, Universitätsstr. 65–67, 9020 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee (im Hauptgebäude, Nordtrakt Ost, Ebene 0)

Hinweis:
Der Vortrag findet auf Englisch statt und ist kostenlos.

Abstract:
Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Livre dou Voir Dit (ca. 1363-65) is a very remarkable medieval Romance, mixing narrative and lyric poetry, musical settings, and letters, all exchanged between the elderly poet and a young female admirer. There has been heated argument among scholars, for over 100 years, as to whether this is indeed a ‚true tale‘ or a fiction. A confused and incomplete edition was published in 1875. But the complete text, edited by Daniel with an English translation by R. Barton Palmer, was published only in 1998. Making that edition revealed clear evidence (textual and historical) that Le Voir Dit was indeed written around a real exchange of letters and described events that really happened.

Over the last five years we have been making a new, very different edition (now in press); and the process of making it has revealed even more information about the writing and medieval editing of Le Voir Dit and more evidence supporting its claim to truth. In this talk, Daniel will look at some of the challenges of making a modern edition of such a large and complex text from the surviving medieval manuscripts. We’ll look at differences between the language of the poet and the lady, and at the muddles Machaut himself created which support the claim that there was two sets of letters on his desk. We’ll see how the days described in the letters correspond to events in the calendar for 1363–64 and at the care with which even the most privileged women had to plan and hide their absences from home. And we’ll look at the ways in which minute differences between the manuscripts can reveal how the text was composed, the beliefs of its authors, and how the beliefs of early copyists (especially about the value of women) changed the text from one manuscript to the next, distorting Machaut’s own, unusually progressive social and religious attitudes.