L’auteur au temps du recueil : repenser l’autorité et la singularité poétiques dans les premiers manuscrits à collections auctoriales de langue d’oïl (1100-1340).

This thesis aims to provide an original analysis on an often studied yet controversial issue: the introduction of the notion of authorship in French language medieval literature. The objective here is to reconsider the poetic, cultural, and historical signification of the particular moment when the author – understood here as the attribution of a text or of a series of texts to a proper noun – first became an essential structuring criteria in the production, and more importantly, in the transmission of French-language texts through medieval manuscripts. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of fonction-auteur, theories of reception and of the paratext, as well as New Codicology, this thesis will consider the author as a signifying textual and editorial construction within several literary collections written in langue d’oïl, in which the editors clearly and undeniably sought to  construct figures of the author. Based on the systematic examination of the manuscript tradition of approximately 320 names of langue d’oïl poets, who were active between 1100 and 1340, this analysis will focus primarily on 25 manuscripts containing authorial collections dedicated to 17 poets, whose names are strongly associated with a series of texts that are copied one after the other. Among these authors are the famous Chrétien de Troyes, Rutebeuf and Adam de la Halle, as well as Philippe de Thaon, frère Angier, Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, Pierre de Beauvais, Philippe de Remi, Gautier le Leu, Jacques de Baisieux, Geoffroi de Paris, Jean de l’Escurel, Baudouin de Condé, Jean de Condé, Watriquet de Couvin and Nicole Bozon.  This thesis attempts to question and ultimately discard the common conception according to which the manuscripts containing individual authorial collections constituted – along with the famous biographies of the troubadours and the chansonniers of the trouvères, often considered as their « ancestors » – the timid beginnings of the rise of the « modern author », himself a prequel to « literary subjectivity », « autobiographical aesthetics » and an ever stronger control exerted by actual empirical authors over the manuscript transmission of their own works. While offering contextual and material updates – supported by original data – regarding the collaborative process that went into the creation of these collections, as well as the  modular aspect of their reception, this thesis will show that these collections were formed through a rich dialogue with the centuries-old latin model of the auctor – who is at once an author, a guardian of truth (auctoritas) and a prestigious ambassador of grammar –, as well as with the antique tradition of « biobibliographical » texts, dealing with the life and works of famous and exemplary authors, such as De viris illustribus, by saint Jerome. The manuscripts studied here repeatedly used this ancient model of biobibliography (« the life and works ») in order to stage a competition between authors writing in langue d’oïl and auctores. This confrontation is particularly interesting when one considers that – contrary to what may be observed in the case of the troubadours, who were quickly seen as the new illustrious vernacular auctores, worthy of vouching for the excellency of langue d’oc poetry and grammar – , we are not simply dealing here with a form of imitation or adaptation in French of ancient models. In fact, the analogy with auctores allows for autoreflexive and sometimes ironic learned exercises, dealing with the editorial, poetic and epistemological creation of the type of author and auctoritas in manuscript collections in langue d’oïl, an idiom which at the time (1100-1340) lacked a true grammar, yet was used in various literary genres meant for entertainment, such as romance, which explored the evanescent barriers between truth and lies, good and evil. Rather than a small step in the long path towards an inevitable coronation, the « invention of the French author » undertaken by these collections constitutes an action that reflects all the uncertainty and interrogations of those who undertook it, while being fully convinced of its utter vanity in the eyes of God and death.

Keyphrases: Auteur, Author, Fonction-auteur, Copyright, Intellectual property, Writer, History of the author, Birth of the author, Authorship, Auctor, Authority, Auctoritas, Attribution, Medieval attribution, Medieval literature, Medieval vernacular literature, Provençal, Chansonniers, Troubadours, Trouvères, Death of the author, Song to book, Michel Foucault, Foucault, Paratext, New Philology, Codicology, New Codicology, Codices, Manuscript, Philology, Subject, Subjectivity, Literary subjectivity, Paul Zumthor, Autographe, Autograph, Medieval autograph, Autography, Authorial manuscript, Scribe, Authorial collections, Individual, Individu, Bibliography, Biographie, Biography, Author's biography, Writer's biography, Poet's biography, Poet, Sylvia Huot, Philippe de Thaon, Philip of Thaon, Angier, Frère Angier, Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, Chrétien de Troyes, Pierre de Beauvais, Philippe de Remi, Grammar, Biobibliography, De viris illustribus, Saint Jerome, Gautier le Leu, Jacques de Baisieux, Rutebeuf, Adam de la Halle, Baudouin de Condé, Jean de Condé, Geoffroi de Paris, Watriquet de Couvin, Nicole Bozon, Accessus ad auctores, Medieval Biography