Troubadour Manuscripts and the Medium of Transmission: Remarks on Compilatio , by Elizabeth W. Poe

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

TROUBADOUR MANUSCRIPTS AND THE MEDIUM OF TRANSMISSION: REMARKS ON COMPILATIO, BY ELIZABETH W. POE I In order to understand a manuscript we surely must read it; in order to understand a body of literature transmitted to us in manuscripts , we surely must read the manuscripts that contain it. The body of poetry by the troubadours is transmitted through manuscripts, 95 major ones and a number of fragments that fluctuates with sporadic losses and gains. If these and all the other medieval Occitan literary manuscripts, excluding archival documents, could be placed end to end on library shelves, they would fill about thirty feet.1 How then is it imaginable that in about two centuries of serious study of the troubadours , we have not really read the troubadour manuscripts—read each one, I mean, with an intention to understand everything we can about it as an elaborate, multifaceted artifact? I can think of two reasons. For one, our interest has focused not on the transmission but on the poetry transmitted. This I consider forgivable oreven understandable, and perhaps even right, so I am not sure that our efforts have been completely wrong-headed. We are drawn to the troubadours, or at least I am, because of their brilliant, witty, sexy, poignant, funny, pretty, melodious songs, and it is because ofthis attraction that we realize, perhaps tardily, that we need to look carefully at their manuscripts. But there is more. Only a real understanding ofthe manuscripts will lead back to understanding the poetry and its development from the beginning onward, including the advent ofthe extant manuscripts around 1250. Transmission is a part of the history ofthis art, as well as our only means ofaccess to it. To understand the poetry and the evolving culture that sustained it, we must understand transmission and the manuscripts. A second reason is that reading the manuscripts is hard. If for no other reason, it would be hard just because of the difficulty of ON COMPILATIO physical access. Not even Italian or French scholars have access to troubadour manuscripts as easy as their access to printed books about them, and physical access in itself is not enough to allow real understanding of a manuscript without repeated visits over an extended time. Furthermore, direct reading of the manuscript as an artifact demands skills in codicology, paleography, and other specialties. And the language, too, is hard. To read a manuscript at first hand requires the skills of a team of specialists who could have mediated between the reader and the manuscript, facilitating the task ofreading it—but at the risk ofdistancing the manuscript from the reader and so defeating the purpose ofthe reading. Far better, despite all our inadequacies, to read the manuscripts ourselves. II In her book Compilado (2000a), Elizabeth Poe has given us what is to my knowledge the most circumstantial, detailed, and penetrating reading we yet have of any troubadour manuscript. She has chosen manuscript //, compiled between Treviso and Padua in northern Italy in the last quarter ofthe thirteenth century, and held today by the Biblioteca Vaticana under the shelf number Latin 3207. She builds on the foundation laid by Maria Careri ( 1990), who studied manuscript //in terms ofcodicology and paleography. (Careri in turn built on the foundation laid by LouisGauchat and Heinrich Kehrli, who published a diplomatic edition ofmanuscript Hin 1891 .) Poe adds to Careri's reading ofthe physical artifact a reading ofits literary content and historical development. She engages in dialogue with Gustav Gröber, whose pioneering analysis ofthe relations among the major chansonniers was published in 1877. Although she considers herself a "latter-day student " ofGröber, she differs from him on the fundamental point ofher study. Gröber dismissed the third part of manuscript //. which he called H3 (folios 43-61), as lacking order, oras Poe paraphrases him, as "hopelessly disorganized." 2 Poe dedicates her book to showing instead that H3 "is in fact acoherent compilation drawn from a number ofsmaller collections, each having a discernible character ofits own" (2000a: 14). WILLIAM D. PADEN In each ofherchapters Poe focuses on a distinct textual component of manuscript H. In the first three chapters she works on the coblas in H3: first the coblas esparsas...