The Middle Ages holds a special place in the history of song. With the emergence of
the troubadours in twelfth-century Occitan, so began a tradition of vernacular lyric that resonates still today. Yet those early utterances are permeated with ambiguity and self-consciousness about the very medium of creation and communication: ‘chant’. ‘Song’ lies at the heart of vernacular inspiration, as pretext for writing, as the consequence of love, and as the invisible agent of communication between the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the lyric. What, though, did that sonorous category signify? Not merely resolvable into a simple binary of words and melody, ‘chant’ was in the decades and centuries that ensued a constantly shifting and productive semantic field. Writers would describe literary creations that were void of a melodic line as ‘chant’, while within the musical textures of thirteenth-century motets and chanson, moments of direct lyricism were cast as ‘dit’. In Italy, Dante’s Divina commedia unfolded canso by canso in the same creative environment that nurtured Italy’s earliest self-designated composers. By the later fourteenth century, conscious of its heritage, poets and composers such as Machaut investigated the categories of song through generic experimentation, and in complex renegotiation of the word-music relationship in forms such as the motet. Finally, with the burgeoning manuscript traditions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the notion of songs as things to be notated or written (‘notée’) adds another theme to the lexicon of song. The slippage in the language associated with song, and the extraordinary range of ways in which medieval poet/composers experiment with the relationship between words and music does not imply confusion, so much as a notion of song which is quite different from our own.


Our conference is a unique opportunity to reevaluate the rich repertories of vernacular poetry and music through the theoretical lens of ‘etymologies’ (medieval and modern). Out temporal span begins with the troubadour repertories and ends with the period of Deschamps. We will focus on four key areas which frame the problem of etymology and category from different perspectives. First, ‘vocabularies’, inviting contemplation of the names of things, from the internal self-naming within individual works, to theoretical descriptions, to fleeting, incidentally designations in literary representation. Second, ‘song within songs; song within story’: moments of self-conscious vocality, either where the protagonist of a song describes themselves or another in an act of communication; or, in genres such as lyric-interpolated romance, where people remember songs, or animate narrative by inserting songs into stories as real-time performance or aphorism. Third, ‘performance’: modern analysis and critique of medieval poetry and music rarely pays attention to the evidence of performance – who was performing, and to whom? How does the real-time of performance interact with the conceit of singing embedded in the work to be performed? How does the agency of the performer – and the vocality of their performance – effect meaning? The fourth and final theme is ‘the look of song’: what can visual representation (in the organization of a manuscript, the layout of a folio, or the pictorial rendering of a song or performance) tell us about the sense of song.