O'Neill, Mary. 2006. Courtly Love Songs of Medieval 
France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvere Repertoire. 
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 

Reviewed by Susan Boynton 

Mary O'Neill's book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of 
an important monophonic repertory that has received relatively little atten­
tion from musicologists, despite its preservation in numerous manuscripts. 
The reasons for this neglect are well known: scholarship on the music of 
the trouveres has generally addressed their songs alongside or in relation to 
those of the troubadours. Consequently, the trouvere corpus is often viewed 
through the lens of a historiography that typically privileges the troubadours 
because of their chronological priority, casting the trouveres as derivative 
imitators. O'Neill seeks to understand the trouveres on their own terms. 
Given the wealth of melodies in medieval manuscripts of trouvere poetry 
(many in multiple versions), a monograph in English devoted entirely to 
the music of the trouveres is long overdue, particularly when considering 
that many of the new perspectives on genre, voice, orality, gender, sexuality, 
and performance in Old French lyric poetry have come from scholars of 
literature. O'Neill's study may not satisfy all expectations-at 226 pages 
including bibliography and indices, it is a slim volume for such a vast 
subject-but the analyses in Courtly Love Songs offer many insights into 
the structures and forms of trouvere song and provide ample material for 
further reflection. 

In the chapter entitled "The grand chant of the Trouveres: An 
Introduction," O'Neill surveys the genre characteristics of trouvere song 
using a representative example by Gace Brule (a trouvere active at several 
French courts in the decades around 1200): "N'est pas a soi qui aime coral­
ment:' In "The Manuscript Tradition: Sources and Notation;' O'Neill divides 
the manuscripts into two chronological phases based on a taxonomy of their 
notation, while acknowledging that the "phase two sources do not form 
a single cohesive group" (38)-the periodization being necessarily loose 
because the individual manuscripts are difficult to date with precision (29). 
For the most part, O'Neill's classification does not take into account the 
later additions to the manuscripts, although she does address questions of 
rhythmic interpretation that are raised by the use of mensural notation in 
the additions to the "Chansonnier du Roi" (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de 
France, fonds franyais 844). These additions also bear witness to intriguing 
developments in musical form and genre, and it would have been pertinent 

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for O'Neill to acknowledge the treatment of this repertoire in Judith Peraino's 
(1995) dissertation. O'Neill's typology of notational forms, as well as her 
account of orality and literacy in the music of Adam de la Halle, confirms 
some conclusions in Dorothy Keyser's (1993) study of Paris, Bibliotheque 
Nationale de France, fonds fran<rais 25566. 

O'Neill devotes considerable attention to the respective roles of oral and 
written transmission. A chapter entitled "The Melodic Art of the Trouveres: 
Orality and the Question of Melodic Variants" introduces the broader 
context of orality in medieval song while focusing primarily on variants in 
the songs of Audefroi Ie Bastard, who flourished at the end of the twelfth 
century. In "The Interaction of Oral, Written, and Literate Processes;' O'Neill 
illustrates the final stage of trouvere song with an organicist stylistic analysis 
of the songs of Adam de la Halle, suggesting that his "compositional process, 
involving the generation of a melody from a nucleus of a few short melodic 
ideas, here, as in the chansons of Gautier de Dargies ... arguably reflects the 
origins of the genre in an oral tradition" (194). Although the connection is 
not made directly, this discussion of generative process sheds some light on 
the subject of melodic variants addressed earlier in the book. More cogent 
is O'Neill's treatment of literate processes of composition, which presents 
the production of contrafacta as a form of writerly intertextuality based on 
the written transmission of songs in the context of the increasing use of 
written records in the thirteenth century. 

It is not clear why O'Neill separates closely related discussions of orality 
and literacy into two different chapters (3 and 6), and she never does define 
the two central terms explicitly-a lack of precision that tends to weaken her 
arguments concerning these categories. O'Neill describes orality, for example, 
as "a rather vague term but one which embraces aspects of the generative 
process, of performance, and of transmission" (53). Here the reader would 
have benefited from an overview considering transmission in relation to the 
roles of composers, singers, and scribes (as in Aubrey 1993 and 1996). 

O'Neill's account of oral traditions in relation to generative-grammar 
models recalls the scholarship of the 1980s, just as the title of one chapter, 
"The Interaction of Oral, Written, and Literate Processes;' echoes that of 
an article by Leo Treitler (1981) albeit without reference to recent reassess­
ments of his approach to structure in medieval music.! She takes some of 
the textual allusions to performance and oral composition that appear in 
the poems of the troubadours and trouveres as transparent "evidence of 
orality in the poetic texts" (56), citing statements in the poems that refer to 
live performance. As Simon Gaunt has pointed out (most recently in 2005), 
such textual gestures are usefully interpreted as a self-conscious discourse 
of an oral poetics so deeply embedded in the Romance lyric tradition that 



Susan Boynton 

it may be inextricable from the textuality of the corpus itself. O'Neill ac­
knowledges that even poetry evidently created in a context of predominant 
orality evinces an awareness of the written transmission of the texts, but she 
also seems to imply that the movement from an oral to a written state was 
fairly unidirectional. Incorporating more of the non-lyric literary evidence 
could have strengthened the account of the relationship between oral and 
written traditions in Courtly Love Songs. Citations or interpolations oflyric 
in narrative romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are often 
accompanied by depictions of performance and composition; they are also 
sources of information about the transmission of lyric poetry, and can 
productively be considered alongside the chansonniers as witnesses to the 
tradition and its reception, as Ardis Butterfield (2002) has demonstrated. 

In several chapters, the oeuvre of an individual trouvere serves to repre­
sent broader phenomena in the repertory. The courtly songs of Gautier de 
Dargies (an early trouvere) form the basis for the discussion of manuscript 
transmission, meter, melody, and syntax, where O'Neill convincingly 
demonstrates the role of rhetorical structure in shaping the songs. Moniot 
de Paris provides the focus for the chapter on continuity and change in 
the later trouvere tradition. O'Neill shows the intersection of melody and 
versification in Moniot's pastourelles and illustrates the variety of structures 
they represent. On the basis of this analysis, O'Neill concludes that Moniot's 
oeuvre is representative oflarger stylistic developments in the middle of the 
thirteenth century. 

The book's origins in O'Neill's 1992 doctoral dissertation may account 
for the contrast between the broad themes suggested by the titles of the 
chapters and the more limited scope of the examples chosen for detailed 
analysis. Besides the courtly love songs that are the focus of O'Neill's book, 
the northern French repertory includes a wide range of genres and sub genres 
so numerous that even the designations continuously invented by modern 
scholars are insufficient. Laments and encomia, songs of religious polemic 
or devotion, dance songs, debate poems, and songs in a woman's voice cover 
a spectrum from comedy to despair. More difficult to categorize are songs 
such as the chansons de toile with their sometimes enigmatic blend of lyric 
and narrative. Even though it was not O'Neill's goal to survey the repertory 
as a whole, more examples taken from genres besides the courtly chanson 
would have provided support for some of her arguments regarding change of 
style and structure over time. In particular, more references to the intriguing 
connections between the chanson and the French motet in the thirteenth 
century would have enriched the considerations of genre. 

O'Neill does allude to the urbanization of the trouveres in the second 
half of the thirteenth century and the concomitant proliferation of new 

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genres, but presents few concrete instances of these developments, except 
for some discussion of Adam de la Halle. Instead, Courtly Love Songs 
emphasizes the varieties of the pastourelle in contrast to the conventions of 
the chanson, reinforcing the binary opposition of aristocratic and popular 
registers conceptualized as high and low styles. As a general framework, 
this dichotomy can be limiting. Although O'Neill relies upon the notion of 
a consistent "High Style" for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars 
have become increasingly aware that it was studies such as John Stevens's 
Words and Music in the Middle Ages (1986) and Christopher Page's Voices 
and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987) that established the notion of a set 
of specific conventions dubbed the "High Style." Page used later treatises to 
extrapolate performance practices for the secular music of the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries, projecting backward the genre designation of grand 
chant that was first attested in the fourteenth.2 O'Neill does not problematize 
the idea of the High Style established by Page, even though it is a complex 
aesthetic construct, as is the very notion of courtliness itself. 

In the first full-length study of the trouveres in English, one would 
have hoped to see a full account of the scholarship to date, but many 
pertinent studies are not cited here. John Haines's work on the manuscript 
transmission and rhythmic interpretation of the repertory would have been 
particularly relevant (Haines 1997; 2004). Although O'Neill states clearly 
that rhythm is not a central concern in this book, she could have dispensed 
with the question more effectively by referring the reader to the most recent 
treatments of the subject. In footnotes summarizing the existing scholarship 
on the notation of individual manuscripts, O'Neill omits Robert Lug's studies 
of chansonnier U (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, fonds fran<;:ais 
20050); Lug's 1995 article would be particularly relevant here. Also puzzling 
is her use of a nineteenth-century edition of the poetic repertory from 
thirteenth-century Arras rather than the more recent one by Roger Berger 
(1981), although she does cite Berger's edition of the Artesian confraternities' 
necrologies. References to recent melodic editions of individual trouveres 
apart from Tischler (1997) would have acknowledged the existing range 
of approaches and thereby highlighted the number of songs available in 
modern transcriptions. Indeed, some of the editions O'Neill does not cite 
are particularly excellent resources for musicologists, such as Maria Sofia 
Lannutti's (1999) critical edition ofthe songs of Guiot de Dijon. 

While the material is for the most part clearly presented and readable, 
some infelicities suggest less than perfect editing. For instance, in the lists 
of manuscript sigla on pages xiv and 14, the manuscript Paris, BNF fro 1591 
is listed as manuscript T, which is actually the siglum normally used for a 
different chansonnier: Paris, BNF fro 12615. The customary siglum for fro 



Susan Boynton 

1591, R, is entirely absent, as is the shelfmark of fro 12615. Compounding this 
mistake, the shelfmark of fro 1591 is identified in this list as the "chansonnier 
de Noailles," the name commonly associated with fro 12615. As many of 
O'Neill's transcriptions employ chansonnier T or R, one would have expected 
a page of corrigenda to be inserted in the book; in fact, the only accurate 
reference to chansonnier R that I was able to find is buried in a footnote on 
page 27, in which a book is cited whose title happens to include both the 
manuscript's correct siglum and its shelf mark. 

Other problems may be more the fault of the publisher than of the 
author: there is no index of manuscripts, and the general index includes 
only one manuscript shelf mark. Several typographical errors that appear 
more than once should have been corrected (Bazzolo for Bozzolo, confrerie 
for confrerie, Ramon de Miraval for Raimon de Miraval). The ordering 
and arrangement of photographic plates, moreover, is unsatisfactory, and 
several are of rather poor quality (presumably because of inferior originals 
provided by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France). Even though the format 
of the black-and-white photographic signature readily fits two photographs 
shown side by side, reproductions of a song from various manuscripts are 
placed on different pages (except for plates 13 and 14). Plates 1 and 3 are 
even printed on the front and back of the same page, which is frustrating 
to anyone who might wish to view both images at once. 

Nevertheless, the book largely accomplishes what O'Neill set out to do, 
namely to illuminate the melodic transmission and style of courtly songs 
in a vast corpus that remains all too little studied. The musical examples are 
ample, accurate, and well chosen, and the many synoptic transcriptions of 
melodies from two or three manuscripts illustrate important aspects of the 
songs' structures and manuscript traditions. This first book-length account 
of the trouvere chanson as music will provide a useful foundation for the 
many future studies that this extensive repertory so clearly deserves. 

Notes 

1. A useful complement would have been Peter Jeffery's (1992) reading of the generative­
grammar theory. 

2. See, for instance, the response to Page's ethos of the "High Style" in Aubrey (1996:257-61), 
who challenges the applicability of this model to troubadour song. 

References 

Aubrey, Elizabeth. 1993. Literacy, Orality, and the Preservation of French and Occitan 
Medieval Courtly Songs. Revista de Musicologia 16 (4): 2355-66. 

--. 1996. The Music of the Troubadours. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana 
University Press. 

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Berger, Roger. 1981. Litterature et societe arrageoises au XIII siecle: les chansons et dits artesiens. 
Arras: Commission departementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais. 

Butterfield, Ardis. 2002. Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume 
de Machaut. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, no. 49. Cambridge and New York: 
Cambridge University Press. 

Gaunt, Simon. 2005. Fictions of Orality in Troubadour Poetry. In Orality and Literacy in 
the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and Its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green, 
edited by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young, 119-38. Utrecht Studies in Medieval 
Literacy, no. 12. Turnhout: Brepols. 

Haines, John. 1997. The "Modal Theory:' Fencing, and the Death of Pierre Aubry. Plainsong 
and Medieval Music 6 (2): 143-50. 

---.2004. Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval 
Music. Musical Performance and Reception. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge 
University Press. 

Jeffery, Peter. 1992. Re-envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of 
Gregorian Chant. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago and London: University 
of Chicago Press. 

Keyser, Dorothy. 1993. Literacy and Orality in the Secular Music of Thirteenth-Century 
France: The Evidence of the "Adam de la Halle" Manuscript. Revista de Musicologia 16 
(4): 2365-89. 

Lannutti, Maria Sofia, ed. 1999. Canzoni. Guiot de Dijon: edizione critica a cura di Maria Sofia 
Lannutti. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo. 

Lug, Robert. 1995. Das "vormodale" Zeichensystem des Chansonniers de Saint-Germain­
des-Pres. Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 52 (1): 19-65. 

Page, Christopher. 1987. Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and 
Songs in France, 1100-1300. London: J. M. Dent. 

Peraino, Judith. 1995. New Music, Notions of Genre, and the "Manuscrit du Roi" circa 1300. 
PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 

Stevens, John. 1986. Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and 
Drama, 1050-1350. Cambridge Studies in Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge 
University Press. 

Tischler, Hans. 1997. Trouvere Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition. 15 vols. 
Corpus mensurabilis musicae, no. 107. Neuhausen: American Institute of Musicology 
and Hanssler-Verlag. 

Treitler, Leo. 1981. Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music. 
Speculum 56 (3): 471-91. 


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