Authorship (in the Middle Ages). The notion of vernacular authorship evolved with the growing importance of French as a written language during the later Middle Ages. Medieval views of authorship can be approached from various perspectives: the vocabulary used to refer to authors and authorial activity; the ways that authors represented the literary process; and the evidence of manuscript organization and illustration.
The numerous terms used by Old French writers to describe their authorial activity reflect the range of attitudes towards literary composition in the vernacular. The word escrire is not applied to the author of a text, being reserved for the activity of scribes. Often the author's activity is expressed in the word faire, implying the author as one who creates a text rather than one who duplicates written copies of it. Other terms also stress the identity of the author as one who finds or conceives an idea and works it out: traire, imaginer, and trouver and its nominal form trouvère. During the 12th and 13th c., the role of the author often blended with that of the performer. There is little distinction, for example, between chanter and faire une chanson. In the course of the later Middle Ages, however, a variety of terms came to express aspects of the technical craft of literary creation as distinct from performance, most of which stress a process of arranging and shaping the textual elements: compiler, ordenner, former. It is to be noted that such terms do not imply that the author has created the text ex nihilo; rather, the author is one who possesses the skills necessary to imagine a conceptual framework within which literary material can be artfully arranged. Lyric composition in the formes fixes, in particular, was portrayed less as a process of singing than as one of assembling words according to elaborate formal patterns. Froissart even used the word maçonner for lyric composition: for him, the lyric poet was a verbal sculptor.
The importance of ordering, framing, and compiling in the literary process suggests that by the 14th c. the concept of vernacular authorship was moving away from that of performer and merging with that of writer. The terms compiler and ordenner, in particular, can refer to the act of literary creation, to the preparation of compendia and florilegia, and to the arrangement of anthology manuscripts, ordinarily the domain of the scribe. That the medieval French poet should be thought of as the author of written texts, even of books, is an extremely important development in the history of French literature. This new status of the French author is reflected in the innovative application of the word poète—hitherto reserved for Latin authors—to Guillaume
Medieval authors posit a variety of sources for their works; while these claims are sometimes fictional, they do serve to illustrate perspectives on the creative process. A medieval author may identify the origin of his or her writing in a pre-existing literary tradition, either written or oral; in the imagination or personal experience of an aristocratic patron; or in the author's own imagination or experience. Classical sources are common, both real—as in Jean de Meun's citations of Ovid, Lucan, Boethius, and others—and fictional, such as the mysterious Latin book that supposedly provided the source for the prose Tristan and portions of the Lancelot—Graal prose cycle. Acting (or posing) as translator, mediating between Latin letters and the French-speaking public, was a common stance for the medieval French author [see Translation]. In other instances, French verse might be used to preserve an oral Breton tradition, as in the lais of Marie de France. In either case French literature was heir to previous traditions which it appropriated and adapted. The author was seen less as a creator or innovator than as one capable of making this material accessible to the French public, thereby participating in an unbroken tradition that bridged ancient and medieval cultures.
The medieval notion of authorship included not only the translation and adaptation of works in other languages, but also the revision or narrative continuation of works in French. Indeed, romance continuations are sometimes much longer than the text to which they are attached, and many are signed by name. In at least one case, that of the Roman de la Rose, the continuator, Jean de Meun, became far more famous than Guillaume de Lorris, author of the original poem. It was fundamental to the medieval understanding of vernacular textuality that the literary text was never completely closed; it could always be reopened for continuation, interpolation, or other revision. As a result, the line between author, scribe, and remanieur can be extremely difficult to determine. It is not until the later Middle Ages, as French poets increasingly assumed responsibility for the written diffusion of their works, that we find a more stabilized textual tradition and a growing sense of the authority of the original text.
The role of the aristocratic patron is crucial to the representation of literary creation [see Patronage]. The authors of both prose and verse romances often claimed to have received the source book, or the central idea, from their patron. In the narrative dit, especially popular in the late 13th and 14th c., the patron's own experiences may provide the subject-matter, with the author posing as witness and recorder. Both Machaut, in the Fonteinne amoureuse (c.1361), and Froissart in the Prison amoureuse (1372-3) and Meliador (1388), even claim to have incorporated lyric poetry written by a patron, a claim generally accepted only for the Meliador. An important aspect of the medieval concept of authorship is the author as collaborator with the patron, one who realizes the patron's ideas and who casts the patron's life in literary terms.
The author's own experiences, finally, are increasingly posited as literary material in the later Middle Ages, in works written in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose. When Guillaume de Lorris claimed his own dream as the subject of his romance, he was taking an unusual step, but subsequently dream-visions became a standard format, as did accounts of the narrator's adventures or misadventures in love. Allowing the narrator—closely identified with the author—to assume a central narrative role was an important step in late medieval French literature. It is part of the development towards a greater focus on the author as originator and crafter of the text, as one whose personal vision is expressed therein. The narrator/protagonist is often portrayed in the very act of writing and arranging the text or the anthology manuscript, a motif reflecting the growing emphasis on the author as writer and figure of authority.
These varying notions of the author are given visual shape in the author portraits that appear in manuscripts. As one might expect, trouvères and troubadours are frequently portrayed as performers, sometimes with musical instruments; narrative poets are commonly represented holding or writing in a book. Lyric poets renowned for their learning, such as Giraut de Borneil and Adam de la Halle, were also sometimes portrayed with books. Both musical instrument and book are iconographic motifs rather than realistic details: trouvères did not necessarily play musical instruments, any more than a narrative poet would have composed texts by writing in a bound volume of blank parchment. What these pictures show is that the concept of the vernacular author included both the learned model of the scholarly writer and the performative model of the singer, reciter, or instrumentalist.
The organization of anthology manuscripts reflects changing attitudes towards the author. During the 12th and 13th c., manuscripts that were not simply miscellanies tended to be compiled according to generic classifications. Narrative texts—both romance and chanson de geste—were often arranged in an order corresponding to the internal chronology of the texts, resulting in the formation of narrative cycles. Authorship was rarely a factor in the compilation of such anthologies. In lyric anthologies, on the other hand, no doubt due to the importance of the first person in lyric discourse, songs were most commonly arranged by author. Author portraits are common in both French and Occitan chansonniers; many of the latter additionally contain the prose vidas and razos that supply information concerning the identity of the poet and the genesis of his or her songs. While the vidas and razos must be regarded as largely fictional, and the portraits as stylized and conventional, such elements none the less serve to construct an authorial figure endowed with identifying features and located in a particular time and place. Still, non-lyric works by the same author were not included in the chansonniers; generic distinction outweighed the importance of authorship.
The earliest known example of a generically diverse collection of texts by a single author, arranged and presented as such, is the compilation of the complete works of Adam de la Halle—songs, motets, plays, and stanzaic verse—in the anthology manuscript Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 25566, dating from the late 13th c. The earliest manuscripts containing the collected poems of Rutebeuf date from the same period. The rise of the single-author codex, however, really takes place in the 14th c., beginning with the dit collections of such early 14th-c. poets as Watriquet de Couvin and Baudouin and Jean de Condé. The phenomenon is most fully represented by the great anthology manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan, carefully arranged and in some cases illuminated under the supervision of the author. The use of authorship as a basis for the compilation of anthology manuscripts reflects a strong sense of the text as primarily identified through its origins with a particular author, whose persona is strong enough to unite a diverse corpus and whose personal vision—informed by both learning and experience—is expressed therein. [For the post-medieval post-medieval period see also Anonymity, Pseudonyms.]
[Sylvia Huot]
Bibliography
- A. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edn. (1988)
- S. Huot, From Song to Book (1987)
